Sure, millions of Windows users had IE as their first browser because it came with Windows, and never needed to look for another. That's Microsoft's fault, such as it is.
But the millions of people who were already using Netscape at the time and switched away from it because it became the most craptacular web browser ever? That's all on Netscape.
I personally went from someone who mocked IE and never intended to use it, to someone praying for Netscape to die in the space of a few short years. For a while there, half a dozen versions of Netscape all had enough market share that my employer at the time wanted to support them, and those fuckers weren't even halfway compliant with each other, much less open standards or IE.
I wouldn't really call Hellgate an MMORPG, even though its developers sometimes do. It fits the literal definition, but doesn't really hold up the connotations/baggage that go with the MMORPG term. It's more two parts Battle.net-style Diablo and one part FPS.
(Note: I really like the game; I just wouldn't call it an MMORPG in the traditional sense.)
Man, if I'm Microsoft and I'm generally willing to break the law to get my way when push comes to shove, I'm probably sending some guys to bust Valentine's kneecaps at a minimum.
Granted, that wouldn't help them out in the short term, but they'd lose less executives if a savage beating was part of the severance package. Hell, they probably could advertise right here on slashdot for people willing to kick a Microsoft executive in the groin for free!
What are you talking about? Providing decent documentation that should have been provided in the first place is now called a loss? A win for your customers should also be a win for your company, but apparently you don't see it that way.
If it costs a bunch of money to produce and you don't get any money back for having produced, yeah, that's what they call a loss in the business world. You lose money. Loss vs. gain, not loss vs. win.
In the given argument, the state (in the US) does NOT pay for those bills -- at least medical ones. The hospital they went to has to eat the losses for the ER visit if the person cannot pay and doesn't have insurance.
Well, sure. But where does that money come from? All of the other patients of the hospital in the form of higher costs.
My guess is the best and brightest from Yahoo would quickly go work for Google, Apple, or someone else if Yahoo is acquired, and Microsoft will be left with the folks who were unable to escape. Acquiring a culturally incompatible company for the engineers doesn't make sense.
I'm not convinced this is true.
The public face/reputation of those companies is very different, true. But that being said, I have friends that work at Microsoft, and I've been in some of their offices. I also have friends that work at Yahoo!, and I've been in some of their offices. From a developer's-eye view internally, in terms of culture and benefits and what not, these are companies that are not really all that different. (Nor is Google all that different from either.)
I mean, yes, Microsoft currently mostly does stuff with MS technology and Yahoo! mostly does stuff with their homebrewed variants of open technologies like PHP, but at either company a given developer has a probably equal chance of having a very casual, pampered work environment and of being a really bright person who works longer hours than is truly necessary for love of their job.
Several posters have already argued that the seatbelt law makes sense because the hospital bill for people injured in this manner is paid for by The State. The problem is that this argument only makes sense if society already works under the presumption that The State is required to pay for people's bills when they can't afford them.
It's not a presumption so much as (to a large degree) the current reality. I'm not saying the solution should be that we make laws against everything dangerous, and I'm not saying the solution should be that if you get hurt in any case and don't have money on hand you're shit out of luck, but... if I get perfect freedom to endanger myself, other people also shouldn't have to pay for it.
Although I'm sure some people won't love the example, I think current smoking laws (in parts of America, anyway) are a reasonable compromise between allowing personal freedoms when they don't harm others, protecting others from said harm, and offering incentives for healthy behavior.
(I still don't see a warning label going on a Blackberry.)
Totally agree with you that in all previous editions of the game, the wizard out-rogues the rogue. That needs to change in a bad way. (Although, in 4E if a rogue is revamped to be a more solid combat character, maybe that's no longer as ridiculous.)
We don't know at the moment how rituals are limited (if at all) and how many options you get to choose from for your per day/per encounter/per will abilities (can you change them daily or only on levelling?)
My understanding is that all of the 'preparation' style mechanics are going away in 4E and everyone's basically a sorcerer. I'm hoping they'll respond that I was mistaken.
I never said everything should be written in assembler, only that optimization is not just a lost art, but a forgotten one. It was deliberately forgotten by legions of programmers drunk on too much computing power.
