Well, here's a solution: Let's just not trust anything the client says. Sanity-check everything. Make the game a dumb frontend that merely sends key signals and receives player/ammo coordinates. I know this is technically very much infeasible, but it is the only way.
This is basically how MMO's work. (Or at least, EVE) All character data is stored server side, and all transactions are encryped and verified by server. The client is simply a very pretty way to interact with the server database. Theres really no way to "Hack" it without flags going up everywhere server side. Any cheats in the game are simply using game mechanics in a way they are not intended, or that generate unexpected results. Those kinds of things have to be fixed in code.
The problem with this setup is it isn't the most responsive. Anyone who has played MMO's knows that lag is simply something that comes with the territory. When you've got a server side database trying to keep track of the interactions of 5,000+ players, plus tracking NPC's and such, you can see how it can get a little slow. This is not ideal for FPS-type gaming. You NEED the server to update your characters info instantaneously. Any delay, and you die.
However, this is why I prefer MMO to standard multiplayer online games. The hacking is pretty much nonexistant in comparison.
So what does "+++++++++++++1241241243124124124" mean to asian players? looks like a macro got stuck in text mode to me....
I was in the Lineage II OB, and the gratutious bot farming was completely gamebreaking. But Lineage's primary market is Asian. I doubt NCsoft gives a rats ass how Lineage II fares in North America. (Sure was the impression I got while playing)
[blockquote][i]What made everyone move from Nintendo, who then was number one, to the newcomer Sony? Final Fantasy 7. [/i][/blockquote]
I would agree with this. Especially as I bought a N64 at it's release in anticipation of FF7. (Square was still with Nintendo then) Then when Square moved to Sony, so did I.
However, I'm tired of buying $200 consoles for a handful of games at most. I'd rather upgrade my computer, something I use daily.
Here's why. Ease of use. You rent a game, put it in, and it plays.
Say someone rents Far Cry, and it doesn't run on install. He's going to want his money back, or help getting it running. What about patches? Should you provide them? PC games are way too much headache for a rental scheme.
I'm not going by any actual knowledge here, just thinking logically. Renting PC games would be a nightmare compared to console games. (on topic, I'm expect there's licensing for game and movie rentals anyway. I'm sure the MPAA gets more than $20 per DVD that's on the rental shelf)
It's actually not. The reason you can't show a DVD to 20 people is because it's a public perfromance, which is a copyright. If you bought 20 people thier own copy of a DVD and let each one watch it on his own TV they couldn't say boo. If this whole licensing thing relies on the strength of a personal use only clause in the EULA, then I hope the guy goes to court and wins.
Heres the thing, you buy 20 copies and give it to 20 people, it becomes their property. If you want to serve more customers, you need to buy more copies. He is buying 20 copies of the game, and setting them up for use by as many people as he can get to come in. It's closer to rental or public performance than it is to reselling the product. He never has to buy more copies to keep servicing his customers. The way he did it, it's a one time, finite cost, with theoretically infinite return. As long as people keep coming in, he makes more money without paying anything more.
You don't need a special license to profit from someone elses work. This is a really common misconception people have, and it's wrong. Copyright does not cover "every way someone can make money", it grants certain specific rights. You can profit off of someone elses work all you want as long as you don't violate any of those rights. For example, you don't need a special license to sell used books. In fact, you don't need a special license to sell books at all. All you have to do is buy books.
Same thing as above, to serve more customers, you have to buy more books. By purchasing retail copies and charging for their use, he can continue to service more and more customers without "restocking". You can't keep reselling the same stack of books ad infinitum.
Basically, the longer he goes on those retail copies he bought the more lucrative it is. Constantly increasing income on a static, one-time expenditure. (Other costs of upkeep non-withstanding)
This is a pretty unique aspect of computer program sales.
How is this any different from the rest of the entertainment industry? Making money off of public exhibitions will cost you extra. it's the same for music and movies.
Yes, everyone is playing legit copies. And if that was the end of it, then there would be no problem. The difference is that he is PROFITING from those copies.
I havn't read the Half Life EULA recently, but I wouldn't be suprised if the one with the retail box is for PERSONAL use. This is COMMERCIAL. In a legal sense, it's a world of difference. You can buy a DVD and watch it at home, but you can't show that same DVD in a theater and charge people per viewing. (not without paying extra to the studio) This is the same thing.
