Of course it's fair, with the proviso that the restrictions are made clear before sign-up. Vote with your feet, and all that.
My ISP doesn't have an anti-p2p policy although, that said, I'm not aware of any in the UK that do. On the other hand most impose a download cap, which can amount to the same thing.
Oh, hell, I agree absolutely. My hypothetical game suggests 100 hours of play-time, not 100 hours of distinct content. A ten-hour game is more than fine if it offers good replay value through configuration (different classes, factions, or whatever) or through its nature (online FPS, racing, etc).
The games I've played longest are Civ 2 and Unreal Tournament, both of which have ultimately offered me a ridiculously low cost per minute.
Let's say that I'm a games publisher. I sell you a game that offers, say, 100 hours of interesting play. After the purchase you have three options:
1) Sell it after a short while.
OK, it wasn't to your taste. Sorry. If it's a good game, there won't be too many people in your situation.
2) Sell it after a longer while.
I'm glad you enjoyed it. Most people into this sort of thing will have bought it new by now. And whoever picked it up second-hand will hopefully buy my next game new, once they've enjoyed this one.
3) Keep it.
Groovy.
Oh, what's that? You've made a game with 10 hours of play? Well, sucks to be you. Let's hope that if it's a truly fucking awesome 10 hours the media will have pushed it to the point that your first-weekend sales will be through the roof. If you've crapped out ten hours of digital tedium you're probably screwed, and a good thing too.
Bottom line: make a good game with a decent replay value and you won't haemorrhage money through second-hand sales.
I think that there is some sense to the policy. If you're told to write a paper your lecturer is going to assess the result with the assumption that you had a specific of time to create it. Handing in something you previously spent a year writing, while still entirely your own work, violates the parameters of the assignment if your fellow students were only given a week.
Oh, hell, agreed on all counts. Here's something I posted on another forum, reposted in the hope that it might bring the light to other Buffy-phobiacs:
I never really liked Buffy. I heard about Firefly on slashdot and thought it sounded quite interesting, but the Wheedon connection put me off. Eventually, after reading increasingly hyperbolic comments about it, I threw the first DVD into my rental queue in the spirit of experimentation.
It eventually turned up, I watched it in one sitting, and put the second DVD at the top of my queue.
By a happy coincidence (the series is pretty much unknown in the UK) I found the box set in a record shop a few days later. After enjoying a spontaneous orgasm I bought it, ran home and...didn't watch it.
Why? Because I love Firefly so much that I wanted to savour it, instead of gobbling it down in one go. It's quite a novel experience for me: I don't think I've ever been such a definite and blatant fanboy about anything before this. Without any previous history of irrational behaviour I've found myself in the same category as the people willing to pay their own money to make another series of Enterprise.
Oh, it's just that you lot tend to be a bit technologically backward. Here in the UK we've been routing our emails through wormholes for years.
Granted, it's a bit of a bitch when your resignation email arrives in your manager's inbox before you've actually decided to quit your job. And a 'Dear Jane' email arriving mid-coitus can dampen the mood somewhat. But on the plus side, I do enjoy the spam I get from green, triple-breasted Martian women.
Yes, it's a new exhibit at Madame Tussauds, showing pop nymphettes impaled upon a variety of medieval weaponry. Well worth a visit if you've ever fancied seeing Kylie being violated with a halberd.
I briefly worked for a telemarketing company (a vacation job while I was at university - don't hate me; I'm not really evil). Every day my colleagues and I would be given a very large, very worn book of names and phone numbers, and would spend a few hours interfering with the lives of the people within.
I've no idea how frequently these books were replaced, but it didn't happen in the two months that I was working there. There was no training to speak of; if you'd asked not to be called again you would have been assured of our compliance and then called a week or two later by the next poor fool who was given the book.
This was eight years ago and perhaps things have changed. But most likely they haven't, and the reason it takes months is that the telemarketers have yet to enter the twentieth century.
"We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility"
Whenever I read something like this I can't help wondering who the author thinks he's going to convince. Being forced to work 80 hours a week, for weeks or even months at a time, does not provide me with flexibility to be relished. Flexibility is being given the choice to work those extra hours, if I want to, and get compensated in time and/or money at a later date.
Or perhaps he was just making an irrelevant observation and missed a bit off the end:
"We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility. However, we're not going to give it to them."
Or maybe even:
"We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish the flexibility granted to their managers to make them work double time for no extra pay".
Really, though, who's his intended audience? A particularly demented judge? Anyone who understands IT or the business universe in general knows that this is verbal diarrhoea. I doubt that his employees will be saying "What, I'm flexible? Well, fuck me; I never realised that! No problems here, then."