Well, yes. And to be fair, it was deliberately forgotten for good reasons.
Optimization in a development project isn't just about optimizing memory usage or CPU cycles -- it's also about optimizing developer time, and often money. For the overwhelming majority (not all) of development projects, it is more important to have a product that works correctly within its constraints built quickly/cheaply than to have one that runs faster or uses less memory (within reason) but costs more or takes longer. If having a service run concurrently on five machines instead of three is dramatically cheaper (that is, the cost of buying/operating the two additional servers is much cheaper than the developer salaries) than paying developers to get it optimized enough to run on the three, what's wrong with that choice?
The modern paradigm, in most cases, is to "just make it work" first and then to use that as a starting point to perform optimizations if necessary. I think it's hard to seriously argue that that's not as it should be.
But, being fair, I'm not sure that it would have been practical to be playing 3E internally for the four years it took to realize some of their biggest mistakes with it.
A lot of it is perspective. If you're a home game maybe a few sessions a year kind of player (as I am now), 3.5 could seem like a cash grab. If you're a heavy con/tournament player (as I was at the time), 3.5 seemed like an overdue patch to a hundred things we all knew were almost unplayably broken.
is great but for developing your average commercial web application within a team I'd rather shoot myself through the head than use Visual Studio.
That's actually one of the cases where Visual Studio shines the hell out of the alternatives:
1) You spend a lot less time dicking around in XML files or with the guts that don't relate to the actual logic of your application.
2) Trying out your changes as a developer and debugging is much easier, much faster, and much more powerful vs. any alternative that I've seen. This actually is one of my biggest beefs against Eclipse + related technologies, even with any set of plug-ins or app servers and what have you that I've seen.
3) Visual Studio Team System, if applicable (it's not cheap and I wouldn't honestly recommend it even for many.NET shops) blows away anything in the free world, not because all of its pieces are the best (e.g., CruiseControl/Ant is probably a better build system than MSBuild currently) but because the integration between them and the IDE is so seamless and good.
I can't tell you how nice it is, for example, to do a code review for someone and be able to use all the power of the IDE to do it. You want to see the definition of a related method? Just click on it as you would normally. You want to try to run the code and test out a potential hole you see? No problem. All of that is easy and requires zero additional effort.
In pretty much every sizeable team I've been on that didn't use VSTS, one of the devs spent half their time dicking around with the build script. Or the source control setup. Or the unit testing framework. Or something that didn't really relate to the actual task at hand.
However, I talk to many developers using both Eclipse and Visual Studio and they all say Visual Studio is still inferior.
FWIW, I've multiple years of experience using each for my full time job, and my opinion is the opposite.
I think that Eclipse is a great IDE, if you've got a ton of experience with it, and know which plug-ins you need to add, and know how to configure it to be just the way you like, and have a powerful machine. You don't struggle much with it in the literal writing code part of development, but any of the many related tasks are probably going to require you knowing what you need to set up or add on and doing it. That's time and effort away from doing the part of the job that's actually interesting to me that I'd just rather not spend.
Visual Studio is just so much more usable and does so much more off a fresh install. If there's any kind of UI to your app at all (web-based or otherwise), it's ridiculously better.
Not that there aren't Java/C++/etc. jobs out there -- there definitely are. There's also a ton of MS tech jobs out there.
I have the skills and experience to go either way, and while I still take some Java/etc. contracts, my preference is for MS work. For the kinds of work I tend to do, C#/Visual Studio is just so much better that using something else feels like pounding nails in with your shoe instead of a hammer.
My original question as seen above: How do you feel you've struck a balance between a desire to simplify/streamline rules to speed play and make the game more accessible, and a desire to preserve the strategy and general goodness of the game as it exists today? Details about proposed changes that were a tough call either way would be interesting.
