1) Those enchant removals/interrupts are irrelevant - they are easily avoided by simple enchant cover and interrupt is easily baitable on mobs. This is sole reason why permas can run Bogroot Growths even when it is plagued by Soulrending Shriek (enchant removal that goes throught perma, fyi). Been there, done that.
2) Mob will NOT use PBAOEs when there is only one person within range. You can easily test this by visiting your local Terrorweb Dryder and waiting till he casts lava font. You will wait a long time. For Bonus points, check range of PBAOES, they are nearly all Adjacent and Slivers is In Area range and since it are spellcasters that use ranged attacks, you can stay at range where slivers will harm them and you will be out of their BPAOE range anyway. Been there, done that.
3) It is True. Permas can, and do run places with touchers easily and safely. Slavers' Exile duncans room for example. touch/bite will simply not kill if you have 1hp left, they will steal 0hp. It is well known behavior of lifestealing based skills. People armed with this knowledge run Slaver's Exile Duncan solo. Been ther... you know what.
---
Look, there is no need to be defensive about this gamebreaker, its not like anet will nerf it if they read this.
Having counters does not mean anything is ballanced. That is ballance rule n. #1. If this rule was not true, PvP would require no ballance updates because counters exist, right.
What I said was by no means hyperbole. Oh, does have counters... or does it?
Echant removal is off mark, so are interupts. Can't be hit by spell -> can't be disenchanted. Can't be hit by spell/attack -> can't be interrupted. There is no downtime to allow that. For very, VERY rage nonspell disenchants, one aditional enchant will provide easy cover.
Touch skills technically work, but will not cause death - they will not take last hitpoint the same way that sacrifice will not kill user with one hitpoint. And if monsters have no other means to remove that last hitpoint... Besides, mobs will not run towards character to use them, so it is just matter of staying at ranger.
PBAOES are easy to avoid because they have quite limited range of 'adjacent' while permas can kill at 'in area' range. Not to mention that most mobs will not cast them in there is only one player within range.
People solo areas full of counters without problems. Stygial Veil and Duncan's dungeons are full of touchers and AOE. UW is full of PBAOE and nonspell/nonattack interrupts/enchant removal.
Those 'counters' utterly fail at countering SF.
Simply put, it is the game breaker as I described it.
Good amount of PvE players got very pissed by this. It made it very hard to get to PvP because all you know about game (1000+ skills and synergies between them) gets thrown out of window, its basically like playing new game.
Typically, PvE felt next to no fallout from PvP based nerfs. PvP builds were quite different from PvE metagame (ironically, "sabway" based builds that steamroll PvE and basically set standart for soloing game were originally used in PvP, their PvE version only because used after they were nerfed in PvP).
That PvP based nerfs did was purging PvE from most ridiculous gamebreakers.
That disconnect that gave PvE was ever increasing power creep and ton of gamebreakers: For example, skill "Shaddow Form" now gives permanent immunity to all spells and attacks. Yep, you are reading right. Players can equip it and two other skills, walk into middle of enemy mob and be unharmed. For as long as he wishes. Yep, ultimate 'tank' that does not require healer. And he is able to kill stuff. He is able to solo equivalent of raid encounters/heroics with absolutelly no danger to him and no skill required.
Without PvP disconnect, it would literally take minutes to be nerfstomped. This is what split gave players: Ridiculous win buttons. People do complain anyway because game with cheats enabled is boring and pointless to play.
Goverment needs people to fear someone. They need source of their fears be always withing walking distance and source of fears that can be easily demonized. Someone they can 'protect' citizens from.
Besides, it is awesome to have this great label which can be stuck on someone. Label that will completely destroy their life withing minutes and which can never be taken off because of social stigma. Something to fear for any troublemaker.
Murder is not good crime for that. It was glorified by media and actually celebrated. Sexual stuff is much more darker and twisted and much easier to stick on someone.
Lots of stuff can happen. He could be hit by a car or could have suffered heart attack. How come they would not consider this simple possibility of RL intervention.
In any case, this outcry is not hmm... friendly or on good terms... to say the least. It givem me mental image of PHB walking into hospital and demanding that worker stops being pussy and to finish up his busywork on time.
