Since about six people have all responded to this in the same way, I'll point out that while there is a mathematical basis for a twelve tone system, there's nothing intrinsic about the idea of only twelve tones. If you extend the idea of harmonics beyond the 12 tones most people stop at, you end up with different numbers of tones, like 19 or 31. See also: microtonal music, which a music composition friend of mine in college was really into.
Adding to the shrug factor, the twelve-tone pitch system as a whole is a human invention. This makes perfect pitch that much stranger, because it means people have an innate ability to attune themselves to an artificial note naming scheme.
So since that scheme can vary somewhat, it would make sense that depending on "which" A your perfect pitch is tuned to, you may have trouble distinguishing G# or A# in a different tuning.
Well, to be fair, analysts are backward-looking. They look at what happened before as a predictor of what happens next, but the whole success of the Wii comes from doing something different and expanding the market. I don't think even Nintendo expected to be #1; thus the "we're not competing" line.
I have one for a similar reason: it goes with my laptop, which for a couple years of college I used in odd places (sitting on a couch, among others). My laptop just has a trackpad on it, which doesn't work at all for accuracy, so instead of buying one of those ridiculous "mini-mice" I got a trackball mouse instead. It sits on my thigh and I don't have to move it to use it.
Just one stat does not work properly. Read the patch list of any other MMO and be dazzled by all the things that didn't work. Yes fate is a pity (most important effect is that it controls regeneration and at the moment it is simply to weak to make a difference) but by MMO standards LOTRO has few bugs.
How many base stats in WoW didn't work at any point in the game since release? Or even secondary stats? "Just one stat" is a really funny claim to make when you're claiming your game is more polished than WoW.
So? You're making an assumption here that the hardcore gamers are the important group, and no one else matters. I'd argue that hardcore gamers are a minority, and that by catering exclusively to them you're hurting your chances of mainstream success; witness the Playstation 3.
Yeah, but the whole point is that it presents a bar to clear for "casual" users. The motivated ones will still find ways to pirate their music if they really want to (just as they could before), and the less motivated ones will enjoy the removal of lock-in and compatibility issues while still having something keeping them from sharing the files widely.
Very few security systems are designed to be impenetrable, just hard enough to penetrate that people won't bother.
Exactly. The success of the Wii has a lot to do with bringing in people who aren't gamers. I saw the term non-gamer used more than once in this thread. The term "casual gamer" is more appropriate, but it's acquired a notion of irrelevancy. The lesson to learn from this: Gamers in the traditional sense are a very small minority of the group of people who might play games given the opportunity. Nintendo's genius was making a console that EVERYONE could play, not just the hardcore gamers.
Look at their competition. Sony's $600 PS3 is unabashedly catering to the traditional gaming market. Microsoft is doing better, but the 360 is still at its heart a traditional console, built on the back of traditional-gamer type games; Guitar Hero is as close as they've gotten to a non-traditional game, and you can see how well that's working out. Wii Sports, Wii Play, and on the DS Nintendogs and Brain Age are not those sorts of games, and that's why they're surprising people.
As a parallel: World of Warcraft. Five years ago, if you told someone a MMOG would have 8 million players, they'd tell you you're nuts: Everquest never even got close to 1 million. But it happened. Why? Not only because it's a polished game from a company with a history of polished games, but because it appeals to people outside the previous base of MMOGs.
I am convinced that the problem with WoW is that you can't make everyone happy. 8 million people means 8 different "visions" of what the perfect MMOG would be.
Witness the BC ideas. Separate PvP and PvE progression? Sounds good, except that the way they chose to do it doesn't apply equally to all classes; if they went further, though, and put PvP-only or PvE-only bonuses on items, you start to have two divergent systems of gameplay, which means you might as well make two games and stop confusing people. Solo, group, and raid progression being equal? A noble goal, but then they discovered that every new tier of encounters has to involve more elaborate gimmicks because there's really no gear progression from instance blues to Vashj drops. So they're changing that, and people are already howling about how the top raiding guilds with Black Temple loot are going to go around two-shotting the lowly casuals in their instance blues.
You really can't win playing a game like this with your playerbase.
Vanguard has the opposite problem: they've somehow made a very expensive game that manages to appeal to no one. They refuse to learn from WoW's successes and failures, or for that matter EQ2's successes and failures (which are an even better example of how to turn around a game that was going nowhere fast). You read an interview with a former Sigil employee, and you get the sense that their Vision, coupled with the release of an unfinished game, makes it entirely unsurprising that the game failed.
I don't see your point. The Viacom lawsuit has a very direct effect on whether the YouTube purchase is a success or a failure, which is why they're not backing down. An employee or ex-employee would have to spill some serious beans for them to be bothered to go after them.
In the case of GameFAQs, it's almost certainly the former. After all, if you go straight to the guide, you don't see any ads. If you go to the Twilight Princess game page, you see exactly one, but hey, that's more than zero. That's why they block non-null referrers which aren't within the site; I assume somewhere down the line null referrers were allowed due to such a concern.
