Most companies tell you 40 hrs, but then expect more, and more and more.
I've had a pretty similar experience. When I was interviewing for my last job, one of the company's managers explicitly told me that there would be about two weeks a year of 'crunch time' in which everyone would work longer hours, but otherwise it would be a 40 hour week. They offered me a salary that I considered fair for that amount of overtime, and I took it. Flash forward to actually being on the job and finding out that working a few hours of overtime every Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday was expected, and a full day+ every other Saturday and Sunday was mandatory.
Of course, that being said, I didn't need lawyers to straighten that out for me; I just found a better job ASAP, as did nearly all of the more skilled people who were given a similar bait and switch by that company. Market forces can't fix everything, but in this case it worked out all right. (My exit interview included the same manager, who flat out denied his earlier fradulent claim, although he'd made it to many of us. Weaselly jackass.)
Anyway, the point being, the 'You agreed to the contract!' sentiment I'm seeing in some of the posts on this article is something I can only agree with if overtime was presented accurately during the interviewing process. I've rarely seen a company that does.
It never has, and never will, have anything to do with popularity or "incentive." That is a red herring put out there. The *real* incentive for crackers is to crack the "uncrackable."
Realllly. So if I decide I want to steal someone's credit card numbers, I'm going to try to crack a Linux box with a much higher probability of belonging to someone who actually knows something about security instead of a Windows box just because it's harder, and that's all I care about.
I'm sorry, but that makes no sense at all.
There surely are crackers who are after the "uncrackable", either for prestige or personal challenge. I won't deny that. Those guys possibly are out there looking for exploits in Linux, and they're going to have a hard time because, as I said, it is harder. There equally are crackers who are trying to actually accomplish something with their cracking, be it assemble an army of zombie machines for some other purpose, steal information, or write a virus that gains a lot of notoriety. Those guys, almost without exception, are going after Windows machines. Some of these guys are your aforementioned script kiddies -- they're looking for easy, yes, and Windows is it, but they're also looking to accomplish something to make themselves feel like big men.
Computers are binary. The world and people generally aren't. It's possible for more than one reason to contribute to a problem, and that's the case here.
Linux is an inherently more secure OS than, say, Windows XP. It makes much smarter choices about what's enabled by default. It doesn't leave a bunch of ports open for no reason.
It's also true that there's much, much more incentive to try to find a security hole in Windows XP because it's the most popular desktop choice and is thus most likely to have the highest density of ignorant users with credit card information.
So! The reason that the argument is plausible is that it's true -- it's just not the whole story.
Or: it could be that the controls are genuinely bad or inaccessible.
Different can be good. Different is not automatically good. I can take a crap on your desk and tell you you're stupid or hate originality if you don't love it, but that doesn't make it true.
I would say that this:
You weren't good with a D-pad when Nintendo came out, you weren't good with an Analog Stick when Dual Shock came out, and you weren't good with Sixaxis when Sixaxis came out.
is probably true, but with respect to game developers, not players. It takes people time to get good at making good controls for a new interface. Lair's team probably didn't have the time and resources to do it right, and if they made the same game again now I'd be willing to bet they'd do better... but, again, it doesn't make what's there now good. Equally, condemning the controls of one game doesn't mean there's something wrong with its developers, purchasers, or aficionados.
When you come right down to it, a video game is still a software project, and it's subject to all of the potential for weird politics, unrealistic deadlines, and irrational demands from on high that any other software project is. I'd be totally unsurprised if one or more of the above did indeed drive the crappy control scheme. The developers probably aren't idiots and knew it wasn't good but for whatever reason couldn't do much about it.
Developer sympathy/solidarity isn't enough to make me actually play the game, but I feel for the team.
I actually don't have a problem with that argument.
If you want to keep your money or think you should keep your money, there's not much I'd want to say about that. Just call it what it is and don't try to pretend it's for altruistic or humanitarian reasons.
In the long term, it's probably beneficial to encourage groups that typically don't go into high tech to do so, just for the purpose of changing the culture around it. Probably, there are women (for example) alive today who, based on their intelligence/aptitudes would've made great engineers, but who became housewives or chose other fields because they didn't grow up around women engineers and weren't exposed to that kind of culture. Most people make most of their choices based around what their peers are doing.