"Some players will inevitably be better than others, but players want things to distinguish themselves from others. So the players who aren't killed often level quicker, and thus are demonstrably 'better' in terms of the level difference."
So, players want something which demonstrates their skill at playing the game. Emmert implies that this distinction is indicated by a high-level character. I assert that this is nonsense.
You're level 100! Well done! But, let's face it, so are loads of other people. Who says you're any better at this than the little level 20 whacking goblins?
Oh, so you got to level 100 in 419 hours online. And it took me 552, so you must be better at this than I am. Except...how much of your time was spent chatting, crafting, exploring, questing, fighting other players? Did you actually do the work, or did you get your friends to power-level you? Hmmm.
Perhaps it would help if, using as many obvious implications as you can lay your hands on, you would be good enough to explain how levelling provides any useful and demonstrable distinction between one player and another.
"So the players who aren't killed often level quicker, and thus are demonstrably 'better' in terms of the level difference."
Really now, this is frothing idiocy. I haven't yet seen a MMORPG where skill and strategy isn't entirely overwhelmed by the time invested in playing - a high-level character is simply demonstrably 'older'.
"This is no different than one person earning a special piece of armor by going on a hard, long quest, and another one who chooses not to go on that quest. The former then gets the recognition for his effort."
This is the main problem with this sort of game, I think. You go on a hard, long, arduous quest. It takes effort. It's a struggle. It's not fun! And if you're anything like me, perhaps you'll grit your teeth and force yourself through it to get the reward at the end. Or you might decide that it's not worth the effort.
The MMORPG watershed he speaks of will, I think, come when someone manages to create a game where the grind is replaced by something consistently entertaining, rather than something which must be endured. Ask a typical player if they'd do the typical levelling activities without getting items or experience and they'd laugh in your face. That's the key; a game which simultaneously rewards and entertains will change the industry.
I play CoH, and I thought it might be useful to give a brief outline of how you can customize a character. You have two fundamental areas of decision making when creating a new hero: his costume and his abilities.
Costume
CoH has easily the most comprehensive outfit generator I've ever seen in a computer game. The basic principle is that each basic item of your character's clothing is individually selected from a predefined set, and then coloured as you see fit.
So, what does your head look like? You can wear a fedora or a duster or a cowboy hat (amongst many others), a medieval helm (of various styles and sizes), horns (big, small, aligned in various ways), etc, etc. The list is evidently limited by factors such as what the art team had time to create - I don't recall seeing a wizard's hat, for example. But take it from me: it's a big list. And then you need to decide on the colour.
Hair? Long, short, spiky, buzz-cut, bald, whatever. Add a moustache and/or beard if appropriate (and if you can decide what style you want). And make it a lovely shade of fuchsia if you really must.
And then you've got your skin colour, your face, shades/spectacles/implants, eye colour, accessories (fancy a cigar? Or a veil? Can't have both, which is probably just as well), skin patterns/tattooes (leopard spots, lightning bolts, blah blah blah) and so on.
I'm boring myself here, but you get the point - the same process is repeated for the rest of your costume. So I've got an old soldier in dark green armour, a dashing medic in a rather fetching red/blue/green gradiated set of skintight leather, and a whole load of completely different others.
So, anyway, the reality is that you can probably create something pretty close to your ideal hero. And something pretty close to Marvel's ideal heroes, too. But not identical: you can't select Spiderman's 'web' theme, and I don't think you can recreate Superman's emblem - CoH will let you place an S on your character's chest, but doesn't have the right background shape. The upshot is that you can make anything using 'generic' clothing (like, umm, Mr Hulk. Bare, green skin? Not exactly a challenge there) but you can't generally do the little flourishes.
Powers
Your costume has no impact on your performance in the game: it's your selection of powers that determines your play style. In a rather simplified nutshell you select an 'archetype' - melee fighter, healer, ranged attacker, etc - and then a couple of power sets. These can be things like super strength, invulnerability, flight, firebolts, invisibility, mental domination, super speed, ice mastery, and so on.
There are a few dozen power sets in total with perhaps a dozen specific abilities (a big skull-cleaving blow with a broadsword, or a faster one dealing less damage, or a swipe which hits multiple opponents, or a parry which makes you harder to damage) in each.
So, as with your costume, you can perform many 'generic' feats of heroism. But you can't generally recreate those employed by your more imaginative hero - no web-slinging, for instance. And while you can play with a few gadgets, you don't get a Batmobile.
