I would think the PC RPG is in trouble more from the highly successful PC-MMORPG than from consoles. Further, I would imagine the console RPG's will decline when MMORPG's get more penetration into the console market - and this won't really happen until they get keyboards (thus further bluring the line between console and PC).
I speak from personal experience. Both my wife and I played PC RPG's (yes, even before we met) and once we tried MMORPG's there is really no going back. We have tried: we both own NWN and the first expansion. We played some of the content together and we have downloaded custom modules and played some of them and even made some efforts to create our own module. The pace of progress and the plot are awesome - but the long term attraction of the game is really negligable. The odds I will buy another RPG are slim. Will I buy the next expansion pack for my MMORPG? Almost certainly.
I had that yellow castle, from the 1970's (I may have gotten it in the very early 80's I can't recall). Anyhow, in a box at my mom's house is every piece. How do I know this? My wife and I built the castle from the instructions about two years ago on a Sunday afternoon during one of those long holidays at home.
Would we have done that if there had been a bunch of big "castle wall" pieces? I really don't think so.
Part of the charm of it is that one can take a bunch of small pieces which, when dumped into a pile on the ground, don't look like much, and put them together into something pretty impressive. And at a certain age, it is really challenging. I probably got the set around age 7 and I recall actually misreading the instructions. I had to go back and figure out what I had done wrong and how to fix it. And in that way, realizing how to really read the instructions - to pay a bit more attention to the details. And in the end, other people would look at it and be impressed. Thus, as a kid you get a sense of accomplishment.
And then you can take it apart and build whatever you want. We would build really long, narrow spaceships and for some reason have other little spaceships dock in it and take off from it. One thing you needed was for the whole long structure to not fall apart when held with one little kid hand. This revealed a flaw even in the vintage 1970's castle kit: and I'm not sure tuffy had the same one, but mine has this "grass" that the castle is built on that you can only plug pieces into the top of. Normal big flat lego floors could be a roof or a ceiling, or both, but this grass could only be a floor. There are indentations in the bottom, but they don't hold legos, or anything for that matter. I think the standard platform, or flat piece, is about 1/3 as high as a standard brick. These big grass pieces were only perhaps half that thick, 1/6 of the height of a normal brick.
But it did make the long, thin, spacecraft construction a bit more interesting, at least unless you cheated and held it with two hands.
leviramsey wrote: Offshoring is a good thing. The "lost jobs" in IT are creating a pool of capital (in the form of labor) that will allow the next great step forward to be taken.
Actually, I hate to tell you but the mouse, the multitasking OS and the windowing OS were invented at Bell Labs, which was basically totally subsidized by the telephone monopoly. They were implemented (poorly) by various companies and now are being perfected by people contributing freely to the projects.
Can you actually track progress in terms of unemployment? Crime is well know to track with it. Here is the example the author gives:
Industrialization could only occur on the scale it did if, thanks to increased efficiency in agriculture, millions of family farms went under, sending their labor capital to the cities to work in the factories.
Millions of family farms went under in the great depression and private companies did not spring forth great innovations. Basically, the federal government hired these people. This really isn't a great point for your argument. Further, why would a company come out with a new line of, say, refridgerators during the depression? How many could they possibly sell?
The industrial revolution did involve many people leaving farm work and going to cities beacuse the wages were better. They had, basically, two job offers and could choose between them. You are suggesting having no job options (laid off IT worker in a bad climate) will promote innovation?
The market for high tech products is largely high tech workers - thus having them unemployed means they cannot buy extravagent new high tech toys.
I largely with leviramsey's assesment of the double standard of the vocal majority here in the RIAA versus the IT slide. Ironically, unions - virtually universally derided here in the past - have been offered as a potential solution. Expecting to see the usual anti-union flames, I opened the 4-5 replies to the pro-union post and found only one, very weak, voice of opposition.
Unions are not going to make you rich in good times, but they can save your job in bad times. Now that times for IT workers are getting bad it's kind of funny to see the shift. Not that IT workers are a great case for unions since the work can be so easily moved overseas.
If you are not unionized, your employer will have a far greater voice in the US federal government than you. It's all about campaign donations. Reform campaign finance, and this will change. Don't hold your breath.
I teach at a University. I am a member of our Union. My position is very different from IT jobs, because it would be relatively difficult to export teaching to India (possible, it may happen, but clearly harder than moving IT jobs).
All in all, our union is a great thing. However, I think young slashdotters would be frusturated with union life because things like years in service can become more important than how good a job you do. You aren't going to become rich. The union will contribute money to political causes you may not favor.
As far as raising a family goes I just can't imagine how my friends in IT will do it. All the money in the world can't buy back the time you spent making it - and if that time corresponds to your kid's childhood then you've just got to go into the deal knowing that. Just like if you join a union you should know the potential disadvantages of that, too. Further, you can affect the direction of your union. I vote in union elections so at some level they are democratic - thus you do have some voice.
Right now, in southern California, unionized grocery workers are on strike over health care. Basically they are being asked to pay more (thus, effectively take a pay cut). So every day people here are making the decision as to the future of unions.
Just as here on slashdot, many IT workers don't support the strikers (some do). I find it ironic.
Sure companies can move offshore, but the goods they import could be required to be manufactured via workers at minimum US wages, or some fraction thereof.
My theory is just print the wages on the box, too. That way, consumers will make informed choices, and informed choices are a staple of capitalism.
Lawyers, doctors, the police, nurses and college professors are also service jobs. They either are good jobs, -or- they should be good jobs because they are very important. Certainly some of what they do can be moved outside the US.
As IT workers, it is very easy for your jobs to be moved offshores. Far easier than rebuilding factories in foreign countries. But that also means it will be easy to move those jobs back if either US workers really are needed for them, or if some change in the law requires it.
There was a show on www.marketplace.org on Dec 9 2003 that talked about NAFTA. Seems all those manufacturing jobs which were supposed to go to Mexico have left Mexico and gone to China, and now are going to Vietnam.
According to the show, the Mexicans were being paid $300-$400 per month. These jobs were sent to China, were people make $100 per month and are now being sent to Vietnam where people are making $30/month. All numbers from marketplace and it's reporters and the people they spoke to in Mexico and China.
I don't think people realize how little people are being paid overseas. $0.50 per hour workers are being replaced with $0.17 per hour workers. Link to the show is in my journal.
These are manufacturing jobs, and there is a huge debate here if we should care about "them" as opposed to "us" the well educated - and I'm not going to add to that argument.
Further, it was suggested that the true nation of origin should be printed on the packaging. I think the wages should be printed, too.
Let's take it a step further. Minimum, maximum and averages wages should be available for all transactions. If MacDonald's pays minimum wage and In'n'Out across the street pays $8/hour, you as a consumer are making an informed choice when you choose one or the other. (Go read Fast Food Nation - workers at some chains are paid vastly more than others).
How much (if anything) are you willing to pay for, say, a motherboard made in the US? I'm not arguing that you *should* pay more, I'm just saying we should all have the information to make the choice.
Of course, companies would lie and subvert the system by averaging in workers in bizzare ways to inflate their average pay. Or they would just lie. Some mix of government and media investigation powers would be needed to give this any teeth. Probably people here would not like a new government agency to actually back this up. In a way, all you have to do is get foreign workers the information that they can contact the US agency and just tell us what they earn - and if the product is mislabeled, that company would be given warning that either label it correctly, or pay what you are saying you will pay. Thus some help would be forthcoming from the workers (perhaps laid off workers, or otherwise disgrunteled workers, but some fraction).
What you are describing is sometimes called "Mudflation" - in essense money can become worthless in muds (MMORPGs). It is a topic of discussion in Everquest.
This will happen if there is nothing worth buying with you money, or if money is so easy to obtain that it becomes worthless.
To have any sembelance of a real economy, game designers must make it really tough to get actual cash. They have to fix any exploits promptly. This requires lots of work.
Further, there must be some money or item sink in the economy. Money must be removed from the game or else it will pile up and become worthless. You can buy things off NPC vendors. Sometimes you do so for quests or to buy skills or equipment.
Everquest has outragously expensive horses one can buy. It's sort of a status thing. It has been a pretty good way to get rid of money. The horses cannot be traded between players, and can be sold back, but at a loss (around 10% lost). Further, everquest has consumable items such as food, drink, arrows, and spell components.
If they were to add houses (or other property) you could rent or NPC's which you could pay to cast spells on you it could take loads of cash out of the economy. Other suggestions are to make armor and weapons degrade over time and thus have to be repaired. Some kind of money sink is necessary. Ideas abound for how to best do it.
