Then again *still*, whether he can play WoW or not in a hotel is a rather stupid, frivilous issue and one not even worth commenting on. That alone speaks to the original question poster's mentality, right there, that it is somehow a "priority" over everyone else's traffic...
Just because it doesn't exist in your corner of/. doesn't mean it doesn't exist as a hot-button issue period. Next time have an idea what you're talking about. Some folks think redlining is the end of the world...
You obviously don't have relatives that live in a rural area.
No, *I* live in a VERY rural area and have most of my life. We're talking sub-10,000 towns being the largest towns in the county or area here. I'm quite keen to the rural challenges of internet connectivity. Heck, we still have people without cable TV here in spots, and STILL some areas that can't even support 28.8 dialup due to such poor voice phone lines (yay for barely topping 20kbps, which many ISP's won't even keep on the line and just drop the connection of!). So don't chide me on that point.
Still, when say... Verizon wants to deploy FIOS first to rich areas (because they're more-likely to be early adopters and can afford it), they get raked over the coals publicly for it. Where exactly are they supposed to start then? The ghettos and run-down areas?
And what, in 40 seconds you've hit your monthly cap?
Seriously though, it' s trade-off. We could have this sort of thing in parts of North America, but it would require consumers and gov't to stop moaning and griping about where telecos and cablecos pick to choose their deployments. Cherry-picking, if you will.
Because in case you didn't notice, all these Asian and European plans that seem so fast (and than always get everyone green with envy) always have the disclaimer "in select areas/markets" on them. Which means "deployed to a very few affluent areas that can likely afford it", a concept which seems to go over OK in Asia and Europe, but not so OK in North America.
The all-pro Seahawks RB is named "Shaun" Alexander.
If you're going to post a front-page story on sports, at least get the first name of one of the top players currently in the game right. This is the equivalent of writing a story on MS and referencing "Steve Bullmer". It's kinda' sad...
No, it's just come to the point that if you're not a 100% loyal Sony fanboy, you apparently must be an XBox or NIntendo fanboy or something. Like I said, ya'll hate good competition. WHY?! Would you guys be happier if Nintendo and MS were killed off and it was just Sony? I'm sure you'd love paying $75/piece for games and getting little innovation, if any at all.
Until Sony actually LAUNCHES a next-gen console, they don't have one. Same for Nintendo. They have nothing but conjecture still. How can MS be "hurting" an industry with the XBox 360 when nobody else has a comparable system out to market yet (but presumably will eventually, though I'm having my doubts about the Revolution)? Right now though, the PS3 and Revolution are exactly as tangible as the Phantom.
Having a 3rd player in the console wars was the single best thing that happened to console gaming anytime recently, especially since Nintendo has really, really lost their step...
Then again... seeing you add a worthless, offtopic line about Linux on the bottom sums up your own fanboyness relatively nicely,a nd your personal experience with it.
The only thing the XBox 360 has hurt is Sony and Nintendo's pride. They didn't take it seriosuly enough and MS beat them to market by a wide margin, with decent (but not great) launch titles (better launch titles than the PS2 ever had though). Oh yeah, and MS has the first real online gaming service with downloadable games that people seem to be flocking to.
I can't fathom that in a week where all the talk has been about how much longer the PS3 is going to be delayed and that it'll cost around $800, people are still trying to say that it's the fault of a next-gen console that's already to market and costs half of what the PS3 apparently will, that is "hurting" the games industry.
So the 360 has the PSU issue? Big deal -- the PS1 had a CD-ROM issue where if you had to ever replace your original one it would no longer fit in your case... the PS2 had issues scratching discs and sometimes outiright destroying DVD movies, as well as several fire-related recalls... this happens when you ship a product to a lot of people.
What's hurting the game industry is Nintendo's constant rehashing of games by slapping "Mario" on the start of the title, and Sony's outright hostility towards their customers and lack of grounding in reality.