Granted, that's not the argument I've generally heard for affirmative action, and for the investment to pay off there and not bone things up worse, eventually affirmative action needs to go away so that you really are picking the best people for the job, if out of a bigger pool than you might've had to pick from otherwise.
Not to be offensive, but I'd consider that theory of increased charitable giving and it solving lots of problems about as credible as the idea that communism works flawlessly because all people will naturally want to do their best and work hard at their jobs despite there being no incentive for it.
You're on opposite ends of the political spectrum in either case, but you're still presupposing something a little naive about human nature that history has never borne out in practice. It's a nice idea, but real people overall just don't work that way.
Yeah, my first thought on reading the grandparent post was:
"What does it cost to pay these people to work an hour? How many hours of work were lost due to these people struggling with their assorted adjustment issues? Multiply that out and, probably, it would've been cheaper to just buy them Office."
I've worked in shops that wouldn't use free software no matter what (I'd try to explain why, but it's irrational); I've also worked in shops that wouldn't use commercial software no matter what. From a smart business perspective, both were wrong. Use what works best for the price, understanding that the price can be more than the literal retail price tag or lack thereof. A lot of the time that's the free option, but for business users used to Excel it probably isn't.
Yeah, I can't disagree that WordPerfect was a better product than Word at the time that MS first clubbed it like a baby seal. It's still not perfect but I'd say it's a lot better these days.
If you liked extending the older versions of Office with VBA, you should check out the kind of stuff you can do with Office 2007 as a developer. I was never especially expert with VBA but it feels like there's a lot more exposed today and it's easier to work your custom bits seamlessly in with the Office UI. I'm simultaneously excited and very, very afraid of the kinds of consulting projects these possibilities will generate.
While I know some people may dislike the new Office 2007, after using it for a while now, I can say honestly that it's the best version yet. The usability and UI are greatly improved (once you get used to them). Open Office lacks the 'polish' that a Microsoft Office delivers. This isn't about document format wars folks -- it's about the sheer usability of one platform over another.
Not a popular position here, but I'm forced to agree.
I'm genuinely glad that there is an Open Office and people who work constantly to make it better. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't see it as competition, but it does provide a limit / sanity check on them; if the price of MS Office rises or it stops improving, OO is always out there as an alternative.
But at the same time, it puzzles me. Microsoft does a thousand things, many of them not well. There are as many niches to get into and build a better mousetrap. But Office? That's one of the things they actually do really well. Many have argued that a large part of MS's continued dominance of the desktop is because of Office, and it's hard for me to disagree. Why pick that of all windmills to tilt at? I can't deny that it's an interesting/challenging project, but...
Despite what TFA says, I swear at some point I read that Jordan had said that if he died before finishing the book, he didn't want anyone else to finish it. Does anyone know A) if this is true and not just a figment of my imagination and B) if so, how/when he recanted on that?
I stopped reading about five books ago, but I'd thought to go back and try to finish the series once it was actually done. I have to assume somewhere in the collective throbbing brain of Slashdot geekery, someone's been following this more closely than I have and has additional details.
The beauty of the game is that there's no 'maxing' your character. You don't hit Level 60 and decide 'ok, now I want to start a new character.' Your avatar is you as long as you play. The decisions you make affect everything you do down the road.
I'd argue that this isn't necessarily a good thing. A game with a maximum level is, in a lot of ways, easier to balance than one in which character progression is completely open-ended. It's also, generally, easier to produce quality content that challenges characters when you have a better idea of their limits.
A game designer is free to create character types that play more differently in a game that doesn't penalize restart as much.
A game that encourages restart also, to a degree, encourages new players. If my friends who have been playing the game for years occasionally go back and start a new character, that gives me as an interested non-player of the game a good jumping-in point; I can start playing at the same time and 'come up' with friends who know the game.
Ultimately, the market decides. Some people like either; I doubt we'll see either kind of game dominate the market to the exclusion of the other.
That's probably an overly simplistic answer. MMORPG players bitch about grind, but it's also one of the things that keeps them playing the game. It's the alcoholic husband that beats them but they keep going back to, if you will.
