I had a coworker who's computer would reboot anytime the table it was on was even slightly jarred. We'd wait until he was doing his programming homework, get good and involved, walk by, and bump into the PC. Oops, reboot!
Another one was something I did. I was just learning how to build PCs, and this was back before the PSU connectors could only fit one way. Anyway, there were four wires you had to wire from the PSU to the case on/off switch. I got them in some sort of bad order, because from then on, anytime you plugged that PC in, and tried to switch it on, it'd reset the breaker for the whole electrical circuit. It took my a couple of tries to realize it wasn't a coincidence that everytime I hit the power button, all the lights went off. What's worse, is this happened to be on the same circuit as the CRC server room.
The upshot is, that socket shouldn't have been on the same circuit, and they fixed that right quick!
I guess it depends on the context. If I heard a noise in the woods, after investigating it and finding nothing, I might assume the next time it's just some animal nosing around for food.
I agree with hearing a shot and then going into cover. For a while, a lot of games would have AI such that the enemy didn't even notice his buddy just dropped. Then they noticed, but did something stupid like stood over the corpse, held perfectly still, and gaped. Again, depending on the context, this might be appropriate. If you're shooting civilians, the shock and lack of training might cause them to do that. Trained soldiers, on the other hand, should have a different response.
Some of that is a balance and playability issue, though. If the first person you shoot sends the whole area you're in into an alert state so high you can't really do anything else without getting killed, that game won't be very much fun.
One could also argue that Splinter Cell is played from a third person perspective, whereas Rainbow 6 and Ghost Recon are first person shooters.
The whole point of FPSs are to be more immersive, to make it seem like you're the person behind that gun showed on screen.
Thus, Splinter Cell plays more like a game, while the other two play more like it's really you. Perhaps that has some impact on the ratings?
A lot of games fake AI by making the computer controlled whatevers omniscient. They know when you're about to turn that corner, and are waiting for you. They know you're hiding in the bushes waiting for them. They never make a mistake, and they do it right every time, all day long.
To me, it would be more interesting to play against things with artificial stupidity. Not of the sort where they just stare at a wall while you're beating them silly from behind, but I don't want them to be omniscient. I want to be able to sneak up on them. I want to be able to lay poised to strike for them to make some sort of mistake, and then I want to be able to capitalize on it.
I want them learning from their mistakes, yes, but also learning bad habits from perceived mistakes. For example, if they hear a noise and come investigate, but find nothing since I've managed to hide quickly enough, I want the next noise to not concern them as much. Things like that would make a more beliveable opposition.
To be fair, games are starting to evolve this way, I just hope the goal isn't only to make games more challenging, but more believable as well.
A lot of these articles tout the energy savings between CRT and LCD. How much does this save you, though?
Even at what I'm thinking is a generous guess of $5 a month in saved energy costs, it could take you up to four years to break even on the cost difference between CRTs and LCDs.
Are these kinds of points in there just so someone can justify buying a new toy with some practical reasons?
The EULA gives two options. I was commenting that one of the options is not valid 99% of the time.
If they give me two options, I expect both options to be valid.
Re:The right to refuse + doctrine of first sale
on
The Basics of EULAs
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· Score: 1
I could believe that, but most MMORPGs aren't an online game that you sign up to play before you buy. You walk into a store, plop down $50 for the game. Then you get home, install it, and then sign up, specifying your demographics and credit card #.
I dunno, though. What happens if an entire clan that is huge decides to hop servers? They all hop to my smoothly running medium pop server, and all the sudden, my server is crashing and making me wait in line to play.
I'm not being selfish here, I'm just advocating that they carefully manage any moves so that it doesn't just move the problem to another server instead of solving the problem.
I'm just tossing this out there, but maybe it has to due with games featuring a prominate logo and the words Ferrari? You're then using their logo.
Some games take the non licensed path, and build a car that looks like a Ferrari, but they call it some made up name. GTA, for example, does this.
So using its likeness, or one very similar, seems to be okay, but you just can't call it a Ferrari.
I really don't know, but it's an interesting point.
This is a very interesting point. When I sign a contract, the terms that both parties agreed to are pretty much set in stone. They can't update the contract, and then force me to sign it. If there's not something in the new contract that piques my interest, I can say "Nope, I like the original contract better." And under the terms of the contract, they have to continue giving me what the original contract specified for as long as I continue my end.
