I've seen people use stats like DPS, DPS per cost, HP per cost, etc for tuning RTS units, sometimes the numbers suggested imbalances that weren't really there because the numbers didn't include some factor that shows up in actual gameplay (most commonly micromanagement which tends to mess up many calculations). I think it is a good question if you should check numbers to look for imbalances and do tuning from the numbers or if you should rely on playtesting only.
As a rule I always play games on Easy because I don't want a challenge. I don't want to get frustrated playing the same level over and over. I want that feeling of progression like I'm getting somewhere.
Feeling like you're getting somewhere and playing a level over and over again are not mutually exclusive, try playing e.g. Ninja Five-O for the Gameboy Advance, you die often but each time you get a bit further and then finally get to the end with a feeling of great accomplishment. I don't like frustrating replays either but to me frustration comes from losing without having a feeling that I understood what I did wrong. If I see where I messed up I can do better next time but if I don't see where my error was I'm inevitably going to repeat it.
Balancing is what makes sure that spamming one unit without a need to consider the game situation is not feasible. It doesn't have much to do with AI, in fact the biggest balance issues crop up with high-level human vs human play. The AI always uses things the way they were meant to be used, a human may find a way to apply things in a way that makes them game breaking. Sure, stupid AI is always a problem but that's not what game balancing is about.
The goal of balancing is to make every element of the game equal. That doesn't mean the machinegun and rocket launcher need to be equally good for killing stuff but the effort or risk needed to get or use them should make up for the difference. It is badly balanced if the RL and MG are both easily accessible but the RL is vastly more powerful. The BFG shouldn't just lie around in a random corridor, it should be placed in a location that's risky to get to so the decision whether to go get the BFG shouldn't always have the same result. I've read an article about balancing and it's important to understand that balancing isn't just power by itself but everything else as well (including costs, effort, etc). If one choice is always better than another choice that the game design considers valid you have an imbalance, if going to get the RL is always preferrable to getting the MG the RL is overpowered.
What are you basing this on? Do you have evidence that MSFT would license to Apple?
They've made IE and Office for the Mac, letting Apple use WMP formats would increase the number of platforms covered by them and give MS a bigger marketshare in the media format market. If MS is unwilling to do that, just call the antitrust commission and tell them that MS isn't willing to license its formats on non-discriminatory terms.
Why would Apple want to do this?
Because that would allow Macs to play more formats and let people use their Mac even when encountering a video that's WMV-only?
If MSFT was the least bit interested in seeing WMA technology on other computer platforms than Windows, we would have already seen an up to date version on not only windows but OS X and Linux.
Of course the license for the format costs money so MS isn't going to give it to Apple for free (would piss their licensees off because they're paying a few cents for each device or copy while Apple wouldn't need to pay anything) and Linux can obviously not afford paying per-copy fees (does Linux even play DVDs by default?). Noone's saying these formats have to be free as in beer, Apple can charge a reasonable fee for using them.
It is up to MSFT to support other platforms if they want business from those users.
I think here support goes from the software vendor towards the format, i.e. MS decides what formats to include with Windows, Apple decides what formats to include with Macs, etc.
License WMA/DRM from MSFT? Please.
Why not? Don't want it to keep your users locked into your format? Okay. But you have the option and that's what counts, if e.g. Zeta wanted to offer support for WMP playback they could.
How Apple does violate antitrust laws? Apple made the iPod, they made the ITMS. They own both products. I do not see how this is similar at all to how MSFT tried to control a platform (PCs) that it did not manufacture, design or even sell.
Antitrust is about using a large marketshare in one market to gain a big marketshare in another market. Microsoft doesnt dominate the PC (which would be hardware), they dominate the OS market and used that to dominate the browser and software media player market. Similarily, Apple dominates the music download market and uses that to control the hardware player market (and the other way around). It's impossible* for a competitor to dethrone Apple in the portable music player market without at the same time attacking their hold in the music download market and vice versa, same as it is practically impossible for anyone to dethrone IE as the most used browser without dethroning Windows as the most used OS.
There is a thriving third-party addon industry surrounding the iPod and Creative has become an official licensee for accessories.