That being said, you're right, WoW isn't perfect. It does, however, get a lot of things right (from the perspective of 'most players will want it to be that way / will keep playing if it is that way') that other efforts in the genre didn't, and it polishes a lot of little details that previously weren't considered to be worthy of much effort.
It's not perfect, but at the same time, if you're going to try to have a successful game in the genre at this point, you probably need to either:
1) Go a very different direction from WoW. Make design decisions that most WoWers would hate and just flat out go for a different (and probably smaller) piece of the market. EVE is probably a good example of this, despite it predating WoW.
2) At least get right most everything WoW got right, as a starting point.
I think it's a safe bet that a lot more game producers are going the second route, and from that perspective it makes sense to talk about what WoW got right.
You can end a whole fight with a color spray, sleep, or web. I've tanked before as a 5th level sorcerer before, since with shield, mage armor and alter self up the monsters couldn't hit him, and if they did hit him, he'd just recast false life.
While you might think that playing a wizard is difficult, I've leveled up enough wizards and sorcerers through the years to know their strength in low levels is things like the above, not pitching out the solitary useless 1d4+1 magic missiles. You just find the niche for yourself, play smart with conserving your spells, and they'll do just as well as the raging 26 strength half-orc barbarian. Not in damage, but if you knock out 3 enemies with a color spray, that's just as good as killing three people in one action.
This is consistent with my own experience, for what it's worth.
The best wizard players I've seen are easily as tough as any character in the party by, say, level 3. Past that point their dominance just gets worse, and worse, and worse. And, equally, the best wizards I've seen aren't usually trying to throw big damage or even any damage, and often will conserve their spells. After that enemy archer is hit with blindness, that hydra with slow, the key party character protected by a blur as enemy rogues mass him, etc., what could have been a scary fight is over and the wizard won it, even if he doesn't do anything for the other six rounds of the fight and doesn't inflict a single point of damage.
Obviously, enemies get saving throws, and things don't go the low level wizard's way ten times out of ten, but they tend to go that way often enough that a well-played wizard of any level seems like a powerhouse character to me.
Obviously we don't really know what 4E will look like yet, but I think you're kidding yourself if 3.5 doesn't have still have a lot of imbalances/problems on the same order of magnitude as those in 3.0 that it fixed.
I mean, the game balances reasonably well if you ignore everything outside of the core books. And as long as no one wants to play a character that isn't a full spellcaster. I've played it for years and had a great time doing so, but I think there's still room for improvement there.
I grant you, I loved 2E in its day and I was extremely skeptical about the need for a 3E, but, you know, once I got past that and actually played it, it [i]was[/i] a much better game that allowed for a much wider variety of characters to be viable. (Or more viable.) I have probably naive hopes that 4E could be as much of an improvement, and thanks to the advent of the internet and Beowulf clusters of supergeeks examining everything with a fine tooth comb, I'll have a pretty good idea of what is or isn't in there a long time before I even have to think about spending money on it.
I mean, I grant you, D&D convention play is generally not for fabulous cash purses, but there's a big audience for the game in conventioners (one that I'd bet, on average, is much much more likely to buy a new D&D book than the average D&D gamer) that is perpetually stuck with 'the rules as written' or something very close to them.
I'm no longer in that group, but for them, a new edition is probably long overdue. Imbalances become obvious very quickly in convention play and spread through the community like wildfire. After a year most characters you play with are one of only a few relatively optimal builds, because even if you're not all about the combat or powermunching, it's only so fun to play D&D and be totally ineffectual relative to the rest of the table.
I'm not exactly calling you a liar, but I'd be very curious to hear the whole context there. Most of the developers I know have either spent days and days reading and fucking around with Subversion until they really understood it to do anything semi-complex (i.e., the stuff that isn't super-easy to do from something like Tortoise), or try like hell to avoid it. There's no way Joe Six-Pack Business User is setting himself up a Subversion repository for a project.
I mean, don't get me wrong. It's great for what it is. It's unstoppable like a motherfuckin' tank... but random business people can't drive a tank, either.
It depends on what you want to get out of the game.
If playing D&D is mostly about killing monsters, getting loot, and gaining levels, something like EQ is probably a pretty good substitute.
I've played in games that were like that and had a good time doing it, but that's not so much what sitting down for a game is about for me anymore.
