Ok, I've got a couple CDs that have become scratched through no fault of my own (looks minor enough to me, but/shrug), and a couple tracks are unplayable. Since I prefer to listen to the entire album at once, I WAS going to burn a copy of the good tracks to a CD and download the scracted ones.
Is this illegal? Why? If so, how do I go about retrieving the music I bought? Is it any different than restoring them from a personal backup, or is it the principle of the thing?
Now, since I like to listen to my CDs at home, work, and in the car, I was also going to burn a second copy to a CD full of mp3s to leave at work for my own person use only.
Is this illegal? Why? I own the albums. No one else is using them. I'm legally allowed to make a backup for personal uses, aren't I?
I just thought of something else - are you allowed to swap songs you got from the radio? If so, how can the RIAA tell the difference?
What constitutes a cultural taboo (about sex)? Not condoning anonymous sex with multiple partners? Being pro-life? Thinking that handing out condoms to children is innappropriate? Maybe it's just me, but despite being born and raised in the U.S., I don't view sex as dirty or evil.
If we are to go by what is on the television, is violence culturally taboo in Europe?
Quite often, I hear people extoll the virutes of Europe with their free-thinking about sex and their censorship of violence. What about portraying sex is better than portraying violence?
Morally speaking, who are we trying to protect? If it's children who can not tell the difference between reality and fantasy, you've only swapped one image with another. Rape, STDs, pregnancy, and abortion are just as serious (if not more so!) as assault, robbery, and murder.
I think you've greatly overstated the involvement of Puritain views in our society. For one, realize people who have negative associations with sex (for whatever reason) will discourage it, just the same as any person with any negative association. It isn't always about what happened hundreds of years ago.
For another, some of the greatest 'heroes' in our society, arguably, work the least. Consider athletes and movie stars - how often are they working? How much do they make? How long are they expected to work?
I think the poster who mentioned you being resentful believed that your comparison of our society with the Puritans was overly harsh and indicitive of resentment of our current societal views.
I'm sure someone else has said it, but patent patenting things. If you have that pesky 'prior art' to deal with, and not the limitless budget of M$, make it more specific: patent patenting things with whatever new form they come out with.
And as soon as they come out with a new form, patent that, too.
Offensive patenting, defensive patenting... and now obstructive patenting.
> Whatever happened to Origin? http://www.origin.ea.com/ Technically, they're still around. However, after being purchased by EA (IIRC), they lost (EA fired) the majority of their creative and technical talent. The result? Origin exists only in the capacity of endless UO expansions.
> Point is, if you release a good enough game, people will upgrade their PCs to get it. This is no different on the PC than it is for anything else. Houses, cars, console systems, PC, guns, ceiling fans... when one doesn't cut it anymore (defined by what action you wish the object to complete), you repair/upgrade/replace it.
PCs in particular have an interesting co-dependant relationship between software and hardware. More demanding software products yield better hardware (ie, benchmarks), while more powerful hardware allows "better" (faster, prettier) software.
> Maybe we'll see Doom3 on DVD? It's a thought. Why? What's the advantage of going DVD over CD for the majority of games released? Unless we're talking Baldur's Gate-style 6 CD sets, what's the incentive to switch?
There are CD cases that contain two CDs, for the ones that still come in jewel cases. Neverwinter Nights, which came on three CDs, had the disks in a CD envelope instead of a case.
And since hard drives are so large, the only reason most games need a CD in the drive is to make sure you've still got 'em.
Think of it this way: what incentives do publishers have to release DVDs instead of CDs?
"...we need to raise taxes so we can afford better education."
His point is that INSTEAD of taking my hard-earned money, the (us) government could fire useless/bad employees (it's currently easier to give a person a raise to get them out of your hair instead of firing them. sound like a good system to you? nyet).
Regardless, throwing money at a problem isn't going to make it go away. You just make the problem fat by feeding it. You can raise my taxes after you've thoroughly examined the issue, the budget, and determined that the *only* problem is money (no way) and that there's no where else to get it (which I won't believe for a moment).
Until then, try solving problems with your head instead of my wallet, m'kay?
It doesn't matter - Lucas can't kill it now. SW has evolved from a great movie trilogy into something much, much greater. it lives on in the hearts of all those who saw and loved the original trilogy, sans special edition.
and, of course, in all the awesome works of fiction done by greats such as Timothy Zahn, Michael J. Stackpole, and all the others who have kept the original SW universe alive and flourishing in their books.
>...with pretty much every one of those big battles you have more than 1/2 the participants either lagged to death or forced out of the game due to client or server crashes.
I've crashed a few times in biiig raids (100+ / side). I've gotten low framerates, but I lean towards IQ over FPS. Hell, I've even been on when the server has gone down for a reboot.
But saying that it happens most of the time when battles involve > 50 people is silly. That might be true on your server - I don't have any characters on Deception - but it's simply not true on Dread.
Maybe try turning the System channel off? That's one thing I hope they implement soon, server-side message filters.
> The servers themselves start to lag in big battles.
There have been some large-scale assualts that I wasn't a part of, and I noticed nothing of the sort.