There's also a thriving market for all kinds of addons for Windows, whether they be useful programs or just fixes for problems in Windows (virus and spyware removers, for example). Addons don't compete with the main product and the point of antitrust laws is to allow competition with the main product without having to enter dozens of other markets to break all the interlocked monopolies.
Optimally the documentation MS has to provide for the Windows API would allow other OSes to license the API and make their OS run Windows applications while paying a small fee per copy to MS.
*=Technically possible but too hard for anyone to pull off.
Why bother? That'd make them act, as long as they've got bread and games their guns remain in the closet. Even better if they believe the government is their friend and the guns are only needed to fight against terrorists (like those people who use their guns to fight the government).
DRM is nothing but a format for this purpose, an open(ly licensed) format is generally better for the competition in the market than a closed format. Open for this purpose means available on non-discriminatory terms (i.e. no excluding competitors you don't like) for a reasonable fee. It greatly helped the CD and DVD formats that they were available to everyone, the obvious next step is to create a common format for digital music that everyone can use for his products. Yes there are several open formats for unprotected content but apparently those don't fulfill the requirements of major copyright holders which doesn't help with creating a unified format.
Apple could get a license and add WMP playback, too. Creative can't get a license for that Apple DRM so their Zen will not be able to play music downloaded from iTunes. Apple's competition cannot add a feature Apple's products have and that feature is of no original value, it's value comes from another product Apple provides. This violates antitrust laws.
Yes but if you have music from iTunes you can't buy a player from a different vendor. Currently iTunes is the biggest store around so it's the first target. MS licenses the WMP formats to other vendors so they can offer content in that format or build players that use it.
Rip it to disk(or virtualDisk) and reimport. You can do this with lossless formats as well as mp3.
Yes but for a collection of thousands of Euros that's going to take quite some time. Time has a value too and since it's less of a hassle to just buy an iPod Apple has an advantage compared to other vendors.
By forcing the DRM to be more open you'd be able to buy a non-Apple made player that could handle the media from iTunes (even though not every player will be capable of it). This will be demanded from anyone getting a significant share of the market but of course it can only be brought to court on a vendor-by-vendor basis so they'll obviously target the big ones first.
Yes because abandoning markets (which means handing them to the competition on a silver tablet) is a good idea. What if this escalates to EU wide levels? Should Apple hand a whole continent to the competition?
It's misleading by mentioning the EU at all. Could just as well have said NATO countries. Just because it didn't really say anything about the EU itself doesn't mean this title wouldn't lead many people (including Rude Turnip) to believe the EU had a part in this. Tabloids love doing that.
Anyone making an MP3 player can get a license for the WMA format for a reasonable price. I don't think these organizations want Apple to offer it for free, they want them to offer it at a reasonable price.
iTunes has a big marketshare and that big marketshare can only use iPods to play their downloaded music on the go. This means people get a strong incentive to own an iPod if they use iTunes. This kind of interlocking violates antitrust laws in many countries, competitors get an artificial disadvantage they can't remove if the customer has another product of yours already. This was also the problem with Windows bundling IE and WMP, competing browsers and media players didn't have a chance to be included with Windows just because Windows is made by the same company as IE and WMP. The point is to prevent a company from using its marketshare in one sector to gain an advantage in another.
I assume they want the format specs to be available to others so other makers of MP3 players can buy a license at a fair price and play ITMS files without extra conversions.
You can fix the DRM with a patch but everything that was released before the patch has already been decrypted and put on bittorrent. Then the new key gets broken and more data gets decrypted and shared, etc. You can't significantly change the algorithm in embedded systems because they probably have a decoder chip (since a full CPU capable of decoding HD video would be pricey) that can run only so many different algorithms.
Wii Sports is pretty high in the sales charts (Wii Play as well but that doesn't count since it's a 10€ game with a 40€ controller). It's sold separately in Japan but still sells to almost all Wii owners.
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I've seen people use stats like DPS, DPS per cost, HP per cost, etc for tuning RTS units, sometimes the numbers suggested imbalances that weren't really there because the numbers didn't include some factor that shows up in actual gameplay (most commonly micromanagement which tends to mess up many calculations). I think it is a good question if you should check numbers to look for imbalances and do tuning from the numbers or if you should rely on playtesting only.