It's part strategy game, part story/RP, part a game of plotting and intrigue. You're never going to see the kind of intra-party plotting and conflict in a MMORPG that is pretty much standard in the last few tabletop games I've played.
More than anything, it's an excuse to get a bunch of friends I don't see enough anymore in one place for a night or a day and hang out and do something together. Sure, I'll play online games with those people, too, but it's not really the same.
I don't get to play anywhere near as much as I did ten years ago, and I probably wouldn't want to, but the occasional game fills a niche for me that not much else will.
I was just discussing with a friend the other day, why I can't stand to play D&D any more. Frankly, it's all the number crunching and the min-maxing. Back when I started with 2nd Edition, that kind of thing was considered anathema-- "munchkin" to borrow the term that was used. When 3rd came out (and with it the first printing of the new Star Wars game), I was leery at first-- but the simplified mechanics won me over, because I can't stand doing math when I'm trying to have fun.
Really, it comes down to the people you're playing with more than anything else.
You could munchkin the hell out of 2nd edition, and a lot of people did. If there's a difference, it's that the 2E rules were a lot less well balanced, so it was a lot easier to figure out what was tough and what wasn't. At least half of the characters at any group I played with in the latter days of 2E were some variation on fighter dual classed to cleric or mage. Thieves? Bards? Ha!
Your group doesn't need to be a bunch of super munchkins for good rules balance to be important. In any cooperative game, people generally like to feel like they're a useful part of the team. If the cleric/wizard can do everything the thief can and a whole lot more and is generally a more useful and tougher character in every way, the guy playing the thief is probably not going to have a good time even if the other guy is trying to not be obnoxious about it. A well designed game gives everyone their day in the sun and encourages cooperation. 3E is a long way from perfect in this regard, and yeah there's a lot of weird-ass or broken special rules in the million supplement books out there, but it feels a lot closer to right to me than 2E did.
I've never looked at it as reinventing perfectly good tools, so much as waiting for a "best of breed" tool to shake out of Open Source or otherwise emerge from the developer community, and then refine the hell out of it. It's mercenary, it's derivative, it's unoriginal, but it also works.
Refine in this case generally meaning, make it prettier and much easier to use, not necessarily more powerful.
Take Subversion, to use one of your examples. Is the source control piece of TFS (taken in a vacuum -- you can make all sorts of arguments about the gains of well-integrated tools, but that's a tangent) more powerful than Subversion? I'd doubt it. Is it easier to use for a.NET project (the market MS is mostly aiming at)? God, yes.
If Visual Studio is your IDE, using Subversion for source control is not great, even given GUIs and additional tools like Tortoise and Ankh. It's rock solid and extensible as all hell, but do I want to write the Apache modules to take advantage of that extensibility? Hell no, I've got other work to do. You definitely *can* use Subversion, and it's free, and it's great, and it does everything it's advertised to do -- but my experience has been, for a.NET project of even moderate size or complexity, someone on the team ends up spending a lot of time dicking with Subversion or with scripts to help automate/manage Subversion. There are operations you need that the integration/GUI tools don't support especially well that come up just often enough that someone needs to take on Subversion as a part time job.
Conversely, on the similarly-sized projects I've worked on that used TFS, one developer spent maybe an afternoon setting up TFS for the project, and usually not someone who had any particular expertise with TFS.
You pay for that ease of use. TFS is not cheap. I wouldn't be using it if someone else wasn't footing the bill. But, you know? In every case in which I've seen it used so far, I'm betting that someone else got more than their money's worth in extra developer time spent working on their project instead of wrestling with a bunch of one-off tools that are brilliant in their way but together, at best, almost get there.
In any case, I don't really see MS as being at war with the Open Source community as far as developer tools go. They're going to wait for OSS to figure out a smart way to do things and then steal the best parts of it to make money off of, but they certainly don't want the people who are doing all that development and design work up front for free to go away or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, I didn't. If there's a next time I'll be smarter. I hadn't thought about working it in like that, so thanks for the tip!
(My current job has a much better pay structure and generally treats me much, much better so it hasn't been an issue since.)
Most companies tell you 40 hrs, but then expect more, and more and more.