Why, after a change in a MMORPG EULA, isn't there a button that says "No thanks, I'll stick to the original terms."?
I guess a lot of depends on the EULA. If it's made to come up everytime you play the game, the length of the contract could be worded to be for "one play session". In which case you have to sign a new contract each time you play the game again.
WoW isn't like this, it only comes up when it changes. But I guess somewhere buried in there is something that says this contract is binding until we change it, at which point you must agree all over again.
Re:Online worlds should implement escrows, not gri
on
The Basics of EULAs
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· Score: 1
The problem with that is that as soon as the company acknowledges the real world value of an item by allowing its sale, and even participating in the sale itself, they are liable to changes.
If I have a +5 Sword of Decapitation, and Blizzard realizes it's too powerful, they can't nerf it to balance the game. If they change it to a +2 Sword of Decapitation, then I have a right to sue them because I paid $200 for this sword through their escrow service, and after the transaction took place, they degraded my item.
It's like a car dealership selling you a car, and then coming by your house one night and replacing the 17" aluminum alloy wheels with 15" steel wheels with KMart hubcaps.
So now they can no longer balance the game.
There are other issues at stake as well. I want to play the game, but I don't want to spend an extra $200 a month on it. I want to be able to get the items via in game methods. And as soon as it becomes easy to sell that +5 Sword of Decapitation to the highest bidder for real money, who's going to sell it for in game money anymore?
What you're proposing is an interesting business model, but the game has to be planned that way from the beginning, and players have to know it's going to work that way. There's at least one out, or coming up, that does work sort of like that. Instead of players selling, though, it's the company itself. The game is free, except if you want the cool items, you pay the company directly for them.
I'm a little bit confused. If you can't stand playing the game for hours... then why did you buy it? Why go through the effort to develop a bot to play something for you, when you don't even like playing it yourself?
A lot easier to just uninstall it and call it a day.
Try taking your copy back and getting a refund from the place of purchase. Maybe WalMart would do it, but that's probably the only place and even then, it's iffy. No one takes back opened software anymore. And of the places that used to (specialized game stores, such as Electronics Boutique), even when they would refund money on opened games, they never would for MMORPGs due to them not knowing if you were still using the key online (I tried it with UO).
I think the problem now is gaming is more mainstream. Back then, the only gamers were the nerdier type, who could use their imaginations to pretend they were playing as any team the wanted to be. You just picked a team that had similar colors, and wham, you're now the Red Sox.
These days, it seems the market is much more geared towards the more casual players with short attention spans. Everything has to be spelled out explicitly for them.
Some of this is also probably related to technology. Back then, it wasn't worth it to license player names because the technology didn't exist to distinguish players anyway. You get 32 pixels to make a player, they're all gonna pretty much look the same.
I don't recall my level, but my mistake was grouping with people I'd never grouped with before, and we went somewhere new. It went okay at first, but then we turned a corner, and were swarmed.
It's not that I wasn't paying attention, it was that I was taking a chance, exploring somewhere new, with people I didn't know.
Sure, you could say that was stupid, but that's what I like about WoW. I can group with complete strangers and take a chance on making new friends, go to a completely new place together, and if the crap hits the fan, the only penalty is a relatively low equipment repair cost and a run back to my corpse (which is shown on the map).
Okay, bad pun. But since there are so many people giving their opinions here, I figured I'd share mine.
First, to temper this, I'll go ahead and admit that I'm an old school MUD addict. I got introduced to MUDs by a friend, and was quickly consumed.
So, at some point I heard about Everquest. I got into the beta, and was completely amazed. It was a MUD game design, but with graphics and sound! I got through the beta, and bought the release version, but eventually quit. I hated having to blindly hunt for my corpse (or beg a bard for help) upon dying. I hated the slow leveling up period. I just wasn't getting enough for what I was investing in it.
Since then, I've tried a few others including City of Heroes and SWG. They've all had similar problems, though.
My biggest problem with SWG is how much time investment they required. For example, I wanted to go the route of a crafter. I got into at first, with the goal of getting machines to do my resource gathering for me, with the end goal of having my own shops and stuff like that.