Deflation:
Items that drop in game and are tradable between players will generally become worth less over time. Everquest has added lots of content over time and old gear that was considered great is now virtually worthless. It's as if the best sword used to be +5 but then the +6 sword comes out. As people are motivated to run out and get a +6 sword (even if it takes lots of real life time and effort) they, invariably, have to sell the old +5 one and thus with enough people doing so the lesser ones will become worth vastly less, and on down the line.
To impede this, gear has to leave the system. One way is to have NPC vendors buy it. How much is that +1 sword worth? Well, if a vendor will buy it for 100 gold coins, probably you will not sell it for less than that. (But now you are adding money to the economy, thus contributing to inflation...)
One way of resolving this is to make the new, +6 sword "no drop" meaning it cannot be traded between characters. The one who picks it up has it, forever. This also prevents "camping" where a single group sit at a location to "farm" it - endlessly gaining the same or similar items over and over to sell later. A way to inhibit (but not stop) this is to mark items "lore" which in Everquest means you can only have one. Even though with a little effort you can run off and sell one and then come back to get another, that extra effort makes lore items much less attractive to "farmers", and thus inhibits farming, a bit.
Another, harsher, way of controlling items is to simply allow them to break (or ware down) after extended use.
Player Flux:
New players are generally good for the economy because they buy up the low end items (causing them to inflate a bit) but they also generate cash for those of higher levels to buy the better stuff - thus keeping the economy moving.
Everquest added a new playable race last year, and it raised prices alot as people made new characters and put some money into them. I personally sold tons of otherwise worthless stuff (which otherwise I would just sell to a vendor). There is a new class coming out soon and I expect similar effects. Thus, old people starting new characters can have a big impact.
Players leaving generally dump all their equipment and money to friends. Of course, all their "no drop" stuff just vanishes. It is expected that as new MMORPG's come onto the market, there will be loads of new high end gear coming to market, which should deflate costs. However, who knows how much money these people have. Perhaps the vast wealth of these people being given away t
beakerMeep said...I dont think he is a bad guy and I do think the newbie griefers should be banned too. But I don't this that maxis did the wrong thing either. From their perspective I could see this guy as someone who is really just there to complain about all that is wrong with people. Maybe that doesn't deserve a totall ban, but I think we should imagine what it was that HE was doing wrong before we jump down Maxi's throat with sensationalist stories about evil corporations...
Look, they banned his account for linking a web page (alphahearlad.com?) from his personal web page. He removed the link (but forgot one) at their bequest and eventually removed the second link (I think) but they banned him anyhow.
Legally, they do have the right to ban his account under the terms of service for this linking. (Note: I have not read the TOS but that is what it says in the article - perhaps the TOS say they can ban you for any reason - I don't know).
This seems really harsh because his actions in the real world - linking to some webpage - got his account banned. I guess what you and many, many others here are saying is basically that they probably just banned him for bringing a lot of bad press to the game.
I don't play the Sims, but I think people should be able to write whatever they want about their experiences online. Banning people because they speak out against the game seems really bad practice. I do play Everquest and *loads* of people complain. I'm sure you can find a messageboard for Eq. Just look at a random smattering of posts and I'm sure you will come across heated statements vilifying those who run the game. Complaining, in game and out, about SOE (who run the game) is virtually the national pasttime in Eq. I assume there is some level of whining in the Sims, hopefully far less than the Eq level, but probabaly some.
So why was this guy banned? Likely because he has some authority in RL. Example? He can get an interview with GameDomain (or whomever he had that interview with). He could write academic papers about the Sims, which probably wouldn't matter except that some geek will dig it up and post in on slashdot here and perhaps thousands will read it.
It's a bizzare thought that we who play these games can complain all we want, unless we actually have some RL authority. In which case, we may get banned for using it to bring problems in game to a larger audience.
beakerMeep finishes: In the end it is they who have the chat logs and he only has his word.
Yes, but reading the article, I think he was banned for linking to some webpage from his personal webpage. They are not banning him for anything that happened in-game, just talking about it.
There was some talk about children beating their siblings. This is a game that parents allow their children to play. The parents are responsible for *not only* what their children do in game, but outside of the game. If that incident happened, there was a real beaten sibling somewhere assumedly with parents (guardians, etc) to go to. At no point is this Maxis's responsibility.
Analogies fail here, but by extension, how is it any *more* Maxis' responsibility than, say, the ISP? The phone company carrying the signal? Who here is supposed to be listening to check if
If Ludlow suggests it is Maxis' responsibility, then he is wrong, in my opinion, but why ban him?
What if there really was something bad (I dunno, perhaps illegal) that was being facilitated via the Sims online, wouldn't they *want* a guy like Ludlow to point it out? ____________________________________________
D&D rules were really simple and for rolling the dice and playing by hand that was great. Virtually every other system I saw (Runequest, Traveller, Other Suns, Ringworld, GURPS) had combat rules and/or character creation rules far more complex.
Thus we used D&D as a core, but *heavily* modified the rules to make it playable. We virtually always used some form of "spell point" system designed to give low level casters an advantage and somewhat limit higher level casters.
D&D was (is?) great just because so much is left unsaid in the rules that you can do anything and have some odds of success. Wanna poison the Orc's water supply? I'm sure there are rules for in somewhere in GURPS, but in D&D the DM just makes something up and it's probably more fun that way.
I ran games where player character sheets were just paragraph form naratives of their lives. Sure they would have spells and/or powers and those could be as flexible or well defined as the individual wanted. I knew roughly how much power they had invested in various abilities and would actually have a "thaco" and "ac" and "hit points" for them - but they didn't need to know it. Basically we were playing D&D, but you could hardly have called in D&D by looking at us play. My favorite line was "role a die. Just tell me what you rolled, and what type of die it was." Sure, for "to hit" rolls they all rolled d20's and for initiative they all rolled d10's (no, its not in the rules, but we had rolled for initiative on d10s for so long they all just did it).
Further, the D&D system I am most familiar with AD&D version 1.0 - the one where the player's handbook has the giant red statue of the deamon on it) was just begging to be balanced. Just look at how sad the thieves are. Look at how insane the psionics are. First level mages are useless and 15th level mages are virtually gods - but it would take them something like four days of rest to restore all their spells. Monks and bards had similar problems.
From Bob Graham's site, the following quote is from Graham's comments on the Iraq resolution before the war, clearly reflecting US intelligence reports, recently (at that time) declassified, which stated the US would be less safe if we invaded Iraq.
Bob Graham said: I would also like to reinforce my conviction that this resolution forces the President to focus our military and intelligence on the wrong target. A historical example, which has been used in this debate, is the example of the 1930s- that England, France and other nations would eventually join in the world's greatest alliance, slept, while Hitler's power grew.
They say that passing this resolution is the equivalent of if the Alllies had declared war on Hitler. I disagree with that assessment of what this lesson of history means. In my judgment, passing this resolution tonight will be the equivalent of declaring war on Italy. That is not what we should be doing. We should not just be declaring war on Mussolini's Italy. We should be declaring war on Hitler's Germany.
Now, there are good reasons for considering attacking today's Italy, meaning Iraq. Saddam Hussein's regime has chemical and biological weapons and is trying to get nuclear capacity. But the briefings I have received have shown that trying to block him and any necessary nuclear materials have been largely successful, as evidenced by the recent intercept of centrifuge tubes. And he is years away from having nuclear capability. So why does it make sense to attack this era's Italy, and not Germany, especially when by attacking Italy, we are making Germany a more probable adversary?
Madam President, the CIA has warned us that international terrorist organizations will probably use United States action against Iraq as an indication for striking us here in the homeland.
You might ask, what does the word 'probably' mean in intelligence speak? It probably means that there is a 75 percent greater chance of the event occurring. And the event is that international terrorist organizations will use United States actions against Iraq as a justification for striking us here in the homeland. Let me read a declassified briefing of the CIA report presented to the Select Committee on Intelligence:
"Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or chemical or biological weapons against the U.S.
"Should Saddam conclude that U.S-led attacks could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions.
"Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorsit offensive in 1991, or [chemical and biological weapons].
"Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamic terrorists in conducting a [weapon of mass destruction] attack against the United States would be his last chance of exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."
Madam President, in other words, odds of another strike against the people of the United States by Al Qaeda or another international terrorist group goes up when we attack Baghdad.
The President should be in the most advantageous position to protect Americans - to launch pre-emptive strikes and hack off the heads of these snakes. With the resolution before us, we are denying the President that opportunity. And we are sending confusing signals to our people and to our allies as to the sincerity of our commitment to the war on terrorism.
End quote.
Again, this is before the invasion. US intelligence thought the US would be less safe even given that Iraq may have some WMD. _______________________________________________
Before the war US intelligence said that invading Iraq would not make the US safer.