I've had a pretty similar experience. When I was interviewing for my last job, one of the company's managers explicitly told me that there would be about two weeks a year of 'crunch time' in which everyone would work longer hours, but otherwise it would be a 40 hour week. They offered me a salary that I considered fair for that amount of overtime, and I took it. Flash forward to actually being on the job and finding out that working a few hours of overtime every Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday was expected, and a full day+ every other Saturday and Sunday was mandatory.
Of course, that being said, I didn't need lawyers to straighten that out for me; I just found a better job ASAP, as did nearly all of the more skilled people who were given a similar bait and switch by that company. Market forces can't fix everything, but in this case it worked out all right. (My exit interview included the same manager, who flat out denied his earlier fradulent claim, although he'd made it to many of us. Weaselly jackass.)
Anyway, the point being, the 'You agreed to the contract!' sentiment I'm seeing in some of the posts on this article is something I can only agree with if overtime was presented accurately during the interviewing process. I've rarely seen a company that does.
Thankfully because she followed our instructions, she ended up in our cell instead of a morgue," Pare said.
I assume she responded to their challenge with the universal, "Don't tase me, dude!"
It never has, and never will, have anything to do with popularity or "incentive." That is a red herring put out there. The *real* incentive for crackers is to crack the "uncrackable."
Realllly. So if I decide I want to steal someone's credit card numbers, I'm going to try to crack a Linux box with a much higher probability of belonging to someone who actually knows something about security instead of a Windows box just because it's harder, and that's all I care about.
I'm sorry, but that makes no sense at all.
There surely are crackers who are after the "uncrackable", either for prestige or personal challenge. I won't deny that. Those guys possibly are out there looking for exploits in Linux, and they're going to have a hard time because, as I said, it is harder. There equally are crackers who are trying to actually accomplish something with their cracking, be it assemble an army of zombie machines for some other purpose, steal information, or write a virus that gains a lot of notoriety. Those guys, almost without exception, are going after Windows machines. Some of these guys are your aforementioned script kiddies -- they're looking for easy, yes, and Windows is it, but they're also looking to accomplish something to make themselves feel like big men.
Computers are binary. The world and people generally aren't. It's possible for more than one reason to contribute to a problem, and that's the case here.
The thing is, it's true and it's not.
Linux is an inherently more secure OS than, say, Windows XP. It makes much smarter choices about what's enabled by default. It doesn't leave a bunch of ports open for no reason.
It's also true that there's much, much more incentive to try to find a security hole in Windows XP because it's the most popular desktop choice and is thus most likely to have the highest density of ignorant users with credit card information.
So! The reason that the argument is plausible is that it's true -- it's just not the whole story.
It's somewhat more entertaining to watch you beat that straw man.
Just because I have a problem with a shitty justification for a position doesn't mean I hold the opposite position.
Or: it could be that the controls are genuinely bad or inaccessible.
Different can be good. Different is not automatically good. I can take a crap on your desk and tell you you're stupid or hate originality if you don't love it, but that doesn't make it true.
I would say that this:
You weren't good with a D-pad when Nintendo came out, you weren't good with an Analog Stick when Dual Shock came out, and you weren't good with Sixaxis when Sixaxis came out.
is probably true, but with respect to game developers, not players. It takes people time to get good at making good controls for a new interface. Lair's team probably didn't have the time and resources to do it right, and if they made the same game again now I'd be willing to bet they'd do better... but, again, it doesn't make what's there now good. Equally, condemning the controls of one game doesn't mean there's something wrong with its developers, purchasers, or aficionados.
When you come right down to it, a video game is still a software project, and it's subject to all of the potential for weird politics, unrealistic deadlines, and irrational demands from on high that any other software project is. I'd be totally unsurprised if one or more of the above did indeed drive the crappy control scheme. The developers probably aren't idiots and knew it wasn't good but for whatever reason couldn't do much about it.
Developer sympathy/solidarity isn't enough to make me actually play the game, but I feel for the team.
I actually don't have a problem with that argument.
If you want to keep your money or think you should keep your money, there's not much I'd want to say about that. Just call it what it is and don't try to pretend it's for altruistic or humanitarian reasons.
... and that's why the dumb shall inherit the earth.
While you're searching for information and knowledge, the idiots are breeding. Take one for the team and sleep with a girl!
In the short term, that's absolutely true.