But then I found out, you still have to spend a lot of time maintaining this crap. I can't go away from a week and come back with a pile of doodads made for me. Maybe it's a balance thing, but I want the game to be there at my demand, not the game demand me to be there at its demand. So I scrapped it.
CoH was actually very close to what I was looking for. I liked the quest/mission structure, and the pace of the game was good. But there was still a death penalty. Not a horrible one compared to some other games, but at one point, I just got too frustrated. Why do I have to repeat all these kills to get rid of this XP debt, just because I made one misstep? Death penalties make me feel like I'm punished for exploring, trying something new, or just testing the limits. Sure, I could grind away until I was sure I could make it in that new area, but then the game becomes a cookie cutter formula, where I look up what to kill, how high to get before going to this area, and what to do there.
Fast forward to my experience with WoW. Since CoH, I'd given up on MMO games. I'd heard rumblings about WoW, but I dismissed it as just a Blizzad flavor of everything else. So I did not pick it up at retail.
Several weeks after it came out, however, I happened across a review for it on one of the big gaming sites. It got a very high score, so I was at least intrigued enough to read the text of the review.
Thankfully, it was a very well done review. Instead of just a bunch of empty words praising the game, it was critical in explaining not only that the game was well done, but also how it was done well.
I read about a quest system that eliminated some of the tedium of the grind. I read about unique races and classes that were all fun to play in their own right. But best of all, I read about the lack of a serious death penalty. So I said, sign me up!
Later that day, I got him with the game. A little over a month later, I'm level 36 (out of 60), and my wife not behind far at 34.
I can honestly say that it seems that Blizzard sat down and said "Okay, what are the 'tried and true' features of the MMO game that suck?" and systematically eliminated them.
To me, it requires a fairly brilliant leap of logic to take something that is the core of just about every game, and eliminate it. But in thinking about it, what purpose does a death penalty serve? I'll grant that it adds a sense of tension to dicey encounters, and bestows a sense of greater reward when you manage to avoid death. But that does not balance with the other side. In other words, in most MMO games, the penalty does not balance well with the reward. Sure I get a bit of a thrill by surviving, but that thrill does not outweigh the sense of frustration and annoying I encounter when I do die. Futhermore, it also limits the willingness to explore, try new stuff, and just freely experience the sense of wonder that a well done
I concur that they make good games, but I think what is hurting them is they're not making them fast enough, and they're not attracting enough third party support.
Sure, there are a few third party exclusives, but most of their third party support comes in the form of ports that are on other systems. And the problem is they're often better on the other systems.
Whether it's because of the Xbox's better graphics and sound capabilities, or the extra buttons on the PS2's controller that makes the game's control more intuitive, or the fact that both Xbox and PS2 have a decent online infrastructure that allows the games to be played online.
No one wants a system where they have to wait 6 months or more for a decent game, especially if they can only have one system.
Another issue I have is with their rehashes. I for one love a continuance of a franchise. The next Zelda adventure, or a new Mario platformer. But Nintendo, especially in their GBA line, are just porting old games. The classic NES series would have been cool for nostolga's sake if they'd stuffed several on one cartridge. But why port Mario64, a game that's not even THAT old, to the DS when you could have instead invested more time and given us a brand new Mario?
I guess I'm answering my own question, in that Nintendo knows they can't put new games out fast enough, so they're rehashing classics.
I wasn't commenting on your interpretation of portng, but of the reporter's. Being that their job is that of a reporter, I could hope that they'd be better educated on the root word, port, that is shared between the word reporter and porting. Oh well.:)
What's next, an announcement that the sky is blue?
Re:I dont think I can hold out any longer...
on
Gran Turismo 4 Goes Gold
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· Score: 2, Informative
IIRC, GT4 is one of the few games to support (but not require) the PS2 hard drive. I dunno what it'll do, probably just load faster. Maybe with the online version, there will be downloadable cars and tracks, but who knows?
Anyway, an advantage of the "old" PS2 is it supports the HD, while the new thin one does not.
I think he's talking about the gang territories portion of the game. You capture rival gang's areas, and defend your own when under attack.
I dunno how strategic it is, really, but it's a neat feature if you like shooting lots of stuff.
It doesn't ban based on the mac address. It bans based on a unique number stored in the Xbox's EEPROM.
Based on that, you can get someone else who never plans to play on Xbox live to use a utility to get the data out of their EEPROM, send it to you, and you can reflash your xbox with this.