WotC's response: The struggle between playability and tactical depth is a constant one for any game designer, and D&D is no different. We're always wrestling with the right balance between providing streamlined, intuitive play and giving players all the options they want. For example, by giving more characters customizable options for their actions in combat, we've added a dramatic level of depth (both strategic, in building your character, and tactical, in employing those options during a fight), but at the cost of increasing complexity for some characters. We think that's a net positive effect, because the lack of tactical and strategic options for fighters, rogues, and many other characters had become a glaring weakness in the game. The key is to ensure that players of different sensibilities can still find a rewarding play experience within the game's framework. A player who prefers simple options can select those and still feel like he's creating an effective character, while his buddy who thrives on complexity can load up on interesting combos without grinding the game to a halt.
Follow-up Question:
Is there any concern that you've eliminated the most tactically interesting/complex characters from the game?
Further explanation/clarification:
As 3.5E D&D stands, I agree that the lack of tactical options for many kinds of characters is a weakness in the game. I'm glad to know that it will be possible to play a tactically interesting fighter without having to comb 10 books for esoteric feats and prestige classes to somehow combine together into a mutt build that ends up tactically interesting.
However, my fear and what my original question was alluding to, is that instead of 'helping the poor', so to speak, you've opted for 'gaming communism'.
I'll try to better clarify that by explaining it in 3.5E terms. Take these three classes for example:
Fighter: - Moderate strategy at the character-build level. - No strategy at the day level. - Few tactical options at the combat level. That is, your fighter with feats picked for mounted combat CAN fire a longbow, but he's not very good at it. His best options in all fights come from a very short list.
Sorcerer: - Moderate strategy at the character-build level. (Less feats to pick vs. fighter, but now you're picking spells, so...) - No strategy at the day level. - Moderate to many tactical options at the combat level. As you reach the mid-levels, you've got a long list of spells and maybe some metamagic feats to apply on the fly.
Druid: - Moderate strategy at the character-build level. (You pick more skills than sorcerer/fighter, but few feats and a few are so good as to be default choices for many of the picks. Probably your single biggest 'build' choice is your animal companion, how you advance it, etc.) - High strategy at the day level. You can fill a variety of roles depending on which spells you prepare. How well you anticipate which spells you need will have a huge impact on the usefulness of your character. - High strategy at the day level. Lots of spells to choose from, an animal companion to manage, wild shape, etc.
Essentially, I'm concerned that instead of making fighter more of a complexity like sorcerer, you've instead chosen to make everyone like sorcerer and that there's no niche in the game for, say, the so-called 'Batman' style wizard; at best, a poor Batman sorcerer style controller seems possible. (See: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18500 if you're not familiar.)
What you're describing amounts to a different kind of game. It's not inherently better.
I like D&D for what it is, and I like a game like Call of Cthulhu for what it is. Combat in the Runequest-and-variant systems is simple and fast, but the flipside of that is that combat isn't especially tactical or interesting. (Note: this is specifically combat that's uninteresting, not the game in general.) Equally, a design choice like high character mortality rates can be a good or bad one, depending on the game. They're good in a game like Cthulhu and they're be bad in a game like D&D.
That being said, it's more than possible that 4E D&D will also fall into that latter fast-but-uninteresting mold.
The "No one is forcing you to change" comment appears often in discussing 4E, and it's valid up to a point.
However, if you're a person who does tournament/convention gaming at all, you're updating or you're giving up that kind of gaming.
A campaign like Living Greyhawk is a lot different from a home game, simultaneously bringing out some of the best and worst of D&D. It's not for everyone, but it's not something you can really replace by any alternative that doesn't move on to 4E rules.
Was I the only one who thought that Oregon Trail's designers were trying to make some kind of environmental/consumerist statement with the way you could shoot all the meat you wanted in a day, but no matter what you could only keep 100 pounds of it, leaving the rest to rot?
Every business I've ever seen is running Microsoft Office.
I don't doubt that there are businesses out there running Open Office or something else, but over the length of my career and through engagements at probably three dozen or so companies in a wide variety of industries, I've never seen a business that didn't run MS Office. Even tech companies where I've been where the culture was very anti-Microsoft and open/free technology was used for everything else humanly possible were still running Microsoft Office.
Who cares about Vista, the right move was.NET. It's taken awhile and too many version and code changes, but they will have the most awesome integrated framework for making any apps. I think you'll see that more and more with online apps and web pages. The fact is, the non MS development community has dropped the ball on a full featured devlopment suite such as.Net and the power and support it has and they are going to pay in yet another decade of MS rule.