In the long term, it's probably beneficial to encourage groups that typically don't go into high tech to do so, just for the purpose of changing the culture around it. Probably, there are women (for example) alive today who, based on their intelligence/aptitudes would've made great engineers, but who became housewives or chose other fields because they didn't grow up around women engineers and weren't exposed to that kind of culture. Most people make most of their choices based around what their peers are doing.
Granted, that's not the argument I've generally heard for affirmative action, and for the investment to pay off there and not bone things up worse, eventually affirmative action needs to go away so that you really are picking the best people for the job, if out of a bigger pool than you might've had to pick from otherwise.
Not to be offensive, but I'd consider that theory of increased charitable giving and it solving lots of problems about as credible as the idea that communism works flawlessly because all people will naturally want to do their best and work hard at their jobs despite there being no incentive for it.
You're on opposite ends of the political spectrum in either case, but you're still presupposing something a little naive about human nature that history has never borne out in practice. It's a nice idea, but real people overall just don't work that way.
Yeah, my first thought on reading the grandparent post was:
"What does it cost to pay these people to work an hour? How many hours of work were lost due to these people struggling with their assorted adjustment issues? Multiply that out and, probably, it would've been cheaper to just buy them Office."
I've worked in shops that wouldn't use free software no matter what (I'd try to explain why, but it's irrational); I've also worked in shops that wouldn't use commercial software no matter what. From a smart business perspective, both were wrong. Use what works best for the price, understanding that the price can be more than the literal retail price tag or lack thereof. A lot of the time that's the free option, but for business users used to Excel it probably isn't.
Yeah, I can't disagree that WordPerfect was a better product than Word at the time that MS first clubbed it like a baby seal. It's still not perfect but I'd say it's a lot better these days.
If you liked extending the older versions of Office with VBA, you should check out the kind of stuff you can do with Office 2007 as a developer. I was never especially expert with VBA but it feels like there's a lot more exposed today and it's easier to work your custom bits seamlessly in with the Office UI. I'm simultaneously excited and very, very afraid of the kinds of consulting projects these possibilities will generate.
While I know some people may dislike the new Office 2007, after using it for a while now, I can say honestly that it's the best version yet. The usability and UI are greatly improved (once you get used to them). Open Office lacks the 'polish' that a Microsoft Office delivers. This isn't about document format wars folks -- it's about the sheer usability of one platform over another.
Not a popular position here, but I'm forced to agree.
I'm genuinely glad that there is an Open Office and people who work constantly to make it better. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't see it as competition, but it does provide a limit / sanity check on them; if the price of MS Office rises or it stops improving, OO is always out there as an alternative.
But at the same time, it puzzles me. Microsoft does a thousand things, many of them not well. There are as many niches to get into and build a better mousetrap. But Office? That's one of the things they actually do really well. Many have argued that a large part of MS's continued dominance of the desktop is because of Office, and it's hard for me to disagree. Why pick that of all windmills to tilt at? I can't deny that it's an interesting/challenging project, but...
Despite what TFA says, I swear at some point I read that Jordan had said that if he died before finishing the book, he didn't want anyone else to finish it. Does anyone know A) if this is true and not just a figment of my imagination and B) if so, how/when he recanted on that?
I stopped reading about five books ago, but I'd thought to go back and try to finish the series once it was actually done. I have to assume somewhere in the collective throbbing brain of Slashdot geekery, someone's been following this more closely than I have and has additional details.
The beauty of the game is that there's no 'maxing' your character. You don't hit Level 60 and decide 'ok, now I want to start a new character.' Your avatar is you as long as you play. The decisions you make affect everything you do down the road.
I'd argue that this isn't necessarily a good thing. A game with a maximum level is, in a lot of ways, easier to balance than one in which character progression is completely open-ended. It's also, generally, easier to produce quality content that challenges characters when you have a better idea of their limits.
A game designer is free to create character types that play more differently in a game that doesn't penalize restart as much.
A game that encourages restart also, to a degree, encourages new players. If my friends who have been playing the game for years occasionally go back and start a new character, that gives me as an interested non-player of the game a good jumping-in point; I can start playing at the same time and 'come up' with friends who know the game.