> UT2003
What's the largest number of people you've played against on an UT2k3 server? 32? How about the map size? Either of those come close to the number of players on a Shadowbane server (1k+) or the size of their world? Hell, even the largest-scale of these games - Battlefield 1942 with 60 people - just can't compare in scope.
I hate it when people bring up random benchmarks with no statistical information. Is 50 your max? Average? Are you running FRAPS, did you save replays to disk and analyze those? Is this a number you took off the top of your head? What resolution are you running? What OS? What's the speed of your process, your motherboard's model number, your video card? What drivers are you running? And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I don't find Shadowbane to exhibit the same functionality as you. I've got an AthXP 1300+, Asus A7V266, 2x256mb crucial PC2100 (NOT enough for XP, got a 512 stick on the way), a Radeon 8500 retail running @ 285/285 and the 2.4 Catalysts, all under WinXP Pro SP 1 with dx9a. I've also got XP installed on an old 2gb ata33 drive, and SB on a 80gb WD on the same chain (yeah, stupid, but I haven't accepted XP yet). And I STILL don't experience the problems you're having. Sure, I drop terrain detail, texture detail, spell effects, and terrain size down to zero during big raids, but I'd be playing AC2 if I only wanted eye candy.
Your Shadowbane experiences have been sub-standard, and I greatly question the quality and stability of your computer (if your accusations are true).
Typically for me, from pressing "Play to->Crush" to taking my first couple steps takes less than 10 minutes - probably closer to 5. Are you *SURE* you don't have some horrible loading problem? Bad RAM, less than 100mb free space, slow CPU, old motherboard? 45 minutes is about the maximum amount of time it's ever taken me to get into the game when the login servers were up.
>...there have been droves of people leaving...
Droves? Check the message boards? I'm a bit of a board warrior (like you couldn't have guessed, I do post on/.), and I don't recall anything resembling 'droves' of comments about actual cancelled accounts. Complaints aren't the same, you know. Even so, 50 posts stating "I'm quitting" may look like a lot on the boards, but amounts to a tiny portion of the population.
> gameplay issues
Aw, hell, while we're here, why not? Gold is needed to support a city. There are no other resources. Since the purpose of this game is GvG / siege warfare, would you prefer to be out cutting wood, hewing stone, and fashioning them into usuable materials? I'd rather kill a few mobs and get XP + the chance for a nice drop, myself. Free cities = stupid.
Casters + Shields = stupid, that's first on my list of complaints. Missing game features? Like what? Server travel? I'm thrilled there's no server travel, it gives us time to prepare for Ebonlore and R30s, etc. The interface is skinnable, get a clue. Lack of content? I'm confused here; do you mean there's not a rich
> You'll have to explain in detail how you manage to avoid the rollback when the servers crash almost twice a day.
Sure, that's easy. I can't recall Dread crashing twice a day. It might have happened in the first couple weeks, but it hasn't happened in the past two AFAIK.
> Perhaps you are so 'uber' you don't get logged in the middle of combat.
If you're logging into the middle of combat, either your Tree is under siege or you logged back in within 15 minutes into the middle of a combat zone. Either way, I am *SERIOUSLY* impressed if your enemies managed to regroup and attack that quickly after a server crash.
If I'm taking this the wrong way, explain to mean what you mean by "logged in the middle of combat".
> If you really need verification... > 7755 entries in what has become the 'wtf?' forum
I assume 'wtf?' = Shadowbane Discussion? Because that board closely resembles EQ's 'Whineplay' boards, and will include topics from every other board. They're also the 'misc' boards, for any topic that doesn't fit into their predefined areas.
Yeah, the largest number of posts are in response to this attack - but hell, it made Slashdot, there's going to be a LOT of interested people.
A lot of people post - isn't that a good thing? Doesn't that say that people are interested enough to post instead of being totally apathetic?
I've been playing Shadowbane from release on Dread. My main character is a 55 Barbarian, and I've been part of a guild that had its town razed to the ground, and am now part of a guild resisting againts what I can only describe as something akin to 'The Evil Empire'. I've been a part of small 10 person PvP raids, mid-sized 50 person incursions, and 1 of at least a Hundred Defenders against uncountable attackers in a large-scale defense of one of the biggest cities on the server.
I even played for a couple months in beta before that.
Your views are not shared by the majority - or even by just me.
> this is only the icing on the cake for a plague of problems
No, this is a *VASTLY* different problem than anything we've been experiencing.
> Massive warfronts and assaults utilizing seige weapons and a slew of powerful spells and powers. None of this has come to pass.
What server are you playing on? AFAIK, every server has had at least one battle that would put some of EQ's big raids to shame.
I've personally been a part of most of the raids between TBW + allies and TBI/L7F + allies on the Dread server.
> The game lag is too terrible to support even the smallest of battles. PvP is almost impossible during primetime hours due to the inability of most casters to launch spells in a timely manner.
Again, on which server do you play? 90% of the time, Dread is pretty much fine. Sometimes, we experience lag spikes. What are the detailed specs of the computer on which you're playing Shadowbane? Does it suck? Do you have the detail turned all the way off? Are you talking about Latency, or Low Framerate?
Let's be specific here: if you can't give me a server and system configuration, I can't effectively rebuke you. Yeah, some of the highly populated servers can get pretty bad (Mourning and Death), but others are pretty smooth most of the time.
