What I meant is that the language filter, which already scrambles letters (using a many-to-one hash which is thus more or less indecipherable), should also scramble other characters, since currently you can "communicate" so long as you use nothing but numbers and symbols. If you can already speak the language, this won't matter to you.
First, I hate leetspeak. I think it's a plague on the game, and that Blizzard should scramble non-alphabet characters in future patches.
Second, I believe Blizzard has stated that the Universal Translator and similar plugins are beyond the acceptable use of the UI system. Reference here. This may lend ammunition to the idea that with the next content patch (ha!) they'll patch the language system.
Oh, but it gets better. Remember a couple of days ago, when Blizzard said they weren't producing any more copies until their server capacity caught up? Yeah, that made people REALLY happy... So the end effect is that they can't win. Either you can't buy a copy of a game you want to play and would freely pay money for, or you can buy it but not always play it. As an alternate analogy, suppose a theater seats 200 comfortably, 300 SRO, and 400 before the fire department gets involved; how many tickets do you sell to the premiere showing?
Incidentally, my server, which sports 5 of the largest 20 guilds on any server, is one of the lower populated ones and has rarely gone down unexpectedly; the login servers cause more problems than the realm servers. This is both before and after the emergency fix a couple days ago.
If people had to wait 2 days when a movie blockbuster came out, for example, there'd be riots.
You mean, like, when the tickets are sold out for the first weekend? Because we all know that never, ever happens on a big name release, and when it happens there are always brutal riots that we always see on the news.
Is my sarcasm heavy enough yet?
Re:The acutal effect is likely a bit different.
on
Editors Get an Earful
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· Score: 1
The trick is that this doesn't stop movie reviewers from giving 1 star, or whatever your lowest score is, to big-budget films. Certainly THEY don't review every indie film that some hack director churns out.
I've noticed grandparent's point, also. Even the players (in their reviews, as on the "review it yourself" feature of major gaming websites, or on GameFAQs) tend to fall into the trap of making a 10 point rating scale into a 7 point rating scale by defining 4 to be bad, 7 to be average, and 10 to be great. This effect is made worse because the players making reviews are self-selected and are more likely to vote 10 for fanboy reasons, but this scale seems peculiar to games, more so than any other arena.
There's a very good legal reason for this: liability if the game goes down.
Suppose a game says they'll give you a hard exchange rate of $1 for 1 gold piece. You have a stockpile of 1000 gold pieces, plus a Sword of Ultimate Stabbing +4 worth 1500 gold pieces.
Then the unfortunate happens: the game shuts down. Suddenly your $2500 ingame property is worthless. It's well within the realm of probability, then, that you could sue the game maker for the loss of your $2500, and win.
Oh, but it gets better. You know why every MMORPG company, with only one exception that I know of (Project Entropia), comes out against EBay sales of their ingame money and items? Same reason: if you can define an exchange rate from USD to ingame gold pieces, you can claim that by shutting the game down, you have lost money, and that they should be liable for it.
So... what you're saying is that you consider a lock on the outer doors of your house, an alarm system, AND random police patrols evidence that your house has a "bad security paradigm".
I'm not going to deny that Windows has made a number of decisions over the years which contribute to this, but honestly if your house had the exact same lock and the exact same key as every other house in the neighborhood, you should not be surprised when you get burglarized.
Guild Wars is only an MMORPG in the loosest sense of the term. The game setup is closer to Diablo 2 than EQ or WoW. (I'm pretty sure even the GW devs don't use that specific acronym.)
I've suggested a Pokemon based MMORPG before. Personally I think it'd be a natural choice for a game concept that practically screams MMORPG as it is. And say what you will about the series, the first Pokemon game was extremely innovative and a lot of fun, whatever your age or maturity level.
Outwar has been doing this for a long time... various sites with similar demographics (for example, http://www.newgrounds.com/) have had to deal with the issue of spamming Outwar links for years. In most of those places it's bannable, or whatever the equivalent is.
Unfortunately, there's really no way to police something like this... a game that's designed such that the more people you can get to click on your links, the better you do. All you can really do is try to keep people from posting them.
Think about it. What current, wildly popular game series has a huge young fanbase, and is based on the idea of striking out on your own to seek fame, fortune, and power?
Pokemon. You know... "I want to be the very best, like no one ever was"?
Actually, the Pokemon series is fairly deep, and was fairly innovative the first time around. Given that the gameplay already revolves around PvM (fighting and capturing wild Pokemon) and the occasional PvP (fighting other trainers), it'd be way too easy. Plus... I for one would actually play a 3D Pokemon MMORPG.
When Nightfreeze originally posted this in SomethingAwful about a month ago, he posted it in about 18 hour intervals, infuriating all of his readers, but adding a great deal to the suspense.