Ultimately, the market decides. Some people like either; I doubt we'll see either kind of game dominate the market to the exclusion of the other.
That's probably an overly simplistic answer. MMORPG players bitch about grind, but it's also one of the things that keeps them playing the game. It's the alcoholic husband that beats them but they keep going back to, if you will.
That being said, you're right, WoW isn't perfect. It does, however, get a lot of things right (from the perspective of 'most players will want it to be that way / will keep playing if it is that way') that other efforts in the genre didn't, and it polishes a lot of little details that previously weren't considered to be worthy of much effort.
It's not perfect, but at the same time, if you're going to try to have a successful game in the genre at this point, you probably need to either:
1) Go a very different direction from WoW. Make design decisions that most WoWers would hate and just flat out go for a different (and probably smaller) piece of the market. EVE is probably a good example of this, despite it predating WoW.
2) At least get right most everything WoW got right, as a starting point.
I think it's a safe bet that a lot more game producers are going the second route, and from that perspective it makes sense to talk about what WoW got right.
You can end a whole fight with a color spray, sleep, or web. I've tanked before as a 5th level sorcerer before, since with shield, mage armor and alter self up the monsters couldn't hit him, and if they did hit him, he'd just recast false life.
While you might think that playing a wizard is difficult, I've leveled up enough wizards and sorcerers through the years to know their strength in low levels is things like the above, not pitching out the solitary useless 1d4+1 magic missiles. You just find the niche for yourself, play smart with conserving your spells, and they'll do just as well as the raging 26 strength half-orc barbarian. Not in damage, but if you knock out 3 enemies with a color spray, that's just as good as killing three people in one action.
This is consistent with my own experience, for what it's worth.
The best wizard players I've seen are easily as tough as any character in the party by, say, level 3. Past that point their dominance just gets worse, and worse, and worse. And, equally, the best wizards I've seen aren't usually trying to throw big damage or even any damage, and often will conserve their spells. After that enemy archer is hit with blindness, that hydra with slow, the key party character protected by a blur as enemy rogues mass him, etc., what could have been a scary fight is over and the wizard won it, even if he doesn't do anything for the other six rounds of the fight and doesn't inflict a single point of damage.
Obviously, enemies get saving throws, and things don't go the low level wizard's way ten times out of ten, but they tend to go that way often enough that a well-played wizard of any level seems like a powerhouse character to me.
Obviously we don't really know what 4E will look like yet, but I think you're kidding yourself if 3.5 doesn't have still have a lot of imbalances/problems on the same order of magnitude as those in 3.0 that it fixed. I mean, the game balances reasonably well if you ignore everything outside of the core books. And as long as no one wants to play a character that isn't a full spellcaster. I've played it for years and had a great time doing so, but I think there's still room for improvement there. I grant you, I loved 2E in its day and I was extremely skeptical about the need for a 3E, but, you know, once I got past that and actually played it, it [i]was[/i] a much better game that allowed for a much wider variety of characters to be viable. (Or more viable.) I have probably naive hopes that 4E could be as much of an improvement, and thanks to the advent of the internet and Beowulf clusters of supergeeks examining everything with a fine tooth comb, I'll have a pretty good idea of what is or isn't in there a long time before I even have to think about spending money on it.
Yep.
I mean, I grant you, D&D convention play is generally not for fabulous cash purses, but there's a big audience for the game in conventioners (one that I'd bet, on average, is much much more likely to buy a new D&D book than the average D&D gamer) that is perpetually stuck with 'the rules as written' or something very close to them.
I'm no longer in that group, but for them, a new edition is probably long overdue. Imbalances become obvious very quickly in convention play and spread through the community like wildfire. After a year most characters you play with are one of only a few relatively optimal builds, because even if you're not all about the combat or powermunching, it's only so fun to play D&D and be totally ineffectual relative to the rest of the table.
I'm not exactly calling you a liar, but I'd be very curious to hear the whole context there. Most of the developers I know have either spent days and days reading and fucking around with Subversion until they really understood it to do anything semi-complex (i.e., the stuff that isn't super-easy to do from something like Tortoise), or try like hell to avoid it. There's no way Joe Six-Pack Business User is setting himself up a Subversion repository for a project.