> Server downtime is extreme.
Sorry, WRONG. You're getting login bottlenecks and 'server downtime' confused. Yeah, the servers gone down periodically for maintainance.
> Login is at times completely impossible.
What a stupid thing to say. Yes, IF THE LOGIN SERVER IS DOWN FOR A PATCH, YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO LOG IN. What I think you MEAN to say, is that SOMETIMES (meaning infrequently; less than once a week) the login servers get congested, and it takes a while to get into the game. Yeah, it's a pain in the neck, but not all MOGs have a launch like DAOC. Remember EQ (probably not, you wouldn't be complaining)? Yeah, it was worse. Don't make me bring out the Terrible Two (AO & WWIIO).
> Rollbacks are nightly.
The last rollback was on Dread on 3/21. It's been a week since any rollbacks, invalidating your comment.
Check out the "SB Support Announcements" of their message boards before making unfounded comments easily rebuked with proof.
> The attrition rate among players is amazing.
Do you have anything to back this up with besides speculation? So your guild has 'vanished', so what? That could mean your guild sucks, or that they created alts, or they switched servers, or any other of the endless posibilities. Give me hard numbers, or quit the bitchin'.
> Ubi/Wolfpack blatantly reject petitions with no regard or consideration for the players.
Wrong again. When I lost my characters to a bug, WP_Ubiq was quick to respond and kept me fairly regularly posted. Yeah, it sucked at the time, but I was by no means ignored or disregarded.
> Every patch makes the client actually worse that it was before.
More sensationalism. I've watched the patches actually fix bugs. I crash less in Shadowbane now than I do in BF1942. Maybe you should take a look at your computer's setup.
> This has been a nightmare for most of us.
You + myself = 2 people. It's a nightmare for you, I'm at least reasonably satisfied and expect things to get better. 1000-1200 people on Dread at peak seems to question this 'nightmare for most' comment.
> Just another account cancelled in a long line of departing players.
See ya, don't let the door hit you on the way out. I'm sure I'll see you complaining on the release of every other game ever made, with the same parting comment, and the same vapid complaints.
Yes, it was Die by the Sword (and it had an expansion back). Despite its name, it had a variety of weapons available (and some very interesting gameplay).
It gave it a good shot, but I found its controls awkward. It used the numpad for control - imagine a 3x3 grid superimposed on your screen, and the 1-9 keys controlling sword placement from lower-left to upper-right. Pressing 1, then 9 would result in your character attacking from lower-left to upper-right. Attacks were styled together in this fashion.
Much more control than in any game to date, but it felt clumsy and sluggish....still, I'll pull it out again and see if my memory doesn't do it justice. -----
JK2 did well with its multiple saber styles, I'll give it that. It was also very fun until *everyone* started using the backwards-sweep move all the time. Between that and flip-kicks / force push/pull, it rapidly became who could get off the first couple hits.
Which raises the question: what do you need two hits with a lightsaber for? Especially if you're talking about that slow, hard sweep - you've taken him off at the knees or below.
Not to mention that attack was unblockable - something like that just needs a good, solid parry (or hitting them anywhere in the vast target that is their exposed body).
And we're still limited to attack-left, attack-right, offensive-attack, and defensive-attack - with three (to five+) styles to chose from, yes, but those are power attacks. With a jedi's mastery of the force (and of the ultra-deadly lightsaber), he has the potential to become the ultimate finess swordsman.
I'd love to see an acrobatic jedi fencer (and be able to control him/her/it). -----
> So you want a good Highlander where the point of the game is to be the only one?
Not really; I'm looking for someone to innovate the way we control things. Ranged weapons are fairly straightforward (point; aim; fire;), and beat-'em-ups have been done and redone, but no one has perfected a way of controlling melee weapons. They're done in pretty much the same way as a ranged weapons - aim, attack.
That's dull and unrepresentative of how interesting and varied swordplay can be. It's just not a simple thing to do, and I think people are shying away from it because of that.
There's an immediate problem to this. The MacGyver character had all this information in his head - how to do the things he did. All he needed to do was find the required tools and parts.
You, the player, enjoy no such luxury. Either the game must supply the information for you (in whatever format; a database of properties of objects that MacGyver knows, or the more straightforward 'tip' section), or you the gamer need to know how to get out of all those tricky situations (in which case it becomes much less interesting).
Either way, its derivitive parts have been done before (or isn't fun); you're either on a pixel-hunt for what you need to continue (essentially find-the-red-keycard), or it turns into a revision of the good old side-scrolling twitchfests where you outrun alien bulls and avoid water with tentacles/poisonous slugs (or the more modern Abe's Oddessy).
Out of curiosity, what's the difference between a chewing-gum bomb and a gun? They're both explosives designed to kill people with a relatively small amount of effort. I'd much prefer a decent interfacing for using a sword, instead of this right-swing/left-swing nonsense.
"I suspect gaming will also be eventually offloaded onto consoles, assuming the tech gap continues to close and prices remain rock-bottom cheap."
Unless DRM cripples computers, I doubt that this will ever happen. Simply put, consoles do not have the expansiveness of functionality that computers do.