Senator Bob Graham, ranking Democrat on the Intelligence committee, asked the intelligence community whether or not invading Iraq would make the US safer. The intelligence committee, before the war, said we would be less safe if we invaded. Remember - this is before the war when evidence of WMD was paraded around the world.
This was public knowledge. It ran in major newspapers. All members of congress must have at least heard of it, even if most Americans did not. They voted to give Bush the green light anyhow.
I heard about this on the NPR (American public radio) program This American Life (www.thislife.org). It was broadcast 12/20/02 and you can go to that website and listen for free to Bob Graham say that himself.
Further, he asks the radio staff to question Bush on some issues. Apparently it is not any easier for him to get answers from the administration than it is for anyone else. They try. Have a listen. _________________________________________ _____
StocDred says, "Heck, our founding fathers couldn't even fathom the high-powered, super-accurate, full-automatic weapons of today
This is exactly to the point. They held weapons of equal power to the government. Today private citizens with, say, shoulder launched stinger missles would be insane. (Don't like your business competition? Shoot the company plane down.) This is a far cry from a dueling pistol.
The scope of weapon power has increased to the point where armed overthrow of the government is a joke (there is a great AC post about this above) - but that is exactly what the founders intended.
They specifically state that to be the only reason the right to bear arms is protected. That gone, we should not have that right, so sayeth the founders.
We have decided to keep the weapons, anyhow. We have the highest murder rate in the world (per person). Go figure.
The number of weapons in the US is staggering. Any plan to significantly reduce the ammount of weapons (beyond, say, buy back programs which are effective, yet limited) would be herculean in scope. Yet even modest proposals are rejected.
Right now Republicans are tyring to push through a bill to destroy all the "Brady bill" data within 72 hours. (Brady bill info: the info you must give to buy a gun outside of a gun show, in the US, at the moment. Given for a background check to ensure you are not mentally ill or have felony convictions). This at a time national security is at it's highest (arguably) since the end of the second world war.
This illustrates how ingraned the "right to bear arms" is in America. Even though it is totally tangential to the intent of the founders, and apparently extremely detremental to the public, the current right to run out and buy a gun (say, a hand gun, easily concealed) will remain unfettered for the forseable future.
Violent video games, on the other hand, are in serious danger of being banned. See, for example, this.
Simple, logical yet tough solutions exist and are not implemented. Example:
Jonny accidentally shoots Jimmy with Jonny's Dad's gun, Jonny's Dad's should be lookin at multiple years in prison. Still wanna have a gun? Sure, go ahead just be certain your kids can't get it, or if they can that it isn't loaded and they can't load it.
Sounds reasonable, sounds not too hard, buy a master lock, lets say.
Yet every year about 4000 children die from gunfire, and about 20,000 are injured in the USA. See thisfor an example with citations. And of those 20,000, about 4,000 are accidental injuries.
Okay, so people try to lock up guns and keep them away from children, but about 4,000 times per year it doesn't work. Still want to risk jail time for owning a gun? It would be your call. Remember, you kid is a kid for a long time (the statistics use 20 years but let's say 15) so during that time interval 60,000 kids will get shot accidentally with guns and (assuming few repeats) that is loads of families effected, perhaps about 1% overall. Statistically, you kid is about 10 times more likely to get shot if you own a gun than if not. I'm sure you can see where this leads. But like I said, be my guest but my kids aren't going to be playing with your kids (at your house) if you keep guns in the house, and I know about it.
Amazing how the Republicans who, nominally, favor personal responsibility cannot inact a law punishing parents for gross neglegence in keeping firearms away from their kids.
And, of course, the Democrats who propose stronger and stronger gun control laws find those efforts thwarted.
I personally don't care which road you follow. Pick one. Follow both. I don't care. Both parties have, at least nominally, some solution to this.
People who play the game a lot will have a very different view from more casual players. Similar to having a good command line interface versus a good GUI, different people will want different things. If the game it too hard to learn, they alienate new players. Of course, in traditional games, you have already bought the game and good luck trying to return it. In online games with subscription costs, this won't fly.
Amazingly, Everquest, a successful online game, was really hard to begin. If you didn't know what you were doing, you could easily loose your "corpse" which had most (or all) of your valuables on it. People still played because it was fun. There was risk, but it was exciting. And you could always get another +3 club of slamming. However, with the increase in competition, Everquest is making it easier and easier to start the game. You now have ingame overhead maps of the cities, which used to take just hours of time to really learn. Now you begin with some gear and some basic hotbuttons pre-configured, and your spells pre-memorized. Further, dont even have to worry about loosing your corpse until level 9? 10? Thus, the game is far more user friendly.
And this has been cited as a sign of the end of Everquest by some. So it goes.
The power gamers will perhaps not mind a complex interface if it is powerful. The novice will. If there are far more novices than power gamers, the balance of limited developer time and effort will shift that direction, if the company is wise. Supply and demand. Simple.
Yet in MMORPGs, there is another issue, and it spurs endless discussion. The question of balance. The history of Everquest is full of "game breaking" items which have been "nerfed" or made less useful, or in some cases, no longer dropped. Yet beyond the obvious items (say, unlimited mana or health) which clearly have to go, there is the big issue. Balance between the classes.
Since players have a great deal of time invested in their character, thus there is a high barrier to switching classes, people hope that in the future, their class is still desirable in groups. Everquest has a strong group system: to get really good stuff, you have to team up. It sucks if you happen to have chosen a class which no one else wants.
Add to this constantly changing content and new levels and abilities, and you have a recipe for infinite whining - and any change will make some people unhappy. Even a simple step of giving one class an extra boost would make classes in competition with it whine.
People will whine about everything, and the internet is a highly critical media. Yet constant change is needed to sell product, thus constant tweaks to balance are needed. And despite the userbase being incredibly whiney, they generally have the idea of what needs to be done.
The current example in everquest is the warrior class at the very high end has trouble holding monster's attention (compared to others). A *small* increase is needed - only for warriors and only at the high levels. Warriors would still be inferior to others at this task, but better than they are now. This is generally the consensus of the calmer voices on the boards. Yet when a change was announced, there was a vast outcry from others that they would be left behind - before they even saw the changes.
Obviously, balance will never be perfect. I think a good idea is to plan for it. Implement a user vote for the most pathetic "class" and give that class, or the bottom 2 or 3, a small bonus to make them more attractive. Hold the election, say, monthly. It will give the users a voice and it will restore *minor* imbalances. Major imbalances will still need to be addressed in the usual way and, although users generally know what is needed, the details must be left to neutral parties - hopefully the developers. _____________________________________ ____________
I second this. My wife and I play Everquest together, and have done so for over three and a half years now. We enjoy it immensely and it's a great hobby to share together. We know two other couples who play together in real life, and stories abound in game of husband/wife teams. My only advice is not to take it too seriously.
Like the origional poster, we had some trouble finding games to play together. For a while we played Age of Empires II in cooperative mode - where I would control our army and she would build up our town and collect resources. We probably played for a week. And we tried to make play cooperative in other games like simcity and baseball mogul, so we would basically take turns playing, but that did not turn out so well.
And then we found Everquest. We really have not played anything else since. I'm sure there are loads of better MMORPG's out there now. I would try one or two first.
Everquest has a nice pace to it. It leaves time to talk with the people you are playing with. Grouping with other people is, virtually always, exteremely beneficial, so just having a two person team to which you can add in other people will give you a huge edge over starting alone. (I have not tried other MMORPG's so I cannot comment on them but I assume they are similar).
I wrote: Thus, I hope we do not find a backup planet. I hope this is it. If we foul our planet to the point it is unlivable, we deserve our fate.
And then guybarr wrote: First, IMHO this is utterly wrong factually: once a society colonizes space, all it'll need is energy and materials. I suggest that actually
there may be few solar systems which are completely uninhabitable.
Second, from the pragmatic POV, this sounds to me like morality gone completely insane: are you truly sugesting that you'd willfully risk total genocide for humanity (and its surrounding biological system, BTW)
just because you think we "deserve it" ?
I hope we don't find a backup planet - one just like Earth - if we foul Earth to the point that it is uninhabitable. We will be forced to live in less habitable places, such as Mars, Earth's Moon, etc, as Guybarr indicates. It would be a fate we deserve.
If we just move on to another, identical, planet after destroying all life on a whole planet, it seems to set a really bad precedence. There is no word for it.
I hope it is not too easy for anyone to leave. It would promote environmental degredation. Already, poor countries manufacture products using environmentally unsound technology. And we all still live here. Dumping mercury into the bay of Japan will have an effect on the health of the population, worldwide. (No, not every person, but it's effects would have reach beyond the region). Yet what consequence would it have for those on another planet?