This has been the stated policy for years, too, even before the CNET deal. This was pitched to the author community as "hey, tell people not to direct-link to your FAQ so they'll go look at the other ones too". Whether people bought it or not is another question, but I adhered to it in the few guides I wrote because I liked the place (even if the boards are festering cesspools).
It only takes one. Last I checked the FairUse4WM hole still hasn't been fixed.
Ocarina of Time: Bottom of the Well
on
Games and Fear
·
· Score: 1
I'm probably the only person who was scared by this, but the first time I went into the Bottom of the Well it scared the hell out of me. False floors, enemies jumping out of nowhere, and some seriously creepy music...
You do understand that in some cases this isn't really their call to make, right? If the studios say "THOU SHALT NOT SELL THIS MOVIE BELOW THIS PRICE", or even better if they expect to receive a "wholesale" price somewhere close to that (wholesale isn't really applicable here, but I'm not sure what the term is for the studios' cut in this case), unless you're big enough to give them the finger like Apple basically did with iTMS not too long ago, you're going to follow along, since you'd rather have the selection and not have the price than not have the selection.
Do you really, honestly think that the "sheep" you talk about have any desire whatsoever to play a game that demands any more out of them than WoW does? (Vanguard, I'm looking at you.)
See, you've got it all wrong. If we blame the parents, they won't vote for us in November, because they think we're insulting their ability to raise their children. But if we shift the blame to others, then all the parents can feel good about how we're protecting their children, and continue to ignore the ratings as before. After all, video gamers themselves are predominantly young, which means either they can't or won't vote, so we're free to alienate them for political gain. As such, blaming the ESRB and the evil gaming lobby trying to corrupt our children is entirely the right course of action.
In other words, I agree completely with everything you said, but you make a problematic assumption that logic even applies here.
My point is that the spelling bee, as noble a pursuit as it may be, is not a sport, and doesn't belong on a sports channel. Progaming is at least slightly more of a sport.
It can't be any worse than the 10 or so year run of the National Spelling Bee on ESPN, or for that matter the 10 hours a day of poker tournaments. At least pro gamers require quick reactions and hand-eye coordination, even if the reaction is simply to click a button. (Sounds easy until you're doing it 200 times a minute.)
Hopefully this "intimate" event will improve the signal-to-noise ratio, which has been pretty atrocious recently. It may also spur more companies to run their own events just for their legions of fans... you know, like BlizzCon.
Slashdot Mirror
Since about six people have all responded to this in the same way, I'll point out that while there is a mathematical basis for a twelve tone system, there's nothing intrinsic about the idea of only twelve tones. If you extend the idea of harmonics beyond the 12 tones most people stop at, you end up with different numbers of tones, like 19 or 31. See also: microtonal music, which a music composition friend of mine in college was really into.
Adding to the shrug factor, the twelve-tone pitch system as a whole is a human invention. This makes perfect pitch that much stranger, because it means people have an innate ability to attune themselves to an artificial note naming scheme.
So since that scheme can vary somewhat, it would make sense that depending on "which" A your perfect pitch is tuned to, you may have trouble distinguishing G# or A# in a different tuning.
Well, to be fair, analysts are backward-looking. They look at what happened before as a predictor of what happens next, but the whole success of the Wii comes from doing something different and expanding the market. I don't think even Nintendo expected to be #1; thus the "we're not competing" line.
The disease in question was rather hurriedly made impossible to spread a week or so after this happened. In other words, TWO YEARS AGO.
According to the article, they did just that.
I have one for a similar reason: it goes with my laptop, which for a couple years of college I used in odd places (sitting on a couch, among others). My laptop just has a trackpad on it, which doesn't work at all for accuracy, so instead of buying one of those ridiculous "mini-mice" I got a trackball mouse instead. It sits on my thigh and I don't have to move it to use it.
Each district represents one elected representative. So the drawing of the districts affects who gets elected from that district.
...No, spirit worked fine from the start of the game. People thought it was worthless for awhile, but not because it was broken.
But what do I know, I only played a priest from December 2004.
How many base stats in WoW didn't work at any point in the game since release? Or even secondary stats? "Just one stat" is a really funny claim to make when you're claiming your game is more polished than WoW.
So? You're making an assumption here that the hardcore gamers are the important group, and no one else matters. I'd argue that hardcore gamers are a minority, and that by catering exclusively to them you're hurting your chances of mainstream success; witness the Playstation 3.
Yeah, but the whole point is that it presents a bar to clear for "casual" users. The motivated ones will still find ways to pirate their music if they really want to (just as they could before), and the less motivated ones will enjoy the removal of lock-in and compatibility issues while still having something keeping them from sharing the files widely.
Very few security systems are designed to be impenetrable, just hard enough to penetrate that people won't bother.
Exactly. The success of the Wii has a lot to do with bringing in people who aren't gamers. I saw the term non-gamer used more than once in this thread. The term "casual gamer" is more appropriate, but it's acquired a notion of irrelevancy. The lesson to learn from this: Gamers in the traditional sense are a very small minority of the group of people who might play games given the opportunity. Nintendo's genius was making a console that EVERYONE could play, not just the hardcore gamers.
