I think this shows that fundamentally Star Wars Galaxies design is flawed. If a year of bug fixes doesn't make the game more fun, the bugs weren't the main problem. Just look at the core design decisions that have messed up how the game can be played. 1. Setting - Galactic Civil war during the middle of the OT. This basically means that you have to limit Jedi, can't have any quests, mob kills, or loot that have far reaching consequences because it would interefere with the continuity. The devs just painted themselves into a corner where the power of the players had to be artificially kept low Contrast this with the popular KOTOR which the devs had pretty much free reign. Want hundreds of Jedi running around? sure. Want a homicidal assassin droid? okay. Want to kill the dark lord of the sith? It's Cool. 2. Economy - Pure player driven Players are by their nature greedy, People want new, useful, shiney things, just look at the successful camp-n-loot gameplay of EQ. Well the pure player economy means that adventurers have to focus on cash missions rather than exploration. What incentive do you have to explore if you don't get a reward, and infact you are penalized, since those who are just running baz nitch money missions are driving up prices. Finally the devs understood and included more useful loot drops. I think they are slowly getting to balancing loot-vs-player. 3. Character Development - pure skill based Major balancing headaches. A pure class driven structure makes balancing so much easier, since you can have very specific roles. We are still looking at balancing issues a year later in SWG. It used to be the uber creature handlers walking around with 3 rancors within a day. Then it was the pistoleers able to waste people with ultra fast guns, then there were 1 shot kill rifle men, and then there have always been the pvp medics. What makes it so hard is there are so many combinations, and you can't make 1 combination significantly worse/better than another. 4. Size of the Universe - HUGE I remember the devs bragged that the universe would be several times the size of EQ and RoK expansion together. Of course, they forgot to mention it would have half the content. They basically decreased the density of "interesting" stuff. So instead of 5 minutes between an interesting dungeon, or camp like in EQ, it was a 20 minute boring run where you would see nothing. Vehicles have definately helped, since you get the sense of size along with being able to get from point A to point B quickly. But all the content still feels diffuse. 5. Combat - Typcial RPG Style It just breaks down the "feel" of Star Wars. I don't remember a Stormtrooper running up 2 feet from Luke and both of them standing there for a few minutes taking shots at each other (including several hits). In the movies they had long gun battles, it was just because people were dodging, running around, taking cover not because they had huge amount of hitpoints. I had hoped SWG would have created an innovative way capturing the feel of battling with blasters, but they didn't. Like I said, to me the game design is inherently flawed. I think that is why they are focusing on the JtL expansion. Because it will be their way of breaking away from the contraints of their original decisions. If it works out I think we will see a focus on the space aspects of SWG, probably to the detriment of the land based RPG game that is being played now.
Re:Semi-serious?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 4, Funny
There never was a Job. Maybe Job just got outsourced?
Bart: Videogames! Whaddya got? [grabs a videogame off the shelf, and reads the title] "Billy Graham's Bible Blaster?"
Rod: Keep firing; convert the heathens!
Bart: Got him!
Rod: No, you just winged him and made him a Unitarian.
Todd: Look out, Bart! A gentle Baha'i!
Bart: All right! Full conversion! Thanks guys, this really cheered me up.
Video: Second Coming! Reload, reload!
Re:There's plenty of religion
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 3, Funny
The voice of God booms, "Headshot"
Re:All I know I learned from Civ2.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
I just hate it when those infidel pikemen take down my holy tanks:(
Sports = Mostly Physical
on
Is Math A Sport?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The philosopher Bernard Suits defines a sport as a game that meets the following four criteria: "(1) that the game be a game of skill; (2) that the skill be physical; (3) that the game have a wide following; and (4) that the following achieve a certain level of stability." "Maybe one should take 2) to mean "at least one of the skills relevant to the game is physical."
I think that falls short of the definition of sports, it should be the skills are primarily physical. Which includes things such as ballroom dancing, figure skating, but rules out math, bridge, or just adding a short running component to solving math problems. Boxing columnist R. Michael Onello says "boxing is 70 percent mental" I disagree with this, the difference between Boxer A and Boxer B can be 70% mental, but that doesn't mean the sport is 70% mental. Once you push the human body to its physical limits (which all top athletes do) the difference from athlete to athlete is mostly mental. For example if you look at 40m times for football wide receivers there isn't much differece, like.1 or.2 seconds. That is one of the primary physical requirement, if you are too slow, no amount of mental skill can help you. So if everybody is running a 4.5s 40m, what makes one much better than another? The mental part, reading defenses, knowing their route against a given defense, running precise routes. The game is physical, the difference maker is mental.
