This isn't a troll, it's the truth. Playing a Peon in the Star Wars Universe is worthless. The focus should be on gameplay, not cannon which is broken in SWG numerous times anyway. How many times in Star wars did you see someone wondering around with a regular axe as a weapon? Bone Armor? Uggg.
o rather than bitching that the designers should have ignored canon and created a game that broke as many rules as possible until it became a fun game that was only losely based in the SW universe, you should complain because they had a responsibility to create a fun game WITHIN THE CONSTRAINTS THEY WERE GIVEN.
But there wasn't a constraint on when they needed the game to occur. They could have made it between episodes 1 and 2 and had plenty of Jedi. The argument could even be made that not all the Jedi or potential Jedi were killed between episodes 3 and 4. If Ben and Yoda could hide from the empire, why couldn't others? The idea of there being a small amount of Jedi in SWG to stick to cannon is BS by the developers/marketers. I'm betting it was strictly a marketing decision to make Jedi rare.
advertising on the box that you could become a Jedi while you couldn't actually do it ingame for months (the code wasn't activated) shows what kind of scam SOE is running with this game.
I wouldn't even argue that Jedi shouldn't be rare, but it should be easy to be allowed to train to become a jedi (ie to become a padawan) but hard to become a Jedi.
Of course not: they all wanted to be Luke, and now that possibility has been taken from them
No they didn't all want to be Luke, but many people did want to try out being a Jedi. SWG is like making a transformers game where it's hard to be a transformer. Who the heck wants to be a human in the transformer world? It's the same thing.
Players wanted to play SWG to be a Jedi, a Bounty Hunter, a Storm Trooper, etc. Instead most people are stuck with things like "Entertainer", "Master Chef", etc. Most of the cool professions are broken (ie smuggler, bounty hunter).
A lot of fanboys are saying everyone wanted to be a Jedi, but I'm sure people would have taken up other professions if they were interesting. It's not like you couldn't balance Jedi out if you put your mind to it.
Space Rogue was another great Origin game from the 80's that had multiple stars, planets, races, etc. Read the review about it, it was way ahead of it's time like a lot of the stuff Origin was doing in the 80's. I would blindly by sequels to most of Origin's 80's games if EA came out with them.
If you make it, complete a set of quests and there's no randomness to it, then everyone would become a Jedi.
Not really, if you make it easy with to become a padawan but hard to become a Jedi then not everyone would become a Jedi.
Say for example that Padawans suffered perma-death. So anytime they were killed they would have to start from scratch. On top of that they are clearly marked as Padawans, and can be PK'ed by any other player and have bounties on their heads. Now say they have to finish 30 quests to become a Jedi. That would be pretty hard to do, but at least the path would be laid out for them and it could be done with a lot of hard work. I would say that would be less frustrating and more fair then leveling 4 professions then trying to find a mystery 5th one out of the remaining 27. This might be more like how it works in "star wars real life" but sometimes real life isn't fair..games should be
The real thing it comes down to is should games stay loyal to their source of insperation or should they be fun? To me I think they should always err on the side of fun. I would rather play a fun football game than a realistic football sim. I'd rather play a fun game based on the matrix then one that sticks to it's storyline so much that it takes away from gameplay. I guess it's personal taste, but I always think games should be more about fun than anything else.
erhaps you do not recall the 2000 Election [I know filthy liberal scum like yourself are both trying to forget and still continuing to focus on it], but Gore was absolutely demolished in the debates leading up to the election.
Mod him down all you want, the truth hurts. Gore was highly touted as a master at debate while Bush was labeled as being "simple" but Gore came off poorly against Bush in the '00 debates.