I agree with this 100%, although I think it'll still be years yet before most of the development world starts to "get it."
In a lot of ways Microsoft's business strategy isn't all that far off from, say, a Blizzard's. One part innovation to ten parts "let someone else do the hard thinking, then come up with basically the same thing and polish the hell out of it." It's hard to argue that.NET started off as anything but a copy of Java and the assorted technologies that orbit Java, but given a couple versions they polished the hell out of it. A lot of what Team System does is blatantly copied from the free software world, and polished and polished in ways that people with ten years of Java (or whatever) experience couldn't give a damn about but a lot of other people have and will.
(Equally, a lot of the best additions in recent versions of Java have been driven by 'competition' of.NET going back the other way, but that's a different tangent.)
They started with mimic and polish to catch up in the development world, and have now pushed on to solving problems that other technologies aren't going to be taking seriously until it's too late.
I do write software now, but probably less than 1% of my career has been spent any closer to the hardware than, say, Java or C#. I'd been programming as a hobby / in earlier school for years, and I can't say I picked up anything appreciable in that department as an undergrad.
I don't think I had any classes with Ralph Johnson, and I'm positive I had zero exposure to typical software design patterns as an undergrad. (I know, you'd think if anywhere... ) This is in the mid-90s and I'm sure it's a lot different now. If today's students are spending more time with factories and singletons and less time learning to build a 286 out of NAND gates (as computer science students) I think that's a great thing for most of them, unlike the article author.
Slashdot Mirror
GPL'ing their code would be a huge risk for Microsoft.
Conversely, there's nothing they'd gain that they actually would care about, as far as I can see.
Basic business management says if something is a huge risk for no reward, you don't do it.
True that.
Sure, millions of Windows users had IE as their first browser because it came with Windows, and never needed to look for another. That's Microsoft's fault, such as it is.
But the millions of people who were already using Netscape at the time and switched away from it because it became the most craptacular web browser ever? That's all on Netscape.
I personally went from someone who mocked IE and never intended to use it, to someone praying for Netscape to die in the space of a few short years. For a while there, half a dozen versions of Netscape all had enough market share that my employer at the time wanted to support them, and those fuckers weren't even halfway compliant with each other, much less open standards or IE.
I wouldn't really call Hellgate an MMORPG, even though its developers sometimes do. It fits the literal definition, but doesn't really hold up the connotations/baggage that go with the MMORPG term. It's more two parts Battle.net-style Diablo and one part FPS.
(Note: I really like the game; I just wouldn't call it an MMORPG in the traditional sense.)
No offense, but did you actually read the thread to this point? From your post I have to conclude that the answer is no.
Also: Not that I was talking about loss leaders, but I don't think that term means what you think it means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
Man, if I'm Microsoft and I'm generally willing to break the law to get my way when push comes to shove, I'm probably sending some guys to bust Valentine's kneecaps at a minimum.
Granted, that wouldn't help them out in the short term, but they'd lose less executives if a savage beating was part of the severance package. Hell, they probably could advertise right here on slashdot for people willing to kick a Microsoft executive in the groin for free!
What are you talking about? Providing decent documentation that should have been provided in the first place is now called a loss? A win for your customers should also be a win for your company, but apparently you don't see it that way.
If it costs a bunch of money to produce and you don't get any money back for having produced, yeah, that's what they call a loss in the business world. You lose money. Loss vs. gain, not loss vs. win.
In the given argument, the state (in the US) does NOT pay for those bills -- at least medical ones. The hospital they went to has to eat the losses for the ER visit if the person cannot pay and doesn't have insurance.
Well, sure. But where does that money come from? All of the other patients of the hospital in the form of higher costs.
Either way the public is footing the bill.
My guess is the best and brightest from Yahoo would quickly go work for Google, Apple, or someone else if Yahoo is acquired, and Microsoft will be left with the folks who were unable to escape. Acquiring a culturally incompatible company for the engineers doesn't make sense.
I'm not convinced this is true.