First of all, console controllers absolutely suck for many game types. You lose a huge portion of control - precision, accuracy, turn rate - when switching from mouse/trackball to stick. I've found games like Halo to be frustrating to the point of unplayable, and I can't imagine playing RTS games like Starcraft.
One of the main reasons that consoles are so popular is also the reason it will fail to achive market dominance: simplicity. Sure, you rarely have to worry about system specs or whatnot - but you pay for it with a loss of resolution, flexibility, and input variance. ----------
That's really funny, I was just about to reply with something similar. I had left my copy of 'Riverdance' in a friend's computer when he loaded up the AvP Predator demo. It starts off kinda slow, and the music takes a while to be obvious about what it is, so his reaction was absolutely hilarious.
Play Shadowbane, and make your own plot. Stop laughing, I'm serious. What more do you want from a MMORPG than to influence the rise and fall of nations? Leveling isn't a chore, it serves as an introduction to the game. Once you join a guild, you're taking part in your nation's saga.
Let me give you an example: A guild of which I was briefly a part was at war with a bigger, more powerful guild. There were many nights where our armies met on the rolling plains and sparse woodlands around our city. We were routed, time and time again, until we were forced to become allied with a different rival nation. Together, we turned the tides of battle - now we take the battle to them.
It's not about levels, money, war, or diplomacy - it's about all of them. Being skilled at some of those four will make up for deficiencies in others.
And take the reviews you read with a grain of salt. The review I read at Gamespot made me wonder if he was playing a different game.
You imply that Aliens and Predators are not from the same creative universe; that's quite wrong. If the endless supply of creative works won't change your mind (I'm talking Dark Horse: Presents, not Batman vs. Predator), then maybe taking a closer look at the end of Predator 2 will. Yeah, that's right, there's an Alien head hanging on the wall of the trophy room Danny Glover enters.
"rich exploration of diverse characters bound to a common fate" is something that isn't decided by subject matter, but script, director, and actors. A story is only as good as the storyteller.
In general, the 'aliens' series of comics are about man's struggles against himself, overcoming his technological errors and failures (attempting to capture aliens/use them as biological warfare/harvest their 'honey'/etc) with the suffering of men and women placed in extreme circumstances. They occassionally represent man vs. nature, too, but under different plot devices.
Predator is another traditional stuggle; man vs. nature. The Predators represent the top of a universal food chain - they are bigger, stronger, faster, have seriously advanced technology, and are interested in hanging us on their walls. In their society, a Predator must successfully kill Kainde Amedha - literally hard-meat, their word for Aliens (Gieger's, not general) - to be acceptd as an adult. They hunt humans - called soft-meat, Pyode Amedha - as one of their favorite sports, because we make good prey (we're intuitive, have a strong will to survive, and shoot back). Their society is harsh and complex, but emphasises honor. In many ways, they're more civilized than we are.
I fear you've dismissed a very well-told, well-written, and beautifully drawn series just because it has 'vs.' in the title.
The PC games are quite excellent, as well.
Finally, don't forget that movies aren't strictly about 'art' - they're entertainment, first and foremost. I, for one, would love to see 'the perfect' Aliens vs. Predator movie, I just don't think it could be pulled off and released in the U.S.
I'm torn; part of me wants to tell you that it's naive to assume there was ever any passion behind Star Trek, and another part of me wants to tell you that Next Gen had that passion.
Clearly, I'm biased;)
I didn't enjoy ToS. It might just be an age gap (I'm in my early 20s), and I probably saw Next Gen first. I enjoyed Nemesis, and feel the movie series should end on a good note.
OTOH, I couldn't care less for DS9, VOY, or ENT.
As for passion, it doesn't exactly equal success - and shows have to be successful. Firefly was my second favorite show of all time (might have made it to first after a season or two), and Joss Whedon n' crew were nothing if not passionate. Damn FOX for all eternity.
The usefulness of this domain totally depends on the method the filter uses to determine whether or not the site is safe for children. Clearly, they'll prevent the usage of certain types of langauge (race/sex/whatever-ist, lewd, obscene, etc) and pictures, but where do you determine to censor content? Do you prevent the discussion of 'adult' topics? How do you get a consensus on what an 'adult' topic is? Where do you go to file a complaint when your page discussing Linux (or Microsoft products, or Jell-O) is rejected because it contains 'adult' subject matter? Does anyone know if this company can be trusted to perform this duty in an impartial and proper manner? What's stopping someone from putting subversive (pick your subversion) topics in a non-offensive, clean, and veiled manner?
My area of Comcast (Reston, VA) doesn't use PPPoE (dhcpc , joy), but I'm familiar with the Roaring Penguin software. It was great - I used it for the firewall/router/mail server I had set up at an old office I used to work at. The business has since relocated to an area that promised DSL but couldn't deliver. Now the box only connects via modem, and I haven't had to administer it in months (because the "normal" broadband attacks aren't happening).
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Ah, okay - thanks for clearing that up for me!
-lw
Ok, I've got a couple CDs that have become scratched through no fault of my own (looks minor enough to me, but /shrug), and a couple tracks are unplayable. Since I prefer to listen to the entire album at once, I WAS going to burn a copy of the good tracks to a CD and download the scracted ones.
Is this illegal? Why? If so, how do I go about retrieving the music I bought? Is it any different than restoring them from a personal backup, or is it the principle of the thing?