In conclusion, then, Marvel are talking a crock of shit, and the Bic analogy used elsewhere (all over the place) in this thread is entirely justified. Can you recreate your favourite superhero? Yes, if the original idea was devoid of subtlety and imagination. Can you recreate a well-designed and nuanced superhero?
That billboard thing was a piece of piss. I wouldn't consider myself qualified to work for Google and yet their little puzzle was so trivial that I couldn't actually be bothered to solve it. Added to which, of course, is the fact that you could Google the answer within a day or two of the buzz commencing.
If they really wanted to use that sort of approach to resumé filtering they'd have used a hard puzzle and put a time limit on it. In reality, it was a marketing tool - albeit quite a good one, in my opinion.
I buy bespoke games lovingly hand-woven (using the finest traditional materials) by master craftsmen in a remote Peruvian mountain village. Rather than a jewel case, each CD is delivered dangling from the nipple of a Burmese virgin.
Really, though: a typical new game will cost me £30. I can get XP Home (OEM) from Scan for £60.
I like playing games. Given the choice I'd play them on a free operating system, but until that's a reality I'll cough up for Windows every few years.
I'm not even convinced that it's overpriced, to be honest. I can buy XP Home for the price of two games. As far as my gaming habit goes, it's a minor expense.
Bug-ridden, yeah, but (non-rhetorical question approaching) are there any viable alternatives?
"capital letters don't really add anything to the message"
You think? I find that capitalisation makes text easier to read: capitals provide a clear visual distinction between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. You can get your meaning across without them, certainly - as you generally can without punctuation - but why wilfully make it difficult?
I'd hope that, for $3-4k, they could do a bit better than an 80GB (2MB cache) Seagate drive. Do "those who do visualization and imaging" really not care about the performance of their storage?
I've never yet seen a machine which skimps on its essential components justify its price tag. No surprise here.
Overall I don't like the idea.
But there's a silver lining: I have a whole load of games I've bought, played for a few hours, and discarded. I tend to keep them in the vague thought that I might one day pick them up again (never happens), or that I can sell them on at some point (weee, that'll earn me $20, in total).
With pay-to-play I'd possibly lose out on the top 5% of games, but I'd save a fortune on the crap. Perhaps this business model would discourage the release of substandard rubbish?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's fair, with the proviso that the restrictions are made clear before sign-up. Vote with your feet, and all that.
My ISP doesn't have an anti-p2p policy although, that said, I'm not aware of any in the UK that do. On the other hand most impose a download cap, which can amount to the same thing.
Oh, hell, I agree absolutely. My hypothetical game suggests 100 hours of play-time, not 100 hours of distinct content. A ten-hour game is more than fine if it offers good replay value through configuration (different classes, factions, or whatever) or through its nature (online FPS, racing, etc).
The games I've played longest are Civ 2 and Unreal Tournament, both of which have ultimately offered me a ridiculously low cost per minute.
Let's say that I'm a games publisher. I sell you a game that offers, say, 100 hours of interesting play. After the purchase you have three options:
1) Sell it after a short while. OK, it wasn't to your taste. Sorry. If it's a good game, there won't be too many people in your situation.
2) Sell it after a longer while. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Most people into this sort of thing will have bought it new by now. And whoever picked it up second-hand will hopefully buy my next game new, once they've enjoyed this one.
3) Keep it. Groovy.
Oh, what's that? You've made a game with 10 hours of play? Well, sucks to be you. Let's hope that if it's a truly fucking awesome 10 hours the media will have pushed it to the point that your first-weekend sales will be through the roof. If you've crapped out ten hours of digital tedium you're probably screwed, and a good thing too.
Bottom line: make a good game with a decent replay value and you won't haemorrhage money through second-hand sales.
I think that there is some sense to the policy. If you're told to write a paper your lecturer is going to assess the result with the assumption that you had a specific of time to create it. Handing in something you previously spent a year writing, while still entirely your own work, violates the parameters of the assignment if your fellow students were only given a week.
Oh, hell, agreed on all counts. Here's something I posted on another forum, reposted in the hope that it might bring the light to other Buffy-phobiacs:
I never really liked Buffy. I heard about Firefly on slashdot and thought it sounded quite interesting, but the Wheedon connection put me off. Eventually, after reading increasingly hyperbolic comments about it, I threw the first DVD into my rental queue in the spirit of experimentation.
It eventually turned up, I watched it in one sitting, and put the second DVD at the top of my queue.
By a happy coincidence (the series is pretty much unknown in the UK) I found the box set in a record shop a few days later. After enjoying a spontaneous orgasm I bought it, ran home and...didn't watch it.