Only 614 of the nearly 7 million existing patents have been revoked Only about 3,750,000 actually could have been reviewed. This is the number of patents since 1964 (1981 was first year they could be reviewed and so anything before 64 would have expired). Also, how many actual disputes are there? There are many really crazy patents so these never get challenged. There are patents that are too ahead of their time so they expire before anybody needs them. Then you have the "my patent stack is bigger than yours" where its easier to threaten counterclaim than to invalidate a patent Even when prior art is presented, re-exams are rare. The patent office held only 6,136 between the time the agency was authorized to do so in July 1981 and the end of March 2004, The important question is how many times prior art has been presented vs how many times was there an overturn. I think that would give us a better indication of how well the review process works. If people/companies think its too expensive to find prior art, thats a business decision not a problem with the patent system.
$15 dollars a month isn't that much for me, I just look at what I could have spent that entertainment money on, and to me its a bargain. For $15 I can get one of the following: 2 Movie tickets 3 McDonald's Value Meals 4 Starbucks Lattes 4 drinks at the bar 1 trip to the ballgame 7 energy drinks .3 rounds of golf 1 day of paintball 1 stage play 1 CD 5 CCG booster packs I get more enjoyment from the 40-60 hours a month I play an MMORPG than I would from any of those other things. YMMV
There are many games that fall outside of the four factors. Myst, Far Cry, Baldur's Gate, Splinter Cell. They don't have customization, open source, or anything breakthrough like you list; They just executed an existing genre really well. Myst was just an adventure puzzle game, with [at the time] mindblowing graphics, and really well executed puzzles. Far Cry is just an FPS with mindblowing graphics and really good physics. The story, the multiplayer, even the gameplay is pretty good, nothing terribly special. Splinter Cell is a good stealth shooter with good gameplay but not spectacular, once again graphics and level design make the game. Baldur's Gate series was just a great story, mediocre graphics, average gameplay On the flip side there are games that have one or more of the four things you list, but aren't great (there are no sure homeruns) because they executed poorly. Tons of me-too RTS that have dynamic campaigns, lots of sucky editable FPS, and even more badly made "controversial" games. The only one that I think does make for a successful game is number 3, but often that is more something that happens as a result of a good game. It doesn't matter how much a dev supports the gaming community if the game is bad. I think the items you list can take a good game and make it a great game, ie Neverwinter Nights, or take a great game and make it genre defining. But none of those things really "make" the game either.
I quit about 4 months into the game out of boredom. I put up with server crashes (Eclipse was notoriously down), broken recipes, broken quests, broken everything, then just got bored. The little Star Wars Galaxies is still on my desktop, and I still pay the monthly fee. Every month or so I log back in, say hi to my fellow guild mates (probably the main reason I even try playing). I enjoy the game for a few hours, checking "all the new content" finish the content in a few days, and run into the same boredom that made me leave before. It's really difficult to admit, because I wanted to love this game so much, but the whole structure just feels so flawed. All the fixes really haven't enhanced my gameplay experience. It wasn't the bugs that brought the game down, lots of people put up with them, it was the whole design of the game that makes it boring. SWG really had a chance to be huge, they haven't had new high profile competition. That is coming in WoW and EQ2. If the Lightspeed expansion doesn't work out, then I doubt it will ever become anything other than a mediocre also-ran MMORPG.
Check out Charlie Adler's resume: Fallout, Earthworm Jim, Monkey Island, GI Joe, Transformers, Rugrats, Tiny Toons, smurfs, Planescape, etc. I'm sure when he talks people say "I know your voice from somewhere
Actually I liked all the voices in Grim Fandango, but the main character Manny was one of the best performances I've heard from a computer game voice actor.
Maybe have the hookers putting on those slap bracelets (j/k), man "I Love the 90s does bring back memories". Actually thats one of the reasons I enjoyed Vice City so much, I was young but remembered Miami Vice, the 80s Music, and later on I saw Scarface. VC was such a great satirical reflection of the 80s, so you had great open gameplay plus a nostalgic setting. I hope they do as good a job with the 90s.
I just got a new monitor to replace the old one I had that went out of focus (and caused me headaches when reading/.). Now do I take it to Office Depot for evironmentally friendly recycling, or Plan A, which was take it out to the desert and bash the hell out of it. Maybe this is a response from HP to prevent cruelty to laser printers ala Office Space.
