I was disappointed that you couldn't dynamically alter the shields back and forth too. I did, however, get shields custom crafted for me that were stronger in back than in the front.
Sure, the upgrade system is neat and gives you something to do, but for what? There's nothing there. And I'm not going to sit through hours upon hours of trivial gameplay to work up to something that I've been told might be challenging.
I understand what you're saying, and essentially agree. The problem is that as far as I know, you could say that about any massively multiplayer game. It's all lame and boring in the final analysis without a good group of friends to have fun with and goof around with. I don't know of any mmorpg that defies that statement.
If there is an MMO that's fun to play for a very long time, where the entertainment comes from the game itself and not the people in it, I'd really love to play it.
Now correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the idea of being in a ship was that it took SKILL TO KILL THINGS and not time.
You make a great point here. I played for a while and liked it, here's my take on it.
It does take skill. If you try JTL, you'll probably find that the game is much more difficult than other MMO's-- what you do actually makes all the difference. If you blindly go in with guns blazing, you're going to get owned. You have to actually work at this game.
It takes time, too. Not just a mindless grind, but it takes time to develop the combination of a playstyle style and a configuration of your ship that you like.
I agree with your point, though, and I think that you're touching on the principal weakness of current MMO's: we don't need the grind. We need things that challenge our skills.
There's still a grind in JTL, but it takes skill, too-- both skill in piloting and skill in deciding how to configure your ship and match that configuration with a play strategy.
I played JTL during JTL beta, and enjoyed it immensely. If you've tried JTL and think it sucks, you need to read this.
At first, I hated it. I thought it was difficult to control and an utter bore. Then I poked around, and saw that many other people really enjoyed. So I thought I'd give it another chance.
Two key things you need to know if you're not enjoying JTL yet:
1. You can't just attack and win, or go straight after your opponent and win. You actually need to practice, think, and use some tactics. It's much harder to play than you might expect at first. You need to stay behind your opponents so they can't shoot back at you, and you need to match your speed to theirs. If a ship is in front of you shooting at you, you need to high tail it behind them immediately. This "actually needing to play" and having what buttons you push actually make a difference is a bit of a shock to most SWG players at first.
2. The design of the ship modules and ship crafting is incredible. It gets a lot more exciting when you get your first ship upgrade, which took me a couple of nights of play.
The first non-free ship you can use has something like 13 different components on it (guns, missles, armor front, armor rear, shields, engine, booster, etc.). But there's a mass limit on the ship that's fairly restrictive. So that leaves it up to the player to decide how he's going to outfit his ship. These choices are non-trivial, and very interesting.
For example, Initially I just threw whatever components into my ship that I could scare up. I was doing OK in battle, but began to suspect I could do better with a different configuration on my ship.
The way the ship crafting system works, you can use all kinds of different strategies in equiping your ship. For example, I really wanted some bigger guns on my ship, but the big guns put it way over the weight limit. I decided to build some shields for my ship that had strong defense in the back, weak defense in the front, and lower mass. I completely took the armor out of the ship, reasoning that hopefully my shields would hold long enough for me to quickly kill the enemy. I essentially gutted my ship to make room for a big fat fun. The strategy worked! I had a great time tinkering with my ship for hours on end, trying all kinds of different things.
The crafting system for the ships lends itself to all kinds of different cooperative strategies, too. For example, you can use blaster that eat through shields but are weaker against armor, or vice versa. You and your friends might get together with a couple of shield-eater ships to soften up the opponents, and group with one ship that specializes in destroying the armor after the shields are gone. And then have another guy with you who acts like a rodeo clown: he uses all the mass on his ship for shields and armor, and carries a light, slow engine and no guns. This guy would talk a lot of smack to draw enemy fire, and even though he wouldn't have much offensive cpability he'd be very difficult to kill.
The crafting system in SWG always had a lot of promise, but it's finally showing its original promise in JTL. Not only are there lots of ship components, but every one of them can be experimented in several meaningful ways. Most items in the game have only a couple of useful ways to experiment on them. In JTL, components have 5 or more ways to experiments, each of which will be useful for various situations.