As for the story itself... it's another tale of people pushing the rules as far as they'll go to get ahead. There's a natural tendency to want to take any advantage, whether it be by exploiting others, exploiting loopholes, exploiting lax enforcement of the rules, or just grinding incessantly. And since the worst that can happen to you online is that you get IP banned or key banned (which only diminishes your standing in that virtual world), it opens up all sorts of doors for people to fulfill whatever escapist criminal fantasies they have. Is that good or bad? Well... that's almost the same debate as "games cause violence".
The really interesting part is the epilogue: after scamming what would amount to a sizeable amount of cash on EBay, he doesn't buy anything with it or flaunt it, he just gives it away. Guess there's really nothing to do once you're the richest player on the server.
I don't like your example... the average user, if they had a computer at all, avoided all of those things like the plague. Now we have a much larger group of users, who on the whole have less skill with computers. I suspect they'll get more skilled as time goes on, but I am NOT underestimating their current or near-future capabilities when I say a fair number of them will run as root all the time, or only set up other accounts for kids.
One would THINK that "run Windows Update regularly" would be conventionally accepted practice, but it's not, even though it's as easy as "here's an update, click this button to install it".
Just wanted to point out a few salient points that I happen to agree with.
When we mention that there is a new exploit for Windows out people for some reason feel the need to blame Windows instead of the users using it. Do you think that these same people are going to have a secure Linux machine, I certainly don't.
I'm not going to argue that Windows is more secure than Linux. But do you really think that all computer users are smart enough not to run as root all the time?
Linux will be ready for the desktop when it is as easy to install, run, and care for as carelessly as Windows users demand.
Linux presents choices. This is considered a good thing. However, choices are also confusing. What good is it to choose from 10 different distros if you don't know where to start, and can't tell any real difference? (Substitute "web browsers", "text editors", "window managers" for distros.) And then you have compatibility problems, which will at some point fade but at the moment present a huge challenge to the average user.
What do you do with 25 GB for a SINGLE GAME? I'm well aware that the big names can easily figure out what to do with it, but at the cost of higher production costs and longer turnarounds, which are already becoming a problem.
Well, in my case it was a 10th grade english class which involved 40 page "journals". I was, however, taught to touch type fairly early on.
I want to know what crackpot thinks that you can be anywhere near good at what schools usually think of as "computer skills" (read: word processing, web design, Excel, Powerpoint, email, internet) without being able to type at a half-decent rate.
You get used to repeatedly tapping A throughout the whole battle. It's not a bad game at all... then again, the story ends rather abruptly with a "go play Golden Sun 2"-type message, and Golden Sun 2 bored me to tears with all the sailing.
Slashdot Mirror
What I meant is that the language filter, which already scrambles letters (using a many-to-one hash which is thus more or less indecipherable), should also scramble other characters, since currently you can "communicate" so long as you use nothing but numbers and symbols. If you can already speak the language, this won't matter to you.
Two things.
First, I hate leetspeak. I think it's a plague on the game, and that Blizzard should scramble non-alphabet characters in future patches.
Second, I believe Blizzard has stated that the Universal Translator and similar plugins are beyond the acceptable use of the UI system. Reference here. This may lend ammunition to the idea that with the next content patch (ha!) they'll patch the language system.
Believe me, I realized the absurdity of the statement before I got to the sarcastic editorial comment at the end. It's not necessary. Stop it.
Oh, but it gets better. Remember a couple of days ago, when Blizzard said they weren't producing any more copies until their server capacity caught up? Yeah, that made people REALLY happy... So the end effect is that they can't win. Either you can't buy a copy of a game you want to play and would freely pay money for, or you can buy it but not always play it. As an alternate analogy, suppose a theater seats 200 comfortably, 300 SRO, and 400 before the fire department gets involved; how many tickets do you sell to the premiere showing?
Incidentally, my server, which sports 5 of the largest 20 guilds on any server, is one of the lower populated ones and has rarely gone down unexpectedly; the login servers cause more problems than the realm servers. This is both before and after the emergency fix a couple days ago.
Is my sarcasm heavy enough yet?
The trick is that this doesn't stop movie reviewers from giving 1 star, or whatever your lowest score is, to big-budget films. Certainly THEY don't review every indie film that some hack director churns out.
I've noticed grandparent's point, also. Even the players (in their reviews, as on the "review it yourself" feature of major gaming websites, or on GameFAQs) tend to fall into the trap of making a 10 point rating scale into a 7 point rating scale by defining 4 to be bad, 7 to be average, and 10 to be great. This effect is made worse because the players making reviews are self-selected and are more likely to vote 10 for fanboy reasons, but this scale seems peculiar to games, more so than any other arena.
If you have a 10 point scale, use all 10 points!
There's a very good legal reason for this: liability if the game goes down.
Suppose a game says they'll give you a hard exchange rate of $1 for 1 gold piece. You have a stockpile of 1000 gold pieces, plus a Sword of Ultimate Stabbing +4 worth 1500 gold pieces.
Then the unfortunate happens: the game shuts down. Suddenly your $2500 ingame property is worthless. It's well within the realm of probability, then, that you could sue the game maker for the loss of your $2500, and win.