Agreed about Lineage. Horrific game. However, I played Guild Wars during the E3 event, and have beed active in the fan communities. It is basically a completely different situation, and a much better one at that. Judge by developer, not by publisher. Don't throw Arena Net under the bus just because they're associated with NCSoft. Arena Net is doing a great job. (Plue they're American so we're their primary market, unlike Lineage)
I don't have as much experience with CoH or Tabula Rasa to make assesments of them, but I will be open minded.
This also applies to well detailed movie universes-you don't have much space to create your own plotlines, or else you run into the movie. KotOR got around this by predating near anything done in that universe so far
This is exactly why SWG does not appeal to me. 99% of the people (including myself) who want to be a part of the star wars universe want to be a Jedi. (or Sith) Thats the big draw. Phenominal cosmic powers, bad-ass lightsaber, feared and respected by all. Most people don't want to play the part of a moisture farmer, or Imperial stormtrooper TK421. However, with the setting of SWG, (between ESB and RotJ) it puts the players in a period of the Star Wars canon where there are NOT hundreds of Jedi/Sith running around. If the game is remotely accurate, Jedi would be VERY rare, so most players would never get to be what they really want to be. However, if they give players what they want, they break with official canon. It's a no-win situation.
If Galaxies had been set in the time period of KotOR, then restrictions on Jedi would not be needed. Players would get what they want, and LucasArts won't have to break their established storyline to accommodate.
Basically, a very good example of a franchise painting itself into a corner by sticking too close to the original movie plots.
Ugh, I remember SODA. Lineage 2 was an okay game. The players is what made it horrible. I remember going into that dungeon near the end of Open Beta, and the only thing I saw were dozens of characters with names like LOVE2001, LOVE2002, LOVE2003, etc. and the local chat was filled with such memorable quotes as "++++++++++++++++++" and "123232323231232323"
Thats not the worst part. If you're unlucky enough to be in a room when a group of botters decide to set up shop, you get to experience how they "clear" a room to start their macros running. It usually involves spamming obscenities at you repeatedly until you leave, and can get to the point of them bringing in a group of high level char's to kill you off.
Needless to say, i did not pay for the retail product, and discourage all I know from wasting their time on it. People running these kinds of operations really make a game unplayable. Or at least so frustrating that noone in their right mind would pay monthly to put up with it.
No monthly fee. The retail will more than likely cost the standard $50. However, no monthly fee for a MMO type game is very nice. I'll buy expansions occasionally instead of paying monthly hoping for new content.
P.S. I'm playing the alpha as well, and I am amazed at the quality. Add some content and some interface features (trade for example) and I'd buy the game today. The engine and mechanics are solid already. They just have to flesh it out.
Given the difference in market share between consoles and PC games, are you suprised they focus on consoles? The only reason FFXI is on PC is because it's a MMO, and thats almost exclusively a PC market. Personally, I'm amazed they did it at all.
Heh, the thing with FF VIII, you can depend on those summons for almost the entire game. But not the whole thing. I did, and when I get to the final dungeon, and they are stripped from your characters, I was screwed. I restarted the game because of that.
Not saying that's good game design in any way. It was very frustrating. FF X kind of fixed it by making summons almost useless against bosses, so you couldn't develop such a dependancy on them.
It seems that only the shit titles see a price cut to attract otherwise uninterested customers.
We have a winnah!
Just like everything else, game companies charge what people are willing to pay. People are still willing to pay $50 for Halo, so it's price really hasn't dropped yet. (I've seen it for $39.99, no lower) Amazingly enough, less popular games are in the $19.99 Bargain bin.
Of course, this is only logical. If it doesn't sell at $50, drop it to $40 until it doesn't sell anymore. Drop to $30 and repeat ad nauseum.
I seriously doubt that piracy has had any real effect on game prices. (Or CD and DVD prices for that matter)
Reading this article, a lot of the new gameplay dynamics, (such as reduced travel time to meet with friends, persistent "hubs" that give access to instanced areas, and focus on group co-op missions) sounds a LOT like what Guild Wars is doing. Only this will be Sci Fi. Not that I'm complaining, it sounds like a lot of fun. Hopefully, this will be the new standard for MMO gameplay. Seems NCSoft is all over this too...
You can download it now and register a beta account. I run the game every couple of days to get any streaming content thats new. I suggest others do the same, so that way you're not fighting for bandwidth just to get to the login screen come May 12th.