Thanks for your post, here are a couple of counter points...
on #2 you said...#2 Becoming a Jedi should be hard as hell and generally not a good time. Though I am not a hardcore fan of the movies, most of the characters seem pretty unhappy with the situation when they decide to follow the Jedi. They leave their families and loved ones forever. They just pick up and go. This is very similar to the profession issue. You stop what you liked doing and give it up for a tough road to hoe. Great sacrifice = great rewards.
actually, this is only true of Anakin and Luke. Anakin wasn't giving up too much, he was free, but his mother was still a slave. It's not like he would have been living some glorious life had he stayed with his mother. Luke left because his aunt and uncle were killed, if they had not been killed he wouldn't have left. Also, this doesn't take into account all of the other jedi you see training in ep 2. Anyway, back to the game which is what is important. I agree becoming a Jedi should be hard, damn hard. Becoming a padawan should have been easy though. Rather than making people grind it out at random professions to become a Jedi, people should have been able to chose the path of padawan from the start. With a penalty, all padawan would have a nice sized bounty on their heads, would stand out in public, and have perma-death and no protection vs PvP. That would make becoming a Jedi damn hard, and challenging without making people grind away and professions they didn't care about. Plus it would fix the broken and boring bounty hunter profession
#4 All of this is very consistent with the movie portrayals of Jedi. Other game inconsistencies aside, in the time of the movies (this is the time the game is set in, correct?) Jedi are rare. Being a Jedi in general seems to be pretty miserable. One guy lives in a cave or something, another lives in some swamp. Yeah, woo, being a Jedi rocks!
The Jedi are rare in episodes 4, 5 and 6. Who is to say they are rare after that? They weren't rare at the time of the clone wars when there were 100's of them running around. The game could have been set at any time in the star wars universe. To say "Well the Jedi were rare at the time" only holds true for episodes 4, 5 and 6. Before and after then there were many Jedi in the galaxy. Who is to say there weren't more Jedi that were just in hiding during episodes 4, 5 and 6? Leia, Luke, Ben and Yoda hid with no problem from the empire.
Here's the deal, anything positive or desirable about being a Jedi is assigned by the individual. I do not play this game but a few guys at work do.
Well I actually HAVE played the game.
I'd also like to thank you for perpetuating the stereotype of gamer as whiny baby who wants everything handed to them and considers themself a game design god. You should reevaluate your own priorities in the game if you think the Jedi path is too hard, and maybe in real life if this is how you present yourself in general.
I'd like to thank you for perpetuating the stereotype of a fanboy who will stand by a product regardless of how poor/inept it is because you identify yourself with it. You should reevaluation your own priorities if you feel the need to suck up to game designers who don't care about you maybe you are too much of a suck up in real life also if this is how you present yourself in general. I of course don't mean this, I just want to show you how silly/petty your last point sounded.
That is where all the content is, and it is no substitute for a storyline or any quests.
And the sad part about this is, Star Wars has a huge universe which could have been used to make plenty of storylines and quests. It's sad that SWG was released before it was done in order to make more money for sony in a certain quarter. This game should have been the MMO that would have brought casual players/non mmo players in.
Do MMO makers ever think that some players (ie like me) would like to go through a MMO without socializing if we don't want to? I hate forced co-op and socializing, and after playing Star Wars Galaxies it seems this is that is the way MMO's are heading.
In game charades? I'd be happy if one of these games could come up with a fun combat system. Game companies seriously should ditch making the little in-game garbage (ie, SWG's fishing simulation, charades, whatever else) and focus on the core parts of the game (ie, combat, balancing races and skills, the economy, etc).
Is anyone aware of companies offering their games at a substantially lower price? One major argument for piracy has always been the price - is there any proof that this is right or wrong?
I think it's right in some cases, wrong in others. There are always people that will pirate games and not buy them, even if the price is $1. But there are also people that will pirate games just because the think they are too expensive, or just because it's easier to pirate the games than it is to earn the money to buy the games or hop from store to store looking for a copy.
So of those three groups of pirates you can get rid of two groups by making games easier to get, and cheaper. What percentage of people fall in those groups? I have no idea.
STEAM from Valve may not be perfect, but it sure is a step to remove the middle man. I'm eager to find out if it will fly...
I tried it months ago for a counter strike update, and it was pretty bad. Still, I'm hopeful for STEAM and the idea behind it. I'll take downloading a game over mail ordering or going to the store to buy it anyday.