Kay also decries what he sees as a fundamental failing of the web--it is primarily an environment for displaying information, not for authoring it He is right the internet is just a great distribution system for information. FTP/Gopher/P2P/WWW are all means for one computer to exchange information. But with this has come new methods of creativity, such as wide spread adoption of Open Source (new method of collaboration) and distributed computing (new method of data analysis). If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they would seek to create computer models of their companies and constantly simulate potential changes. People are using computers to simulate pretty much everything. Car crashes,investments, city traffic, call center wait times, economies, effectiveness of medicine, buildings, weather, new materials, foot traffic & queue times at retail centers, shoes, etc.
V-E day was May 8, 1945; the successful test of atomic bomb was July 6, 1945. Unfortunately the time machine project hasn't been completed so we could drop the atomic bomb on Germany first. If you look at the destruction of the firebombings of Dresden and Hamburg, you would know the goverment wouldn't have had a problem dropping the atomic bomb there.
In a related note:
Washington - Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a warning about a possible Al-Queda threat involving biological weapons from Antartica. "Although we have no specific information about time, place, or means; we are issuing this warning because of CIA reports regarding increased "communications chatter" of such a plot"
Just playing devil's advocate I think what he is saying is that open source has a free (As in beer) workforce. Many of the contributers to open source have professional software jobs by day, and do open source by night. If open source replaces commercial CSS, then what happens to people's day job? Open source doesn't pay the bills. Taken to the extreme, if there is no commercial software, you remove a level of paying software jobs. Nobody would get paid to create programs, just by individual companies for customization. Widespread adoption of OSS will be a boon to the world. Just like any disruptive idea, it will cause problems, unemployement, etc; but overall it will help humanity and the spread of information.
mod parent up! You can't replace the specialized knowledge of PhDs with anything else. If there really was a shortage of PhDs and huge need for more, the salaries would be much higher. I have a BS degree and work in process development. Half of my department is PhDs, but their skills are underutilized. Theoretical work takes you to a certain point, then comes more practical application. Many of the PhDs I work with are unhappy since they are involved more in simple troubleshooting activities, than truely creative and more specialized research. I would suspect many PhDs are underemployed, and not getting full use of their very specialized skills.
Zine does not directly blame cyber games for the violence but rather youth gangs that congregate in such places without proper supervision. Amazing when cyber cafe's become stomping grounds for youth gangs. The s0uth$ide Athl0nZ getting violent with the e@st$ide SC$Izz
Slashdot Mirror
I think this shows that fundamentally Star Wars Galaxies design is flawed. If a year of bug fixes doesn't make the game more fun, the bugs weren't the main problem. Just look at the core design decisions that have messed up how the game can be played.
1. Setting - Galactic Civil war during the middle of the OT.
This basically means that you have to limit Jedi, can't have any quests, mob kills, or loot that have far reaching consequences because it would interefere with the continuity. The devs just painted themselves into a corner where the power of the players had to be artificially kept low
Contrast this with the popular KOTOR which the devs had pretty much free reign. Want hundreds of Jedi running around? sure. Want a homicidal assassin droid? okay. Want to kill the dark lord of the sith? It's Cool.
2. Economy - Pure player driven
Players are by their nature greedy, People want new, useful, shiney things, just look at the successful camp-n-loot gameplay of EQ. Well the pure player economy means that adventurers have to focus on cash missions rather than exploration. What incentive do you have to explore if you don't get a reward, and infact you are penalized, since those who are just running baz nitch money missions are driving up prices. Finally the devs understood and included more useful loot drops. I think they are slowly getting to balancing loot-vs-player.
3. Character Development - pure skill based
Major balancing headaches. A pure class driven structure makes balancing so much easier, since you can have very specific roles. We are still looking at balancing issues a year later in SWG. It used to be the uber creature handlers walking around with 3 rancors within a day. Then it was the pistoleers able to waste people with ultra fast guns, then there were 1 shot kill rifle men, and then there have always been the pvp medics. What makes it so hard is there are so many combinations, and you can't make 1 combination significantly worse/better than another.
4. Size of the Universe - HUGE
I remember the devs bragged that the universe would be several times the size of EQ and RoK expansion together. Of course, they forgot to mention it would have half the content. They basically decreased the density of "interesting" stuff. So instead of 5 minutes between an interesting dungeon, or camp like in EQ, it was a 20 minute boring run where you would see nothing. Vehicles have definately helped, since you get the sense of size along with being able to get from point A to point B quickly. But all the content still feels diffuse.
5. Combat - Typcial RPG Style
It just breaks down the "feel" of Star Wars. I don't remember a Stormtrooper running up 2 feet from Luke and both of them standing there for a few minutes taking shots at each other (including several hits). In the movies they had long gun battles, it was just because people were dodging, running around, taking cover not because they had huge amount of hitpoints. I had hoped SWG would have created an innovative way capturing the feel of battling with blasters, but they didn't.
