So what you're saying is that there IS one true path, but with some cheap randomness thrown into the mix. Follow the same path you always follow, taking into account the random distribution and discovery of resources, treasures, and map position.
How can you read through endless Civilization community sites and strategy sites and come away with the idea that there is anything other than certain set paths and strategies that you should spreadsheet-progression yourself through to win?
"ONE true way" should perhaps not be meant so literally, but you get the gist.
In fairness to the game, I can't say that I played a ton of Civilization IV (a few weeks straight almost non-stop, but that was it). It certainly is a bit more open than Civlization III, but it seems to be that it has a very strong sense of "paths to the end" which you must follow. I don't just mean "diplomacy / culture / war", but StarCraft-esque "build order" type of paths.
Discovering elements in the game grid certainly throw some sense of unpredictability onto the mix, like the roll of a dice on a board game. That doesn't really detract from the mapped-out formulas, though.
I love Star Craft in addition to Civilization and Civilization is definitely more open and relaxed, but it still falls on the "one/two/three true ways" side of the play arc. Fortunately, Civilization is less of a "I can predict the end based on the first thirty seconds of game play" prone.
I hope Civilization V blows me out of the water. I'm sure it'll be an improvement and I think they're aiming for that sort of more open evolution. I don't blame them for it not being there yet, though. I'm not a game designer of any sort, but it seems like an incredible task.
I'll point out, though, that part of the reason I just built a huge beast of a new gaming rig after falling out with PC gaming for the past few years is specifically for Diablo III, StarCraft II, and . . . Civilization V. So I'm giving it a chance and buying into it. Just not getting my hopes up too much.:)
I seem to recall the intention was that they were going to use the funds raised from Torchlight to make a Torchlight MMO.
If this comes out in December of 2011, that's far enough apart, perhaps. But anything less definitely risks "too soon". I'd rather they invest more time in polishing it and not worry about getting it out the door.
I love Civilization, but I always find that the "one true way" to play starts to bum me out and I end up not playing beyond the first couple of weeks. There's a great excitement in the discovery and exploration and surprise when you can meander through a game against real people. It's not quite the same when -- as is the case with Civilization -- the game becomes nothing but a competition to see who can speed through the spreadsheet containing the "one true path to victory" the fastest. The graphics become irrelevant and you may as well be sitting down to a multi-player spreadsheet.
I'll buy it. I'll enjoy it. I just won't enjoy it for months or years like so many of the hard core do. I wish someone would figure out the special key to keeping the excitement and exploration part of the game long into the game's cycle.
If you're overclocking your card, I can see how running at full capacity could eventually succumb to thermal damage. If your card is stock, then how exactly is "taxing" it at 100% going to damage it? Does your CPU fry when it runs at 99% or 100%? Of course not - unless it is overclocked (too much) or otherwise improperly installed or configured.
If these cards are not overclocked and Star Craft truly IS killing them, it definitely has nothing to do with the cards running at full capacity and overheating.
People understand that these cards are tested off the line, right? They know what these cards can run at when they manufacture them. Not to mention, plenty of people also run various distributed projects on their GPUs without any problem whatsoever.
Ever since that report came out a few years ago, it has been "trendy" to walk around proclaiming "I'm a geek and have some weird OCD traits, so I totally have aspergers!" I'm sure it is sometimes legitimate and meaningful, but for the most part I suspect it is the geek version of a guy going around telling people how edgy and brooding and complex he is. And when geeks aren't going around self-diagnosing themselves as that, I'm sure doctors are all too often eager to do it for them for the same odd reasons they go around telling everyone (or used to, at least) that they have ADD and ADHD simply because they can't sit in a chair and not twitch a muscle for fifteen hours straight.
Interestingly on a similar trajectory as selfish idiots who insist on squirting out some kids on the verge of menopause (when other things, like downs syndrome goes from a 1:1200 risk to a 1:30 or worse risk).
Anyway, it's great for people to be self-sufficient as long as they are capable of fending for themselves and not at risk of being exploited in ways the "normal" worker is not.
Not nearly as reprehensible as I find every idiot geek out there (many of them, sadly to say, on Slashdot) that seem to have some perverse need to revel in calling themselves autistic -- or at the very least "oh, I like star trek and collecting shit, so I have fucking aspergers". Ever since that "report" came out a few years ago, every single fucktard on the planet has started going around clinging to that like some crazy fucking Munchhausen crazed mother.