As a rule I always play games on Easy because I don't want a challenge. I don't want to get frustrated playing the same level over and over. I want that feeling of progression like I'm getting somewhere.
Feeling like you're getting somewhere and playing a level over and over again are not mutually exclusive, try playing e.g. Ninja Five-O for the Gameboy Advance, you die often but each time you get a bit further and then finally get to the end with a feeling of great accomplishment. I don't like frustrating replays either but to me frustration comes from losing without having a feeling that I understood what I did wrong. If I see where I messed up I can do better next time but if I don't see where my error was I'm inevitably going to repeat it.
Balancing is what makes sure that spamming one unit without a need to consider the game situation is not feasible. It doesn't have much to do with AI, in fact the biggest balance issues crop up with high-level human vs human play. The AI always uses things the way they were meant to be used, a human may find a way to apply things in a way that makes them game breaking. Sure, stupid AI is always a problem but that's not what game balancing is about.
The goal of balancing is to make every element of the game equal. That doesn't mean the machinegun and rocket launcher need to be equally good for killing stuff but the effort or risk needed to get or use them should make up for the difference. It is badly balanced if the RL and MG are both easily accessible but the RL is vastly more powerful. The BFG shouldn't just lie around in a random corridor, it should be placed in a location that's risky to get to so the decision whether to go get the BFG shouldn't always have the same result. I've read an article about balancing and it's important to understand that balancing isn't just power by itself but everything else as well (including costs, effort, etc). If one choice is always better than another choice that the game design considers valid you have an imbalance, if going to get the RL is always preferrable to getting the MG the RL is overpowered.
What are you basing this on? Do you have evidence that MSFT would license to Apple?
They've made IE and Office for the Mac, letting Apple use WMP formats would increase the number of platforms covered by them and give MS a bigger marketshare in the media format market. If MS is unwilling to do that, just call the antitrust commission and tell them that MS isn't willing to license its formats on non-discriminatory terms.
Why would Apple want to do this?
Because that would allow Macs to play more formats and let people use their Mac even when encountering a video that's WMV-only?
If MSFT was the least bit interested in seeing WMA technology on other computer platforms than Windows, we would have already seen an up to date version on not only windows but OS X and Linux.
Of course the license for the format costs money so MS isn't going to give it to Apple for free (would piss their licensees off because they're paying a few cents for each device or copy while Apple wouldn't need to pay anything) and Linux can obviously not afford paying per-copy fees (does Linux even play DVDs by default?). Noone's saying these formats have to be free as in beer, Apple can charge a reasonable fee for using them.
It is up to MSFT to support other platforms if they want business from those users.
I think here support goes from the software vendor towards the format, i.e. MS decides what formats to include with Windows, Apple decides what formats to include with Macs, etc.
License WMA/DRM from MSFT? Please.
Why not? Don't want it to keep your users locked into your format? Okay. But you have the option and that's what counts, if e.g. Zeta wanted to offer support for WMP playback they could.
How Apple does violate antitrust laws? Apple made the iPod, they made the ITMS. They own both products. I do not see how this is similar at all to how MSFT tried to control a platform (PCs) that it did not manufacture, design or even sell.
Antitrust is about using a large marketshare in one market to gain a big marketshare in another market. Microsoft doesnt dominate the PC (which would be hardware), they dominate the OS market and used that to dominate the browser and software media player market. Similarily, Apple dominates the music download market and uses that to control the hardware player market (and the other way around). It's impossible* for a competitor to dethrone Apple in the portable music player market without at the same time attacking their hold in the music download market and vice versa, same as it is practically impossible for anyone to dethrone IE as the most used browser without dethroning Windows as the most used OS.
There is a thriving third-party addon industry surrounding the iPod and Creative has become an official licensee for accessories.
There's also a thriving market for all kinds of addons for Windows, whether they be useful programs or just fixes for problems in Windows (virus and spyware removers, for example). Addons don't compete with the main product and the point of antitrust laws is to allow competition with the main product without having to enter dozens of other markets to break all the interlocked monopolies.
Optimally the documentation MS has to provide for the Windows API would allow other OSes to license the API and make their OS run Windows applications while paying a small fee per copy to MS.