It will be interesting to see if the servers can survive the thousands of players this early on. Supposedly, there have already been well over 10,000 copies of the client downloaded off Fileplanet. Add in copies distributed to friends, and copies from PC Gamer, theres going to be a LOT of people trying this out.
This is correct. You can be invited into a new area without buying the expansion, but you cannot initiate that mission yourself if you havn't purchased it. Very interesting idea.
Something else to keep in mind, it is PVP, but it's all consentual. If you don't want to PVP, don't enter a PVP map. PVP is different from traditional MMO's, in that normal missions only have the people you are grouped with in it. You can't be attacked by other players while crawling a dungeon, cuase it's instanced. Noone else is in the dungeon but your party. There are competitive PVP "missions" that pit willing contestants against each other in a variety of settings. (ladder, Free for all, King of the Hill, etc) It's an iteresting mix of persistant and instanced play styles.
They don't need to I think, everything seems built into the client. If it uses a P2P back-end, you wouldn't know it.
It's quite incredible, the installer is under 100kb. When launching for the first time, you download about 30 mb to get to the login screen. Over half of which is downloading in the background while you set up your account. Dunno how much more needs to be downloaded until we can login, but it is very quick and painless on a DSL connection.
I recommend downloading the client just to check out the engine. Even the login screen looks really nice. And to see something really cool, start resizing the window. Go ahead, it's not constrained to any particular aspect ratio at all. You can do whatever you want with the game window. I don't think there's a DirectX game out that can do that. Multi taskers rejoice!
Again, we're kind of getting away from the point. I was simply pointing out that the medium is not tied to a specific genre.
You may not agree with Speiglman's views or his portrayal of them. But that does not change the fact that the book is in a decidedly different genre from the mainstream of comics. Using animals to portray the characters is more akin to literary device than fantasy. The characters animal appearance is not to be taken literally. They are not talking mice and cats. They are people. The animal appearance is simply an abstraction. (and again, I am not saying anything about the correctness of his views, as that is not the issue. Just the methods he chooses to portray them.)
With the love triange in superman, it was never the focus of the plot, and the main character is still a superhero. In SiP, the characters are normal people. The emotional ties ARE the story. Not a sub plot to a superhero book. Theres a very big difference there, and nothing "Superhero and/or fantasy-like"
I admit, the example of the Sandman is a bit more ambiguous. However even if the character has powers that even gods fear, his actions are far from heroic. The character does not wield his power to defeat evil, save mankind, or any other ideal. He does as he sees fit, and aften in a way that is especially cruel. (condemning a former lover to 10,000 years in hell for spurning him, for example)The story of The Sandamn is ultimately a tragedy. With the main characters destruction brought about by his own actions and failures. Fantasy? Yes. Remotely the same genre as standard superhero fare? Hell no.
As for Alan Moore's The Watchmen, it is most definitely a superhero book. However it uses that genre to explore concepts that the mainstream would not touch with a 10 foot pole.
You also mention "comics and the impossible people that they show". Is this any different from books, movies, television, radio, music, and theatre in the impossible and fantastic characters and situations they depict? Again, me central point is that the medium of expression does not in any way dictate or limit what you can express with it. Games are no different. Good discussion! It definitely kept me sane at work.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. THEN it's a sport.
The problem with this setup is it isn't the most responsive. Anyone who has played MMO's knows that lag is simply something that comes with the territory. When you've got a server side database trying to keep track of the interactions of 5,000+ players, plus tracking NPC's and such, you can see how it can get a little slow. This is not ideal for FPS-type gaming. You NEED the server to update your characters info instantaneously. Any delay, and you die.
However, this is why I prefer MMO to standard multiplayer online games. The hacking is pretty much nonexistant in comparison.
So what does "+++++++++++++1241241243124124124" mean to asian players? looks like a macro got stuck in text mode to me....
I was in the Lineage II OB, and the gratutious bot farming was completely gamebreaking. But Lineage's primary market is Asian. I doubt NCsoft gives a rats ass how Lineage II fares in North America. (Sure was the impression I got while playing)
[blockquote][i]What made everyone move from Nintendo, who then was number one, to the newcomer Sony? Final Fantasy 7. [/i][/blockquote] I would agree with this. Especially as I bought a N64 at it's release in anticipation of FF7. (Square was still with Nintendo then) Then when Square moved to Sony, so did I.