The public face/reputation of those companies is very different, true. But that being said, I have friends that work at Microsoft, and I've been in some of their offices. I also have friends that work at Yahoo!, and I've been in some of their offices. From a developer's-eye view internally, in terms of culture and benefits and what not, these are companies that are not really all that different. (Nor is Google all that different from either.)
I mean, yes, Microsoft currently mostly does stuff with MS technology and Yahoo! mostly does stuff with their homebrewed variants of open technologies like PHP, but at either company a given developer has a probably equal chance of having a very casual, pampered work environment and of being a really bright person who works longer hours than is truly necessary for love of their job.
Several posters have already argued that the seatbelt law makes sense because the hospital bill for people injured in this manner is paid for by The State. The problem is that this argument only makes sense if society already works under the presumption that The State is required to pay for people's bills when they can't afford them.
It's not a presumption so much as (to a large degree) the current reality. I'm not saying the solution should be that we make laws against everything dangerous, and I'm not saying the solution should be that if you get hurt in any case and don't have money on hand you're shit out of luck, but... if I get perfect freedom to endanger myself, other people also shouldn't have to pay for it.
Although I'm sure some people won't love the example, I think current smoking laws (in parts of America, anyway) are a reasonable compromise between allowing personal freedoms when they don't harm others, protecting others from said harm, and offering incentives for healthy behavior.
(I still don't see a warning label going on a Blackberry.)
Totally agree with you that in all previous editions of the game, the wizard out-rogues the rogue. That needs to change in a bad way. (Although, in 4E if a rogue is revamped to be a more solid combat character, maybe that's no longer as ridiculous.)
/per encounter /per will abilities (can you change them daily or only on levelling?)
We don't know at the moment how rituals are limited (if at all) and how many options you get to choose from for your per day
My understanding is that all of the 'preparation' style mechanics are going away in 4E and everyone's basically a sorcerer. I'm hoping they'll respond that I was mistaken.
You can read the Scientologist religious document concerning Jesus here:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~kspaink/fishman/index2.html
Short version: They call him a pedophile with a nasty temper.
I never said everything should be written in assembler, only that optimization is not just a lost art, but a forgotten one. It was deliberately forgotten by legions of programmers drunk on too much computing power.
Well, yes. And to be fair, it was deliberately forgotten for good reasons.
Optimization in a development project isn't just about optimizing memory usage or CPU cycles -- it's also about optimizing developer time, and often money. For the overwhelming majority (not all) of development projects, it is more important to have a product that works correctly within its constraints built quickly/cheaply than to have one that runs faster or uses less memory (within reason) but costs more or takes longer. If having a service run concurrently on five machines instead of three is dramatically cheaper (that is, the cost of buying/operating the two additional servers is much cheaper than the developer salaries) than paying developers to get it optimized enough to run on the three, what's wrong with that choice?
The modern paradigm, in most cases, is to "just make it work" first and then to use that as a starting point to perform optimizations if necessary. I think it's hard to seriously argue that that's not as it should be.
Amen.
But, being fair, I'm not sure that it would have been practical to be playing 3E internally for the four years it took to realize some of their biggest mistakes with it.
A lot of it is perspective. If you're a home game maybe a few sessions a year kind of player (as I am now), 3.5 could seem like a cash grab. If you're a heavy con/tournament player (as I was at the time), 3.5 seemed like an overdue patch to a hundred things we all knew were almost unplayably broken.
is great but for developing your average commercial web application within a team I'd rather shoot myself through the head than use Visual Studio.
.NET shops) blows away anything in the free world, not because all of its pieces are the best (e.g., CruiseControl/Ant is probably a better build system than MSBuild currently) but because the integration between them and the IDE is so seamless and good.
That's actually one of the cases where Visual Studio shines the hell out of the alternatives:
1) You spend a lot less time dicking around in XML files or with the guts that don't relate to the actual logic of your application.
2) Trying out your changes as a developer and debugging is much easier, much faster, and much more powerful vs. any alternative that I've seen. This actually is one of my biggest beefs against Eclipse + related technologies, even with any set of plug-ins or app servers and what have you that I've seen.