In this story, these aren't people who have to wear helmets and rattle off the CIA Factbook incessantly. These are people with "high functioning" autism which, again, About half of the Slashdot audience has claimed to have over the years.
Because, as far as video game publishers are concerned (and book, movie, music, software, hardware, etc) publishers and manufacturers are concerned, anyone who buys a used version of something from a store or online marketplace or a friend is a criminal. In fact, in an ideal world, hey would love permission to prosecute people who buy game and them have the audacity to let someone else play the game, too. If you buy one copy of Modern Warfare 2 and you live in a house with four gamers and the first gamer lets the other three gamers use his copy when they want to play, that house has four criminals living there, as far as they're concerned.
Ideally, these fuckers would like to charge you for the game and then charge each person you let play the game another $60 all over again and then charge you again for a regular "playing fee". They apparently can't even get "piracy" right. The guy who copied the game to play on his machine isn't a pirate. The dicks fabricating fake copies in packaging all shrink-wrapped and priced at $20 instead of $60 to make a buck are pirates.
So one's moral compass should be determined by the government? What part of "hey, we want you to turn over all this information on dissidents so that we can lock them in cages for the rest of their lives and threaten their family, etc, etc" is justified by "well, gosh, it's what they have to do if they want to do business in China, man.."?
Unfortunately, what it does prove is that making a buck is far more important and valuable to society and government and people than privacy.
I can't see any statement putting this into a better context. Killing your husband is illegal. Searching for ways to kill someone is not. Perhaps you're an author looking for information for a story. Perhaps you're just curious. Perhaps it's nobody else's fucking business. And once you start parsing through what is and is not valid to remain private and what should be exposed, you admit that you will have to sift through and have access to EVERYTHING - "good' or "bad".
The best policy here is "we hold nothing with greater value than an individual's privacy and we will always defend that to the fullest extent of the law, always". Period. Anything short of that is bullshit.
Then again, Tiger Woods isn't a criminal. His wife is. Being absurdly rich and having sex with lots of women isn't a crime. Yet it's an example of something that you might not want google or the government or any other entity throwing out there or exploiting. It's none of their business. (And isn't it interesting how he's the one whose behavior we'd be concerned with here, when his wife physically abused him... If the sexes were turned around, would we be going insane over the fact the woman was cheating, rather than the fact that the man beat the shit out of her?).
Respect for the privacy of the individual is one of the most vitally important elements of our government. If you don't have that respect, you don't have anything. Period.
By google's reasoning, abortion doctor's shouldn't have any privacy and those people trying to post all their private information online (and we know exactly why they do that) should be allowed to do so. After all, if you're not a criminal, why do you care about privacy? It's not like anyone is going to murder you or anything. Oh... right.
And hey, while we're at it, let's post all the information about children who are adopted, molested, beaten, and abused. And let's post all the information about every rape victim. After all, if a rape victim isn't a criminal, why is she so concerned with privacy?
This extends to limitless examples and what it really comes down to is "because it's MY fucking information". So fuck them.
Then again, Google is the company that not only allows that "rip off report" guy's website to be indexed, but actually PROMOTES his extortion scam to the top of most search results (while most other search engines squelch or even remove the results entirely). The level to which google truly doesn't give a fuck about its customers is astounding.
All those brains and they still seem to have difficulty with the concept of privacy. It's baffling.
Also, while they're at it, why do they even use passwords for people's email accounts? I bet they use passwords for their employees. And I bet they send their data over encrypted connections. And I bet they email their employees checks and important information in protected "security" envelopes. Why? What's with all this secrecy if non-criminals have nothing to hide?
With the CEO's "privacy is for criminals" mentality, I think having your information used between businesses for their own profit is the absolute *least* we should be worried about. How about the privacy of people with medical concerns using google (search, gmail, etc) to research it? Or readily handing over the key to the government (or many governments) for "the good of the people" (reads, to hunt down wrong-doers and squelch oppositions of anything anywhere).