This kind of complexity where equipment can be tailored to special strategies is going to make JTL a lot of fun. Perhaps this level of thinking isn't for everyone, but many people are going to have a great time with this-- even people that aren't just Star Wars nuts.
Actually, Tale in the Desert lures a much more mature audience than your average massively multiplayer game. There's no hacking and slashing, there's no way to be super elite. It's a cooperative game, where the players work together to advance their collective technology. When I was playing, I personally found that the people playing Tale in the Desert were emotionally more mature than what I've seen in Asheron's Call, Lineage 2, Ultima Online, Everquest, Shadowbane, and Star Wars Galaxies.
While you may be right that the problem here was borne of immaturity, it's certainly not because this game attracts a more immature audience than other games.
Perhaps a better title for the article would be "When Political Correctness Spins Out of Control."
There's more kinds of defects that are possible in a game than just technical bugs.
Some crucial kinds of questions the testing needs to tell the development team includes: Is it too hard? Is it too easy? Did you get stumped anywhere? Was it boring anywhere? Did the storyline make sense to you, or was it unclear in certain places?
It won't take long for the development team to get so far into the weeds on the project that they won't be able to answer questions like those for themselves.
Putting together a test plan that figures out what kinds of issues like these need to be addressed is going to take some thought and attention from competent individuals. That sort of thing costs money if you need to be confident that you have a quality product. Drop the funding, and your risk have having a pile of poo increases.
The computer will also alert shoppers as they approach favorite items or promotions
I'm an introvert. Just being at the store is about all the interactivity I want in a given day. Make it any more interactive and I'm going to need some quiet time afterwards!
I would also have pointed out that Skype, Firefox, and Tale in the Desert work great under Linux, and that's what I spend the majority of my workday doing, so Linux is quite viable.
I think what he was suggesting is that the open source movement might be a good resource for helping companies figure out how to protect their products from piracy.
They could have the biggest nukes ever made, and it wouldn't matter to us as long as they don't have an ICBM to reach us with them.
The world is getting smaller, so are nukes, and so is our isolation from the rest of the world.
It's ironic that you make your comment so close to the anniversary of 9/11.
Numbering is my number one problem with Word. I absolutely love Outline mode, and Word's Outline mode is the one reason I don't use Open Office. But I'll be damned if I can get the thing to number documents in a reasonable way.
I couldn't care less about the plain text format thing... I just hit Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, and paste into Notepad if I want plain text.
Another pretty major annoyance: trying to paste content from a web page into Word. I have to "sanitize" the text by using Paste Special / Plain Text, because if I don't, Word will sit there forever doing God only knows what kind of processing before dropping in the pasted content!
By the way, if you haven't learned how to use Outline mode to gather your thoughts and automatically format documents, do it. I can't think of 20 minutes of learning that'll have a bigger payoff.
1. Think about what you consider important skills or characteristics for this person to have to do well in the position.
2. For each of the post important things from #1, ask the candidate to tell you a specific story about how they did that item. Important: Do not let them get away with a hypothetical about how they would do it, or how it should be done. You need a specify story of how they really did it in the past.
3. For the most important thing or things from #2, ask them if they would give you a reference to discuss the story. The reference would be anyone that can first hand verify the story, anyone that was involved. That could be a boss, co-worker, direct report employee, vendor, or customer.
You'll be amazed at how few people you interview can actually tell you stories as described in #2. It's truly an amazing way to separate the men from the boys.
Before I started using this technique, I found myself liking most people I met. After using the technique, it totally changed my perspective on interviewing. I started disapproving of a lot more candidates than I did before. And I was surprised by how well some people did compared to how I expected them to do based on my first impression.
Let's be fair. Consider other hobbies that people spend lots of time doing. Is gaming really so much worse? At least it's interactive, and you talk to other people.
And with regard to memorizing pointless facts, people have been doing that forever (baseball statistics, for example, or trivia on cars).
It's not nice to insult people because of their hobbies and interests. You may find a more receptive audience insulting sci fi fans to one of those myriad hot chicks you're always dating.