The level of pollution now should be warning enough that a second planet probably won't be the last. Imagine meeting an alien race with a string of uninhabitable planets behind us. I hope it is not too easy for the decisionmakers to escape the consequences. If so, those left behind will have a far greater reason to worry.
ActionPlant Says: "it would certainly be nice to finally find a backup for our planet. You can't tell me there aren't at least a few people out there who have been rather alarmed at all of our recent unexpected solar activity"
I think the real threat to our planet is ourselves, not our sun. Thus, I hope we do not find a backup planet. I hope this is it. If we foul our planet to the point it is unlivable, we deserve our fate. Another planet would be a convenient way out.
Not, of course, that I am in any position to affect change on this issue. Either a habitable planet is in range or not. Either we find it, or not. Certainly we should try. It would be amazing. I just hope it is not too easy to leave Earth for the rich and powerful. Living in the USA, recent news does not affirm faith in such leaders.
Honestly, I'd sooner trust the average person I meet on the street, even if they are raving aloud, over the average American corporate executive. ______________________________________ __________
Sure, you are right. A zone can hold lots of people, probably more than 600. With the gear available at the time, it would have taken loads of people. The developers, at that time, said it would have taken so many people that the zone would crash. They did not specify how many. In part, it shows how much the new AA and gear changes the game.
Further, it is kind of amazing that no one woke up the Sleeper on that server for so long. It is, apparently, a once-in-a-server-lifetime event, thus all the other servers where Sleeper was woken ages ago and could not kill it. It's not like there was a chance to gather another, say, 300 friends, and try again. I heard perhaps a year ago that sleeper had been woken on all servers. Obviously this was not the case.
They gave Sleeper total immunity to spell damage and an insane ammount of hit points and an insane regeneration rate. Apparently, it was vulnerable to summoned creatures thus all the magic users who could, made them.
Sleeper was weaker, but upgraded a couple expansions ago and then he was wakened on virtually every server. This one server may well be the last holdout - no one woke him there. Time passed. Sleeper was not upgraded, but players were.
Thus the inevitable happened.
As for invulnerability, they can make a creature untargetable - and thus unkillable. I suppose you could argue that some kind of area of effect attack would injure it, but Sleeper is/was immune to spell damage...and that doesn't leave much.
I have no problem with just having a really nasty monster in the game, but they should have planned for it to be killed and given it loot. Best loot from Velius expansion, which I guess would seem a bit gimpy now, would have made people think more highly of the development team, because at least they had thought it out.
It goes to show how much time these people have on their hands. Perhaps more things like this could be introduced with commensurate loot.
This was on a PvP server, by the way, so all those people spent all that time in close proximity to one another and at any time they could have started smacking each other. They didn't. It is a great feat of organization and dedication.
Further, after the first time they got the guy down to 27% health and the zone was reset, the people were all given complete resurections (e.g. death with no losses) by a GM *and* a few points (called AA points or alternate advancement points) to make up for all the losses they took in those initial deaths. That was pretty kind of the GM's...given the fact that they probably brought the zone down intentionally to prevent the people from killing it.
I think there was a quote at the time Sleeper was upgraded that it would take so many people to take it down that the zone would crash - and that was probably true at that time. Perhaps it would have taken, say, 600 people, and that will bring down zones in Everquest, I think. (A zone is just sort of a patch of virtual space. All space is divided into "zones".)
All money can do is buy ads, not votes, but ads are time to make a case, so money is important. That said:
Americans are restricted in what we can give to candidates for office. However, we can donate either a very large or unlimited ammount to special interest groups, which can donate large ammounts or just run ads for a certain candidate. Attempts to restirct this have actually lost in court, up to the supreme court (highest court in the USA) because such restrictions violate free speach.
Instead, we have "quid pro quo" laws which make it illegal for elected officials to actually do anything which favors the people they have accepted donations for. The standard of proof seems to be, basically, a direct link between the donation and the action. Obviously, proving this is absurdly difficult.
Example: anti-abortion group seeks to donate money to candidate. They just ask around until they find someone in a tight race who is anti-abortion. They give that person money. Person wins and votes against abortion rights. Obviously, there is no case here. The person already decided what they felt and then took the money. Sure, they might have been more vocal, spent more time or effort or pulled in more favors for abortion than they would have otherwise.
Other example: energy company wants tax break. Donates to a candidate who has no background in energy policy at all. Perhaps has never voted on an energy bill. Candidate wins and pushes for tax break for energy company. How can one prove that that is not what the candidate origionally believed? Most likely, the candidate is anti-tax to begin with. Aren't they all?
Discussion of this issue in America has become exteremely jaded. On NPR (national public radio, in America) on the fairly conservative finance program (Marketplace) I have heard repeated references to business "getting what they are paying for" from congress, and repeated references to "bought and paid for" politicians. I don't listen (radio/tv) to much coverage of congress, but I have heard Democrats accuse Republicans of quid pro quo, to which the republican simply replied your side does it, too.
Further, ads from special interest groups (SIGs) in favor of a candidate are not supposed to have any input from that candidate. This is apparently violated constantly.
These politicans should be beyond reproach, yet most are obviously taking bribes. How can we change that, and stay within the constitution?
1. Force politicians to recuse themselves from any decision in which they have an interest, including having an ad run for them by an interest group.
1a. All ads for a candidate should be subject to veto by that candidate.
Want a pro-abortion SIG to endorse you? Fine. You can't vote on any abortion issues for the next term of office.
2. Ads run against a particular candidate must pay to provide equal time to the candidate, available directly after the ad, to rebut the ad without pentalty of recusion on the topic, e.g. without regard to (1) above.
2a. If any significant connections can be made between the candidate and the ad run against the candidate, the candidate forfits the reply time. Instead it would be used to indicate the connection.
This is needed to prevent candidates from putting up "straw man" arguments against themselves and then attacking such ads in the free time allowed. Now, you might think that's crazy but actually this happens already in City of Los Angeles politics.
3. Disallow corporations from any form of political donations or speach. Corporations do not have the right to vote, only real people do, thus there is precedence for disallowing them political speach.
Sure, you can make an organization to promote any political cause you want, say the environment. You can take donations from anyone you want. You can run ads for any candidate you want, discussion them and the environment. Then they have to recuse themselves from any votes on that topic, b
Alright. US constitution says a well armed militia is necessary to prevent tyrany. Essentially, the founders wanted the people to have arms equal to the military so that revolution was possible. After all, that is what they had just done. They were not stupid. They were not hypocritical, at least not on this issue. When the weapons were scarsely more effective than bows and arrows it made sense.
Time passed. The machine gun was invented. So was the tank. Now we have satellite guided bombs accurate enough to hit a small building which can be fired from hundreds of miles away. We have nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. At some point we realize that even if you have the money to buy it, you just don't have the right to, say, a nuclear bomb.
Yes, this is basically a flagrant violation of the second ammendment - because if our government becomes a tyrany and we try armed resistance, we will loose. We will not have weapons we could have attained if the laws had allowed it.
Oh, you are so right - we need to have RPGs with sensibly dressed women.
Ya I think at least you should have a choice - and that you should be able to change from day to day. In Everquest, you kind of choose how you dress by picking your race when you make a character and its not so easy to go back and change that after having spent perhaps 100s of hours. There are ways to manipulate your image through using equipment, but really you want use the best equipment you can get. Sacrificing gear quality for looks seems a tough choice.
I think there is easily room within Eq's current graphics engine to just use/hidearmor commands to better control your looks. As for actually concealing more of yourself, that would be a little harder, but I'm sure they could do something.
Do you think some (many?) players don't want to be bothered chatting in a MMO and that might be some of what turns the mainstream players off?
Yes, you are absolutely right JavaLord. Some people will be turned off by the downtime. Some people just don't want to meet new people, either. I actually think the inherently repetitive gameplay has a lot of turn off value, too.
But from what I have heard, all these other MMORPG's after Eq, such as Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online and/or DAoC or others tried to minimize downtime and make the games more constant action. It doesn't seem to have attracted more people - even though at first it seems like the ultimate improvement. I'm just trying to explain why.
I think there is also a soloing issue here, too. In Everquest most people need groups to gain experience. I think other games tried to get away from that and alow people to be entirely self sufficient - which at first sounds great but eventually you realize you are playing a single player game, it is not really a great game, and you are paying $15/month to play it. Not really a stunning deal.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think the PC RPG is in trouble more from the highly successful PC-MMORPG than from consoles. Further, I would imagine the console RPG's will decline when MMORPG's get more penetration into the console market - and this won't really happen until they get keyboards (thus further bluring the line between console and PC).