This will get you back on Live. Unfortunately, unless you figure out how they banned you in the first place, they'll just ban this new EEPROM.
It was a useful trick when the only way to get banned was to forget to switch off your modchip prior to hopping on Live, but no longer.
Slashdot Mirror
Another one was something I did. I was just learning how to build PCs, and this was back before the PSU connectors could only fit one way. Anyway, there were four wires you had to wire from the PSU to the case on/off switch. I got them in some sort of bad order, because from then on, anytime you plugged that PC in, and tried to switch it on, it'd reset the breaker for the whole electrical circuit. It took my a couple of tries to realize it wasn't a coincidence that everytime I hit the power button, all the lights went off. What's worse, is this happened to be on the same circuit as the CRC server room.
The upshot is, that socket shouldn't have been on the same circuit, and they fixed that right quick!
I guess it depends on the context. If I heard a noise in the woods, after investigating it and finding nothing, I might assume the next time it's just some animal nosing around for food. I agree with hearing a shot and then going into cover. For a while, a lot of games would have AI such that the enemy didn't even notice his buddy just dropped. Then they noticed, but did something stupid like stood over the corpse, held perfectly still, and gaped. Again, depending on the context, this might be appropriate. If you're shooting civilians, the shock and lack of training might cause them to do that. Trained soldiers, on the other hand, should have a different response. Some of that is a balance and playability issue, though. If the first person you shoot sends the whole area you're in into an alert state so high you can't really do anything else without getting killed, that game won't be very much fun.
Thus, Splinter Cell plays more like a game, while the other two play more like it's really you. Perhaps that has some impact on the ratings?
A lot of games fake AI by making the computer controlled whatevers omniscient. They know when you're about to turn that corner, and are waiting for you. They know you're hiding in the bushes waiting for them. They never make a mistake, and they do it right every time, all day long. To me, it would be more interesting to play against things with artificial stupidity. Not of the sort where they just stare at a wall while you're beating them silly from behind, but I don't want them to be omniscient. I want to be able to sneak up on them. I want to be able to lay poised to strike for them to make some sort of mistake, and then I want to be able to capitalize on it. I want them learning from their mistakes, yes, but also learning bad habits from perceived mistakes. For example, if they hear a noise and come investigate, but find nothing since I've managed to hide quickly enough, I want the next noise to not concern them as much. Things like that would make a more beliveable opposition. To be fair, games are starting to evolve this way, I just hope the goal isn't only to make games more challenging, but more believable as well.
A lot of these articles tout the energy savings between CRT and LCD. How much does this save you, though? Even at what I'm thinking is a generous guess of $5 a month in saved energy costs, it could take you up to four years to break even on the cost difference between CRTs and LCDs. Are these kinds of points in there just so someone can justify buying a new toy with some practical reasons?
The EULA gives two options. I was commenting that one of the options is not valid 99% of the time. If they give me two options, I expect both options to be valid.
I could believe that, but most MMORPGs aren't an online game that you sign up to play before you buy. You walk into a store, plop down $50 for the game. Then you get home, install it, and then sign up, specifying your demographics and credit card #.
I dunno, though. What happens if an entire clan that is huge decides to hop servers? They all hop to my smoothly running medium pop server, and all the sudden, my server is crashing and making me wait in line to play. I'm not being selfish here, I'm just advocating that they carefully manage any moves so that it doesn't just move the problem to another server instead of solving the problem.
I'm just tossing this out there, but maybe it has to due with games featuring a prominate logo and the words Ferrari? You're then using their logo. Some games take the non licensed path, and build a car that looks like a Ferrari, but they call it some made up name. GTA, for example, does this. So using its likeness, or one very similar, seems to be okay, but you just can't call it a Ferrari. I really don't know, but it's an interesting point.
This is a very interesting point. When I sign a contract, the terms that both parties agreed to are pretty much set in stone. They can't update the contract, and then force me to sign it. If there's not something in the new contract that piques my interest, I can say "Nope, I like the original contract better." And under the terms of the contract, they have to continue giving me what the original contract specified for as long as I continue my end. Why, after a change in a MMORPG EULA, isn't there a button that says "No thanks, I'll stick to the original terms."? I guess a lot of depends on the EULA. If it's made to come up everytime you play the game, the length of the contract could be worded to be for "one play session". In which case you have to sign a new contract each time you play the game again. WoW isn't like this, it only comes up when it changes. But I guess somewhere buried in there is something that says this contract is binding until we change it, at which point you must agree all over again.