That and the fanboy writers who can't swallow their pride and admit that they didn't take MS seriously enough ever since the original XBox, and are getting proven wrong in having so much faith in Sony (who, right now mind you, has exactly the same number of shipped console products as MS has -- two. It's not like Sony is Nintendo or something and been around forever in the gaming console industry, when you think about it).
Gaming is the only industry I've ever seen where the consumers HATE competition and the benefits it reaps them, I swear... all because they can't get past their pre-pubescent-ish fanboy loyalties.
I'm pretty sure that if this company in question is publicly-traded and US-based, this is something Sarbanes-Oxley will not just frown upon but force them to switch back and simply not allow to happen. They don't mess around with stuff when it comes to I.T., and that's not just a security risk to them, it's a HIGH security risk. And they'd be quite right.
If it's not a publicly-traded company though... you're hosed. Get a new job, because there may as well not even be an I.T. Dept. in that case,a nd your bosses are incompetent and when things go wrong they'll blame to I.T. staff for being there and not going to great lengths to make up for it, not themselves for movingg them there.
But yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a SoX violation of very high magnitude...
So how many of you losers have not only played this version of the game, but previous versions of the game, qualifying you to comment on the series in any form?
Years ago I participated in an alpha of a MMO football game. It was hard to play because of the mouse/keyboard controls, but it did work and was an interesting game.
There also *is* a "MMO" hockey game. You can find it here:
Some Finnish folks put it together a year or two ago, and I was quite addicted for a while. Graphics aren't very good but the gameplay was quite compelling, and after you got to know certain other players you learned which ones you could rely on for defense, which ones would find ways to get open in the slot, etc...
These games would work great as MMO games if people stopped being such graphics facsists though.
I don't care what anyone says. I don't care if other people are sick of it, or don't think it's funny. And I don't care in the least if it's staged (which is likely is). And I know a bunch of ya'll will post about how you think it's not funny, or don't get it, or ocmplain that it's here...
But every time I watch that video and I get to that defining moment, I am sent into a fit of laughter.
It's like Bubb Rubb ("It goes... WHOO HOOOOOO!!!"), it never gets old and it confirms the internet's purpose and place in life for me.
The reason I say that is because while there have been 2 or 3 good NFL games out on the market in the past 4 or 5 years, it's really been AGES since someone nailed it in designing a good baseball game IMHO.
Triple Play went form bad to worse... High Heat came close but always had nagging, dumb problems...
So I'm not entirely sure why this would come to fruition. Is it bad? Not necessarily. Maybe we'll even get a decent MLB game out of it finally.
However, it's not like it's been a strong market to begin with. I always said if ESPN/SEGA had pulled their heads out of their a** and concentrated just on making and establishing a superb MLB game line that then maybe they could take on the big boys at EA.
However, baseball has fallen quite a ways down the food chain now. Basketball, football, and even hockey and soccer games are more-popular now. SO they get attention first, and then whatever's leftover goes to baseball.
People get excited about preordering Madden or NHL or Live, or even FIFA. People don't get excited about preordering a baseball game.
I'm wondering if MLB simply woke up finally to this realization of the waning popularity of their sport and decided to cash in while they could.
Also... has anyone thought of asking/callng for Valve to make publicly available how and WHY they're deactivating people? And by that I mean specific records and details? In other words, some proof so that they can be audited? This extends beyond Good Budiness/Bad Business and seems to have wandered into an area where someone should really be regulating/overseeing Valve.
Otherwise, is there any accountability for them to not just deactivate paying customers once they have their money? I can't imagine they would care much if it's a paying customer or not, seeing how it's very likely the next product they release wouldn't be for 3 or 4 more years anyways...
What a joke. Anyone dumb enough to use Steam in the first place and then gets their account deactivated, wrongly or rightfully, gets what they deserve for being blind, dumb sheep with no sense of what they're dealing with. And I can guarantee you out of the 30,000 they have deactivated, the number of paying, legit customers they deactivated is in at least the hundreds. That's the way it always works.