*=Technically possible but too hard for anyone to pull off.
Why bother? That'd make them act, as long as they've got bread and games their guns remain in the closet. Even better if they believe the government is their friend and the guns are only needed to fight against terrorists (like those people who use their guns to fight the government).
When are they going to start doing anything?
A big issue with that kind of resale is that you can be damn sure loads of assholes will keep their "backups" after selling or returning the original.
Second life property equates to server space or instances of copyrighted material.
Now let's apply that to a downloadable content service that uses DRM to prevent resale.
Also, don't you have to pass real assets onto some sucker to get your money, too?
DRM is nothing but a format for this purpose, an open(ly licensed) format is generally better for the competition in the market than a closed format. Open for this purpose means available on non-discriminatory terms (i.e. no excluding competitors you don't like) for a reasonable fee. It greatly helped the CD and DVD formats that they were available to everyone, the obvious next step is to create a common format for digital music that everyone can use for his products. Yes there are several open formats for unprotected content but apparently those don't fulfill the requirements of major copyright holders which doesn't help with creating a unified format.
Apple could get a license and add WMP playback, too. Creative can't get a license for that Apple DRM so their Zen will not be able to play music downloaded from iTunes. Apple's competition cannot add a feature Apple's products have and that feature is of no original value, it's value comes from another product Apple provides. This violates antitrust laws.
Yes but if you have music from iTunes you can't buy a player from a different vendor. Currently iTunes is the biggest store around so it's the first target. MS licenses the WMP formats to other vendors so they can offer content in that format or build players that use it.
The EU is already handling MS and because the legal system can handle more than one lawsuit at a time these groups are now going after Apple.
Rip it to disk(or virtualDisk) and reimport. You can do this with lossless formats as well as mp3.
Yes but for a collection of thousands of Euros that's going to take quite some time. Time has a value too and since it's less of a hassle to just buy an iPod Apple has an advantage compared to other vendors.
By forcing the DRM to be more open you'd be able to buy a non-Apple made player that could handle the media from iTunes (even though not every player will be capable of it). This will be demanded from anyone getting a significant share of the market but of course it can only be brought to court on a vendor-by-vendor basis so they'll obviously target the big ones first.
Yes because abandoning markets (which means handing them to the competition on a silver tablet) is a good idea. What if this escalates to EU wide levels? Should Apple hand a whole continent to the competition?
Because the goal is to create a fair and competitive market, not follow the ideals of random DRM haters.
It's misleading by mentioning the EU at all. Could just as well have said NATO countries. Just because it didn't really say anything about the EU itself doesn't mean this title wouldn't lead many people (including Rude Turnip) to believe the EU had a part in this. Tabloids love doing that.
Anyone making an MP3 player can get a license for the WMA format for a reasonable price. I don't think these organizations want Apple to offer it for free, they want them to offer it at a reasonable price.
iTunes has a big marketshare and that big marketshare can only use iPods to play their downloaded music on the go. This means people get a strong incentive to own an iPod if they use iTunes. This kind of interlocking violates antitrust laws in many countries, competitors get an artificial disadvantage they can't remove if the customer has another product of yours already. This was also the problem with Windows bundling IE and WMP, competing browsers and media players didn't have a chance to be included with Windows just because Windows is made by the same company as IE and WMP. The point is to prevent a company from using its marketshare in one sector to gain an advantage in another.
I assume they want the format specs to be available to others so other makers of MP3 players can buy a license at a fair price and play ITMS files without extra conversions.
You can fix the DRM with a patch but everything that was released before the patch has already been decrypted and put on bittorrent. Then the new key gets broken and more data gets decrypted and shared, etc. You can't significantly change the algorithm in embedded systems because they probably have a decoder chip (since a full CPU capable of decoding HD video would be pricey) that can run only so many different algorithms.
I'd assume they'd spend more on storing that inventory than they lose because of this pricedrop.
Wii Sports is pretty high in the sales charts (Wii Play as well but that doesn't count since it's a 10€ game with a 40€ controller). It's sold separately in Japan but still sells to almost all Wii owners.
Not until they add Chaos Space Marines.