I speak from personal experience. Both my wife and I played PC RPG's (yes, even before we met) and once we tried MMORPG's there is really no going back. We have tried: we both own NWN and the first expansion. We played some of the content together and we have downloaded custom modules and played some of them and even made some efforts to create our own module. The pace of progress and the plot are awesome - but the long term attraction of the game is really negligable. The odds I will buy another RPG are slim. Will I buy the next expansion pack for my MMORPG? Almost certainly.
I had that yellow castle, from the 1970's (I may have gotten it in the very early 80's I can't recall). Anyhow, in a box at my mom's house is every piece. How do I know this? My wife and I built the castle from the instructions about two years ago on a Sunday afternoon during one of those long holidays at home.
Would we have done that if there had been a bunch of big "castle wall" pieces? I really don't think so.
Part of the charm of it is that one can take a bunch of small pieces which, when dumped into a pile on the ground, don't look like much, and put them together into something pretty impressive. And at a certain age, it is really challenging. I probably got the set around age 7 and I recall actually misreading the instructions. I had to go back and figure out what I had done wrong and how to fix it. And in that way, realizing how to really read the instructions - to pay a bit more attention to the details. And in the end, other people would look at it and be impressed. Thus, as a kid you get a sense of accomplishment.
And then you can take it apart and build whatever you want. We would build really long, narrow spaceships and for some reason have other little spaceships dock in it and take off from it. One thing you needed was for the whole long structure to not fall apart when held with one little kid hand. This revealed a flaw even in the vintage 1970's castle kit: and I'm not sure tuffy had the same one, but mine has this "grass" that the castle is built on that you can only plug pieces into the top of. Normal big flat lego floors could be a roof or a ceiling, or both, but this grass could only be a floor. There are indentations in the bottom, but they don't hold legos, or anything for that matter. I think the standard platform, or flat piece, is about 1/3 as high as a standard brick. These big grass pieces were only perhaps half that thick, 1/6 of the height of a normal brick.
But it did make the long, thin, spacecraft construction a bit more interesting, at least unless you cheated and held it with two hands.
leviramsey wrote:
Offshoring is a good thing. The "lost jobs" in IT are creating a pool of capital (in the form of labor) that will allow the next great step forward to be taken.
Actually, I hate to tell you but the mouse, the multitasking OS and the windowing OS were invented at Bell Labs, which was basically totally subsidized by the telephone monopoly. They were implemented (poorly) by various companies and now are being perfected by people contributing freely to the projects.
Can you actually track progress in terms of unemployment? Crime is well know to track with it. Here is the example the author gives:
Industrialization could only occur on the scale it did if, thanks to increased efficiency in agriculture, millions of family farms went under, sending their labor capital to the cities to work in the factories.
Millions of family farms went under in the great depression and private companies did not spring forth great innovations. Basically, the federal government hired these people. This really isn't a great point for your argument. Further, why would a company come out with a new line of, say, refridgerators during the depression? How many could they possibly sell?
The industrial revolution did involve many people leaving farm work and going to cities beacuse the wages were better. They had, basically, two job offers and could choose between them. You are suggesting having no job options (laid off IT worker in a bad climate) will promote innovation?
The market for high tech products is largely high tech workers - thus having them unemployed means they cannot buy extravagent new high tech toys.
I largely with leviramsey's assesment of the double standard of the vocal majority here in the RIAA versus the IT slide. Ironically, unions - virtually universally derided here in the past - have been offered as a potential solution. Expecting to see the usual anti-union flames, I opened the 4-5 replies to the pro-union post and found only one, very weak, voice of opposition.
Unions are not going to make you rich in good times, but they can save your job in bad times. Now that times for IT workers are getting bad it's kind of funny to see the shift. Not that IT workers are a great case for unions since the work can be so easily moved overseas.
If you are not unionized, your employer will have a far greater voice in the US federal government than you. It's all about campaign donations. Reform campaign finance, and this will change. Don't hold your breath.
I teach at a University. I am a member of our Union. My position is very different from IT jobs, because it would be relatively difficult to export teaching to India (possible, it may happen, but clearly harder than moving IT jobs).
All in all, our union is a great thing. However, I think young slashdotters would be frusturated with union life because things like years in service can become more important than how good a job you do. You aren't going to become rich. The union will contribute money to political causes you may not favor.
As far as raising a family goes I just can't imagine how my friends in IT will do it. All the money in the world can't buy back the time you spent making it - and if that time corresponds to your kid's childhood then you've just got to go into the deal knowing that. Just like if you join a union you should know the potential disadvantages of that, too. Further, you can affect the direction of your union. I vote in union elections so at some level they are democratic - thus you do have some voice.
Right now, in southern California, unionized grocery workers are on strike over health care. Basically they are being asked to pay more (thus, effectively take a pay cut). So every day people here are making the decision as to the future of unions.
Just as here on slashdot, many IT workers don't support the strikers (some do). I find it ironic.
Sure companies can move offshore, but the goods they import could be required to be manufactured via workers at minimum US wages, or some fraction thereof.
My theory is just print the wages on the box, too. That way, consumers will make informed choices, and informed choices are a staple of capitalism.
Lawyers, doctors, the police, nurses and college professors are also service jobs. They either are good jobs, -or- they should be good jobs because they are very important. Certainly some of what they do can be moved outside the US.
As IT workers, it is very easy for your jobs to be moved offshores. Far easier than rebuilding factories in foreign countries. But that also means it will be easy to move those jobs back if either US workers really are needed for them, or if some change in the law requires it.
There was a show on www.marketplace.org on Dec 9 2003 that talked about NAFTA. Seems all those manufacturing jobs which were supposed to go to Mexico have left Mexico and gone to China, and now are going to Vietnam.
According to the show, the Mexicans were being paid $300-$400 per month. These jobs were sent to China, were people make $100 per month and are now being sent to Vietnam where people are making $30/month. All numbers from marketplace and it's reporters and the people they spoke to in Mexico and China.
I don't think people realize how little people are being paid overseas. $0.50 per hour workers are being replaced with $0.17 per hour workers. Link to the show is in my journal.
These are manufacturing jobs, and there is a huge debate here if we should care about "them" as opposed to "us" the well educated - and I'm not going to add to that argument.
Further, it was suggested that the true nation of origin should be printed on the packaging. I think the wages should be printed, too.
Let's take it a step further. Minimum, maximum and averages wages should be available for all transactions. If MacDonald's pays minimum wage and In'n'Out across the street pays $8/hour, you as a consumer are making an informed choice when you choose one or the other. (Go read Fast Food Nation - workers at some chains are paid vastly more than others).
How much (if anything) are you willing to pay for, say, a motherboard made in the US? I'm not arguing that you *should* pay more, I'm just saying we should all have the information to make the choice.
Of course, companies would lie and subvert the system by averaging in workers in bizzare ways to inflate their average pay. Or they would just lie. Some mix of government and media investigation powers would be needed to give this any teeth. Probably people here would not like a new government agency to actually back this up. In a way, all you have to do is get foreign workers the information that they can contact the US agency and just tell us what they earn - and if the product is mislabeled, that company would be given warning that either label it correctly, or pay what you are saying you will pay. Thus some help would be forthcoming from the workers (perhaps laid off workers, or otherwise disgrunteled workers, but some fraction).
Inflation:
What you are describing is sometimes called "Mudflation" - in essense money can become worthless in muds (MMORPGs). It is a topic of discussion in Everquest.
This will happen if there is nothing worth buying with you money, or if money is so easy to obtain that it becomes worthless.
To have any sembelance of a real economy, game designers must make it really tough to get actual cash. They have to fix any exploits promptly. This requires lots of work.
Further, there must be some money or item sink in the economy. Money must be removed from the game or else it will pile up and become worthless. You can buy things off NPC vendors. Sometimes you do so for quests or to buy skills or equipment.
Everquest has outragously expensive horses one can buy. It's sort of a status thing. It has been a pretty good way to get rid of money. The horses cannot be traded between players, and can be sold back, but at a loss (around 10% lost). Further, everquest has consumable items such as food, drink, arrows, and spell components.
If they were to add houses (or other property) you could rent or NPC's which you could pay to cast spells on you it could take loads of cash out of the economy. Other suggestions are to make armor and weapons degrade over time and thus have to be repaired. Some kind of money sink is necessary. Ideas abound for how to best do it.