3) Visual Studio Team System, if applicable (it's not cheap and I wouldn't honestly recommend it even for many
I can't tell you how nice it is, for example, to do a code review for someone and be able to use all the power of the IDE to do it. You want to see the definition of a related method? Just click on it as you would normally. You want to try to run the code and test out a potential hole you see? No problem. All of that is easy and requires zero additional effort.
In pretty much every sizeable team I've been on that didn't use VSTS, one of the devs spent half their time dicking around with the build script. Or the source control setup. Or the unit testing framework. Or something that didn't really relate to the actual task at hand.
FYI, Scientology isn't a Christian denomination and as far as I know doesn't present itself as such.
You might be confusing them with Christian Scientists?
However, I talk to many developers using both Eclipse and Visual Studio and they all say Visual Studio is still inferior.
FWIW, I've multiple years of experience using each for my full time job, and my opinion is the opposite.
I think that Eclipse is a great IDE, if you've got a ton of experience with it, and know which plug-ins you need to add, and know how to configure it to be just the way you like, and have a powerful machine. You don't struggle much with it in the literal writing code part of development, but any of the many related tasks are probably going to require you knowing what you need to set up or add on and doing it. That's time and effort away from doing the part of the job that's actually interesting to me that I'd just rather not spend.
Visual Studio is just so much more usable and does so much more off a fresh install. If there's any kind of UI to your app at all (web-based or otherwise), it's ridiculously better.
My experience is similar.
Not that there aren't Java/C++/etc. jobs out there -- there definitely are. There's also a ton of MS tech jobs out there.
I have the skills and experience to go either way, and while I still take some Java/etc. contracts, my preference is for MS work. For the kinds of work I tend to do, C#/Visual Studio is just so much better that using something else feels like pounding nails in with your shoe instead of a hammer.
YMMV.
My original question as seen above:
How do you feel you've struck a balance between a desire to simplify/streamline rules to speed play and make the game more accessible, and a desire to preserve the strategy and general goodness of the game as it exists today? Details about proposed changes that were a tough call either way would be interesting.
WotC's response:
The struggle between playability and tactical depth is a constant one for any game designer, and D&D is no different. We're always wrestling with the right balance between providing streamlined, intuitive play and giving players all the options they want. For example, by giving more characters customizable options for their actions in combat, we've added a dramatic level of depth (both strategic, in building your character, and tactical, in employing those options during a fight), but at the cost of increasing complexity for some characters. We think that's a net positive effect, because the lack of tactical and strategic options for fighters, rogues, and many other characters had become a glaring weakness in the game. The key is to ensure that players of different sensibilities can still find a rewarding play experience within the game's framework. A player who prefers simple options can select those and still feel like he's creating an effective character, while his buddy who thrives on complexity can load up on interesting combos without grinding the game to a halt.
Follow-up Question:
Is there any concern that you've eliminated the most tactically interesting/complex characters from the game?
Further explanation/clarification:
As 3.5E D&D stands, I agree that the lack of tactical options for many kinds of characters is a weakness in the game. I'm glad to know that it will be possible to play a tactically interesting fighter without having to comb 10 books for esoteric feats and prestige classes to somehow combine together into a mutt build that ends up tactically interesting.
However, my fear and what my original question was alluding to, is that instead of 'helping the poor', so to speak, you've opted for 'gaming communism'.
I'll try to better clarify that by explaining it in 3.5E terms. Take these three classes for example:
Fighter:
- Moderate strategy at the character-build level.
- No strategy at the day level.
- Few tactical options at the combat level. That is, your fighter with feats picked for mounted combat CAN fire a longbow, but he's not very good at it. His best options in all fights come from a very short list.
Sorcerer:
- Moderate strategy at the character-build level. (Less feats to pick vs. fighter, but now you're picking spells, so...)
- No strategy at the day level.
- Moderate to many tactical options at the combat level. As you reach the mid-levels, you've got a long list of spells and maybe some metamagic feats to apply on the fly.
Druid:
- Moderate strategy at the character-build level. (You pick more skills than sorcerer/fighter, but few feats and a few are so good as to be default choices for many of the picks. Probably your single biggest 'build' choice is your animal companion, how you advance it, etc.)