I find myself nitpicking the inadequacies in most games nowadays. It's not hard to. Take C&C Generals, for instance. How was the AI in that game any different than what was available in the =very= original Command and Conquer? It isn't.
C&C generals was actually the first RTS I played more than once or twice. I found after playing for 1-2 weeks the AI was painfully dumb. Are most RTS games that bad?
And, despite all the 'cool' 3D rendered models and cutscenes, Generals still wasn't as graphically intense or as richly written (in terms of story, graphics, and the like), or as well acted as its earliest Westwood predecessor. To say nothing of the horrible voice acting in Generals vs C&C.
I neeeeed neeew shoooeees
Why not? Is it that people think multiplayer is the end-all and they no longer need to design good single player games? I don't know about anyone else, but single player mode is what gets me drawn into the game and addicted - multiplayer is an attempt to fulfill that addiction.
I actually only buy games that are multiplayer. I even bought generals with the thought that I would mostly play online until I found out how poor the community was.
Why do I feel like a shrinking demographic?
You aren't, if anything you will become part of a growing demographic as players get turned off of multiplayer by poor matchmaking systems. If Joe Player works 8 hours, comes home and wants to play a game online, he doesn't want to play Joe EliteGamer who has no job, and has been playing for the 8 hours that Joe Player was at work. Multiplayer is fun when the participants are at equal skill levels, when they aren't it gets pretty boring and/or annoying pretty quickly.
Not fun when you play for money? Tell that to any pro-athlete. Sure it's work, but it's the best work you could hope for.
I would venture that pro-athletes for the most part know they are going to make enough money to support themselves. If a pro-athlete has a bad season, loses a fight, etc they still get paid. If you are a pro gamer and you fly out to these tournaments and you have a bad day? You get nothing. You lose the money you spent on a plane ticket
When I was playing on the OGL ladder for Unreal tournament DM 1v1 I was logging about 40-50 hours a week. You really need to put in 20-40 hours a week if you want to be a good player.
Before that, when I was in college I played in the weekly tournaments for money at 8-on the break for fighting games. Even with those, I found if I didn't practice enough I would be a little 'off'
You can't compare being a pro gamer to a pro-athlete because the pro gamer always faces the fact that he or she might not make any money and most of the time can lose money (the cost of their trip). The closest thing you can compare it to is being a pro-gambler,
but a pro-gambler doesn't have to fly across country (most of the time) to gamble. Nor does he have to work on his fast twitch reaction time every day.
The days of the professional gamer aren't here yet, but when (if) they are I will ditch my mad programming skills and be on board.:)
PC games have two problems in my eyes. The first is they are overpriced, and the second is piracy. As much as the game industry would like to jump up and down and blame piracy for their prices, it's BS.
Here is a real life example, a friend of mine went to EB to buy Jedi Acadamy (A game that came out a few months ago). He wants to play Jedi Acadamy online, even though there is a small community (maybe about 30-50 players online at a time on all of the servers put together). They told him it was $50. He asked for a used version and they told him $44. He promptly told them he was going to buy it from ebay or pirate it.
I think PC games should go the way of ITunes. Cut out the middleman and sell the games for $15 - $20 a piece. Most of the documentation that comes with games nowadays is incomplete or poor. Gamefaqs usually has better documentation than most games ship with.
Ahh, the old "I don't like the facts so I'll deny them" approach, it'd be nice to see a *new* argument against reality once and a while.
Reality is calling 1000 people in a phone survey and saying that they represent the whole American populations opinion? Cmon.
The question wasn't some weird trick question, and it wasn't conducted in hicksville.
But the poll asks something different from what you said, you said in your original post...
what he doubtless meant was that roughly 70% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussain was responsible for the attacks on September 11. The frightening thing is that this figure does seem to be accurate.
Now what the poll says is...
How likely is it that Saddam Hussein: was personally involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks?