Valve has completely ignored the history and fact that these schemes DO NOT WORK, and when you try to do something like this to combat illegal copies of the game you only 1) Piss off your normal customer base by making it even more inconvenient for them, and 2) you INEVITABLY make mistakes and you punish/cut off paying customers. Oh yeah, and I forgot... the people who REALLY want an illegal copy will still get it no matter what.
Valve has become a joke, and Steam is a joke. And no amount of Tychos gushing in their blogs and news posts about how "great" a system of delivery a model like Steam is will prevent its eventual failure. No content system which lets a company deactivate accounts on a whim can survive because there WILL be mistakes, and those "mistakes" will go from Paying Customers to Former Paying Customers. And once you lose them, they will never ever come back, and they will make it their personal goal to drive as many other people away form it as possible.
Time to get a new idea instead of rehashing the same old one that's been tried and failed for nearly a decade now, guys...
It crashes at least once a session, if not twice. And it's done this since at least 0.7. Prior to that it crashed even more-frequently. I didn't notice any difference between PR and the final release of 1.0 to be honest -- they've just all been crashy even when nothing else is running on my system.
So no, you're not alone. However, the Firefox zealotry has gotten to the point where even suggesting that it's not the single most-stable thing in the universe is considered heresy. In actuality all they need to do is actually work for once on making the dumb thing more-stable instead of adding some dumb new feature nobody will use anyways, like the built-in RSS tracking.
If they can actually make Firefox stable, they might then have a legit claim as being the #1 browser, but right now the random crashes during normal usage and the hangs during updates. Both Opera and IE don't crash nearly as often as Firefox.
Not only do I get dragged into the occasional VGA Planets game when all my friends snap and get the craving for it, I also take part in what amount to the Forgotten PBEM games -- online sports management sim leagues.
You have a franchise, you micromanage operations for say, a weeks' worth of games, then send in files and insuructions to a commissioner who process and runs them, then saves and posts the updated gamefile and within a couple days the entire process in repeated again. Instructions and processes incluse contract offers, sending people up and down to and from the farm, making trades, setting lines and/or lineups for particular games, managing ticket prices... it's as involved as a Conquer Space game like VGAP, if not moreso, and even as other PBEM gametypes are dying out online leagues are still going strong -- look at EHM, OOTP, CM/FM or Front office Football.
PBEM's doing fine overall. For all those highly-detailed management games, it'll be around as a genre as long as email remains around. It just has no penetration with the FPS, twitch crowd anymore (thank god).
I'm getting tired of the whole EA vs ESPN debate because only one of the two companies releases games on the only platform that matters -- PC. And that company is EA. Until the ESPN line is released for PC, they aren't even a true direct competitor to EA, who has released games for PC for years and years. If you're missing an entire platform, you're a niche, not a competitor.
Also, I don't know about you but I haven't bought many games of any type lately, for any platform. Why? Because the economy still blows and I have other things to spend money on that are more-important than dropping $50 on some game.
Perhaps that amazingly-obvious factor has a lot to do with it EA's numbers being down -- nobody has as much money to waste on games right now.
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For God's sake, someone mod this parent comment up.
The article linked to is a 2003 article quoting 2002 sales figures. It's beyond irrelevant....
Then again *still*, whether he can play WoW or not in a hotel is a rather stupid, frivilous issue and one not even worth commenting on. That alone speaks to the original question poster's mentality, right there, that it is somehow a "priority" over everyone else's traffic...
Nothing says "Winning game design" like 3 random celebrities who have no idea what they're doing... am I right?
The odds of anything palattable coming out of this studio are staggering.
If this were the case, why has postage gone up so much in just the past 10 years?
Oh they're hurting all right. Maybe if they developed betetr QoS themselves, they wouldn't be in this bind.
Yeah with America being so socialist and egalitarian and...oh wait, you're talking out of your arse.
/. doesn't mean it doesn't exist as a hot-button issue period. Next time have an idea what you're talking about. Some folks think redlining is the end of the world...