However, I'm tired of buying $200 consoles for a handful of games at most. I'd rather upgrade my computer, something I use daily.
Here's why. Ease of use. You rent a game, put it in, and it plays.
Say someone rents Far Cry, and it doesn't run on install. He's going to want his money back, or help getting it running. What about patches? Should you provide them? PC games are way too much headache for a rental scheme.
I'm not going by any actual knowledge here, just thinking logically. Renting PC games would be a nightmare compared to console games.
(on topic, I'm expect there's licensing for game and movie rentals anyway. I'm sure the MPAA gets more than $20 per DVD that's on the rental shelf)
Same thing as above, to serve more customers, you have to buy more books. By purchasing retail copies and charging for their use, he can continue to service more and more customers without "restocking". You can't keep reselling the same stack of books ad infinitum.
Basically, the longer he goes on those retail copies he bought the more lucrative it is. Constantly increasing income on a static, one-time expenditure. (Other costs of upkeep non-withstanding)
I would actually consider getting a subscription if I could play as a Jawa. Hmm...
/me runs off shouting "Utini!"
Not saying it's right, but its not that unusual.
It was community made. Valve bought the rights to it. So they control licensing on it now.
Yes, everyone is playing legit copies. And if that was the end of it, then there would be no problem. The difference is that he is PROFITING from those copies.
I havn't read the Half Life EULA recently, but I wouldn't be suprised if the one with the retail box is for PERSONAL use. This is COMMERCIAL. In a legal sense, it's a world of difference. You can buy a DVD and watch it at home, but you can't show that same DVD in a theater and charge people per viewing. (not without paying extra to the studio) This is the same thing.
Agreed about Lineage. Horrific game. However, I played Guild Wars during the E3 event, and have beed active in the fan communities. It is basically a completely different situation, and a much better one at that. Judge by developer, not by publisher. Don't throw Arena Net under the bus just because they're associated with NCSoft. Arena Net is doing a great job. (Plue they're American so we're their primary market, unlike Lineage)
I don't have as much experience with CoH or Tabula Rasa to make assesments of them, but I will be open minded.
If Galaxies had been set in the time period of KotOR, then restrictions on Jedi would not be needed. Players would get what they want, and LucasArts won't have to break their established storyline to accommodate.
Basically, a very good example of a franchise painting itself into a corner by sticking too close to the original movie plots.
Ugh, I remember SODA. Lineage 2 was an okay game. The players is what made it horrible. I remember going into that dungeon near the end of Open Beta, and the only thing I saw were dozens of characters with names like LOVE2001, LOVE2002, LOVE2003, etc. and the local chat was filled with such memorable quotes as "++++++++++++++++++" and "123232323231232323"
Thats not the worst part. If you're unlucky enough to be in a room when a group of botters decide to set up shop, you get to experience how they "clear" a room to start their macros running. It usually involves spamming obscenities at you repeatedly until you leave, and can get to the point of them bringing in a group of high level char's to kill you off.
Needless to say, i did not pay for the retail product, and discourage all I know from wasting their time on it. People running these kinds of operations really make a game unplayable. Or at least so frustrating that noone in their right mind would pay monthly to put up with it.
The sad thing is, he's prolly getting paid to do that. Hell, I'd love to get paid to go to E3 and wave a sword around for a few minutes.
No monthly fee. The retail will more than likely cost the standard $50. However, no monthly fee for a MMO type game is very nice. I'll buy expansions occasionally instead of paying monthly hoping for new content.
P.S. I'm playing the alpha as well, and I am amazed at the quality. Add some content and some interface features (trade for example) and I'd buy the game today. The engine and mechanics are solid already. They just have to flesh it out.
Given the difference in market share between consoles and PC games, are you suprised they focus on consoles? The only reason FFXI is on PC is because it's a MMO, and thats almost exclusively a PC market. Personally, I'm amazed they did it at all.
Heh, the thing with FF VIII, you can depend on those summons for almost the entire game. But not the whole thing. I did, and when I get to the final dungeon, and they are stripped from your characters, I was screwed. I restarted the game because of that.
Not saying that's good game design in any way. It was very frustrating. FF X kind of fixed it by making summons almost useless against bosses, so you couldn't develop such a dependancy on them.
Oh God, I can't take the irony! It's too rediculous to not be a joke!
*BZZT*
Kettle? This is Pot, over!