Very likely 32%
Somewhat likely 37%
Not very likely 15%
Not at all likely 12%
DK/No opinion 3%
Saying he was responsible for them (your wording) is different from saying that was he somewhat likely to have been invoved in the attacks. Saying you think something is somewhat likely does not mean the same thing as saying " I believe".
Somewhat involved could mean, as little as could he have allowed terrorists to train in Iraq or funded them? Could he have been where the terrorists got their anthrax from?
The government knew that the average American wouldn't support a war in Iraq based on the "Well, Cheney and Rumsfeld think it would be fun" argument
C'mon you don't really believe this do you? Give me a break. Do you think they went to war because they "thought it would be fun" or because they thought Sadaam was a threat and getting rid of him could bring stability to a part of the world that needs it? The argument that America went to war because Rumsfeld thought it would "be fun" is utter trash and deviod of any independent thinking or basis in fact.
Never underestimate Karl Rove, or the ability of Joe Average to be mislead.
And never underestimate the tinfoil hat wearing leftists from being mislead and trying to spin everything into "America is Evil"
One could wonder, would there have been an 9/11 if the Bush administration ware not elected?
of course it wouldn't have. Osama just hated GWB. He didn't hate the 40-50 years of the US protecting and supporting Isreal...He just had a beef with GWB. Osama wouldn't have done that had gore become president. As a matter of fact, I think osama may run as Dean's vice president. He really loves America and Isreal, he just hates GWB.
What he doubtless meant was that roughly 70% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussain was responsible for the attacks on September 11. The frightening thing is that this figure does seem to be accurate.
Give me a link to one study that says that, and where they actually found the 70% of the US citizens from. I'll bet it was a very small group of people, from a very poor town in the US. Anyone who has had a college level course in statistics knows you can make a poll say anything you want to if you control the way questions are asked and who participates in it.
Your granny, or superman, or anyone else is a valued human being. They should be helped through research. But gee, the knowing destruction of unborn babies is wrong - then using those body parts, fresh from the slaugter... that's just a bit too far.
We have to deal with realism. Abortion is legal in the US. Many young women unfortuantly use abortion as birth control. I don't agree with that morally, but who am I to dictate morals to other people? Out of this evil(imo), if some good can come by using the stem cells from aborted fetuses...why not? Are they serving a greater good by being thrown into the trash? If you don't allow stem cell research that could save someones life, you are as much a murderer in my eyes as the women who has an abortion as a form of birth control.
It really depends how you phrase the question. Due to wild sci-fi movies and the way the media treats cloning projects like sci-fi of course the general population will say "No you should not clone humans". Try phrasing the question "should stem cell research be legal for finding the cures to diseases such as MS" and watch the poll go to 70-80% yes.
My own personal opposition to cloning comes not from moral reasons, but because we have a population problem
We have a population problem? We might, but it's not in the direction you think. Women are having less babies and it's not just in America, it's around the world. As women become more liberated and birth control (including)becomes more popular, less and less women will have children. Impotence in males is also rising, it may come to a point where we need to clone ourselves, or our ancestors.
The guy that pulled the gun at the CS tournament is a coward though. If you have to resort to violence at least be a man and fight with your hands. A gun is a cowards way out.
if you take games this seriously, theres something that wrong with you
Most clannie gamers see FPS games as a social outlet, so it's about social status plus prize money. Most people take social status and money pretty seriously.
"I personally keep Java off my computer because it crashes the system," he said. "If Sun had the interests of the customer in mind, then the Sun desktop would be written in C and donated to Linux. Sun is no better than Microsoft."
I've never, ever seen Java "crash the system". Not on a mac, or on a PC. Where did they find this crackhead? I'm sure I'm going to get modded down for this, but the linux zealots need to stop with this "IT HAS TO BE IN C AND OPEN SOURCE TO BE GOOD". Anything that takes desktop market share away from microsoft at this point is good.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a troll, it's the truth. Playing a Peon in the Star Wars Universe is worthless. The focus should be on gameplay, not cannon which is broken in SWG numerous times anyway. How many times in Star wars did you see someone wondering around with a regular axe as a weapon? Bone Armor? Uggg.
o rather than bitching that the designers should have ignored canon and created a game that broke as many rules as possible until it became a fun game that was only losely based in the SW universe, you should complain because they had a responsibility to create a fun game WITHIN THE CONSTRAINTS THEY WERE GIVEN.