Now, since I like to listen to my CDs at home, work, and in the car, I was also going to burn a second copy to a CD full of mp3s to leave at work for my own person use only.
Is this illegal? Why? I own the albums. No one else is using them. I'm legally allowed to make a backup for personal uses, aren't I?
I just thought of something else - are you allowed to swap songs you got from the radio? If so, how can the RIAA tell the difference?
-lw
What constitutes a cultural taboo (about sex)? Not condoning anonymous sex with multiple partners? Being pro-life? Thinking that handing out condoms to children is innappropriate? Maybe it's just me, but despite being born and raised in the U.S., I don't view sex as dirty or evil.
If we are to go by what is on the television, is violence culturally taboo in Europe?
Quite often, I hear people extoll the virutes of Europe with their free-thinking about sex and their censorship of violence. What about portraying sex is better than portraying violence?
Morally speaking, who are we trying to protect? If it's children who can not tell the difference between reality and fantasy, you've only swapped one image with another. Rape, STDs, pregnancy, and abortion are just as serious (if not more so!) as assault, robbery, and murder.
I think you've greatly overstated the involvement of Puritain views in our society. For one, realize people who have negative associations with sex (for whatever reason) will discourage it, just the same as any person with any negative association. It isn't always about what happened hundreds of years ago.
For another, some of the greatest 'heroes' in our society, arguably, work the least. Consider athletes and movie stars - how often are they working? How much do they make? How long are they expected to work?
I think the poster who mentioned you being resentful believed that your comparison of our society with the Puritans was overly harsh and indicitive of resentment of our current societal views.
-lw
I'm sure someone else has said it, but patent patenting things. If you have that pesky 'prior art' to deal with, and not the limitless budget of M$, make it more specific: patent patenting things with whatever new form they come out with.
And as soon as they come out with a new form, patent that, too.
Offensive patenting, defensive patenting... and now obstructive patenting.
-lw
> Whatever happened to Origin?
http://www.origin.ea.com/
Technically, they're still around. However, after being purchased by EA (IIRC), they lost (EA fired) the majority of their creative and technical talent. The result? Origin exists only in the capacity of endless UO expansions.
> Point is, if you release a good enough game, people will upgrade their PCs to get it.
This is no different on the PC than it is for anything else. Houses, cars, console systems, PC, guns, ceiling fans... when one doesn't cut it anymore (defined by what action you wish the object to complete), you repair/upgrade/replace it.
PCs in particular have an interesting co-dependant relationship between software and hardware. More demanding software products yield better hardware (ie, benchmarks), while more powerful hardware allows "better" (faster, prettier) software.
> Maybe we'll see Doom3 on DVD? It's a thought.
Why? What's the advantage of going DVD over CD for the majority of games released? Unless we're talking Baldur's Gate-style 6 CD sets, what's the incentive to switch?
There are CD cases that contain two CDs, for the ones that still come in jewel cases. Neverwinter Nights, which came on three CDs, had the disks in a CD envelope instead of a case.
And since hard drives are so large, the only reason most games need a CD in the drive is to make sure you've still got 'em.
Think of it this way: what incentives do publishers have to release DVDs instead of CDs?
-lw
so register on /. and do it yourself. or meta-moderate. moron.
-lw
"...we need to raise taxes so we can afford better education."
His point is that INSTEAD of taking my hard-earned money, the (us) government could fire useless/bad employees (it's currently easier to give a person a raise to get them out of your hair instead of firing them. sound like a good system to you? nyet).
Regardless, throwing money at a problem isn't going to make it go away. You just make the problem fat by feeding it. You can raise my taxes after you've thoroughly examined the issue, the budget, and determined that the *only* problem is money (no way) and that there's no where else to get it (which I won't believe for a moment).
Until then, try solving problems with your head instead of my wallet, m'kay?
-lw
It doesn't matter - Lucas can't kill it now. SW has evolved from a great movie trilogy into something much, much greater. it lives on in the hearts of all those who saw and loved the original trilogy, sans special edition.
and, of course, in all the awesome works of fiction done by greats such as Timothy Zahn, Michael J. Stackpole, and all the others who have kept the original SW universe alive and flourishing in their books.
-lw
I'd rather be a gamer than a skater ;)
> ...with pretty much every one of those big battles you have more than 1/2 the participants either lagged to death or forced out of the game due to client or server crashes.
...there have been droves of people leaving...
/.), and I don't recall anything resembling 'droves' of comments about actual cancelled accounts. Complaints aren't the same, you know. Even so, 50 posts stating "I'm quitting" may look like a lot on the boards, but amounts to a tiny portion of the population.
I've crashed a few times in biiig raids (100+ / side). I've gotten low framerates, but I lean towards IQ over FPS. Hell, I've even been on when the server has gone down for a reboot.
But saying that it happens most of the time when battles involve > 50 people is silly. That might be true on your server - I don't have any characters on Deception - but it's simply not true on Dread.
Maybe try turning the System channel off? That's one thing I hope they implement soon, server-side message filters.
> The servers themselves start to lag in big battles.
There have been some large-scale assualts that I wasn't a part of, and I noticed nothing of the sort.