The problem with that is that as soon as the company acknowledges the real world value of an item by allowing its sale, and even participating in the sale itself, they are liable to changes. If I have a +5 Sword of Decapitation, and Blizzard realizes it's too powerful, they can't nerf it to balance the game. If they change it to a +2 Sword of Decapitation, then I have a right to sue them because I paid $200 for this sword through their escrow service, and after the transaction took place, they degraded my item. It's like a car dealership selling you a car, and then coming by your house one night and replacing the 17" aluminum alloy wheels with 15" steel wheels with KMart hubcaps. So now they can no longer balance the game. There are other issues at stake as well. I want to play the game, but I don't want to spend an extra $200 a month on it. I want to be able to get the items via in game methods. And as soon as it becomes easy to sell that +5 Sword of Decapitation to the highest bidder for real money, who's going to sell it for in game money anymore? What you're proposing is an interesting business model, but the game has to be planned that way from the beginning, and players have to know it's going to work that way. There's at least one out, or coming up, that does work sort of like that. Instead of players selling, though, it's the company itself. The game is free, except if you want the cool items, you pay the company directly for them.
I'm a little bit confused. If you can't stand playing the game for hours... then why did you buy it? Why go through the effort to develop a bot to play something for you, when you don't even like playing it yourself? A lot easier to just uninstall it and call it a day.
Try taking your copy back and getting a refund from the place of purchase. Maybe WalMart would do it, but that's probably the only place and even then, it's iffy. No one takes back opened software anymore. And of the places that used to (specialized game stores, such as Electronics Boutique), even when they would refund money on opened games, they never would for MMORPGs due to them not knowing if you were still using the key online (I tried it with UO).
because they want to put out a MMORPG now too.
I think the problem now is gaming is more mainstream. Back then, the only gamers were the nerdier type, who could use their imaginations to pretend they were playing as any team the wanted to be. You just picked a team that had similar colors, and wham, you're now the Red Sox. These days, it seems the market is much more geared towards the more casual players with short attention spans. Everything has to be spelled out explicitly for them. Some of this is also probably related to technology. Back then, it wasn't worth it to license player names because the technology didn't exist to distinguish players anyway. You get 32 pixels to make a player, they're all gonna pretty much look the same.
I don't recall my level, but my mistake was grouping with people I'd never grouped with before, and we went somewhere new. It went okay at first, but then we turned a corner, and were swarmed.
It's not that I wasn't paying attention, it was that I was taking a chance, exploring somewhere new, with people I didn't know.
Sure, you could say that was stupid, but that's what I like about WoW. I can group with complete strangers and take a chance on making new friends, go to a completely new place together, and if the crap hits the fan, the only penalty is a relatively low equipment repair cost and a run back to my corpse (which is shown on the map).
WOW!
Okay, bad pun. But since there are so many people giving their opinions here, I figured I'd share mine.
First, to temper this, I'll go ahead and admit that I'm an old school MUD addict. I got introduced to MUDs by a friend, and was quickly consumed.
So, at some point I heard about Everquest. I got into the beta, and was completely amazed. It was a MUD game design, but with graphics and sound! I got through the beta, and bought the release version, but eventually quit. I hated having to blindly hunt for my corpse (or beg a bard for help) upon dying. I hated the slow leveling up period. I just wasn't getting enough for what I was investing in it.
Since then, I've tried a few others including City of Heroes and SWG. They've all had similar problems, though.
My biggest problem with SWG is how much time investment they required. For example, I wanted to go the route of a crafter. I got into at first, with the goal of getting machines to do my resource gathering for me, with the end goal of having my own shops and stuff like that.
But then I found out, you still have to spend a lot of time maintaining this crap. I can't go away from a week and come back with a pile of doodads made for me. Maybe it's a balance thing, but I want the game to be there at my demand, not the game demand me to be there at its demand. So I scrapped it.