But there wasn't a constraint on when they needed the game to occur. They could have made it between episodes 1 and 2 and had plenty of Jedi. The argument could even be made that not all the Jedi or potential Jedi were killed between episodes 3 and 4. If Ben and Yoda could hide from the empire, why couldn't others? The idea of there being a small amount of Jedi in SWG to stick to cannon is BS by the developers/marketers. I'm betting it was strictly a marketing decision to make Jedi rare.
advertising on the box that you could become a Jedi while you couldn't actually do it ingame for months (the code wasn't activated) shows what kind of scam SOE is running with this game.
I wouldn't even argue that Jedi shouldn't be rare, but it should be easy to be allowed to train to become a jedi (ie to become a padawan) but hard to become a Jedi.
Of course not: they all wanted to be Luke, and now that possibility has been taken from them
No they didn't all want to be Luke, but many people did want to try out being a Jedi. SWG is like making a transformers game where it's hard to be a transformer. Who the heck wants to be a human in the transformer world? It's the same thing.
Players wanted to play SWG to be a Jedi, a Bounty Hunter, a Storm Trooper, etc. Instead most people are stuck with things like "Entertainer", "Master Chef", etc. Most of the cool professions are broken (ie smuggler, bounty hunter).
A lot of fanboys are saying everyone wanted to be a Jedi, but I'm sure people would have taken up other professions if they were interesting. It's not like you couldn't balance Jedi out if you put your mind to it.
Space Rogue was another great Origin game from the 80's that had multiple stars, planets, races, etc. Read the review about it, it was way ahead of it's time like a lot of the stuff Origin was doing in the 80's. I would blindly by sequels to most of Origin's 80's games if EA came out with them.
If you make it, complete a set of quests and there's no randomness to it, then everyone would become a Jedi.
Not really, if you make it easy with to become a padawan but hard to become a Jedi then not everyone would become a Jedi.
Say for example that Padawans suffered perma-death. So anytime they were killed they would have to start from scratch. On top of that they are clearly marked as Padawans, and can be PK'ed by any other player and have bounties on their heads. Now say they have to finish 30 quests to become a Jedi. That would be pretty hard to do, but at least the path would be laid out for them and it could be done with a lot of hard work. I would say that would be less frustrating and more fair then leveling 4 professions then trying to find a mystery 5th one out of the remaining 27. This might be more like how it works in "star wars real life" but sometimes real life isn't fair..games should be
The real thing it comes down to is should games stay loyal to their source of insperation or should they be fun? To me I think they should always err on the side of fun. I would rather play a fun football game than a realistic football sim. I'd rather play a fun game based on the matrix then one that sticks to it's storyline so much that it takes away from gameplay. I guess it's personal taste, but I always think games should be more about fun than anything else.
erhaps you do not recall the 2000 Election [I know filthy liberal scum like yourself are both trying to forget and still continuing to focus on it], but Gore was absolutely demolished in the debates leading up to the election.
Mod him down all you want, the truth hurts. Gore was highly touted as a master at debate while Bush was labeled as being "simple" but Gore came off poorly against Bush in the '00 debates.