- High strategy at the day level. You can fill a variety of roles depending on which spells you prepare. How well you anticipate which spells you need will have a huge impact on the usefulness of your character.
- High strategy at the day level. Lots of spells to choose from, an animal companion to manage, wild shape, etc.
Essentially, I'm concerned that instead of making fighter more of a complexity like sorcerer, you've instead chosen to make everyone like sorcerer and that there's no niche in the game for, say, the so-called 'Batman' style wizard; at best, a poor Batman sorcerer style controller seems possible. (See: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18500 if you're not familiar.)
What you're describing amounts to a different kind of game. It's not inherently better.
I like D&D for what it is, and I like a game like Call of Cthulhu for what it is. Combat in the Runequest-and-variant systems is simple and fast, but the flipside of that is that combat isn't especially tactical or interesting. (Note: this is specifically combat that's uninteresting, not the game in general.) Equally, a design choice like high character mortality rates can be a good or bad one, depending on the game. They're good in a game like Cthulhu and they're be bad in a game like D&D.
That being said, it's more than possible that 4E D&D will also fall into that latter fast-but-uninteresting mold.
The "No one is forcing you to change" comment appears often in discussing 4E, and it's valid up to a point.
However, if you're a person who does tournament/convention gaming at all, you're updating or you're giving up that kind of gaming.
A campaign like Living Greyhawk is a lot different from a home game, simultaneously bringing out some of the best and worst of D&D. It's not for everyone, but it's not something you can really replace by any alternative that doesn't move on to 4E rules.
Was I the only one who thought that Oregon Trail's designers were trying to make some kind of environmental/consumerist statement with the way you could shoot all the meat you wanted in a day, but no matter what you could only keep 100 pounds of it, leaving the rest to rot?
Every business I've ever seen is running Microsoft Office.
I don't doubt that there are businesses out there running Open Office or something else, but over the length of my career and through engagements at probably three dozen or so companies in a wide variety of industries, I've never seen a business that didn't run MS Office. Even tech companies where I've been where the culture was very anti-Microsoft and open/free technology was used for everything else humanly possible were still running Microsoft Office.
Who cares about Vista, the right move was .NET. It's taken awhile and too many version and code changes, but they will have the most awesome integrated framework for making any apps. I think you'll see that more and more with online apps and web pages. The fact is, the non MS development community has dropped the ball on a full featured devlopment suite such as .Net and the power and support it has and they are going to pay in yet another decade of MS rule.
.NET started off as anything but a copy of Java and the assorted technologies that orbit Java, but given a couple versions they polished the hell out of it. A lot of what Team System does is blatantly copied from the free software world, and polished and polished in ways that people with ten years of Java (or whatever) experience couldn't give a damn about but a lot of other people have and will.
.NET going back the other way, but that's a different tangent.)
I agree with this 100%, although I think it'll still be years yet before most of the development world starts to "get it."
In a lot of ways Microsoft's business strategy isn't all that far off from, say, a Blizzard's. One part innovation to ten parts "let someone else do the hard thinking, then come up with basically the same thing and polish the hell out of it." It's hard to argue that
(Equally, a lot of the best additions in recent versions of Java have been driven by 'competition' of
They started with mimic and polish to catch up in the development world, and have now pushed on to solving problems that other technologies aren't going to be taking seriously until it's too late.
You could do it, but you had to slowly develop a special Zangief thumb callous for it.
Who knew you could get out of shape for playing Street Fighter 2?
I do write software now, but probably less than 1% of my career has been spent any closer to the hardware than, say, Java or C#. I'd been programming as a hobby / in earlier school for years, and I can't say I picked up anything appreciable in that department as an undergrad.
I don't think I had any classes with Ralph Johnson, and I'm positive I had zero exposure to typical software design patterns as an undergrad. (I know, you'd think if anywhere... ) This is in the mid-90s and I'm sure it's a lot different now. If today's students are spending more time with factories and singletons and less time learning to build a 286 out of NAND gates (as computer science students) I think that's a great thing for most of them, unlike the article author.