Yes, because nobody anywhere in the U.S. ever complains about redlining or complains about it, and nobody ever pays any mind to it.
Or not.
Just because it doesn't exist in your corner of
You obviously don't have relatives that live in a rural area.
No, *I* live in a VERY rural area and have most of my life. We're talking sub-10,000 towns being the largest towns in the county or area here. I'm quite keen to the rural challenges of internet connectivity. Heck, we still have people without cable TV here in spots, and STILL some areas that can't even support 28.8 dialup due to such poor voice phone lines (yay for barely topping 20kbps, which many ISP's won't even keep on the line and just drop the connection of!). So don't chide me on that point.
Still, when say... Verizon wants to deploy FIOS first to rich areas (because they're more-likely to be early adopters and can afford it), they get raked over the coals publicly for it. Where exactly are they supposed to start then? The ghettos and run-down areas?
It was a joke, poking fun at N. American caps (the the "Seriously though" in the next sentence). Wow people take things too literally. ;-)
And what, in 40 seconds you've hit your monthly cap?
Seriously though, it' s trade-off. We could have this sort of thing in parts of North America, but it would require consumers and gov't to stop moaning and griping about where telecos and cablecos pick to choose their deployments. Cherry-picking, if you will.
Because in case you didn't notice, all these Asian and European plans that seem so fast (and than always get everyone green with envy) always have the disclaimer "in select areas/markets" on them. Which means "deployed to a very few affluent areas that can likely afford it", a concept which seems to go over OK in Asia and Europe, but not so OK in North America.
Errr... "publically"? And "trade" when "traded" is meant?
This needed cleaning up before posting
Who's "Sean" Alexander?
The all-pro Seahawks RB is named "Shaun" Alexander.
If you're going to post a front-page story on sports, at least get the first name of one of the top players currently in the game right. This is the equivalent of writing a story on MS and referencing "Steve Bullmer". It's kinda' sad...
I don't. I only care if the games are good and fun, and worth my bucks.
If women don't want to make games, that's fine by me and I don't see the problem. I, as a consumer, care only about the end-result product.
So since you think it's so important to success...
Aside from the XBox with Halo, name another console that had an actual killer app right at or around launch time?
No, it's just come to the point that if you're not a 100% loyal Sony fanboy, you apparently must be an XBox or NIntendo fanboy or something. Like I said, ya'll hate good competition. WHY?! Would you guys be happier if Nintendo and MS were killed off and it was just Sony? I'm sure you'd love paying $75/piece for games and getting little innovation, if any at all.
Until Sony actually LAUNCHES a next-gen console, they don't have one. Same for Nintendo. They have nothing but conjecture still. How can MS be "hurting" an industry with the XBox 360 when nobody else has a comparable system out to market yet (but presumably will eventually, though I'm having my doubts about the Revolution)? Right now though, the PS3 and Revolution are exactly as tangible as the Phantom.
Having a 3rd player in the console wars was the single best thing that happened to console gaming anytime recently, especially since Nintendo has really, really lost their step...
Then again... seeing you add a worthless, offtopic line about Linux on the bottom sums up your own fanboyness relatively nicely,a nd your personal experience with it.
The only thing the XBox 360 has hurt is Sony and Nintendo's pride. They didn't take it seriosuly enough and MS beat them to market by a wide margin, with decent (but not great) launch titles (better launch titles than the PS2 ever had though). Oh yeah, and MS has the first real online gaming service with downloadable games that people seem to be flocking to.
I can't fathom that in a week where all the talk has been about how much longer the PS3 is going to be delayed and that it'll cost around $800, people are still trying to say that it's the fault of a next-gen console that's already to market and costs half of what the PS3 apparently will, that is "hurting" the games industry.
So the 360 has the PSU issue? Big deal -- the PS1 had a CD-ROM issue where if you had to ever replace your original one it would no longer fit in your case... the PS2 had issues scratching discs and sometimes outiright destroying DVD movies, as well as several fire-related recalls... this happens when you ship a product to a lot of people.