Thanks for your post, here are a couple of counter points... on #2 you said.. .#2 Becoming a Jedi should be hard as hell and generally not a good time. Though I am not a hardcore fan of the movies, most of the characters seem pretty unhappy with the situation when they decide to follow the Jedi. They leave their families and loved ones forever. They just pick up and go. This is very similar to the profession issue. You stop what you liked doing and give it up for a tough road to hoe. Great sacrifice = great rewards.
actually, this is only true of Anakin and Luke. Anakin wasn't giving up too much, he was free, but his mother was still a slave. It's not like he would have been living some glorious life had he stayed with his mother. Luke left because his aunt and uncle were killed, if they had not been killed he wouldn't have left. Also, this doesn't take into account all of the other jedi you see training in ep 2. Anyway, back to the game which is what is important. I agree becoming a Jedi should be hard, damn hard. Becoming a padawan should have been easy though. Rather than making people grind it out at random professions to become a Jedi, people should have been able to chose the path of padawan from the start. With a penalty, all padawan would have a nice sized bounty on their heads, would stand out in public, and have perma-death and no protection vs PvP. That would make becoming a Jedi damn hard, and challenging without making people grind away and professions they didn't care about. Plus it would fix the broken and boring bounty hunter profession
#4 All of this is very consistent with the movie portrayals of Jedi. Other game inconsistencies aside, in the time of the movies (this is the time the game is set in, correct?) Jedi are rare. Being a Jedi in general seems to be pretty miserable. One guy lives in a cave or something, another lives in some swamp. Yeah, woo, being a Jedi rocks!
The Jedi are rare in episodes 4, 5 and 6. Who is to say they are rare after that? They weren't rare at the time of the clone wars when there were 100's of them running around. The game could have been set at any time in the star wars universe. To say "Well the Jedi were rare at the time" only holds true for episodes 4, 5 and 6. Before and after then there were many Jedi in the galaxy. Who is to say there weren't more Jedi that were just in hiding during episodes 4, 5 and 6? Leia, Luke, Ben and Yoda hid with no problem from the empire.
Here's the deal, anything positive or desirable about being a Jedi is assigned by the individual. I do not play this game but a few guys at work do.
Well I actually HAVE played the game.
I'd also like to thank you for perpetuating the stereotype of gamer as whiny baby who wants everything handed to them and considers themself a game design god. You should reevaluate your own priorities in the game if you think the Jedi path is too hard, and maybe in real life if this is how you present yourself in general.
I'd like to thank you for perpetuating the stereotype of a fanboy who will stand by a product regardless of how poor/inept it is because you identify yourself with it. You should reevaluation your own priorities if you feel the need to suck up to game designers who don't care about you maybe you are too much of a suck up in real life also if this is how you present yourself in general. I of course don't mean this, I just want to show you how silly/petty your last point sounded.
That is where all the content is, and it is no substitute for a storyline or any quests.
And the sad part about this is, Star Wars has a huge universe which could have been used to make plenty of storylines and quests. It's sad that SWG was released before it was done in order to make more money for sony in a certain quarter. This game should have been the MMO that would have brought casual players/non mmo players in.
Do MMO makers ever think that some players (ie like me) would like to go through a MMO without socializing if we don't want to? I hate forced co-op and socializing, and after playing Star Wars Galaxies it seems this is that is the way MMO's are heading.
In game charades? I'd be happy if one of these games could come up with a fun combat system. Game companies seriously should ditch making the little in-game garbage (ie, SWG's fishing simulation, charades, whatever else) and focus on the core parts of the game (ie, combat, balancing races and skills, the economy, etc).
Is anyone aware of companies offering their games at a substantially lower price? One major argument for piracy has always been the price - is there any proof that this is right or wrong?
I think it's right in some cases, wrong in others. There are always people that will pirate games and not buy them, even if the price is $1. But there are also people that will pirate games just because the think they are too expensive, or just because it's easier to pirate the games than it is to earn the money to buy the games or hop from store to store looking for a copy.
So of those three groups of pirates you can get rid of two groups by making games easier to get, and cheaper. What percentage of people fall in those groups? I have no idea.
STEAM from Valve may not be perfect, but it sure is a step to remove the middle man. I'm eager to find out if it will fly...
I tried it months ago for a counter strike update, and it was pretty bad. Still, I'm hopeful for STEAM and the idea behind it. I'll take downloading a game over mail ordering or going to the store to buy it anyday.