Look at their competition. Sony's $600 PS3 is unabashedly catering to the traditional gaming market. Microsoft is doing better, but the 360 is still at its heart a traditional console, built on the back of traditional-gamer type games; Guitar Hero is as close as they've gotten to a non-traditional game, and you can see how well that's working out. Wii Sports, Wii Play, and on the DS Nintendogs and Brain Age are not those sorts of games, and that's why they're surprising people.
As a parallel: World of Warcraft. Five years ago, if you told someone a MMOG would have 8 million players, they'd tell you you're nuts: Everquest never even got close to 1 million. But it happened. Why? Not only because it's a polished game from a company with a history of polished games, but because it appeals to people outside the previous base of MMOGs.
I am convinced that the problem with WoW is that you can't make everyone happy. 8 million people means 8 different "visions" of what the perfect MMOG would be.
Witness the BC ideas. Separate PvP and PvE progression? Sounds good, except that the way they chose to do it doesn't apply equally to all classes; if they went further, though, and put PvP-only or PvE-only bonuses on items, you start to have two divergent systems of gameplay, which means you might as well make two games and stop confusing people. Solo, group, and raid progression being equal? A noble goal, but then they discovered that every new tier of encounters has to involve more elaborate gimmicks because there's really no gear progression from instance blues to Vashj drops. So they're changing that, and people are already howling about how the top raiding guilds with Black Temple loot are going to go around two-shotting the lowly casuals in their instance blues.
You really can't win playing a game like this with your playerbase.
Vanguard has the opposite problem: they've somehow made a very expensive game that manages to appeal to no one. They refuse to learn from WoW's successes and failures, or for that matter EQ2's successes and failures (which are an even better example of how to turn around a game that was going nowhere fast). You read an interview with a former Sigil employee, and you get the sense that their Vision, coupled with the release of an unfinished game, makes it entirely unsurprising that the game failed.
I don't see your point. The Viacom lawsuit has a very direct effect on whether the YouTube purchase is a success or a failure, which is why they're not backing down. An employee or ex-employee would have to spill some serious beans for them to be bothered to go after them.
No, they're the same case. The original article:M .20070213.w2belggoogle0213/BNStory/Business/home
l e.html?_r=2&ref=business&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGA
This article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/business/14goog
Notice they both talk about Google News and a group of French newspapers.
In the case of GameFAQs, it's almost certainly the former. After all, if you go straight to the guide, you don't see any ads. If you go to the Twilight Princess game page, you see exactly one, but hey, that's more than zero. That's why they block non-null referrers which aren't within the site; I assume somewhere down the line null referrers were allowed due to such a concern.
This has been the stated policy for years, too, even before the CNET deal. This was pitched to the author community as "hey, tell people not to direct-link to your FAQ so they'll go look at the other ones too". Whether people bought it or not is another question, but I adhered to it in the few guides I wrote because I liked the place (even if the boards are festering cesspools).
It only takes one. Last I checked the FairUse4WM hole still hasn't been fixed.
I'm probably the only person who was scared by this, but the first time I went into the Bottom of the Well it scared the hell out of me. False floors, enemies jumping out of nowhere, and some seriously creepy music...
Get quest to find 15 grue spleens
Find grues
Kill 15 grues and loot 15 grue spleens
Return
Repeat 20 times
Ding
Repeat 59 more times
You act like repetition is a new thing with the level 60 game. And I still play WoW.
You do understand that in some cases this isn't really their call to make, right? If the studios say "THOU SHALT NOT SELL THIS MOVIE BELOW THIS PRICE", or even better if they expect to receive a "wholesale" price somewhere close to that (wholesale isn't really applicable here, but I'm not sure what the term is for the studios' cut in this case), unless you're big enough to give them the finger like Apple basically did with iTMS not too long ago, you're going to follow along, since you'd rather have the selection and not have the price than not have the selection.
Do you really, honestly think that the "sheep" you talk about have any desire whatsoever to play a game that demands any more out of them than WoW does? (Vanguard, I'm looking at you.)
See, you've got it all wrong. If we blame the parents, they won't vote for us in November, because they think we're insulting their ability to raise their children. But if we shift the blame to others, then all the parents can feel good about how we're protecting their children, and continue to ignore the ratings as before. After all, video gamers themselves are predominantly young, which means either they can't or won't vote, so we're free to alienate them for political gain. As such, blaming the ESRB and the evil gaming lobby trying to corrupt our children is entirely the right course of action.
In other words, I agree completely with everything you said, but you make a problematic assumption that logic even applies here.
My point is that the spelling bee, as noble a pursuit as it may be, is not a sport, and doesn't belong on a sports channel. Progaming is at least slightly more of a sport.
It can't be any worse than the 10 or so year run of the National Spelling Bee on ESPN, or for that matter the 10 hours a day of poker tournaments. At least pro gamers require quick reactions and hand-eye coordination, even if the reaction is simply to click a button. (Sounds easy until you're doing it 200 times a minute.)
Hopefully this "intimate" event will improve the signal-to-noise ratio, which has been pretty atrocious recently. It may also spur more companies to run their own events just for their legions of fans... you know, like BlizzCon.