There's a reason we don't have our social security numbers, salaries, phone numbers and countless other things tattooed on our foreheads for all to see at will. I've never been a google fanboy, but I appreciate the services they offer and use them quite frequently (far more than just their search features). The CEO's comments make me feel tricked, dirty, and seriously questioning whether I will use any of their services anymore (including search). And that's saying a lot, because short of something like this statement, I have always said "I can't imagine every wanting to use any other search engine. Period."
Are other businesses just as bad? Perhaps. But there is a significant difference between the very strongly worded "privacy is for criminals" and the attitude many other companies have.
Their logic is always "the average user only checks their email and maybe the sports scores and a news website". If that's the case, then what harm to those users are the "heavy" users really doing? The nature of the argument undermines the argument to begin with.
What really frustrates me is that I use a lot of bandwidth and I would happily pay double what I pay now to have double the access (ie, pay for two accounts). Unfortunately, they won't let you do that. This "public utility" that always has a monopoly in each region as far as providing service offers one option and one option only. Period. That's pretty poor service.
I and others in my household enjoy watching a lot of HD content on netflix, downloading entire games on XBOX, streaming radio stations, VPN'ing into work, watching videos online, keeping vital backups remotely with backup services, downloading PLENTY of IPTV and podcasts in high quality, playing video games, etc. It definitely ads up to a LOT of bandwidth. And I'm willing to pay (not ridiculous jacked up prices, mind you - but I'll pay double to use double, certainly). Unfortunately, I can't get what I as a customer and citizen am willing to pay for, even though the company is granted special access by local government on behalf of me.
Instead, they consider people like me a pariah, because we don't have the same usage patterns as someone's elderly grandmother that just emails "the kids" once a month.
TechCrunch is so cutting edge. . . Wait, didn't we already go through this whole "Video Professor guy is a scam and here's the scammy behavior and the feds are investigating" thing months ago? Maybe even a couple years ago? Hell, I seem to recall seeing something on that G4TV show about it a year or two ago.
I mean, really, "Video Professor is a scam!" ranks up there in terms of widely-spread knowledge among generally everybody as "blue hippo is a scam". Or even more like "those letters that come in the mail and ask you to send a dollar to the sender and then send your own letter to six new people is a scam".
What's next -- I shouldn't give my banking information and social security number and passwords to people who randomly call me up and ask for them, claiming to be in a position of authority within the institution? *GASP*
I agree that as incredibly offensive as it is, it is absolutely a protected form of political speech in as much as it is commentary (no matter how obscene and juvenile) about a celebrity, public figure, de facto political figure. Meanwhile, the every day person has to put up with actual libel on the internet that is not in any way merely a form of "free speech" or "political commentary" and there's no recourse for them - through Google or otherwise.
It seems to me, then, that the best thing they could have done is left it alone. The algorithm essentially culls the pulse of the internet for good or bad and when you start tweaking that (for instance, to promote google affiliates to the top two or three results), then you are essentially devaluing the entire worth of your index.
Yes, because comparing a president's intellect to that of a monkey is exactly the same as a racist comparison of the president's wife to the physical appearance of a monkey. I know it might be nice to live in a little vacuum world in which nothing has any context, but certain things in our society are very loaded, even if when broken down, they should not be.
I think the truly sad thing here is how the first lady gets something like this wiped from the internet (more or less) while every other person who isn't rich or famous or powerful has to simply accept Google indexing (even prominently) very slanderous, libelous, offensive, repulsive, wrong, insulting things by other people (for example, see how Google is perhaps the only search engine to not only avoid hampering the Rip Off Report's libelous and unchecked content that the owner uses as a method of extortion against businesses and individuals under the guise of a consumer activist service, but actually prominently ranks and displays content) -- if you're not the president's wife, it's just tough shit for you. If you *are*, then boy howdy, we'll jump right on that!
I don't need to discuss stem-cell research and military actions and political maneuvers with the kid who pumps gas or the soccer mom down the street to have my mind opened up and stumble upon an enlightening view. Endless ignorant-noise (commentary) from other people merely reading the news (or, more liking, listening to some biased commentator regurgitating their version of what was in the news and parroting that back to me with talking points they had handed to them without any real comprehension) doesn't really contribute anything.
Besides, I want to know facts. I don't care about your *opinion* on events that occurred yesterday. I just want to know what fucking occurred.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is that there IS one true path, but with some cheap randomness thrown into the mix. Follow the same path you always follow, taking into account the random distribution and discovery of resources, treasures, and map position.