I find myself nitpicking the inadequacies in most games nowadays. It's not hard to. Take C&C Generals, for instance. How was the AI in that game any different than what was available in the =very= original Command and Conquer? It isn't.
C&C generals was actually the first RTS I played more than once or twice. I found after playing for 1-2 weeks the AI was painfully dumb. Are most RTS games that bad?
And, despite all the 'cool' 3D rendered models and cutscenes, Generals still wasn't as graphically intense or as richly written (in terms of story, graphics, and the like), or as well acted as its earliest Westwood predecessor. To say nothing of the horrible voice acting in Generals vs C&C.
I neeeeed neeew shoooeees
Why not? Is it that people think multiplayer is the end-all and they no longer need to design good single player games? I don't know about anyone else, but single player mode is what gets me drawn into the game and addicted - multiplayer is an attempt to fulfill that addiction.
I actually only buy games that are multiplayer. I even bought generals with the thought that I would mostly play online until I found out how poor the community was.
Why do I feel like a shrinking demographic?
You aren't, if anything you will become part of a growing demographic as players get turned off of multiplayer by poor matchmaking systems. If Joe Player works 8 hours, comes home and wants to play a game online, he doesn't want to play Joe EliteGamer who has no job, and has been playing for the 8 hours that Joe Player was at work. Multiplayer is fun when the participants are at equal skill levels, when they aren't it gets pretty boring and/or annoying pretty quickly.
Not fun when you play for money? Tell that to any pro-athlete. Sure it's work, but it's the best work you could hope for.
:)
I would venture that pro-athletes for the most part know they are going to make enough money to support themselves. If a pro-athlete has a bad season, loses a fight, etc they still get paid. If you are a pro gamer and you fly out to these tournaments and you have a bad day? You get nothing. You lose the money you spent on a plane ticket
When I was playing on the OGL ladder for Unreal tournament DM 1v1 I was logging about 40-50 hours a week. You really need to put in 20-40 hours a week if you want to be a good player.
Before that, when I was in college I played in the weekly tournaments for money at 8-on the break for fighting games. Even with those, I found if I didn't practice enough I would be a little 'off'
You can't compare being a pro gamer to a pro-athlete because the pro gamer always faces the fact that he or she might not make any money and most of the time can lose money (the cost of their trip). The closest thing you can compare it to is being a pro-gambler, but a pro-gambler doesn't have to fly across country (most of the time) to gamble. Nor does he have to work on his fast twitch reaction time every day.
The days of the professional gamer aren't here yet, but when (if) they are I will ditch my mad programming skills and be on board.
PC games have two problems in my eyes. The first is they are overpriced, and the second is piracy. As much as the game industry would like to jump up and down and blame piracy for their prices, it's BS.
Here is a real life example, a friend of mine went to EB to buy Jedi Acadamy (A game that came out a few months ago). He wants to play Jedi Acadamy online, even though there is a small community (maybe about 30-50 players online at a time on all of the servers put together). They told him it was $50. He asked for a used version and they told him $44. He promptly told them he was going to buy it from ebay or pirate it.
I think PC games should go the way of ITunes. Cut out the middleman and sell the games for $15 - $20 a piece. Most of the documentation that comes with games nowadays is incomplete or poor. Gamefaqs usually has better documentation than most games ship with.
When you start playing this seriously it isn't fun anymore, and you realize how limited the rule-set/skill level needed for most games is.
Ahh, the old "I don't like the facts so I'll deny them" approach, it'd be nice to see a *new* argument against reality once and a while.
Reality is calling 1000 people in a phone survey and saying that they represent the whole American populations opinion? Cmon.
The question wasn't some weird trick question, and it wasn't conducted in hicksville.
But the poll asks something different from what you said, you said in your original post...
what he doubtless meant was that roughly 70% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussain was responsible for the attacks on September 11. The frightening thing is that this figure does seem to be accurate.
Now what the poll says is...
How likely is it that Saddam Hussein: was personally involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks?