Deflation:
Items that drop in game and are tradable between players will generally become worth less over time. Everquest has added lots of content over time and old gear that was considered great is now virtually worthless. It's as if the best sword used to be +5 but then the +6 sword comes out. As people are motivated to run out and get a +6 sword (even if it takes lots of real life time and effort) they, invariably, have to sell the old +5 one and thus with enough people doing so the lesser ones will become worth vastly less, and on down the line.
To impede this, gear has to leave the system. One way is to have NPC vendors buy it. How much is that +1 sword worth? Well, if a vendor will buy it for 100 gold coins, probably you will not sell it for less than that. (But now you are adding money to the economy, thus contributing to inflation...)
One way of resolving this is to make the new, +6 sword "no drop" meaning it cannot be traded between characters. The one who picks it up has it, forever. This also prevents "camping" where a single group sit at a location to "farm" it - endlessly gaining the same or similar items over and over to sell later. A way to inhibit (but not stop) this is to mark items "lore" which in Everquest means you can only have one. Even though with a little effort you can run off and sell one and then come back to get another, that extra effort makes lore items much less attractive to "farmers", and thus inhibits farming, a bit.
Another, harsher, way of controlling items is to simply allow them to break (or ware down) after extended use.
Player Flux:
New players are generally good for the economy because they buy up the low end items (causing them to inflate a bit) but they also generate cash for those of higher levels to buy the better stuff - thus keeping the economy moving.
Everquest added a new playable race last year, and it raised prices alot as people made new characters and put some money into them. I personally sold tons of otherwise worthless stuff (which otherwise I would just sell to a vendor). There is a new class coming out soon and I expect similar effects. Thus, old people starting new characters can have a big impact.
Players leaving generally dump all their equipment and money to friends. Of course, all their "no drop" stuff just vanishes. It is expected that as new MMORPG's come onto the market, there will be loads of new high end gear coming to market, which should deflate costs. However, who knows how much money these people have. Perhaps the vast wealth of these people being given away t
beakerMeep said ...I dont think he is a bad guy and I do think the newbie griefers should be banned too. But I don't this that maxis did the wrong thing either. From their perspective I could see this guy as someone who is really just there to complain about all that is wrong with people. Maybe that doesn't deserve a totall ban, but I think we should imagine what it was that HE was doing wrong before we jump down Maxi's throat with sensationalist stories about evil corporations...
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Look, they banned his account for linking a web page (alphahearlad.com?) from his personal web page. He removed the link (but forgot one) at their bequest and eventually removed the second link (I think) but they banned him anyhow.
Legally, they do have the right to ban his account under the terms of service for this linking. (Note: I have not read the TOS but that is what it says in the article - perhaps the TOS say they can ban you for any reason - I don't know).
This seems really harsh because his actions in the real world - linking to some webpage - got his account banned. I guess what you and many, many others here are saying is basically that they probably just banned him for bringing a lot of bad press to the game.
I don't play the Sims, but I think people should be able to write whatever they want about their experiences online. Banning people because they speak out against the game seems really bad practice. I do play Everquest and *loads* of people complain. I'm sure you can find a messageboard for Eq. Just look at a random smattering of posts and I'm sure you will come across heated statements vilifying those who run the game. Complaining, in game and out, about SOE (who run the game) is virtually the national pasttime in Eq. I assume there is some level of whining in the Sims, hopefully far less than the Eq level, but probabaly some.
So why was this guy banned? Likely because he has some authority in RL. Example? He can get an interview with GameDomain (or whomever he had that interview with). He could write academic papers about the Sims, which probably wouldn't matter except that some geek will dig it up and post in on slashdot here and perhaps thousands will read it.
It's a bizzare thought that we who play these games can complain all we want, unless we actually have some RL authority. In which case, we may get banned for using it to bring problems in game to a larger audience.
beakerMeep finishes: In the end it is they who have the chat logs and he only has his word.
Yes, but reading the article, I think he was banned for linking to some webpage from his personal webpage. They are not banning him for anything that happened in-game, just talking about it.
There was some talk about children beating their siblings. This is a game that parents allow their children to play. The parents are responsible for *not only* what their children do in game, but outside of the game. If that incident happened, there was a real beaten sibling somewhere assumedly with parents (guardians, etc) to go to. At no point is this Maxis's responsibility.
Analogies fail here, but by extension, how is it any *more* Maxis' responsibility than, say, the ISP? The phone company carrying the signal? Who here is supposed to be listening to check if
If Ludlow suggests it is Maxis' responsibility, then he is wrong, in my opinion, but why ban him?
What if there really was something bad (I dunno, perhaps illegal) that was being facilitated via the Sims online, wouldn't they *want* a guy like Ludlow to point it out?
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Mixing Nyquil and Dayquil, eh? I thought they annihilate - leaving only a burst of pure light.
D&D rules were really simple and for rolling the dice and playing by hand that was great. Virtually every other system I saw (Runequest, Traveller, Other Suns, Ringworld, GURPS) had combat rules and/or character creation rules far more complex.
Thus we used D&D as a core, but *heavily* modified the rules to make it playable. We virtually always used some form of "spell point" system designed to give low level casters an advantage and somewhat limit higher level casters.
D&D was (is?) great just because so much is left unsaid in the rules that you can do anything and have some odds of success. Wanna poison the Orc's water supply? I'm sure there are rules for in somewhere in GURPS, but in D&D the DM just makes something up and it's probably more fun that way.
I ran games where player character sheets were just paragraph form naratives of their lives. Sure they would have spells and/or powers and those could be as flexible or well defined as the individual wanted. I knew roughly how much power they had invested in various abilities and would actually have a "thaco" and "ac" and "hit points" for them - but they didn't need to know it. Basically we were playing D&D, but you could hardly have called in D&D by looking at us play. My favorite line was "role a die. Just tell me what you rolled, and what type of die it was." Sure, for "to hit" rolls they all rolled d20's and for initiative they all rolled d10's (no, its not in the rules, but we had rolled for initiative on d10s for so long they all just did it).
Further, the D&D system I am most familiar with AD&D version 1.0 - the one where the player's handbook has the giant red statue of the deamon on it) was just begging to be balanced. Just look at how sad the thieves are. Look at how insane the psionics are. First level mages are useless and 15th level mages are virtually gods - but it would take them something like four days of rest to restore all their spells. Monks and bards had similar problems.
Isn't there an Asian MMORPG which has way more total subscribers than Everquest? I think it is called Lineage, or something like that?
Perhaps they just mean the most popular MMORPG in the US market.
From Bob Graham's site, the following quote is from Graham's comments on the Iraq resolution before the war, clearly reflecting US intelligence reports, recently (at that time) declassified, which stated the US would be less safe if we invaded Iraq.
Bob Graham said:
I would also like to reinforce my conviction that this resolution forces the President to focus our military and intelligence on the wrong target. A historical example, which has been used in this debate, is the example of the 1930s- that England, France and other nations would eventually join in the world's greatest alliance, slept, while Hitler's power grew.
They say that passing this resolution is the equivalent of if the Alllies had declared war on Hitler. I disagree with that assessment of what this lesson of history means. In my judgment, passing this resolution tonight will be the equivalent of declaring war on Italy. That is not what we should be doing. We should not just be declaring war on Mussolini's Italy. We should be declaring war on Hitler's Germany.
Now, there are good reasons for considering attacking today's Italy, meaning Iraq. Saddam Hussein's regime has chemical and biological weapons and is trying to get nuclear capacity. But the briefings I have received have shown that trying to block him and any necessary nuclear materials have been largely successful, as evidenced by the recent intercept of centrifuge tubes. And he is years away from having nuclear capability. So why does it make sense to attack this era's Italy, and not Germany, especially when by attacking Italy, we are making Germany a more probable adversary?
Madam President, the CIA has warned us that international terrorist organizations will probably use United States action against Iraq as an indication for striking us here in the homeland.
You might ask, what does the word 'probably' mean in intelligence speak? It probably means that there is a 75 percent greater chance of the event occurring. And the event is that international terrorist organizations will use United States actions against Iraq as a justification for striking us here in the homeland. Let me read a declassified briefing of the CIA report presented to the Select Committee on Intelligence:
"Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or chemical or biological weapons against the U.S.
"Should Saddam conclude that U.S-led attacks could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions.
"Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorsit offensive in 1991, or [chemical and biological weapons].
"Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamic terrorists in conducting a [weapon of mass destruction] attack against the United States would be his last chance of exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."
Madam President, in other words, odds of another strike against the people of the United States by Al Qaeda or another international terrorist group goes up when we attack Baghdad.
The President should be in the most advantageous position to protect Americans - to launch pre-emptive strikes and hack off the heads of these snakes. With the resolution before us, we are denying the President that opportunity. And we are sending confusing signals to our people and to our allies as to the sincerity of our commitment to the war on terrorism.