Exactly why do we still need region coding on DVDs?
To let them make more money obviously. Set price for each market to be different and reap optimum profit from each. Its not dissimilar from different voltages/socket shapes or NTSC/PAL tv format difference. Product locked to market and thus preventing it from competing with cheaper itself in different market.
Obviously, this is at huge cost to customers. It should be outlawed, but i guess as long as people can pirate stuff and get around it, noone will care enough to go into streets and protest loudly or write to senators.
See, this is where content companies win: they get away pulling all sorts of crap because techie people who care can get around it easily and nontechhie people don't care.
I am afraid you were deluding yourself for 30 years.
There is quite difference between game that you can copy without any trouble by normal cd-copy routine of your favorite burning software. And game that you simply can not copy without some net digging and without waiting for someone to crack it.
100% Prevention? No, not really, obviously does not work and can not work, but they do not need to get even close. All you really need is to make it difficult enough to make sure game gets week or two of shelf life before pirates start to compete and difficult enough so that timmy, the clueless, will never really be able to give copy to his friend johny the clueless.
Think of it as super short copyright: It only needs to last long enough to author to make money.
If you want to deliver your content to 100% of customers, P2P is no-go:
1) It will simply not work for certain configurations and underperforms in many others. You want to tinker with customers computer, open ports etc... and it is not going to be enough. You need fallback. 2) It can saturate customer BW, especially if you are 'evil' and let em seed for a while after they are done. 3) It does not work for certain content: It is kinda hard to stream with p2p, and most conent is that: some silly streamed videos. You can not really deliver websites with p2p either. Biggest media sites simply can not tap potential of p2p. 5) Tech support is nightmare.
All in all, you will need fallback: good oldfashioned http or ftp download. And customers are kinda smart... If direct download is faster than torrent (it will for most people who are not on academic networks), people will choose direct download. I know I will: 1kb of upload kinda blocks about 5kb of download on my connection. 2000 seed torrent of one iso means overnight, getting that iso from ftp is about hour.
Blizzard had to invest a lot to fallback and seed servers, OS projects still need big ftps.
My piratey coleagues use direct download file stores like rapidshare instead of any p2p it seems and I think they got it right. Being able to actually saturate your downlink from seccond 1 with nearly guaranteed speed simply wins over p2p unrealiablity. P2p is not THE way to pirate anymore.
So if you are business and have rented that big server that can handle load, you can as well not bother with p2p. Do not fall in "ellegance" trap. elegant solution is not always best solution. p2p has lots of elegance and tech neatness, but that does not help it in being succesfull business tool.
1) Cheap equipment is a bit worse. It might not impact performance at all, but chances are, some sue-happy person might win malpractice case thatnks to 'subpar equipment used'. Cheap in this case can be pretty expensive.
2) Costs are directly transalted to customer. And people will pay a LOT when their health is concerned. So, if customers can afford to pay you for expensive stuff... you might as well let em pay because your profit margins can be bigger. Simply, you can have lab test cost 10$ and add margin of say 5$, or you can have lab test costing 100$ and add margin of 50$.
3) Expensive stuff means more profit for equipment makers (bigger price -> bigger margins). Enough to be able to advertize and add little, hmm, personal incentive to buy pricey stuff.
4) And sometimes, you really DO need that expensive stuff because it can make difference between life and death.
I would not call poor controls "part of challenge". I would call it excuse for bad ui design and attempt to hide fact that game lacks depth or reall challenge.
It is true that effective usage of controls takes skill and expertize, but that does not mean that controls have to be hard to operate to begin or to require some sort of learning: fps controls, for example, are quite standardized by now. Only learning happening usually only concerns game specific features.
Take starcaft for example. Any player can easily navigate and play game, but there are features for experts that add depth to competitive skillset.
Once this hits mainstream, you will be *wishing* for Comic Sans when entering new site and waiting for font to load. And papyrus would be godsend which you will celebrate by writing email to webmaster and thanking him.
Which is totally inconvenient for user that has to keep up with it... *AA wins with every step of arms race because users need to adapt.