Very likely 32%
Somewhat likely 37%
Not very likely 15%
Not at all likely 12%
DK/No opinion 3%
Saying he was responsible for them (your wording) is different from saying that was he somewhat likely to have been invoved in the attacks. Saying you think something is somewhat likely does not mean the same thing as saying " I believe".
Somewhat involved could mean, as little as could he have allowed terrorists to train in Iraq or funded them? Could he have been where the terrorists got their anthrax from?
The government knew that the average American wouldn't support a war in Iraq based on the "Well, Cheney and Rumsfeld think it would be fun" argument
C'mon you don't really believe this do you? Give me a break. Do you think they went to war because they "thought it would be fun" or because they thought Sadaam was a threat and getting rid of him could bring stability to a part of the world that needs it? The argument that America went to war because Rumsfeld thought it would "be fun" is utter trash and deviod of any independent thinking or basis in fact.
Never underestimate Karl Rove, or the ability of Joe Average to be mislead.
And never underestimate the tinfoil hat wearing leftists from being mislead and trying to spin everything into "America is Evil"
One could wonder, would there have been an 9/11 if the Bush administration ware not elected?
of course it wouldn't have. Osama just hated GWB. He didn't hate the 40-50 years of the US protecting and supporting Isreal...He just had a beef with GWB. Osama wouldn't have done that had gore become president. As a matter of fact, I think osama may run as Dean's vice president. He really loves America and Isreal, he just hates GWB.
What he doubtless meant was that roughly 70% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussain was responsible for the attacks on September 11. The frightening thing is that this figure does seem to be accurate.
Give me a link to one study that says that, and where they actually found the 70% of the US citizens from. I'll bet it was a very small group of people, from a very poor town in the US. Anyone who has had a college level course in statistics knows you can make a poll say anything you want to if you control the way questions are asked and who participates in it.
actually we revert to a 24.39 hour life cycle which proves we are all really martians.
Couldn't they be harvested from miscarried fetuses as well?
Your granny, or superman, or anyone else is a valued human being. They should be helped through research. But gee, the knowing destruction of unborn babies is wrong - then using those body parts, fresh from the slaugter... that's just a bit too far.
We have to deal with realism. Abortion is legal in the US. Many young women unfortuantly use abortion as birth control. I don't agree with that morally, but who am I to dictate morals to other people? Out of this evil(imo), if some good can come by using the stem cells from aborted fetuses...why not? Are they serving a greater good by being thrown into the trash? If you don't allow stem cell research that could save someones life, you are as much a murderer in my eyes as the women who has an abortion as a form of birth control.
Really? CBS [cbsnews.com]
It really depends how you phrase the question. Due to wild sci-fi movies and the way the media treats cloning projects like sci-fi of course the general population will say "No you should not clone humans". Try phrasing the question "should stem cell research be legal for finding the cures to diseases such as MS" and watch the poll go to 70-80% yes.
My own personal opposition to cloning comes not from moral reasons, but because we have a population problem
We have a population problem? We might, but it's not in the direction you think. Women are having less babies and it's not just in America, it's around the world. As women become more liberated and birth control (including)becomes more popular, less and less women will have children. Impotence in males is also rising, it may come to a point where we need to clone ourselves, or our ancestors.
The guy that pulled the gun at the CS tournament is a coward though. If you have to resort to violence at least be a man and fight with your hands. A gun is a cowards way out.
if you take games this seriously, theres something that wrong with you
Most clannie gamers see FPS games as a social outlet, so it's about social status plus prize money. Most people take social status and money pretty seriously.
From the article...
"I personally keep Java off my computer because it crashes the system," he said. "If Sun had the interests of the customer in mind, then the Sun desktop would be written in C and donated to Linux. Sun is no better than Microsoft."
I've never, ever seen Java "crash the system". Not on a mac, or on a PC. Where did they find this crackhead? I'm sure I'm going to get modded down for this, but the linux zealots need to stop with this "IT HAS TO BE IN C AND OPEN SOURCE TO BE GOOD". Anything that takes desktop market share away from microsoft at this point is good.