End quote.
Again, this is before the invasion. US intelligence thought the US would be less safe even given that Iraq may have some WMD. _______________________________________________
Before the war US intelligence said that invading Iraq would not make the US safer.
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Senator Bob Graham, ranking Democrat on the Intelligence committee, asked the intelligence community whether or not invading Iraq would make the US safer. The intelligence committee, before the war, said we would be less safe if we invaded. Remember - this is before the war when evidence of WMD was paraded around the world.
This was public knowledge. It ran in major newspapers. All members of congress must have at least heard of it, even if most Americans did not. They voted to give Bush the green light anyhow.
I heard about this on the NPR (American public radio) program This American Life (www.thislife.org). It was broadcast 12/20/02 and you can go to that website and listen for free to Bob Graham say that himself.
Further, he asks the radio staff to question Bush on some issues. Apparently it is not any easier for him to get answers from the administration than it is for anyone else. They try. Have a listen.
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StocDred says, "Heck, our founding fathers couldn't even fathom the high-powered, super-accurate, full-automatic weapons of today
This is exactly to the point. They held weapons of equal power to the government. Today private citizens with, say, shoulder launched stinger missles would be insane. (Don't like your business competition? Shoot the company plane down.) This is a far cry from a dueling pistol.
The scope of weapon power has increased to the point where armed overthrow of the government is a joke (there is a great AC post about this above) - but that is exactly what the founders intended.
They specifically state that to be the only reason the right to bear arms is protected. That gone, we should not have that right, so sayeth the founders.
We have decided to keep the weapons, anyhow. We have the highest murder rate in the world (per person). Go figure.
The number of weapons in the US is staggering. Any plan to significantly reduce the ammount of weapons (beyond, say, buy back programs which are effective, yet limited) would be herculean in scope. Yet even modest proposals are rejected.
Right now Republicans are tyring to push through a bill to destroy all the "Brady bill" data within 72 hours. (Brady bill info: the info you must give to buy a gun outside of a gun show, in the US, at the moment. Given for a background check to ensure you are not mentally ill or have felony convictions). This at a time national security is at it's highest (arguably) since the end of the second world war.
This illustrates how ingraned the "right to bear arms" is in America. Even though it is totally tangential to the intent of the founders, and apparently extremely detremental to the public, the current right to run out and buy a gun (say, a hand gun, easily concealed) will remain unfettered for the forseable future.
Violent video games, on the other hand, are in serious danger of being banned. See, for example, this.
Simple, logical yet tough solutions exist and are not implemented. Example:
Jonny accidentally shoots Jimmy with Jonny's Dad's gun, Jonny's Dad's should be lookin at multiple years in prison. Still wanna have a gun? Sure, go ahead just be certain your kids can't get it, or if they can that it isn't loaded and they can't load it.
Sounds reasonable, sounds not too hard, buy a master lock, lets say.
Yet every year about 4000 children die from gunfire, and about 20,000 are injured in the USA. See thisfor an example with citations. And of those 20,000, about 4,000 are accidental injuries.
Okay, so people try to lock up guns and keep them away from children, but about 4,000 times per year it doesn't work. Still want to risk jail time for owning a gun? It would be your call. Remember, you kid is a kid for a long time (the statistics use 20 years but let's say 15) so during that time interval 60,000 kids will get shot accidentally with guns and (assuming few repeats) that is loads of families effected, perhaps about 1% overall. Statistically, you kid is about 10 times more likely to get shot if you own a gun than if not. I'm sure you can see where this leads. But like I said, be my guest but my kids aren't going to be playing with your kids (at your house) if you keep guns in the house, and I know about it.
Amazing how the Republicans who, nominally, favor personal responsibility cannot inact a law punishing parents for gross neglegence in keeping firearms away from their kids.
And, of course, the Democrats who propose stronger and stronger gun control laws find those efforts thwarted.
I personally don't care which road you follow. Pick one. Follow both. I don't care. Both parties have, at least nominally, some solution to this.
During the
People who play the game a lot will have a very different view from more casual players. Similar to having a good command line interface versus a good GUI, different people will want different things. If the game it too hard to learn, they alienate new players. Of course, in traditional games, you have already bought the game and good luck trying to return it. In online games with subscription costs, this won't fly.
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Amazingly, Everquest, a successful online game, was really hard to begin. If you didn't know what you were doing, you could easily loose your "corpse" which had most (or all) of your valuables on it. People still played because it was fun. There was risk, but it was exciting. And you could always get another +3 club of slamming. However, with the increase in competition, Everquest is making it easier and easier to start the game. You now have ingame overhead maps of the cities, which used to take just hours of time to really learn. Now you begin with some gear and some basic hotbuttons pre-configured, and your spells pre-memorized. Further, dont even have to worry about loosing your corpse until level 9? 10? Thus, the game is far more user friendly.
And this has been cited as a sign of the end of Everquest by some. So it goes.
The power gamers will perhaps not mind a complex interface if it is powerful. The novice will. If there are far more novices than power gamers, the balance of limited developer time and effort will shift that direction, if the company is wise. Supply and demand. Simple.
Yet in MMORPGs, there is another issue, and it spurs endless discussion. The question of balance. The history of Everquest is full of "game breaking" items which have been "nerfed" or made less useful, or in some cases, no longer dropped. Yet beyond the obvious items (say, unlimited mana or health) which clearly have to go, there is the big issue. Balance between the classes.
Since players have a great deal of time invested in their character, thus there is a high barrier to switching classes, people hope that in the future, their class is still desirable in groups. Everquest has a strong group system: to get really good stuff, you have to team up. It sucks if you happen to have chosen a class which no one else wants.
Add to this constantly changing content and new levels and abilities, and you have a recipe for infinite whining - and any change will make some people unhappy. Even a simple step of giving one class an extra boost would make classes in competition with it whine.
People will whine about everything, and the internet is a highly critical media. Yet constant change is needed to sell product, thus constant tweaks to balance are needed. And despite the userbase being incredibly whiney, they generally have the idea of what needs to be done.
The current example in everquest is the warrior class at the very high end has trouble holding monster's attention (compared to others). A *small* increase is needed - only for warriors and only at the high levels. Warriors would still be inferior to others at this task, but better than they are now. This is generally the consensus of the calmer voices on the boards. Yet when a change was announced, there was a vast outcry from others that they would be left behind - before they even saw the changes.
Obviously, balance will never be perfect. I think a good idea is to plan for it. Implement a user vote for the most pathetic "class" and give that class, or the bottom 2 or 3, a small bonus to make them more attractive. Hold the election, say, monthly. It will give the users a voice and it will restore *minor* imbalances. Major imbalances will still need to be addressed in the usual way and, although users generally know what is needed, the details must be left to neutral parties - hopefully the developers.
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I second this. My wife and I play Everquest together, and have done so for over three and a half years now. We enjoy it immensely and it's a great hobby to share together. We know two other couples who play together in real life, and stories abound in game of husband/wife teams. My only advice is not to take it too seriously.
Like the origional poster, we had some trouble finding games to play together. For a while we played Age of Empires II in cooperative mode - where I would control our army and she would build up our town and collect resources. We probably played for a week. And we tried to make play cooperative in other games like simcity and baseball mogul, so we would basically take turns playing, but that did not turn out so well.
And then we found Everquest. We really have not played anything else since. I'm sure there are loads of better MMORPG's out there now. I would try one or two first.
Everquest has a nice pace to it. It leaves time to talk with the people you are playing with. Grouping with other people is, virtually always, exteremely beneficial, so just having a two person team to which you can add in other people will give you a huge edge over starting alone. (I have not tried other MMORPG's so I cannot comment on them but I assume they are similar).
I wrote:
Thus, I hope we do not find a backup planet. I hope this is it.
If we foul our planet to the point it is unlivable, we deserve our fate.
And then guybarr wrote:
First, IMHO this is utterly wrong factually: once a society colonizes
space, all it'll need is energy and materials. I suggest that actually
there may be few solar systems which are completely uninhabitable.
Second, from the pragmatic POV, this sounds to me like morality gone
completely insane: are you truly sugesting that you'd willfully risk
total genocide for humanity (and its surrounding biological system, BTW)
just because you think we "deserve it" ?
I hope we don't find a backup planet - one just like Earth - if we foul Earth to the point that it is uninhabitable. We will be forced to live in less habitable places, such as Mars, Earth's Moon, etc, as Guybarr indicates. It would be a fate we deserve.
If we just move on to another, identical, planet after destroying all life on a whole planet, it seems to set a really bad precedence. There is no word for it.