Andre regardless of images, there is more trouble: But they still need channel to share those files with public... and to organize them and allow searching... or you end up with closed communities of people who share them between themselves and network with other similar communities, which hinders casual torrent downloading.
Which basically means *AA gets what they wanted. Hordes are cut off or have harder time downloading.
Idea is not to force people out of sharing, but make it inconvenient enough to stop being more useful than going out and cashing money for originals.
There are more reason for ascii 2d than just being easy to create.
Ascii is also easy to recognize and player can easily "read" situation. It is sort of high-contrast graphics that is very hard to pull with graphical tiles. I tried tilesets for DF and stayed away from it... it just made game look messy.
And, once you get from 2d, you loose overview. I have seens roguelikes turned to classic dungeons (you can not really do much more thanks to underlying blocky nature of those games) and it was pain to play. Mazes of random rooms are not pleasant to navigate at all if you do it from first person view...
Cartooony graphics? Oh noes! Serious gamer can't be seen playing something that look cartoony that just can't be fun!
That is *prefect* graphics for this game for these reasons:
* Pretty much anyone can run it. And have great performance. Whole point of looking cartoony is that it lets artists get away with low-poly and low-res models that would look terrible if they attempted realistic look.
* It is iconic and stylish and well made. Very recognizable, very easy to look at.
* It avoids uncanny valley.
I'd take this anytime over boring, resource-hog, uncanny valley dwellers.
a) Google actually reacts to DMCA-like request and does remove search results if companies ask them to. see: http://www.google.com/dmca.html
b) Their business model is not build around enabling piracy, very much unlike sites that depends on it to exists and make profit, hence a) works and there is no reason nor legal grounds to sue them.
Compared to cookie cutter pirate site where a) will not ever work because b) they will be out of business if they complied and removed copyrighted material as they would be out of content and ad revenue fast. At best they will post childish reaction on their site.
They still have central services that could be taken down. And their 'legal' existences still depends wholly on same law avoidance schema like before.
And since they go a long way to make sure they can not be liable for providing access to copyrighted shit because they would not know it is there (which they know will be there, hence the blind services), its kinda self defeating as they prove themselves they are 'looking for trouble' and expecting material that they will be liable for, and that they want that material there.
10$ that pedoporn will appear there asap, forcing them to react with implementing ability to block certain content. I am sure RIAA can afford few machines in 3rd world do get some content up there.
Its seems that they have 'target time' in which players can reach max level. Is max level is raised, part of leveling process needs to be changed to keep time spent reaching max level the same.
Which makes sense because player who joins game later has to catch up with population at level cap where the content is, and after several expansions it would be quite frustrating trying to catch up
Now, if they simply abolished concept of levels...
No, they use it because it introduces massive downtime that is easy to justify as you can get some players even believe it is for their own good.
MMO 101: Downtime and timesinks are good thing for business. It means you get away with having less actual content while players take longer to do something, making sure they will be around in next month.
I have been playing instant teleport-anywhere game (Guild Wars) and frankly it is single most awesome thing. Worls still feels big in parts where cotnent is and small where player runs out of it. Just like in WoW: Areas which you outlevel just shrink in your head. By time you are done with walking on feet, you are indeed done and any travel-related downtime is pointless and punishing.
Game would not be bigger if i had to spend 30 minutes getting to some location "for your own good". It would be oxonobiously anoying.
Ive actually quit WoW over lack of instant movement. Waiting 30 minutes for group to ssemble is not fun, neither well spent time. When you spend more time afking game and reding book while you wait for someone than playing, something is very wrong...
Its simple. You drop any packet that does not look like normal 'nothing to hide person surfing' traffic.
There is not just black list, there is whitelist approach too. Technology does not win this once the other side gets serious because the other side physically controls the tubes.
As for steam and whatnot, opeartors of those services will take care of it if they want to keep doing business there.
Slashdot Mirror
Model S is priced at 49.900$
It somehow already happened. Cool, eh.
1) Those enchant removals/interrupts are irrelevant - they are easily avoided by simple enchant cover and interrupt is easily baitable on mobs. This is sole reason why permas can run Bogroot Growths even when it is plagued by Soulrending Shriek (enchant removal that goes throught perma, fyi). Been there, done that.