How can you read through endless Civilization community sites and strategy sites and come away with the idea that there is anything other than certain set paths and strategies that you should spreadsheet-progression yourself through to win?
"ONE true way" should perhaps not be meant so literally, but you get the gist.
In fairness to the game, I can't say that I played a ton of Civilization IV (a few weeks straight almost non-stop, but that was it). It certainly is a bit more open than Civlization III, but it seems to be that it has a very strong sense of "paths to the end" which you must follow. I don't just mean "diplomacy / culture / war", but StarCraft-esque "build order" type of paths.
Discovering elements in the game grid certainly throw some sense of unpredictability onto the mix, like the roll of a dice on a board game. That doesn't really detract from the mapped-out formulas, though.
I love Star Craft in addition to Civilization and Civilization is definitely more open and relaxed, but it still falls on the "one/two/three true ways" side of the play arc. Fortunately, Civilization is less of a "I can predict the end based on the first thirty seconds of game play" prone.
I hope Civilization V blows me out of the water. I'm sure it'll be an improvement and I think they're aiming for that sort of more open evolution. I don't blame them for it not being there yet, though. I'm not a game designer of any sort, but it seems like an incredible task.
I'll point out, though, that part of the reason I just built a huge beast of a new gaming rig after falling out with PC gaming for the past few years is specifically for Diablo III, StarCraft II, and . . . Civilization V. So I'm giving it a chance and buying into it. Just not getting my hopes up too much. :)
I meant to imply "incorrectly" within the statement "if you're overclocking your card".
I seem to recall the intention was that they were going to use the funds raised from Torchlight to make a Torchlight MMO.
If this comes out in December of 2011, that's far enough apart, perhaps. But anything less definitely risks "too soon". I'd rather they invest more time in polishing it and not worry about getting it out the door.
I love Civilization, but I always find that the "one true way" to play starts to bum me out and I end up not playing beyond the first couple of weeks. There's a great excitement in the discovery and exploration and surprise when you can meander through a game against real people. It's not quite the same when -- as is the case with Civilization -- the game becomes nothing but a competition to see who can speed through the spreadsheet containing the "one true path to victory" the fastest. The graphics become irrelevant and you may as well be sitting down to a multi-player spreadsheet.
I'll buy it. I'll enjoy it. I just won't enjoy it for months or years like so many of the hard core do. I wish someone would figure out the special key to keeping the excitement and exploration part of the game long into the game's cycle.
It's a great game, but I grow weary of the recent trend where every franchise must have an annual release.
If you're overclocking your card, I can see how running at full capacity could eventually succumb to thermal damage. If your card is stock, then how exactly is "taxing" it at 100% going to damage it? Does your CPU fry when it runs at 99% or 100%? Of course not - unless it is overclocked (too much) or otherwise improperly installed or configured.
If these cards are not overclocked and Star Craft truly IS killing them, it definitely has nothing to do with the cards running at full capacity and overheating.
People understand that these cards are tested off the line, right? They know what these cards can run at when they manufacture them. Not to mention, plenty of people also run various distributed projects on their GPUs without any problem whatsoever.
Yes, but that's simply part of being American; nothing to do with Autism.
Ever since that report came out a few years ago, it has been "trendy" to walk around proclaiming "I'm a geek and have some weird OCD traits, so I totally have aspergers!" I'm sure it is sometimes legitimate and meaningful, but for the most part I suspect it is the geek version of a guy going around telling people how edgy and brooding and complex he is. And when geeks aren't going around self-diagnosing themselves as that, I'm sure doctors are all too often eager to do it for them for the same odd reasons they go around telling everyone (or used to, at least) that they have ADD and ADHD simply because they can't sit in a chair and not twitch a muscle for fifteen hours straight.
Interestingly on a similar trajectory as selfish idiots who insist on squirting out some kids on the verge of menopause (when other things, like downs syndrome goes from a 1:1200 risk to a 1:30 or worse risk).
Anyway, it's great for people to be self-sufficient as long as they are capable of fending for themselves and not at risk of being exploited in ways the "normal" worker is not.