> UT2003
What's the largest number of people you've played against on an UT2k3 server? 32? How about the map size? Either of those come close to the number of players on a Shadowbane server (1k+) or the size of their world? Hell, even the largest-scale of these games - Battlefield 1942 with 60 people - just can't compare in scope.
I hate it when people bring up random benchmarks with no statistical information. Is 50 your max? Average? Are you running FRAPS, did you save replays to disk and analyze those? Is this a number you took off the top of your head? What resolution are you running? What OS? What's the speed of your process, your motherboard's model number, your video card? What drivers are you running? And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I don't find Shadowbane to exhibit the same functionality as you. I've got an AthXP 1300+, Asus A7V266, 2x256mb crucial PC2100 (NOT enough for XP, got a 512 stick on the way), a Radeon 8500 retail running @ 285/285 and the 2.4 Catalysts, all under WinXP Pro SP 1 with dx9a. I've also got XP installed on an old 2gb ata33 drive, and SB on a 80gb WD on the same chain (yeah, stupid, but I haven't accepted XP yet). And I STILL don't experience the problems you're having. Sure, I drop terrain detail, texture detail, spell effects, and terrain size down to zero during big raids, but I'd be playing AC2 if I only wanted eye candy.
Your Shadowbane experiences have been sub-standard, and I greatly question the quality and stability of your computer (if your accusations are true).
Typically for me, from pressing "Play to->Crush" to taking my first couple steps takes less than 10 minutes - probably closer to 5. Are you *SURE* you don't have some horrible loading problem? Bad RAM, less than 100mb free space, slow CPU, old motherboard? 45 minutes is about the maximum amount of time it's ever taken me to get into the game when the login servers were up.
>
Droves? Check the message boards? I'm a bit of a board warrior (like you couldn't have guessed, I do post on
> gameplay issues
Aw, hell, while we're here, why not? Gold is needed to support a city. There are no other resources. Since the purpose of this game is GvG / siege warfare, would you prefer to be out cutting wood, hewing stone, and fashioning them into usuable materials? I'd rather kill a few mobs and get XP + the chance for a nice drop, myself. Free cities = stupid.
Casters + Shields = stupid, that's first on my list of complaints. Missing game features? Like what? Server travel? I'm thrilled there's no server travel, it gives us time to prepare for Ebonlore and R30s, etc. The interface is skinnable, get a clue. Lack of content? I'm confused here; do you mean there's not a rich
Hmm, sarcasm. Perhaps a better approach would be to address the issue, instead?
Shadowbane has it's flaws. Server security is (was? will be?) apparently one of them.
I'm also having a great deal of fun, and I found most of the statements to which I replied misleading or just plain wrong.
Oh, wait, you don't care about the issue - you're just interested in making snide comments from the sideline. My mistake.
-lw
If you filter out ACs, maybe you'll post to me.
> You'll have to explain in detail how you manage to avoid the rollback when the servers crash almost twice a day.
Sure, that's easy. I can't recall Dread crashing twice a day. It might have happened in the first couple weeks, but it hasn't happened in the past two AFAIK.
> Perhaps you are so 'uber' you don't get logged in the middle of combat.
If you're logging into the middle of combat, either your Tree is under siege or you logged back in within 15 minutes into the middle of a combat zone. Either way, I am *SERIOUSLY* impressed if your enemies managed to regroup and attack that quickly after a server crash.
If I'm taking this the wrong way, explain to mean what you mean by "logged in the middle of combat".
> If you really need verification...
> 7755 entries in what has become the 'wtf?' forum
I assume 'wtf?' = Shadowbane Discussion? Because that board closely resembles EQ's 'Whineplay' boards, and will include topics from every other board. They're also the 'misc' boards, for any topic that doesn't fit into their predefined areas.
Yeah, the largest number of posts are in response to this attack - but hell, it made Slashdot, there's going to be a LOT of interested people.
A lot of people post - isn't that a good thing? Doesn't that say that people are interested enough to post instead of being totally apathetic?
I've been playing Shadowbane from release on Dread. My main character is a 55 Barbarian, and I've been part of a guild that had its town razed to the ground, and am now part of a guild resisting againts what I can only describe as something akin to 'The Evil Empire'. I've been a part of small 10 person PvP raids, mid-sized 50 person incursions, and 1 of at least a Hundred Defenders against uncountable attackers in a large-scale defense of one of the biggest cities on the server.
I even played for a couple months in beta before that.
Your views are not shared by the majority - or even by just me.
-lw
> this is only the icing on the cake for a plague of problems
No, this is a *VASTLY* different problem than anything we've been experiencing.
> Massive warfronts and assaults utilizing seige weapons and a slew of powerful spells and powers. None of this has come to pass.
What server are you playing on? AFAIK, every server has had at least one battle that would put some of EQ's big raids to shame.
I've personally been a part of most of the raids between TBW + allies and TBI/L7F + allies on the Dread server.
> The game lag is too terrible to support even the smallest of battles. PvP is almost impossible during primetime hours due to the inability of most casters to launch spells in a timely manner.
Again, on which server do you play? 90% of the time, Dread is pretty much fine. Sometimes, we experience lag spikes. What are the detailed specs of the computer on which you're playing Shadowbane? Does it suck? Do you have the detail turned all the way off? Are you talking about Latency, or Low Framerate?