I hope it is not too easy for anyone to leave. It would promote environmental degredation. Already, poor countries manufacture products using environmentally unsound technology. And we all still live here. Dumping mercury into the bay of Japan will have an effect on the health of the population, worldwide. (No, not every person, but it's effects would have reach beyond the region). Yet what consequence would it have for those on another planet?
The level of pollution now should be warning enough that a second planet probably won't be the last. Imagine meeting an alien race with a string of uninhabitable planets behind us. I hope it is not too easy for the decisionmakers to escape the consequences. If so, those left behind will have a far greater reason to worry.
ActionPlant Says:
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"it would certainly be nice to finally find a backup for our planet. You can't tell me there aren't at least a few people out there who have been rather alarmed at all of our recent unexpected solar activity"
I think the real threat to our planet is ourselves, not our sun.
Thus, I hope we do not find a backup planet.
I hope this is it. If we foul our planet to the point it is unlivable, we deserve our fate.
Another planet would be a convenient way out.
Not, of course, that I am in any position to affect change on this issue. Either a habitable planet is in range or not. Either we find it, or not. Certainly we should try. It would be amazing. I just hope it is not too easy to leave Earth for the rich and powerful. Living in the USA, recent news does not affirm faith in such leaders.
Honestly, I'd sooner trust the average person I meet on the street, even if they are raving aloud, over the average American corporate executive.
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Sure, you are right. A zone can hold lots of people, probably more than 600. With the gear available at the time, it would have taken loads of people. The developers, at that time, said it would have taken so many people that the zone would crash. They did not specify how many. In part, it shows how much the new AA and gear changes the game.
Further, it is kind of amazing that no one woke up the Sleeper on that server for so long. It is, apparently, a once-in-a-server-lifetime event, thus all the other servers where Sleeper was woken ages ago and could not kill it. It's not like there was a chance to gather another, say, 300 friends, and try again. I heard perhaps a year ago that sleeper had been woken on all servers. Obviously this was not the case.
Hi,
They gave Sleeper total immunity to spell damage and an insane ammount of hit points and an insane regeneration rate. Apparently, it was vulnerable to summoned creatures thus all the magic users who could, made them.
Sleeper was weaker, but upgraded a couple expansions ago and then he was wakened on virtually every server. This one server may well be the last holdout - no one woke him there. Time passed. Sleeper was not upgraded, but players were.
Thus the inevitable happened.
As for invulnerability, they can make a creature untargetable - and thus unkillable. I suppose you could argue that some kind of area of effect attack would injure it, but Sleeper is/was immune to spell damage...and that doesn't leave much.
I have no problem with just having a really nasty monster in the game, but they should have planned for it to be killed and given it loot. Best loot from Velius expansion, which I guess would seem a bit gimpy now, would have made people think more highly of the development team, because at least they had thought it out.
It goes to show how much time these people have on their hands. Perhaps more things like this could be introduced with commensurate loot.
This was on a PvP server, by the way, so all those people spent all that time in close proximity to one another and at any time they could have started smacking each other. They didn't. It is a great feat of organization and dedication.
Further, after the first time they got the guy down to 27% health and the zone was reset, the people were all given complete resurections (e.g. death with no losses) by a GM *and* a few points (called AA points or alternate advancement points) to make up for all the losses they took in those initial deaths. That was pretty kind of the GM's...given the fact that they probably brought the zone down intentionally to prevent the people from killing it.
I think there was a quote at the time Sleeper was upgraded that it would take so many people to take it down that the zone would crash - and that was probably true at that time. Perhaps it would have taken, say, 600 people, and that will bring down zones in Everquest, I think. (A zone is just sort of a patch of virtual space. All space is divided into "zones".)
All money can do is buy ads, not votes, but ads are time to make a case, so money is important. That said:
Americans are restricted in what we can give to candidates for office. However, we can donate either a very large or unlimited ammount to special interest groups, which can donate large ammounts or just run ads for a certain candidate. Attempts to restirct this have actually lost in court, up to the supreme court (highest court in the USA) because such restrictions violate free speach.
Instead, we have "quid pro quo" laws which make it illegal for elected officials to actually do anything which favors the people they have accepted donations for. The standard of proof seems to be, basically, a direct link between the donation and the action. Obviously, proving this is absurdly difficult.
Example: anti-abortion group seeks to donate money to candidate. They just ask around until they find someone in a tight race who is anti-abortion. They give that person money. Person wins and votes against abortion rights. Obviously, there is no case here. The person already decided what they felt and then took the money. Sure, they might have been more vocal, spent more time or effort or pulled in more favors for abortion than they would have otherwise.
Other example: energy company wants tax break. Donates to a candidate who has no background in energy policy at all. Perhaps has never voted on an energy bill. Candidate wins and pushes for tax break for energy company. How can one prove that that is not what the candidate origionally believed? Most likely, the candidate is anti-tax to begin with. Aren't they all?
Discussion of this issue in America has become exteremely jaded. On NPR (national public radio, in America) on the fairly conservative finance program (Marketplace) I have heard repeated references to business "getting what they are paying for" from congress, and repeated references to "bought and paid for" politicians. I don't listen (radio/tv) to much coverage of congress, but I have heard Democrats accuse Republicans of quid pro quo, to which the republican simply replied your side does it, too.
Further, ads from special interest groups (SIGs) in favor of a candidate are not supposed to have any input from that candidate. This is apparently violated constantly.
These politicans should be beyond reproach, yet most are obviously taking bribes. How can we change that, and stay within the constitution?
1. Force politicians to recuse themselves from any decision in which they have an interest, including having an ad run for them by an interest group.
1a. All ads for a candidate should be subject to veto by that candidate.
Want a pro-abortion SIG to endorse you? Fine. You can't vote on any abortion issues for the next term of office.
2. Ads run against a particular candidate must pay to provide equal time to the candidate, available directly after the ad, to rebut the ad without pentalty of recusion on the topic, e.g. without regard to (1) above.
2a. If any significant connections can be made between the candidate and the ad run against the candidate, the candidate forfits the reply time. Instead it would be used to indicate the connection.
This is needed to prevent candidates from putting up "straw man" arguments against themselves and then attacking such ads in the free time allowed. Now, you might think that's crazy but actually this happens already in City of Los Angeles politics.
3. Disallow corporations from any form of political donations or speach. Corporations do not have the right to vote, only real people do, thus there is precedence for disallowing them political speach.
Sure, you can make an organization to promote any political cause you want, say the environment. You can take donations from anyone you want. You can run ads for any candidate you want, discussion them and the environment. Then they have to recuse themselves from any votes on that topic, b
Alright. US constitution says a well armed militia is necessary to prevent tyrany. Essentially, the founders wanted the people to have arms equal to the military so that revolution was possible. After all, that is what they had just done. They were not stupid. They were not hypocritical, at least not on this issue. When the weapons were scarsely more effective than bows and arrows it made sense.
Time passed. The machine gun was invented. So was the tank. Now we have satellite guided bombs accurate enough to hit a small building which can be fired from hundreds of miles away. We have nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. At some point we realize that even if you have the money to buy it, you just don't have the right to, say, a nuclear bomb.
Yes, this is basically a flagrant violation of the second ammendment - because if our government becomes a tyrany and we try armed resistance, we will loose. We will not have weapons we could have attained if the laws had allowed it.
But just consider the alternative.
Oh, you are so right - we need to have RPGs with sensibly dressed women.
/hidearmor commands to better control your looks. As for actually concealing more of yourself, that would be a little harder, but I'm sure they could do something.
Ya I think at least you should have a choice - and that you should be able to change from day to day. In Everquest, you kind of choose how you dress by picking your race when you make a character and its not so easy to go back and change that after having spent perhaps 100s of hours. There are ways to manipulate your image through using equipment, but really you want use the best equipment you can get. Sacrificing gear quality for looks seems a tough choice.
I think there is easily room within Eq's current graphics engine to just use
Do you think some (many?) players don't want to be bothered chatting in a MMO and that might be some of what turns the mainstream players off?
Yes, you are absolutely right JavaLord. Some people will be turned off by the downtime. Some people just don't want to meet new people, either. I actually think the inherently repetitive gameplay has a lot of turn off value, too.
But from what I have heard, all these other MMORPG's after Eq, such as Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online and/or DAoC or others tried to minimize downtime and make the games more constant action. It doesn't seem to have attracted more people - even though at first it seems like the ultimate improvement. I'm just trying to explain why.
I think there is also a soloing issue here, too. In Everquest most people need groups to gain experience. I think other games tried to get away from that and alow people to be entirely self sufficient - which at first sounds great but eventually you realize you are playing a single player game, it is not really a great game, and you are paying $15/month to play it. Not really a stunning deal.