2) Mob will NOT use PBAOEs when there is only one person within range. You can easily test this by visiting your local Terrorweb Dryder and waiting till he casts lava font. You will wait a long time. For Bonus points, check range of PBAOES, they are nearly all Adjacent and Slivers is In Area range and since it are spellcasters that use ranged attacks, you can stay at range where slivers will harm them and you will be out of their BPAOE range anyway. Been there, done that.
3) It is True. Permas can, and do run places with touchers easily and safely. Slavers' Exile duncans room for example. touch/bite will simply not kill if you have 1hp left, they will steal 0hp. It is well known behavior of lifestealing based skills. People armed with this knowledge run Slaver's Exile Duncan solo. Been ther... you know what.
---
Look, there is no need to be defensive about this gamebreaker, its not like anet will nerf it if they read this.
Having counters does not mean anything is ballanced. That is ballance rule n. #1. If this rule was not true, PvP would require no ballance updates because counters exist, right.
What I said was by no means hyperbole. Oh, does have counters ... or does it?
Echant removal is off mark, so are interupts. Can't be hit by spell -> can't be disenchanted. Can't be hit by spell/attack -> can't be interrupted. There is no downtime to allow that. For very, VERY rage nonspell disenchants, one aditional enchant will provide easy cover.
Touch skills technically work, but will not cause death - they will not take last hitpoint the same way that sacrifice will not kill user with one hitpoint. And if monsters have no other means to remove that last hitpoint... Besides, mobs will not run towards character to use them, so it is just matter of staying at ranger.
PBAOES are easy to avoid because they have quite limited range of 'adjacent' while permas can kill at 'in area' range. Not to mention that most mobs will not cast them in there is only one player within range.
People solo areas full of counters without problems. Stygial Veil and Duncan's dungeons are full of touchers and AOE. UW is full of PBAOE and nonspell/nonattack interrupts/enchant removal.
Those 'counters' utterly fail at countering SF.
Simply put, it is the game breaker as I described it.
Good amount of PvE players got very pissed by this. It made it very hard to get to PvP because all you know about game (1000+ skills and synergies between them) gets thrown out of window, its basically like playing new game.
Typically, PvE felt next to no fallout from PvP based nerfs. PvP builds were quite different from PvE metagame (ironically, "sabway" based builds that steamroll PvE and basically set standart for soloing game were originally used in PvP, their PvE version only because used after they were nerfed in PvP).
That PvP based nerfs did was purging PvE from most ridiculous gamebreakers.
That disconnect that gave PvE was ever increasing power creep and ton of gamebreakers: For example, skill "Shaddow Form" now gives permanent immunity to all spells and attacks. Yep, you are reading right. Players can equip it and two other skills, walk into middle of enemy mob and be unharmed. For as long as he wishes. Yep, ultimate 'tank' that does not require healer. And he is able to kill stuff. He is able to solo equivalent of raid encounters/heroics with absolutelly no danger to him and no skill required.
Without PvP disconnect, it would literally take minutes to be nerfstomped. This is what split gave players: Ridiculous win buttons. People do complain anyway because game with cheats enabled is boring and pointless to play.
Goverment needs people to fear someone. They need source of their fears be always withing walking distance and source of fears that can be easily demonized. Someone they can 'protect' citizens from.
Besides, it is awesome to have this great label which can be stuck on someone. Label that will completely destroy their life withing minutes and which can never be taken off because of social stigma. Something to fear for any troublemaker.
Murder is not good crime for that. It was glorified by media and actually celebrated. Sexual stuff is much more darker and twisted and much easier to stick on someone.
This.
Lots of stuff can happen. He could be hit by a car or could have suffered heart attack. How come they would not consider this simple possibility of RL intervention.
In any case, this outcry is not hmm ... friendly or on good terms ... to say the least. It givem me mental image of PHB walking into hospital and demanding that worker stops being pussy and to finish up his busywork on time.
Exactly why do we still need region coding on DVDs?
To let them make more money obviously. Set price for each market to be different and reap optimum profit from each. Its not dissimilar from different voltages/socket shapes or NTSC/PAL tv format difference. Product locked to market and thus preventing it from competing with cheaper itself in different market.