Oh, but it gets better. You know why every MMORPG company, with only one exception that I know of (Project Entropia), comes out against EBay sales of their ingame money and items? Same reason: if you can define an exchange rate from USD to ingame gold pieces, you can claim that by shutting the game down, you have lost money, and that they should be liable for it.
You can use WASD to move around, if that's your favorite flavor... although you'll end up running enough that you'll be using the autorun quite a bit.
So... what you're saying is that you consider a lock on the outer doors of your house, an alarm system, AND random police patrols evidence that your house has a "bad security paradigm".
I'm not going to deny that Windows has made a number of decisions over the years which contribute to this, but honestly if your house had the exact same lock and the exact same key as every other house in the neighborhood, you should not be surprised when you get burglarized.
Guild Wars is only an MMORPG in the loosest sense of the term. The game setup is closer to Diablo 2 than EQ or WoW. (I'm pretty sure even the GW devs don't use that specific acronym.)
that you're having to wait for an open beta slot to open up...
(I already have one, having jumped on FilePlanet right as it started giving out keys.)
I've suggested a Pokemon based MMORPG before. Personally I think it'd be a natural choice for a game concept that practically screams MMORPG as it is. And say what you will about the series, the first Pokemon game was extremely innovative and a lot of fun, whatever your age or maturity level.
Outwar has been doing this for a long time... various sites with similar demographics (for example, http://www.newgrounds.com/) have had to deal with the issue of spamming Outwar links for years. In most of those places it's bannable, or whatever the equivalent is.
Unfortunately, there's really no way to police something like this... a game that's designed such that the more people you can get to click on your links, the better you do. All you can really do is try to keep people from posting them.
You severely overestimate the average American, even if you restrict it to the average American who would buy such a thing.
Think about it. What current, wildly popular game series has a huge young fanbase, and is based on the idea of striking out on your own to seek fame, fortune, and power?
Pokemon. You know... "I want to be the very best, like no one ever was"?
Actually, the Pokemon series is fairly deep, and was fairly innovative the first time around. Given that the gameplay already revolves around PvM (fighting and capturing wild Pokemon) and the occasional PvP (fighting other trainers), it'd be way too easy. Plus... I for one would actually play a 3D Pokemon MMORPG.
When Nightfreeze originally posted this in SomethingAwful about a month ago, he posted it in about 18 hour intervals, infuriating all of his readers, but adding a great deal to the suspense.
As for the story itself... it's another tale of people pushing the rules as far as they'll go to get ahead. There's a natural tendency to want to take any advantage, whether it be by exploiting others, exploiting loopholes, exploiting lax enforcement of the rules, or just grinding incessantly. And since the worst that can happen to you online is that you get IP banned or key banned (which only diminishes your standing in that virtual world), it opens up all sorts of doors for people to fulfill whatever escapist criminal fantasies they have. Is that good or bad? Well... that's almost the same debate as "games cause violence".
The really interesting part is the epilogue: after scamming what would amount to a sizeable amount of cash on EBay, he doesn't buy anything with it or flaunt it, he just gives it away. Guess there's really nothing to do once you're the richest player on the server.
So... uh... what are the other two buttons for?
I'm pretty sure consoles still have a loading advantage, but as they become more and more like prefab PCs, maybe even that will change.
Yeah. Could you imagine the outcry if all you had to do to get ahead in your MMORPG of choice is go on EBay and buy a better character?
No... wait...
I don't like your example... the average user, if they had a computer at all, avoided all of those things like the plague. Now we have a much larger group of users, who on the whole have less skill with computers. I suspect they'll get more skilled as time goes on, but I am NOT underestimating their current or near-future capabilities when I say a fair number of them will run as root all the time, or only set up other accounts for kids.
One would THINK that "run Windows Update regularly" would be conventionally accepted practice, but it's not, even though it's as easy as "here's an update, click this button to install it".
I'm not going to argue that Windows is more secure than Linux. But do you really think that all computer users are smart enough not to run as root all the time?
Linux presents choices. This is considered a good thing. However, choices are also confusing. What good is it to choose from 10 different distros if you don't know where to start, and can't tell any real difference? (Substitute "web browsers", "text editors", "window managers" for distros.) And then you have compatibility problems, which will at some point fade but at the moment present a huge challenge to the average user.
What do you do with 25 GB for a SINGLE GAME? I'm well aware that the big names can easily figure out what to do with it, but at the cost of higher production costs and longer turnarounds, which are already becoming a problem.
Well, in my case it was a 10th grade english class which involved 40 page "journals". I was, however, taught to touch type fairly early on.
I want to know what crackpot thinks that you can be anywhere near good at what schools usually think of as "computer skills" (read: word processing, web design, Excel, Powerpoint, email, internet) without being able to type at a half-decent rate.
You get used to repeatedly tapping A throughout the whole battle. It's not a bad game at all... then again, the story ends rather abruptly with a "go play Golden Sun 2"-type message, and Golden Sun 2 bored me to tears with all the sailing.