Why? Because I love Firefly so much that I wanted to savour it, instead of gobbling it down in one go. It's quite a novel experience for me: I don't think I've ever been such a definite and blatant fanboy about anything before this. Without any previous history of irrational behaviour I've found myself in the same category as the people willing to pay their own money to make another series of Enterprise.
Sounds like overkill to me. I prefer to just minimize things a little bit.
Oh, it's just that you lot tend to be a bit technologically backward. Here in the UK we've been routing our emails through wormholes for years. Granted, it's a bit of a bitch when your resignation email arrives in your manager's inbox before you've actually decided to quit your job. And a 'Dear Jane' email arriving mid-coitus can dampen the mood somewhat. But on the plus side, I do enjoy the spam I get from green, triple-breasted Martian women.
Same here, though I apply it twice for additional security. Can't be too careful...
Yes, it's a new exhibit at Madame Tussauds, showing pop nymphettes impaled upon a variety of medieval weaponry. Well worth a visit if you've ever fancied seeing Kylie being violated with a halberd.
I briefly worked for a telemarketing company (a vacation job while I was at university - don't hate me; I'm not really evil). Every day my colleagues and I would be given a very large, very worn book of names and phone numbers, and would spend a few hours interfering with the lives of the people within.
I've no idea how frequently these books were replaced, but it didn't happen in the two months that I was working there. There was no training to speak of; if you'd asked not to be called again you would have been assured of our compliance and then called a week or two later by the next poor fool who was given the book.
This was eight years ago and perhaps things have changed. But most likely they haven't, and the reason it takes months is that the telemarketers have yet to enter the twentieth century.
"We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility"
Whenever I read something like this I can't help wondering who the author thinks he's going to convince. Being forced to work 80 hours a week, for weeks or even months at a time, does not provide me with flexibility to be relished. Flexibility is being given the choice to work those extra hours, if I want to, and get compensated in time and/or money at a later date.
Or perhaps he was just making an irrelevant observation and missed a bit off the end:
"We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility. However, we're not going to give it to them."
Or maybe even:
"We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish the flexibility granted to their managers to make them work double time for no extra pay".
Really, though, who's his intended audience? A particularly demented judge? Anyone who understands IT or the business universe in general knows that this is verbal diarrhoea. I doubt that his employees will be saying "What, I'm flexible? Well, fuck me; I never realised that! No problems here, then."
Someone's created a Cell processor which has become sentient and submitted a rather garbled story about itself to slashdot.
Let's try this again, shall we?
"Some players will inevitably be better than others, but players want things to distinguish themselves from others. So the players who aren't killed often level quicker, and thus are demonstrably 'better' in terms of the level difference."
So, players want something which demonstrates their skill at playing the game. Emmert implies that this distinction is indicated by a high-level character. I assert that this is nonsense.
You're level 100! Well done! But, let's face it, so are loads of other people. Who says you're any better at this than the little level 20 whacking goblins?
Oh, so you got to level 100 in 419 hours online. And it took me 552, so you must be better at this than I am. Except...how much of your time was spent chatting, crafting, exploring, questing, fighting other players? Did you actually do the work, or did you get your friends to power-level you? Hmmm.
Perhaps it would help if, using as many obvious implications as you can lay your hands on, you would be good enough to explain how levelling provides any useful and demonstrable distinction between one player and another.
A couple of things:
"So the players who aren't killed often level quicker, and thus are demonstrably 'better' in terms of the level difference."
Really now, this is frothing idiocy. I haven't yet seen a MMORPG where skill and strategy isn't entirely overwhelmed by the time invested in playing - a high-level character is simply demonstrably 'older'.
"This is no different than one person earning a special piece of armor by going on a hard, long quest, and another one who chooses not to go on that quest. The former then gets the recognition for his effort."
This is the main problem with this sort of game, I think. You go on a hard, long, arduous quest. It takes effort. It's a struggle. It's not fun! And if you're anything like me, perhaps you'll grit your teeth and force yourself through it to get the reward at the end. Or you might decide that it's not worth the effort.
The MMORPG watershed he speaks of will, I think, come when someone manages to create a game where the grind is replaced by something consistently entertaining, rather than something which must be endured. Ask a typical player if they'd do the typical levelling activities without getting items or experience and they'd laugh in your face. That's the key; a game which simultaneously rewards and entertains will change the industry.
I play CoH, and I thought it might be useful to give a brief outline of how you can customize a character. You have two fundamental areas of decision making when creating a new hero: his costume and his abilities.
Costume
CoH has easily the most comprehensive outfit generator I've ever seen in a computer game. The basic principle is that each basic item of your character's clothing is individually selected from a predefined set, and then coloured as you see fit.