Like I said, to me the game design is inherently flawed. I think that is why they are focusing on the JtL expansion. Because it will be their way of breaking away from the contraints of their original decisions. If it works out I think we will see a focus on the space aspects of SWG, probably to the detriment of the land based RPG game that is being played now.
There never was a Job.
Maybe Job just got outsourced?
Bart: Videogames! Whaddya got? [grabs a videogame off the shelf, and reads the title] "Billy Graham's Bible Blaster?"
Rod: Keep firing; convert the heathens!
Bart: Got him!
Rod: No, you just winged him and made him a Unitarian.
Todd: Look out, Bart! A gentle Baha'i!
Bart: All right! Full conversion! Thanks guys, this really cheered me up.
Video: Second Coming! Reload, reload!
The voice of God booms, "Headshot"
I just hate it when those infidel pikemen take down my holy tanks :(
The philosopher Bernard Suits defines a sport as a game that meets the following four criteria: "(1) that the game be a game of skill; (2) that the skill be physical; (3) that the game have a wide following; and (4) that the following achieve a certain level of stability." .1 or .2 seconds. That is one of the primary physical requirement, if you are too slow, no amount of mental skill can help you. So if everybody is running a 4.5s 40m, what makes one much better than another? The mental part, reading defenses, knowing their route against a given defense, running precise routes. The game is physical, the difference maker is mental.
"Maybe one should take 2) to mean "at least one of the skills relevant to the game is physical."
I think that falls short of the definition of sports, it should be the skills are primarily physical. Which includes things such as ballroom dancing, figure skating, but rules out math, bridge, or just adding a short running component to solving math problems.
Boxing columnist R. Michael Onello says "boxing is 70 percent mental"
I disagree with this, the difference between Boxer A and Boxer B can be 70% mental, but that doesn't mean the sport is 70% mental. Once you push the human body to its physical limits (which all top athletes do) the difference from athlete to athlete is mostly mental.
For example if you look at 40m times for football wide receivers there isn't much differece, like
I loved that game. It taught kids to "Say No To Drugs" by gunning down everybody.
Only 614 of the nearly 7 million existing patents have been revoked
Only about 3,750,000 actually could have been reviewed. This is the number of patents since 1964 (1981 was first year they could be reviewed and so anything before 64 would have expired).
Also, how many actual disputes are there?
There are many really crazy patents so these never get challenged.
There are patents that are too ahead of their time so they expire before anybody needs them.
Then you have the "my patent stack is bigger than yours" where its easier to threaten counterclaim than to invalidate a patent
Even when prior art is presented, re-exams are rare. The patent office held only 6,136 between the time the agency was authorized to do so in July 1981 and the end of March 2004,
The important question is how many times prior art has been presented vs how many times was there an overturn. I think that would give us a better indication of how well the review process works. If people/companies think its too expensive to find prior art, thats a business decision not a problem with the patent system.
why does he need to have an addictive personality, maybe he is having fun.
$15 dollars a month isn't that much for me, I just look at what I could have spent that entertainment money on, and to me its a bargain.
For $15 I can get one of the following:
2 Movie tickets
3 McDonald's Value Meals
4 Starbucks Lattes
4 drinks at the bar
1 trip to the ballgame
7 energy drinks
.3 rounds of golf
1 day of paintball
1 stage play
1 CD
5 CCG booster packs
I get more enjoyment from the 40-60 hours a month I play an MMORPG than I would from any of those other things. YMMV
Density affect on the speed of sound in different mediums different materials
There are many games that fall outside of the four factors.
Myst, Far Cry, Baldur's Gate, Splinter Cell. They don't have customization, open source, or anything breakthrough like you list; They just executed an existing genre really well.
Myst was just an adventure puzzle game, with [at the time] mindblowing graphics, and really well executed puzzles.
Far Cry is just an FPS with mindblowing graphics and really good physics. The story, the multiplayer, even the gameplay is pretty good, nothing terribly special.
Splinter Cell is a good stealth shooter with good gameplay but not spectacular, once again graphics and level design make the game.
Baldur's Gate series was just a great story, mediocre graphics, average gameplay
On the flip side there are games that have one or more of the four things you list, but aren't great (there are no sure homeruns) because they executed poorly. Tons of me-too RTS that have dynamic campaigns, lots of sucky editable FPS, and even more badly made "controversial" games.
The only one that I think does make for a successful game is number 3, but often that is more something that happens as a result of a good game. It doesn't matter how much a dev supports the gaming community if the game is bad.
I think the items you list can take a good game and make it a great game, ie Neverwinter Nights, or take a great game and make it genre defining. But none of those things really "make" the game either.