Not nearly as reprehensible as I find every idiot geek out there (many of them, sadly to say, on Slashdot) that seem to have some perverse need to revel in calling themselves autistic -- or at the very least "oh, I like star trek and collecting shit, so I have fucking aspergers". Ever since that "report" came out a few years ago, every single fucktard on the planet has started going around clinging to that like some crazy fucking Munchhausen crazed mother.
In this story, these aren't people who have to wear helmets and rattle off the CIA Factbook incessantly. These are people with "high functioning" autism which, again, About half of the Slashdot audience has claimed to have over the years.
Because, as far as video game publishers are concerned (and book, movie, music, software, hardware, etc) publishers and manufacturers are concerned, anyone who buys a used version of something from a store or online marketplace or a friend is a criminal. In fact, in an ideal world, hey would love permission to prosecute people who buy game and them have the audacity to let someone else play the game, too. If you buy one copy of Modern Warfare 2 and you live in a house with four gamers and the first gamer lets the other three gamers use his copy when they want to play, that house has four criminals living there, as far as they're concerned.
Ideally, these fuckers would like to charge you for the game and then charge each person you let play the game another $60 all over again and then charge you again for a regular "playing fee". They apparently can't even get "piracy" right. The guy who copied the game to play on his machine isn't a pirate. The dicks fabricating fake copies in packaging all shrink-wrapped and priced at $20 instead of $60 to make a buck are pirates.
So one's moral compass should be determined by the government? What part of "hey, we want you to turn over all this information on dissidents so that we can lock them in cages for the rest of their lives and threaten their family, etc, etc" is justified by "well, gosh, it's what they have to do if they want to do business in China, man.."?
Unfortunately, what it does prove is that making a buck is far more important and valuable to society and government and people than privacy.
I can't see any statement putting this into a better context. Killing your husband is illegal. Searching for ways to kill someone is not. Perhaps you're an author looking for information for a story. Perhaps you're just curious. Perhaps it's nobody else's fucking business. And once you start parsing through what is and is not valid to remain private and what should be exposed, you admit that you will have to sift through and have access to EVERYTHING - "good' or "bad".
The best policy here is "we hold nothing with greater value than an individual's privacy and we will always defend that to the fullest extent of the law, always". Period. Anything short of that is bullshit.
Then again, Tiger Woods isn't a criminal. His wife is. Being absurdly rich and having sex with lots of women isn't a crime. Yet it's an example of something that you might not want google or the government or any other entity throwing out there or exploiting. It's none of their business. (And isn't it interesting how he's the one whose behavior we'd be concerned with here, when his wife physically abused him... If the sexes were turned around, would we be going insane over the fact the woman was cheating, rather than the fact that the man beat the shit out of her?).
Respect for the privacy of the individual is one of the most vitally important elements of our government. If you don't have that respect, you don't have anything. Period.
By google's reasoning, abortion doctor's shouldn't have any privacy and those people trying to post all their private information online (and we know exactly why they do that) should be allowed to do so. After all, if you're not a criminal, why do you care about privacy? It's not like anyone is going to murder you or anything. Oh... right.
And hey, while we're at it, let's post all the information about children who are adopted, molested, beaten, and abused. And let's post all the information about every rape victim. After all, if a rape victim isn't a criminal, why is she so concerned with privacy?
This extends to limitless examples and what it really comes down to is "because it's MY fucking information". So fuck them.
Then again, Google is the company that not only allows that "rip off report" guy's website to be indexed, but actually PROMOTES his extortion scam to the top of most search results (while most other search engines squelch or even remove the results entirely). The level to which google truly doesn't give a fuck about its customers is astounding.
All those brains and they still seem to have difficulty with the concept of privacy. It's baffling.
Also, while they're at it, why do they even use passwords for people's email accounts? I bet they use passwords for their employees. And I bet they send their data over encrypted connections. And I bet they email their employees checks and important information in protected "security" envelopes. Why? What's with all this secrecy if non-criminals have nothing to hide?
With the CEO's "privacy is for criminals" mentality, I think having your information used between businesses for their own profit is the absolute *least* we should be worried about. How about the privacy of people with medical concerns using google (search, gmail, etc) to research it? Or readily handing over the key to the government (or many governments) for "the good of the people" (reads, to hunt down wrong-doers and squelch oppositions of anything anywhere).