Actually I thought there was some pretty cool places on Tatooine. Like those major cliffs and plateaus up in the center of the map around 0,0 for example.
Slashdot Mirror
I was disappointed that you couldn't dynamically alter the shields back and forth too. I did, however, get shields custom crafted for me that were stronger in back than in the front.
I understand what you're saying, and essentially agree. The problem is that as far as I know, you could say that about any massively multiplayer game. It's all lame and boring in the final analysis without a good group of friends to have fun with and goof around with. I don't know of any mmorpg that defies that statement.
If there is an MMO that's fun to play for a very long time, where the entertainment comes from the game itself and not the people in it, I'd really love to play it.
You make a great point here. I played for a while and liked it, here's my take on it.
It does take skill. If you try JTL, you'll probably find that the game is much more difficult than other MMO's-- what you do actually makes all the difference. If you blindly go in with guns blazing, you're going to get owned. You have to actually work at this game.
It takes time, too. Not just a mindless grind, but it takes time to develop the combination of a playstyle style and a configuration of your ship that you like.
I agree with your point, though, and I think that you're touching on the principal weakness of current MMO's: we don't need the grind. We need things that challenge our skills.
There's still a grind in JTL, but it takes skill, too-- both skill in piloting and skill in deciding how to configure your ship and match that configuration with a play strategy.
At first, I hated it. I thought it was difficult to control and an utter bore. Then I poked around, and saw that many other people really enjoyed. So I thought I'd give it another chance.
Two key things you need to know if you're not enjoying JTL yet:
1. You can't just attack and win, or go straight after your opponent and win. You actually need to practice, think, and use some tactics. It's much harder to play than you might expect at first. You need to stay behind your opponents so they can't shoot back at you, and you need to match your speed to theirs. If a ship is in front of you shooting at you, you need to high tail it behind them immediately. This "actually needing to play" and having what buttons you push actually make a difference is a bit of a shock to most SWG players at first.
2. The design of the ship modules and ship crafting is incredible. It gets a lot more exciting when you get your first ship upgrade, which took me a couple of nights of play.
The first non-free ship you can use has something like 13 different components on it (guns, missles, armor front, armor rear, shields, engine, booster, etc.). But there's a mass limit on the ship that's fairly restrictive. So that leaves it up to the player to decide how he's going to outfit his ship. These choices are non-trivial, and very interesting.
For example, Initially I just threw whatever components into my ship that I could scare up. I was doing OK in battle, but began to suspect I could do better with a different configuration on my ship.
The way the ship crafting system works, you can use all kinds of different strategies in equiping your ship. For example, I really wanted some bigger guns on my ship, but the big guns put it way over the weight limit. I decided to build some shields for my ship that had strong defense in the back, weak defense in the front, and lower mass. I completely took the armor out of the ship, reasoning that hopefully my shields would hold long enough for me to quickly kill the enemy. I essentially gutted my ship to make room for a big fat fun. The strategy worked! I had a great time tinkering with my ship for hours on end, trying all kinds of different things.
The crafting system for the ships lends itself to all kinds of different cooperative strategies, too. For example, you can use blaster that eat through shields but are weaker against armor, or vice versa. You and your friends might get together with a couple of shield-eater ships to soften up the opponents, and group with one ship that specializes in destroying the armor after the shields are gone. And then have another guy with you who acts like a rodeo clown: he uses all the mass on his ship for shields and armor, and carries a light, slow engine and no guns. This guy would talk a lot of smack to draw enemy fire, and even though he wouldn't have much offensive cpability he'd be very difficult to kill.
The crafting system in SWG always had a lot of promise, but it's finally showing its original promise in JTL. Not only are there lots of ship components, but every one of them can be experimented in several meaningful ways. Most items in the game have only a couple of useful ways to experiment on them. In JTL, components have 5 or more ways to experiments, each of which will be useful for various situations.
This kind of complexity where equipment can be tailored to special strategies is going to make JTL a lot of fun. Perhaps this level of thinking isn't for everyone, but many people are going to have a great time with this-- even people that aren't just Star Wars nuts.