I quit about 4 months into the game out of boredom. I put up with server crashes (Eclipse was notoriously down), broken recipes, broken quests, broken everything, then just got bored. The little Star Wars Galaxies is still on my desktop, and I still pay the monthly fee. Every month or so I log back in, say hi to my fellow guild mates (probably the main reason I even try playing). I enjoy the game for a few hours, checking "all the new content" finish the content in a few days, and run into the same boredom that made me leave before.
It's really difficult to admit, because I wanted to love this game so much, but the whole structure just feels so flawed. All the fixes really haven't enhanced my gameplay experience. It wasn't the bugs that brought the game down, lots of people put up with them, it was the whole design of the game that makes it boring.
SWG really had a chance to be huge, they haven't had new high profile competition. That is coming in WoW and EQ2. If the Lightspeed expansion doesn't work out, then I doubt it will ever become anything other than a mediocre also-ran MMORPG.
Check out Charlie Adler's resume:
Fallout, Earthworm Jim, Monkey Island, GI Joe, Transformers, Rugrats, Tiny Toons, smurfs, Planescape, etc.
I'm sure when he talks people say "I know your voice from somewhere
Actually I liked all the voices in Grim Fandango, but the main character Manny was one of the best performances I've heard from a computer game voice actor.
Its an old monitor, I tried degauss several times. I was thinking of the next step which is de-stroy.
Maybe have the hookers putting on those slap bracelets (j/k), man "I Love the 90s does bring back memories".
Actually thats one of the reasons I enjoyed Vice City so much, I was young but remembered Miami Vice, the 80s Music, and later on I saw Scarface. VC was such a great satirical reflection of the 80s, so you had great open gameplay plus a nostalgic setting. I hope they do as good a job with the 90s.
I just got a new monitor to replace the old one I had that went out of focus (and caused me headaches when reading /.).
Now do I take it to Office Depot for evironmentally friendly recycling, or Plan A, which was take it out to the desert and bash the hell out of it.
Maybe this is a response from HP to prevent cruelty to laser printers ala Office Space.
Kay also decries what he sees as a fundamental failing of the web--it is primarily an environment for displaying information, not for authoring it
He is right the internet is just a great distribution system for information. FTP/Gopher/P2P/WWW are all means for one computer to exchange information. But with this has come new methods of creativity, such as wide spread adoption of Open Source (new method of collaboration) and distributed computing (new method of data analysis).
If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they would seek to create computer models of their companies and constantly simulate potential changes.
People are using computers to simulate pretty much everything. Car crashes,investments, city traffic, call center wait times, economies, effectiveness of medicine, buildings, weather, new materials, foot traffic & queue times at retail centers, shoes, etc.
V-E day was May 8, 1945; the successful test of atomic bomb was July 6, 1945. Unfortunately the time machine project hasn't been completed so we could drop the atomic bomb on Germany first.
If you look at the destruction of the firebombings of Dresden and Hamburg, you would know the goverment wouldn't have had a problem dropping the atomic bomb there.
In a related note:
Washington - Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a warning about a possible Al-Queda threat involving biological weapons from Antartica. "Although we have no specific information about time, place, or means; we are issuing this warning because of CIA reports regarding increased "communications chatter" of such a plot"
Its more like buying a house and paying your dues to the homeowners association to maintain the hedges and keeping the community park clean.
Just playing devil's advocate
I think what he is saying is that open source has a free (As in beer) workforce. Many of the contributers to open source have professional software jobs by day, and do open source by night. If open source replaces commercial CSS, then what happens to people's day job? Open source doesn't pay the bills.
Taken to the extreme, if there is no commercial software, you remove a level of paying software jobs. Nobody would get paid to create programs, just by individual companies for customization.
Widespread adoption of OSS will be a boon to the world. Just like any disruptive idea, it will cause problems, unemployement, etc; but overall it will help humanity and the spread of information.
mod parent up!
You can't replace the specialized knowledge of PhDs with anything else. If there really was a shortage of PhDs and huge need for more, the salaries would be much higher.
I have a BS degree and work in process development. Half of my department is PhDs, but their skills are underutilized. Theoretical work takes you to a certain point, then comes more practical application. Many of the PhDs I work with are unhappy since they are involved more in simple troubleshooting activities, than truely creative and more specialized research.
I would suspect many PhDs are underemployed, and not getting full use of their very specialized skills.
Zine does not directly blame cyber games for the violence but rather youth gangs that congregate in such places without proper supervision.
Amazing when cyber cafe's become stomping grounds for youth gangs. The s0uth$ide Athl0nZ getting violent with the e@st$ide SC$Izz