So, what does your head look like? You can wear a fedora or a duster or a cowboy hat (amongst many others), a medieval helm (of various styles and sizes), horns (big, small, aligned in various ways), etc, etc. The list is evidently limited by factors such as what the art team had time to create - I don't recall seeing a wizard's hat, for example. But take it from me: it's a big list. And then you need to decide on the colour.
Hair? Long, short, spiky, buzz-cut, bald, whatever. Add a moustache and/or beard if appropriate (and if you can decide what style you want). And make it a lovely shade of fuchsia if you really must.
And then you've got your skin colour, your face, shades/spectacles/implants, eye colour, accessories (fancy a cigar? Or a veil? Can't have both, which is probably just as well), skin patterns/tattooes (leopard spots, lightning bolts, blah blah blah) and so on.
I'm boring myself here, but you get the point - the same process is repeated for the rest of your costume. So I've got an old soldier in dark green armour, a dashing medic in a rather fetching red/blue/green gradiated set of skintight leather, and a whole load of completely different others.
So, anyway, the reality is that you can probably create something pretty close to your ideal hero. And something pretty close to Marvel's ideal heroes, too. But not identical: you can't select Spiderman's 'web' theme, and I don't think you can recreate Superman's emblem - CoH will let you place an S on your character's chest, but doesn't have the right background shape. The upshot is that you can make anything using 'generic' clothing (like, umm, Mr Hulk. Bare, green skin? Not exactly a challenge there) but you can't generally do the little flourishes.
Powers
Your costume has no impact on your performance in the game: it's your selection of powers that determines your play style. In a rather simplified nutshell you select an 'archetype' - melee fighter, healer, ranged attacker, etc - and then a couple of power sets. These can be things like super strength, invulnerability, flight, firebolts, invisibility, mental domination, super speed, ice mastery, and so on.
There are a few dozen power sets in total with perhaps a dozen specific abilities (a big skull-cleaving blow with a broadsword, or a faster one dealing less damage, or a swipe which hits multiple opponents, or a parry which makes you harder to damage) in each.
So, as with your costume, you can perform many 'generic' feats of heroism. But you can't generally recreate those employed by your more imaginative hero - no web-slinging, for instance. And while you can play with a few gadgets, you don't get a Batmobile.
In conclusion, then, Marvel are talking a crock of shit, and the Bic analogy used elsewhere (all over the place) in this thread is entirely justified. Can you recreate your favourite superhero? Yes, if the original idea was devoid of subtlety and imagination. Can you recreate a well-designed and nuanced superhero?
Fraid not.
That billboard thing was a piece of piss. I wouldn't consider myself qualified to work for Google and yet their little puzzle was so trivial that I couldn't actually be bothered to solve it. Added to which, of course, is the fact that you could Google the answer within a day or two of the buzz commencing.
If they really wanted to use that sort of approach to resumé filtering they'd have used a hard puzzle and put a time limit on it. In reality, it was a marketing tool - albeit quite a good one, in my opinion.
I buy bespoke games lovingly hand-woven (using the finest traditional materials) by master craftsmen in a remote Peruvian mountain village. Rather than a jewel case, each CD is delivered dangling from the nipple of a Burmese virgin.
Really, though: a typical new game will cost me £30. I can get XP Home (OEM) from Scan for £60.
I like playing games. Given the choice I'd play them on a free operating system, but until that's a reality I'll cough up for Windows every few years. I'm not even convinced that it's overpriced, to be honest. I can buy XP Home for the price of two games. As far as my gaming habit goes, it's a minor expense.
Bug-ridden, yeah, but (non-rhetorical question approaching) are there any viable alternatives?
"capital letters don't really add anything to the message"
You think? I find that capitalisation makes text easier to read: capitals provide a clear visual distinction between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. You can get your meaning across without them, certainly - as you generally can without punctuation - but why wilfully make it difficult?
Yes.
I'd hope that, for $3-4k, they could do a bit better than an 80GB (2MB cache) Seagate drive. Do "those who do visualization and imaging" really not care about the performance of their storage?
I've never yet seen a machine which skimps on its essential components justify its price tag. No surprise here.
Overall I don't like the idea. But there's a silver lining: I have a whole load of games I've bought, played for a few hours, and discarded. I tend to keep them in the vague thought that I might one day pick them up again (never happens), or that I can sell them on at some point (weee, that'll earn me $20, in total). With pay-to-play I'd possibly lose out on the top 5% of games, but I'd save a fortune on the crap. Perhaps this business model would discourage the release of substandard rubbish?
Well, in a manner of speaking...