Let's be specific here: if you can't give me a server and system configuration, I can't effectively rebuke you. Yeah, some of the highly populated servers can get pretty bad (Mourning and Death), but others are pretty smooth most of the time.
> Server downtime is extreme.
Sorry, WRONG. You're getting login bottlenecks and 'server downtime' confused. Yeah, the servers gone down periodically for maintainance.
> Login is at times completely impossible.
What a stupid thing to say. Yes, IF THE LOGIN SERVER IS DOWN FOR A PATCH, YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO LOG IN. What I think you MEAN to say, is that SOMETIMES (meaning infrequently; less than once a week) the login servers get congested, and it takes a while to get into the game. Yeah, it's a pain in the neck, but not all MOGs have a launch like DAOC. Remember EQ (probably not, you wouldn't be complaining)? Yeah, it was worse. Don't make me bring out the Terrible Two (AO & WWIIO).
> Rollbacks are nightly.
The last rollback was on Dread on 3/21. It's been a week since any rollbacks, invalidating your comment.
Check out the "SB Support Announcements" of their message boards before making unfounded comments easily rebuked with proof.
> The attrition rate among players is amazing.
Do you have anything to back this up with besides speculation? So your guild has 'vanished', so what? That could mean your guild sucks, or that they created alts, or they switched servers, or any other of the endless posibilities. Give me hard numbers, or quit the bitchin'.
> Ubi/Wolfpack blatantly reject petitions with no regard or consideration for the players.
Wrong again. When I lost my characters to a bug, WP_Ubiq was quick to respond and kept me fairly regularly posted. Yeah, it sucked at the time, but I was by no means ignored or disregarded.
> Every patch makes the client actually worse that it was before.
More sensationalism. I've watched the patches actually fix bugs. I crash less in Shadowbane now than I do in BF1942. Maybe you should take a look at your computer's setup.
> This has been a nightmare for most of us.
You + myself = 2 people. It's a nightmare for you, I'm at least reasonably satisfied and expect things to get better. 1000-1200 people on Dread at peak seems to question this 'nightmare for most' comment.
> Just another account cancelled in a long line of departing players.
See ya, don't let the door hit you on the way out. I'm sure I'll see you complaining on the release of every other game ever made, with the same parting comment, and the same vapid complaints.
-lw
Yes, it was Die by the Sword (and it had an expansion back). Despite its name, it had a variety of weapons available (and some very interesting gameplay).
...still, I'll pull it out again and see if my memory doesn't do it justice.
It gave it a good shot, but I found its controls awkward. It used the numpad for control - imagine a 3x3 grid superimposed on your screen, and the 1-9 keys controlling sword placement from lower-left to upper-right. Pressing 1, then 9 would result in your character attacking from lower-left to upper-right. Attacks were styled together in this fashion.
Much more control than in any game to date, but it felt clumsy and sluggish.
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JK2 did well with its multiple saber styles, I'll give it that. It was also very fun until *everyone* started using the backwards-sweep move all the time. Between that and flip-kicks / force push/pull, it rapidly became who could get off the first couple hits.
Which raises the question: what do you need two hits with a lightsaber for? Especially if you're talking about that slow, hard sweep - you've taken him off at the knees or below.
Not to mention that attack was unblockable - something like that just needs a good, solid parry (or hitting them anywhere in the vast target that is their exposed body).
And we're still limited to attack-left, attack-right, offensive-attack, and defensive-attack - with three (to five+) styles to chose from, yes, but those are power attacks. With a jedi's mastery of the force (and of the ultra-deadly lightsaber), he has the potential to become the ultimate finess swordsman.
I'd love to see an acrobatic jedi fencer (and be able to control him/her/it).
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> So you want a good Highlander where the point of the game is to be the only one?
Not really; I'm looking for someone to innovate the way we control things. Ranged weapons are fairly straightforward (point; aim; fire;), and beat-'em-ups have been done and redone, but no one has perfected a way of controlling melee weapons. They're done in pretty much the same way as a ranged weapons - aim, attack.
That's dull and unrepresentative of how interesting and varied swordplay can be. It's just not a simple thing to do, and I think people are shying away from it because of that.
There's an immediate problem to this. The MacGyver character had all this information in his head - how to do the things he did. All he needed to do was find the required tools and parts.
You, the player, enjoy no such luxury. Either the game must supply the information for you (in whatever format; a database of properties of objects that MacGyver knows, or the more straightforward 'tip' section), or you the gamer need to know how to get out of all those tricky situations (in which case it becomes much less interesting).
Either way, its derivitive parts have been done before (or isn't fun); you're either on a pixel-hunt for what you need to continue (essentially find-the-red-keycard), or it turns into a revision of the good old side-scrolling twitchfests where you outrun alien bulls and avoid water with tentacles/poisonous slugs (or the more modern Abe's Oddessy).
Out of curiosity, what's the difference between a chewing-gum bomb and a gun? They're both explosives designed to kill people with a relatively small amount of effort. I'd much prefer a decent interfacing for using a sword, instead of this right-swing/left-swing nonsense.
"I suspect gaming will also be eventually offloaded onto consoles, assuming the tech gap continues to close and prices remain rock-bottom cheap."