What's hurting the game industry is Nintendo's constant rehashing of games by slapping "Mario" on the start of the title, and Sony's outright hostility towards their customers and lack of grounding in reality.
That and the fanboy writers who can't swallow their pride and admit that they didn't take MS seriously enough ever since the original XBox, and are getting proven wrong in having so much faith in Sony (who, right now mind you, has exactly the same number of shipped console products as MS has -- two. It's not like Sony is Nintendo or something and been around forever in the gaming console industry, when you think about it).
Gaming is the only industry I've ever seen where the consumers HATE competition and the benefits it reaps them, I swear... all because they can't get past their pre-pubescent-ish fanboy loyalties.
So did this loser ever copyright or patent the idea?
Does he have any actual proof that this idea was his?
Was he smart enough to make EA sign a contract and/or agreement to not use his idea(s) without his licensing or permission?
If not, then he walked right in, and handed them his ideas, and there's really not anything he can do about it.
Stupidity is not, nor should it ever be, rewarded.
I'm pretty sure that if this company in question is publicly-traded and US-based, this is something Sarbanes-Oxley will not just frown upon but force them to switch back and simply not allow to happen. They don't mess around with stuff when it comes to I.T., and that's not just a security risk to them, it's a HIGH security risk. And they'd be quite right.
If it's not a publicly-traded company though... you're hosed. Get a new job, because there may as well not even be an I.T. Dept. in that case,a nd your bosses are incompetent and when things go wrong they'll blame to I.T. staff for being there and not going to great lengths to make up for it, not themselves for movingg them there.
But yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a SoX violation of very high magnitude...
So how many of you losers have not only played this version of the game, but previous versions of the game, qualifying you to comment on the series in any form?
That's what I thought, very few.
-- Primis.
Years ago I participated in an alpha of a MMO football game. It was hard to play because of the mouse/keyboard controls, but it did work and was an interesting game.
There also *is* a "MMO" hockey game. You can find it here:
http://www.kiekko.tk/?lang=en
Some Finnish folks put it together a year or two ago, and I was quite addicted for a while. Graphics aren't very good but the gameplay was quite compelling, and after you got to know certain other players you learned which ones you could rely on for defense, which ones would find ways to get open in the slot, etc...
These games would work great as MMO games if people stopped being such graphics facsists though.
I don't care what anyone says. I don't care if other people are sick of it, or don't think it's funny. And I don't care in the least if it's staged (which is likely is). And I know a bunch of ya'll will post about how you think it's not funny, or don't get it, or ocmplain that it's here...
But every time I watch that video and I get to that defining moment, I am sent into a fit of laughter.
It's like Bubb Rubb ("It goes... WHOO HOOOOOO!!!"), it never gets old and it confirms the internet's purpose and place in life for me.
-- Primis.
The reason I say that is because while there have been 2 or 3 good NFL games out on the market in the past 4 or 5 years, it's really been AGES since someone nailed it in designing a good baseball game IMHO.
Triple Play went form bad to worse... High Heat came close but always had nagging, dumb problems...
So I'm not entirely sure why this would come to fruition. Is it bad? Not necessarily. Maybe we'll even get a decent MLB game out of it finally.
However, it's not like it's been a strong market to begin with. I always said if ESPN/SEGA had pulled their heads out of their a** and concentrated just on making and establishing a superb MLB game line that then maybe they could take on the big boys at EA.
However, baseball has fallen quite a ways down the food chain now. Basketball, football, and even hockey and soccer games are more-popular now. SO they get attention first, and then whatever's leftover goes to baseball.
People get excited about preordering Madden or NHL or Live, or even FIFA. People don't get excited about preordering a baseball game.
I'm wondering if MLB simply woke up finally to this realization of the waning popularity of their sport and decided to cash in while they could.
-- Primis.