CoH was actually very close to what I was looking for. I liked the quest/mission structure, and the pace of the game was good. But there was still a death penalty. Not a horrible one compared to some other games, but at one point, I just got too frustrated. Why do I have to repeat all these kills to get rid of this XP debt, just because I made one misstep? Death penalties make me feel like I'm punished for exploring, trying something new, or just testing the limits. Sure, I could grind away until I was sure I could make it in that new area, but then the game becomes a cookie cutter formula, where I look up what to kill, how high to get before going to this area, and what to do there.
Fast forward to my experience with WoW. Since CoH, I'd given up on MMO games. I'd heard rumblings about WoW, but I dismissed it as just a Blizzad flavor of everything else. So I did not pick it up at retail.
Several weeks after it came out, however, I happened across a review for it on one of the big gaming sites. It got a very high score, so I was at least intrigued enough to read the text of the review.
Thankfully, it was a very well done review. Instead of just a bunch of empty words praising the game, it was critical in explaining not only that the game was well done, but also how it was done well.
I read about a quest system that eliminated some of the tedium of the grind. I read about unique races and classes that were all fun to play in their own right. But best of all, I read about the lack of a serious death penalty. So I said, sign me up!
Later that day, I got him with the game. A little over a month later, I'm level 36 (out of 60), and my wife not behind far at 34.
I can honestly say that it seems that Blizzard sat down and said "Okay, what are the 'tried and true' features of the MMO game that suck?" and systematically eliminated them.
To me, it requires a fairly brilliant leap of logic to take something that is the core of just about every game, and eliminate it. But in thinking about it, what purpose does a death penalty serve? I'll grant that it adds a sense of tension to dicey encounters, and bestows a sense of greater reward when you manage to avoid death. But that does not balance with the other side. In other words, in most MMO games, the penalty does not balance well with the reward. Sure I get a bit of a thrill by surviving, but that thrill does not outweigh the sense of frustration and annoying I encounter when I do die. Futhermore, it also limits the willingness to explore, try new stuff, and just freely experience the sense of wonder that a well done
I concur that they make good games, but I think what is hurting them is they're not making them fast enough, and they're not attracting enough third party support.
Sure, there are a few third party exclusives, but most of their third party support comes in the form of ports that are on other systems. And the problem is they're often better on the other systems.
Whether it's because of the Xbox's better graphics and sound capabilities, or the extra buttons on the PS2's controller that makes the game's control more intuitive, or the fact that both Xbox and PS2 have a decent online infrastructure that allows the games to be played online.
No one wants a system where they have to wait 6 months or more for a decent game, especially if they can only have one system.
Another issue I have is with their rehashes. I for one love a continuance of a franchise. The next Zelda adventure, or a new Mario platformer. But Nintendo, especially in their GBA line, are just porting old games. The classic NES series would have been cool for nostolga's sake if they'd stuffed several on one cartridge. But why port Mario64, a game that's not even THAT old, to the DS when you could have instead invested more time and given us a brand new Mario?
I guess I'm answering my own question, in that Nintendo knows they can't put new games out fast enough, so they're rehashing classics.
I wasn't commenting on your interpretation of portng, but of the reporter's. Being that their job is that of a reporter, I could hope that they'd be better educated on the root word, port, that is shared between the word reporter and porting. Oh well. :)
So porting is "making"? That's like saying John Doe is the writer of Les Miserable, because he translated it into English.
Will make the loading times even longer? Great!
What's next, an announcement that the sky is blue?
IIRC, GT4 is one of the few games to support (but not require) the PS2 hard drive. I dunno what it'll do, probably just load faster. Maybe with the online version, there will be downloadable cars and tracks, but who knows?
Anyway, an advantage of the "old" PS2 is it supports the HD, while the new thin one does not.
I think he's talking about the gang territories portion of the game. You capture rival gang's areas, and defend your own when under attack. I dunno how strategic it is, really, but it's a neat feature if you like shooting lots of stuff.
It doesn't ban based on the mac address. It bans based on a unique number stored in the Xbox's EEPROM. Based on that, you can get someone else who never plans to play on Xbox live to use a utility to get the data out of their EEPROM, send it to you, and you can reflash your xbox with this. This will get you back on Live. Unfortunately, unless you figure out how they banned you in the first place, they'll just ban this new EEPROM. It was a useful trick when the only way to get banned was to forget to switch off your modchip prior to hopping on Live, but no longer.