Unless DRM cripples computers, I doubt that this will ever happen. Simply put, consoles do not have the expansiveness of functionality that computers do.
First of all, console controllers absolutely suck for many game types. You lose a huge portion of control - precision, accuracy, turn rate - when switching from mouse/trackball to stick. I've found games like Halo to be frustrating to the point of unplayable, and I can't imagine playing RTS games like Starcraft.
One of the main reasons that consoles are so popular is also the reason it will fail to achive market dominance: simplicity. Sure, you rarely have to worry about system specs or whatnot - but you pay for it with a loss of resolution, flexibility, and input variance.
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That's really funny, I was just about to reply with something similar. I had left my copy of 'Riverdance' in a friend's computer when he loaded up the AvP Predator demo. It starts off kinda slow, and the music takes a while to be obvious about what it is, so his reaction was absolutely hilarious.
Play Shadowbane, and make your own plot.
Stop laughing, I'm serious. What more do you want from a MMORPG than to influence the rise and fall of nations? Leveling isn't a chore, it serves as an introduction to the game. Once you join a guild, you're taking part in your nation's saga.
Let me give you an example:
A guild of which I was briefly a part was at war with a bigger, more powerful guild. There were many nights where our armies met on the rolling plains and sparse woodlands around our city. We were routed, time and time again, until we were forced to become allied with a different rival nation. Together, we turned the tides of battle - now we take the battle to them.
It's not about levels, money, war, or diplomacy - it's about all of them. Being skilled at some of those four will make up for deficiencies in others.
And take the reviews you read with a grain of salt. The review I read at Gamespot made me wonder if he was playing a different game.
-lw
You imply that Aliens and Predators are not from the same creative universe; that's quite wrong. If the endless supply of creative works won't change your mind (I'm talking Dark Horse: Presents, not Batman vs. Predator), then maybe taking a closer look at the end of Predator 2 will. Yeah, that's right, there's an Alien head hanging on the wall of the trophy room Danny Glover enters.
"rich exploration of diverse characters bound to a common fate" is something that isn't decided by subject matter, but script, director, and actors. A story is only as good as the storyteller.
In general, the 'aliens' series of comics are about man's struggles against himself, overcoming his technological errors and failures (attempting to capture aliens/use them as biological warfare/harvest their 'honey'/etc) with the suffering of men and women placed in extreme circumstances. They occassionally represent man vs. nature, too, but under different plot devices.
Predator is another traditional stuggle; man vs. nature. The Predators represent the top of a universal food chain - they are bigger, stronger, faster, have seriously advanced technology, and are interested in hanging us on their walls. In their society, a Predator must successfully kill Kainde Amedha - literally hard-meat, their word for Aliens (Gieger's, not general) - to be acceptd as an adult. They hunt humans - called soft-meat, Pyode Amedha - as one of their favorite sports, because we make good prey (we're intuitive, have a strong will to survive, and shoot back). Their society is harsh and complex, but emphasises honor. In many ways, they're more civilized than we are.
I fear you've dismissed a very well-told, well-written, and beautifully drawn series just because it has 'vs.' in the title.
The PC games are quite excellent, as well.
Finally, don't forget that movies aren't strictly about 'art' - they're entertainment, first and foremost. I, for one, would love to see 'the perfect' Aliens vs. Predator movie, I just don't think it could be pulled off and released in the U.S.
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I'm torn; part of me wants to tell you that it's naive to assume there was ever any passion behind Star Trek, and another part of me wants to tell you that Next Gen had that passion.
;)
Clearly, I'm biased
I didn't enjoy ToS. It might just be an age gap (I'm in my early 20s), and I probably saw Next Gen first. I enjoyed Nemesis, and feel the movie series should end on a good note.
OTOH, I couldn't care less for DS9, VOY, or ENT.
As for passion, it doesn't exactly equal success - and shows have to be successful. Firefly was my second favorite show of all time (might have made it to first after a season or two), and Joss Whedon n' crew were nothing if not passionate. Damn FOX for all eternity.
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The usefulness of this domain totally depends on the method the filter uses to determine whether or not the site is safe for children. Clearly, they'll prevent the usage of certain types of langauge (race/sex/whatever-ist, lewd, obscene, etc) and pictures, but where do you determine to censor content?
Do you prevent the discussion of 'adult' topics? How do you get a consensus on what an 'adult' topic is? Where do you go to file a complaint when your page discussing Linux (or Microsoft products, or Jell-O) is rejected because it contains 'adult' subject matter?
Does anyone know if this company can be trusted to perform this duty in an impartial and proper manner?
What's stopping someone from putting subversive (pick your subversion) topics in a non-offensive, clean, and veiled manner?
-lw
Because xxx.safeForKids.org is pretty much a contridiction in terms. Unless you're suggesting to make the xxx safe for kids? ;)
-lw
My area of Comcast (Reston, VA) doesn't use PPPoE (dhcpc , joy), but I'm familiar with the Roaring Penguin software. It was great - I used it for the firewall/router/mail server I had set up at an old office I used to work at. The business has since relocated to an area that promised DSL but couldn't deliver. Now the box only connects via modem, and I haven't had to administer it in months (because the "normal" broadband attacks aren't happening).
-lw