There's a reason we don't have our social security numbers, salaries, phone numbers and countless other things tattooed on our foreheads for all to see at will. I've never been a google fanboy, but I appreciate the services they offer and use them quite frequently (far more than just their search features). The CEO's comments make me feel tricked, dirty, and seriously questioning whether I will use any of their services anymore (including search). And that's saying a lot, because short of something like this statement, I have always said "I can't imagine every wanting to use any other search engine. Period."
Are other businesses just as bad? Perhaps. But there is a significant difference between the very strongly worded "privacy is for criminals" and the attitude many other companies have.
Their logic is always "the average user only checks their email and maybe the sports scores and a news website". If that's the case, then what harm to those users are the "heavy" users really doing? The nature of the argument undermines the argument to begin with.
What really frustrates me is that I use a lot of bandwidth and I would happily pay double what I pay now to have double the access (ie, pay for two accounts). Unfortunately, they won't let you do that. This "public utility" that always has a monopoly in each region as far as providing service offers one option and one option only. Period. That's pretty poor service.
I and others in my household enjoy watching a lot of HD content on netflix, downloading entire games on XBOX, streaming radio stations, VPN'ing into work, watching videos online, keeping vital backups remotely with backup services, downloading PLENTY of IPTV and podcasts in high quality, playing video games, etc. It definitely ads up to a LOT of bandwidth. And I'm willing to pay (not ridiculous jacked up prices, mind you - but I'll pay double to use double, certainly). Unfortunately, I can't get what I as a customer and citizen am willing to pay for, even though the company is granted special access by local government on behalf of me.
Instead, they consider people like me a pariah, because we don't have the same usage patterns as someone's elderly grandmother that just emails "the kids" once a month.
No, YOU grow op!
TechCrunch is so cutting edge. . . Wait, didn't we already go through this whole "Video Professor guy is a scam and here's the scammy behavior and the feds are investigating" thing months ago? Maybe even a couple years ago? Hell, I seem to recall seeing something on that G4TV show about it a year or two ago.
I mean, really, "Video Professor is a scam!" ranks up there in terms of widely-spread knowledge among generally everybody as "blue hippo is a scam". Or even more like "those letters that come in the mail and ask you to send a dollar to the sender and then send your own letter to six new people is a scam".
What's next -- I shouldn't give my banking information and social security number and passwords to people who randomly call me up and ask for them, claiming to be in a position of authority within the institution? *GASP*
I agree that as incredibly offensive as it is, it is absolutely a protected form of political speech in as much as it is commentary (no matter how obscene and juvenile) about a celebrity, public figure, de facto political figure. Meanwhile, the every day person has to put up with actual libel on the internet that is not in any way merely a form of "free speech" or "political commentary" and there's no recourse for them - through Google or otherwise.
It seems to me, then, that the best thing they could have done is left it alone. The algorithm essentially culls the pulse of the internet for good or bad and when you start tweaking that (for instance, to promote google affiliates to the top two or three results), then you are essentially devaluing the entire worth of your index.
Yes, because comparing a president's intellect to that of a monkey is exactly the same as a racist comparison of the president's wife to the physical appearance of a monkey. I know it might be nice to live in a little vacuum world in which nothing has any context, but certain things in our society are very loaded, even if when broken down, they should not be.
I think the truly sad thing here is how the first lady gets something like this wiped from the internet (more or less) while every other person who isn't rich or famous or powerful has to simply accept Google indexing (even prominently) very slanderous, libelous, offensive, repulsive, wrong, insulting things by other people (for example, see how Google is perhaps the only search engine to not only avoid hampering the Rip Off Report's libelous and unchecked content that the owner uses as a method of extortion against businesses and individuals under the guise of a consumer activist service, but actually prominently ranks and displays content) -- if you're not the president's wife, it's just tough shit for you. If you *are*, then boy howdy, we'll jump right on that!
I don't need to discuss stem-cell research and military actions and political maneuvers with the kid who pumps gas or the soccer mom down the street to have my mind opened up and stumble upon an enlightening view. Endless ignorant-noise (commentary) from other people merely reading the news (or, more liking, listening to some biased commentator regurgitating their version of what was in the news and parroting that back to me with talking points they had handed to them without any real comprehension) doesn't really contribute anything.
Besides, I want to know facts. I don't care about your *opinion* on events that occurred yesterday. I just want to know what fucking occurred.