Also... has anyone thought of asking/callng for Valve to make publicly available how and WHY they're deactivating people? And by that I mean specific records and details? In other words, some proof so that they can be audited? This extends beyond Good Budiness/Bad Business and seems to have wandered into an area where someone should really be regulating/overseeing Valve.
Otherwise, is there any accountability for them to not just deactivate paying customers once they have their money? I can't imagine they would care much if it's a paying customer or not, seeing how it's very likely the next product they release wouldn't be for 3 or 4 more years anyways...
-- Primis.
What a joke. Anyone dumb enough to use Steam in the first place and then gets their account deactivated, wrongly or rightfully, gets what they deserve for being blind, dumb sheep with no sense of what they're dealing with. And I can guarantee you out of the 30,000 they have deactivated, the number of paying, legit customers they deactivated is in at least the hundreds. That's the way it always works.
Valve has completely ignored the history and fact that these schemes DO NOT WORK, and when you try to do something like this to combat illegal copies of the game you only 1) Piss off your normal customer base by making it even more inconvenient for them, and 2) you INEVITABLY make mistakes and you punish/cut off paying customers. Oh yeah, and I forgot... the people who REALLY want an illegal copy will still get it no matter what.
Valve has become a joke, and Steam is a joke. And no amount of Tychos gushing in their blogs and news posts about how "great" a system of delivery a model like Steam is will prevent its eventual failure. No content system which lets a company deactivate accounts on a whim can survive because there WILL be mistakes, and those "mistakes" will go from Paying Customers to Former Paying Customers. And once you lose them, they will never ever come back, and they will make it their personal goal to drive as many other people away form it as possible.
Time to get a new idea instead of rehashing the same old one that's been tried and failed for nearly a decade now, guys...
-- Primis.
It crashes at least once a session, if not twice. And it's done this since at least 0.7. Prior to that it crashed even more-frequently. I didn't notice any difference between PR and the final release of 1.0 to be honest -- they've just all been crashy even when nothing else is running on my system.
So no, you're not alone. However, the Firefox zealotry has gotten to the point where even suggesting that it's not the single most-stable thing in the universe is considered heresy. In actuality all they need to do is actually work for once on making the dumb thing more-stable instead of adding some dumb new feature nobody will use anyways, like the built-in RSS tracking.
If they can actually make Firefox stable, they might then have a legit claim as being the #1 browser, but right now the random crashes during normal usage and the hangs during updates. Both Opera and IE don't crash nearly as often as Firefox.
-- Primis.
Not only do I get dragged into the occasional VGA Planets game when all my friends snap and get the craving for it, I also take part in what amount to the Forgotten PBEM games -- online sports management sim leagues.
You have a franchise, you micromanage operations for say, a weeks' worth of games, then send in files and insuructions to a commissioner who process and runs them, then saves and posts the updated gamefile and within a couple days the entire process in repeated again. Instructions and processes incluse contract offers, sending people up and down to and from the farm, making trades, setting lines and/or lineups for particular games, managing ticket prices... it's as involved as a Conquer Space game like VGAP, if not moreso, and even as other PBEM gametypes are dying out online leagues are still going strong -- look at EHM, OOTP, CM/FM or Front office Football.
PBEM's doing fine overall. For all those highly-detailed management games, it'll be around as a genre as long as email remains around. It just has no penetration with the FPS, twitch crowd anymore (thank god).
-- Primis.
I'm getting tired of the whole EA vs ESPN debate because only one of the two companies releases games on the only platform that matters -- PC. And that company is EA. Until the ESPN line is released for PC, they aren't even a true direct competitor to EA, who has released games for PC for years and years. If you're missing an entire platform, you're a niche, not a competitor.
Also, I don't know about you but I haven't bought many games of any type lately, for any platform. Why? Because the economy still blows and I have other things to spend money on that are more-important than dropping $50 on some game.
Perhaps that amazingly-obvious factor has a lot to do with it EA's numbers being down -- nobody has as much money to waste on games right now.
-- Primis.