Too bad he's already modded down to the gutter before I got a chance to reference Stephenson's Hole Hawg.
but regardless of that, which is more immature: a) playing an online game, or b) trolling instead engaging in rational discussion?
While you may be right that the problem here was borne of immaturity, it's certainly not because this game attracts a more immature audience than other games.
Perhaps a better title for the article would be "When Political Correctness Spins Out of Control."
Some crucial kinds of questions the testing needs to tell the development team includes: Is it too hard? Is it too easy? Did you get stumped anywhere? Was it boring anywhere? Did the storyline make sense to you, or was it unclear in certain places?
It won't take long for the development team to get so far into the weeds on the project that they won't be able to answer questions like those for themselves.
Putting together a test plan that figures out what kinds of issues like these need to be addressed is going to take some thought and attention from competent individuals. That sort of thing costs money if you need to be confident that you have a quality product. Drop the funding, and your risk have having a pile of poo increases.
Is it more dangerous on an airplane than batteries?
I'm sure you're not alone in feeling this way. I bet they've lost nearly a dozen customers like this.
I'm an introvert. Just being at the store is about all the interactivity I want in a given day. Make it any more interactive and I'm going to need some quiet time afterwards!
But, if you confess, then freedom marches forward!
And if all that doesn't make the problems with NULL look small, then surely nothing can.
I would also have pointed out that Skype, Firefox, and Tale in the Desert work great under Linux, and that's what I spend the majority of my workday doing, so Linux is quite viable.
You can. Fujitsu implemented a COBOL.NET. It's an abmonination.
I agree, the image recognition would be quite do-able. When they said that image recognition in games was years away, they were mistaken. Here's some software that's already doing image recognition for games.
I think what he was suggesting is that the open source movement might be a good resource for helping companies figure out how to protect their products from piracy.
They could have the biggest nukes ever made, and it wouldn't matter to us as long as they don't have an ICBM to reach us with them.
The world is getting smaller, so are nukes, and so is our isolation from the rest of the world.
It's ironic that you make your comment so close to the anniversary of 9/11.
What is this "enlightened environment" of which you speak?
Numbering is my number one problem with Word. I absolutely love Outline mode, and Word's Outline mode is the one reason I don't use Open Office. But I'll be damned if I can get the thing to number documents in a reasonable way. I couldn't care less about the plain text format thing... I just hit Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, and paste into Notepad if I want plain text. Another pretty major annoyance: trying to paste content from a web page into Word. I have to "sanitize" the text by using Paste Special / Plain Text, because if I don't, Word will sit there forever doing God only knows what kind of processing before dropping in the pasted content! By the way, if you haven't learned how to use Outline mode to gather your thoughts and automatically format documents, do it. I can't think of 20 minutes of learning that'll have a bigger payoff.
...people like me, who develop corporate LAMP sites...
No offense, but doesn't this mean you put together web sites in PHP, as the grandparent suggested?
I thought Horizons was a crappy second-tier MMORPG itself.
1. Think about what you consider important skills or characteristics for this person to have to do well in the position. 2. For each of the post important things from #1, ask the candidate to tell you a specific story about how they did that item. Important: Do not let them get away with a hypothetical about how they would do it, or how it should be done. You need a specify story of how they really did it in the past. 3. For the most important thing or things from #2, ask them if they would give you a reference to discuss the story. The reference would be anyone that can first hand verify the story, anyone that was involved. That could be a boss, co-worker, direct report employee, vendor, or customer. You'll be amazed at how few people you interview can actually tell you stories as described in #2. It's truly an amazing way to separate the men from the boys. Before I started using this technique, I found myself liking most people I met. After using the technique, it totally changed my perspective on interviewing. I started disapproving of a lot more candidates than I did before. And I was surprised by how well some people did compared to how I expected them to do based on my first impression.
And with regard to memorizing pointless facts, people have been doing that forever (baseball statistics, for example, or trivia on cars).
It's not nice to insult people because of their hobbies and interests. You may find a more receptive audience insulting sci fi fans to one of those myriad hot chicks you're always dating.
Actually I thought there was some pretty cool places on Tatooine. Like those major cliffs and plateaus up in the center of the map around 0,0 for example.