Obviously, this is at huge cost to customers. It should be outlawed, but i guess as long as people can pirate stuff and get around it, noone will care enough to go into streets and protest loudly or write to senators.
See, this is where content companies win: they get away pulling all sorts of crap because techie people who care can get around it easily and nontechhie people don't care.
We have reserves, send in more councelors!
I am afraid you were deluding yourself for 30 years.
There is quite difference between game that you can copy without any trouble by normal cd-copy routine of your favorite burning software. And game that you simply can not copy without some net digging and without waiting for someone to crack it.
100% Prevention? No, not really, obviously does not work and can not work, but they do not need to get even close. All you really need is to make it difficult enough to make sure game gets week or two of shelf life before pirates start to compete and difficult enough so that timmy, the clueless, will never really be able to give copy to his friend johny the clueless.
Think of it as super short copyright: It only needs to last long enough to author to make money.
Here is THE issue:
If you want to deliver your content to 100% of customers, P2P is no-go:
1) It will simply not work for certain configurations and underperforms in many others. You want to tinker with customers computer, open ports etc ... and it is not going to be enough. You need fallback.
2) It can saturate customer BW, especially if you are 'evil' and let em seed for a while after they are done.
3) It does not work for certain content: It is kinda hard to stream with p2p, and most conent is that: some silly streamed videos. You can not really deliver websites with p2p either. Biggest media sites simply can not tap potential of p2p.
5) Tech support is nightmare.
All in all, you will need fallback: good oldfashioned http or ftp download. And customers are kinda smart ... If direct download is faster than torrent (it will for most people who are not on academic networks), people will choose direct download. I know I will: 1kb of upload kinda blocks about 5kb of download on my connection. 2000 seed torrent of one iso means overnight, getting that iso from ftp is about hour.
Blizzard had to invest a lot to fallback and seed servers, OS projects still need big ftps.
My piratey coleagues use direct download file stores like rapidshare instead of any p2p it seems and I think they got it right. Being able to actually saturate your downlink from seccond 1 with nearly guaranteed speed simply wins over p2p unrealiablity. P2p is not THE way to pirate anymore.
So if you are business and have rented that big server that can handle load, you can as well not bother with p2p. Do not fall in "ellegance" trap. elegant solution is not always best solution. p2p has lots of elegance and tech neatness, but that does not help it in being succesfull business tool.
1) Cheap equipment is a bit worse. It might not impact performance at all, but chances are, some sue-happy person might win malpractice case thatnks to 'subpar equipment used'. Cheap in this case can be pretty expensive.
2) Costs are directly transalted to customer. And people will pay a LOT when their health is concerned. So, if customers can afford to pay you for expensive stuff ... you might as well let em pay because your profit margins can be bigger. Simply, you can have lab test cost 10$ and add margin of say 5$, or you can have lab test costing 100$ and add margin of 50$.
3) Expensive stuff means more profit for equipment makers (bigger price -> bigger margins). Enough to be able to advertize and add little, hmm, personal incentive to buy pricey stuff.
4) And sometimes, you really DO need that expensive stuff because it can make difference between life and death.
I would not call poor controls "part of challenge". I would call it excuse for bad ui design and attempt to hide fact that game lacks depth or reall challenge.
It is true that effective usage of controls takes skill and expertize, but that does not mean that controls have to be hard to operate to begin or to require some sort of learning: fps controls, for example, are quite standardized by now. Only learning happening usually only concerns game specific features.
Take starcaft for example. Any player can easily navigate and play game, but there are features for experts that add depth to competitive skillset.
... he player must use the mouse to physically turn knobs and open doors ...
Oh come on, ain't first rule of game design to throw away "realistic" rubbish and make game comfortable to play?
Once this hits mainstream, you will be *wishing* for Comic Sans when entering new site and waiting for font to load. And papyrus would be godsend which you will celebrate by writing email to webmaster and thanking him.
Which is totally inconvenient for user that has to keep up with it... *AA wins with every step of arms race because users need to adapt.
Andre regardless of images, there is more trouble: But they still need channel to share those files with public ... and to organize them and allow searching ... or you end up with closed communities of people who share them between themselves and network with other similar communities, which hinders casual torrent downloading.