*BZZT*
Just like everything else, game companies charge what people are willing to pay. People are still willing to pay $50 for Halo, so it's price really hasn't dropped yet. (I've seen it for $39.99, no lower) Amazingly enough, less popular games are in the $19.99 Bargain bin.
Of course, this is only logical. If it doesn't sell at $50, drop it to $40 until it doesn't sell anymore. Drop to $30 and repeat ad nauseum.
I seriously doubt that piracy has had any real effect on game prices. (Or CD and DVD prices for that matter)
Reading this article, a lot of the new gameplay dynamics, (such as reduced travel time to meet with friends, persistent "hubs" that give access to instanced areas, and focus on group co-op missions) sounds a LOT like what Guild Wars is doing. Only this will be Sci Fi. Not that I'm complaining, it sounds like a lot of fun. Hopefully, this will be the new standard for MMO gameplay. Seems NCSoft is all over this too...
sorry, didn't mean to call it Beta. You can register for the E3 event now.
You can download it now and register a beta account. I run the game every couple of days to get any streaming content thats new. I suggest others do the same, so that way you're not fighting for bandwidth just to get to the login screen come May 12th.
It will be interesting to see if the servers can survive the thousands of players this early on. Supposedly, there have already been well over 10,000 copies of the client downloaded off Fileplanet. Add in copies distributed to friends, and copies from PC Gamer, theres going to be a LOT of people trying this out.
This is correct. You can be invited into a new area without buying the expansion, but you cannot initiate that mission yourself if you havn't purchased it. Very interesting idea.
Something else to keep in mind, it is PVP, but it's all consentual. If you don't want to PVP, don't enter a PVP map. PVP is different from traditional MMO's, in that normal missions only have the people you are grouped with in it. You can't be attacked by other players while crawling a dungeon, cuase it's instanced. Noone else is in the dungeon but your party. There are competitive PVP "missions" that pit willing contestants against each other in a variety of settings. (ladder, Free for all, King of the Hill, etc) It's an iteresting mix of persistant and instanced play styles.
They don't need to I think, everything seems built into the client. If it uses a P2P back-end, you wouldn't know it.
It's quite incredible, the installer is under 100kb. When launching for the first time, you download about 30 mb to get to the login screen. Over half of which is downloading in the background while you set up your account. Dunno how much more needs to be downloaded until we can login, but it is very quick and painless on a DSL connection.
I recommend downloading the client just to check out the engine. Even the login screen looks really nice. And to see something really cool, start resizing the window. Go ahead, it's not constrained to any particular aspect ratio at all. You can do whatever you want with the game window. I don't think there's a DirectX game out that can do that. Multi taskers rejoice!
Again, we're kind of getting away from the point. I was simply pointing out that the medium is not tied to a specific genre.
:)
You may not agree with Speiglman's views or his portrayal of them. But that does not change the fact that the book is in a decidedly different genre from the mainstream of comics. Using animals to portray the characters is more akin to literary device than fantasy. The characters animal appearance is not to be taken literally. They are not talking mice and cats. They are people. The animal appearance is simply an abstraction. (and again, I am not saying anything about the correctness of his views, as that is not the issue. Just the methods he chooses to portray them.)
With the love triange in superman, it was never the focus of the plot, and the main character is still a superhero. In SiP, the characters are normal people. The emotional ties ARE the story. Not a sub plot to a superhero book. Theres a very big difference there, and nothing "Superhero and/or fantasy-like"
I admit, the example of the Sandman is a bit more ambiguous. However even if the character has powers that even gods fear, his actions are far from heroic. The character does not wield his power to defeat evil, save mankind, or any other ideal. He does as he sees fit, and aften in a way that is especially cruel. (condemning a former lover to 10,000 years in hell for spurning him, for example)The story of The Sandamn is ultimately a tragedy. With the main characters destruction brought about by his own actions and failures. Fantasy? Yes. Remotely the same genre as standard superhero fare? Hell no.
As for Alan Moore's The Watchmen, it is most definitely a superhero book. However it uses that genre to explore concepts that the mainstream would not touch with a 10 foot pole.
You also mention "comics and the impossible people that they show". Is this any different from books, movies, television, radio, music, and theatre in the impossible and fantastic characters and situations they depict? Again, me central point is that the medium of expression does not in any way dictate or limit what you can express with it. Games are no different. Good discussion! It definitely kept me sane at work.