I mean, don't get me wrong. It's great for what it is. It's unstoppable like a motherfuckin' tank... but random business people can't drive a tank, either.
It depends on what you want to get out of the game.
If playing D&D is mostly about killing monsters, getting loot, and gaining levels, something like EQ is probably a pretty good substitute.
I've played in games that were like that and had a good time doing it, but that's not so much what sitting down for a game is about for me anymore.
It's part strategy game, part story/RP, part a game of plotting and intrigue. You're never going to see the kind of intra-party plotting and conflict in a MMORPG that is pretty much standard in the last few tabletop games I've played.
More than anything, it's an excuse to get a bunch of friends I don't see enough anymore in one place for a night or a day and hang out and do something together. Sure, I'll play online games with those people, too, but it's not really the same.
I don't get to play anywhere near as much as I did ten years ago, and I probably wouldn't want to, but the occasional game fills a niche for me that not much else will.
I was just discussing with a friend the other day, why I can't stand to play D&D any more. Frankly, it's all the number crunching and the min-maxing. Back when I started with 2nd Edition, that kind of thing was considered anathema-- "munchkin" to borrow the term that was used. When 3rd came out (and with it the first printing of the new Star Wars game), I was leery at first-- but the simplified mechanics won me over, because I can't stand doing math when I'm trying to have fun.
Really, it comes down to the people you're playing with more than anything else.
You could munchkin the hell out of 2nd edition, and a lot of people did. If there's a difference, it's that the 2E rules were a lot less well balanced, so it was a lot easier to figure out what was tough and what wasn't. At least half of the characters at any group I played with in the latter days of 2E were some variation on fighter dual classed to cleric or mage. Thieves? Bards? Ha!
Your group doesn't need to be a bunch of super munchkins for good rules balance to be important. In any cooperative game, people generally like to feel like they're a useful part of the team. If the cleric/wizard can do everything the thief can and a whole lot more and is generally a more useful and tougher character in every way, the guy playing the thief is probably not going to have a good time even if the other guy is trying to not be obnoxious about it. A well designed game gives everyone their day in the sun and encourages cooperation. 3E is a long way from perfect in this regard, and yeah there's a lot of weird-ass or broken special rules in the million supplement books out there, but it feels a lot closer to right to me than 2E did.
I've never looked at it as reinventing perfectly good tools, so much as waiting for a "best of breed" tool to shake out of Open Source or otherwise emerge from the developer community, and then refine the hell out of it. It's mercenary, it's derivative, it's unoriginal, but it also works.
.NET project (the market MS is mostly aiming at)? God, yes.
.NET project of even moderate size or complexity, someone on the team ends up spending a lot of time dicking with Subversion or with scripts to help automate/manage Subversion. There are operations you need that the integration/GUI tools don't support especially well that come up just often enough that someone needs to take on Subversion as a part time job.
Refine in this case generally meaning, make it prettier and much easier to use, not necessarily more powerful.
Take Subversion, to use one of your examples. Is the source control piece of TFS (taken in a vacuum -- you can make all sorts of arguments about the gains of well-integrated tools, but that's a tangent) more powerful than Subversion? I'd doubt it. Is it easier to use for a
If Visual Studio is your IDE, using Subversion for source control is not great, even given GUIs and additional tools like Tortoise and Ankh. It's rock solid and extensible as all hell, but do I want to write the Apache modules to take advantage of that extensibility? Hell no, I've got other work to do. You definitely *can* use Subversion, and it's free, and it's great, and it does everything it's advertised to do -- but my experience has been, for a
Conversely, on the similarly-sized projects I've worked on that used TFS, one developer spent maybe an afternoon setting up TFS for the project, and usually not someone who had any particular expertise with TFS.
You pay for that ease of use. TFS is not cheap. I wouldn't be using it if someone else wasn't footing the bill. But, you know? In every case in which I've seen it used so far, I'm betting that someone else got more than their money's worth in extra developer time spent working on their project instead of wrestling with a bunch of one-off tools that are brilliant in their way but together, at best, almost get there.
In any case, I don't really see MS as being at war with the Open Source community as far as developer tools go. They're going to wait for OSS to figure out a smart way to do things and then steal the best parts of it to make money off of, but they certainly don't want the people who are doing all that development and design work up front for free to go away or anything.