Which basically means *AA gets what they wanted. Hordes are cut off or have harder time downloading.
Idea is not to force people out of sharing, but make it inconvenient enough to stop being more useful than going out and cashing money for originals.
But that actually kills gameplay.
There are more reason for ascii 2d than just being easy to create.
Ascii is also easy to recognize and player can easily "read" situation. It is sort of high-contrast graphics that is very hard to pull with graphical tiles. I tried tilesets for DF and stayed away from it ... it just made game look messy.
And, once you get from 2d, you loose overview. I have seens roguelikes turned to classic dungeons (you can not really do much more thanks to underlying blocky nature of those games) and it was pain to play. Mazes of random rooms are not pleasant to navigate at all if you do it from first person view...
Or they would allow old classes start right at 'heroic' levels.
Archmage class - mage starting at L55. ...
Blademaster - warrior starting at L55.
Ranger - hunter starting at L55
Cartooony graphics? Oh noes! Serious gamer can't be seen playing something that look cartoony that just can't be fun!
That is *prefect* graphics for this game for these reasons:
* Pretty much anyone can run it. And have great performance. Whole point of looking cartoony is that it lets artists get away with low-poly and low-res models that would look terrible if they attempted realistic look.
* It is iconic and stylish and well made. Very recognizable, very easy to look at.
* It avoids uncanny valley.
I'd take this anytime over boring, resource-hog, uncanny valley dwellers.
Nope.
a) Google actually reacts to DMCA-like request and does remove search results if companies ask them to. see: http://www.google.com/dmca.html
b) Their business model is not build around enabling piracy, very much unlike sites that depends on it to exists and make profit, hence a) works and there is no reason nor legal grounds to sue them.
Compared to cookie cutter pirate site where a) will not ever work because b) they will be out of business if they complied and removed copyrighted material as they would be out of content and ad revenue fast. At best they will post childish reaction on their site.
They still have central services that could be taken down. And their 'legal' existences still depends wholly on same law avoidance schema like before.
And since they go a long way to make sure they can not be liable for providing access to copyrighted shit because they would not know it is there (which they know will be there, hence the blind services), its kinda self defeating as they prove themselves they are 'looking for trouble' and expecting material that they will be liable for, and that they want that material there.
10$ that pedoporn will appear there asap, forcing them to react with implementing ability to block certain content. I am sure RIAA can afford few machines in 3rd world do get some content up there.
Its seems that they have 'target time' in which players can reach max level. Is max level is raised, part of leveling process needs to be changed to keep time spent reaching max level the same.
Which makes sense because player who joins game later has to catch up with population at level cap where the content is, and after several expansions it would be quite frustrating trying to catch up
Now, if they simply abolished concept of levels ...
No, they use it because it introduces massive downtime that is easy to justify as you can get some players even believe it is for their own good.
MMO 101: Downtime and timesinks are good thing for business. It means you get away with having less actual content while players take longer to do something, making sure they will be around in next month.
I have been playing instant teleport-anywhere game (Guild Wars) and frankly it is single most awesome thing. Worls still feels big in parts where cotnent is and small where player runs out of it. Just like in WoW: Areas which you outlevel just shrink in your head. By time you are done with walking on feet, you are indeed done and any travel-related downtime is pointless and punishing.
Game would not be bigger if i had to spend 30 minutes getting to some location "for your own good". It would be oxonobiously anoying.
Ive actually quit WoW over lack of instant movement. Waiting 30 minutes for group to ssemble is not fun, neither well spent time. When you spend more time afking game and reding book while you wait for someone than playing, something is very wrong ...
Time to install Kazaa and start downloading top 10 music!
Its simple. You drop any packet that does not look like normal 'nothing to hide person surfing' traffic.
There is not just black list, there is whitelist approach too. Technology does not win this once the other side gets serious because the other side physically controls the tubes.
As for steam and whatnot, opeartors of those services will take care of it if they want to keep doing business there.
Not gauging response. Sending message.
"We can destroy your business in here on whim. Now, be nice and play by the rules."
And people wonder why Google turned evil while ago and cooperates with censor-states.