Despite being multiplayer and bumping to other people, most of them played alone, not in groups. Certain quests forced people together, but it was pita to set up group that was destined to break apart in seconds afte completition of hardest objective (waiting for 30 minutes for someone arrive just for that? oh come on.), and since they were optional...
Even when doing instances, groups dissolved asap last boss was reached. Only real thing where working together with players was worth it were raids. Yawn.
Best thing that MP did for me was ability to be "nice" to strangers by casting long lasting buffs on them.
In guildwars, I can be anywhere in seconds. Seconds, at not cost. Is there anything more awesome MMO can do to help socialization? All people in friends list are one second away. I can join group for any dungeon/mission i fancy in seconds. World is huge for me, not limited by where i can travel during my gaming session.
Compared to wow where i would pretend being afk when asked for help because i simply could not bear zepelin/windrider/mount timesink.
Hint: you do not build comunity by forcing people to play together.
You build community by giving people tools to easily meet and play together.
Is town too busy? Boom, new set of districts is spawned! They will be probably located on different server too, making players overcrowding non issue. Players can switch them at will (as bonus, they are grouped by geolocation and laguange, but can still switch to different ones.
The only way to handle rush of thousands of players to one area when special events happen. 5 thousands of players want to participate in xmass feestival? no problem, just spawn 50 districts in that town.
As conspiracy theory, i would rate this "D, put some effort, but is utterly unconvincing"
It is same as it always was: Power. They know pretty much everything is shitty, they don't care. Current situation is worth preserving because it is the one with them in power.
Not different from any other historical situation.
Ban is not just passive filtering (whitelisting btw, cat is quite dangerous when it is ordered to stop being friend and takes advantage of all its options) Ban could also mean fines or worse. French three strikes, anyone?
Not to mention that protocol change is annoyance that severely hurts networks, end user experience and may end up making p2p useless for anyone except hardcore. There is limit of annoyance after which ordinary user just gives up.
Fishined product would be too obvious show of no "cease and desist" happening, regardless of how anonymous torrent would be.
As far as last-minute letters go, I think that publishers do not want to cause pointless damage (most such projects never take off so it is pointless to scout for them and send letters asap - that leaves big that of pissed people who now have target to point at "look, our project was great and we had skill and determination to pull it off, but these evil guys stopped us.", same people that would give up/loose interest after few weeks.)
Diablo is, of course, simplified because of visuals versus verbosity conflict. But it still retains core - Randomized adventure, dungeon discovery. atmosphere.
There is nothing bad at throwing out kitchen sink and doing spring cleaning. Away with steep learning curve, leave core of game.
Problem solving, for example - typical problem solving in RL basically consists of having the luck of having right item in inventory. (and remembering to pray if everything else fails) There are gonna be lots of nuances, obscure mechanics that can be abused, lots of different options to dealing with something. But it all can be condesned to "was i lucky enough to have x in backpack?". Might as well just simplify it. For example, condesate all the "equipment rusting/melting/breaking" events to simple durability loss, or all the harm character in interesting way effects to health loss, etc...
Discovery another - in heart, discovery in roguelikes is as shallow as in Diablos - just uncover level to find enemies/loot, proceed to next level. But it works.
Depth of roguelike is in player imagination, rich enviroment that adds event to trigger more imagination (meeting rust monster beating it with wooden sword), its not just that enviroment alone - without player imagination it is just pointlessly overcomplicated dungeon crawl slash roulette.
I would not even call ascii primitive audiovisuals. It is more of a abstraction. And it enourages developers to work on important stuff: gameplay. And if game is fun without graphics, you just hit jackpot.
But of course awesome things happen if someone manages to take that roguelike core and adds fitting graphics ( Diablo series. )
How is that different from using scripting laguage to include inclue?
Hint: It is really not. If anything, your mega 1000 site requies some kind of cms and server side includes anyway.
Also, what about trying to understand what was conceptually wrong with frames instead of getting your paties in bunch and crying fowl when someone smirks at your frame based site? It broke too many things (deep linking, web search engines, etc...) that benefit user to justify its dubious benefits for developer.
Maybe they should stop themselves "Pirate party" and remove that "it should be okay to pirate stuff" from list of their goals, they will not have that many problems. Everything else is great list of civil liberties that are worth fighting for... but including piracy in there? What for? To piss of big companies and get more votes?
a) Value of pirated item is basically what pirate would pay if pirating was not an option.
That is anytime from zero (zero being, be puts no value into item and would not even bother pirating it.) to several times of pricetag.
However, my observation is that 1-3$ DVDs on newstands here basically "ruined" piracy of whatever movies came out like that, sop rice would be around there.
Or:
b) Expenditures that pirate has to make to pirate.
That includes time (it take time to looup source, tap it and deal with resulting file), Knowledge (How-tos take some), Bandwidths costs (especially if you have fup caps), HD costs (that file has to sit somewhere), etc...
For me, that would be around 2$, but i imagine that some basement dweller would price it for cents and on the other hand for someone else it would be hundreds of $ wasted time.
Freedom of speech is not freedom to steal. If you want to make point, boycot abusive companies, don't continue using their products, because even if you steal it, you still support em. Go to competition.
People should support real heroes of this fight ( http://www.eff.org/ ), not couple of populists who just surf wave of people wanting free stuff and who are now scared of consequences.
People do not look up facts anymore, one click away is one click too far for wast majority. Not being exposed to them in school means not being exposed to them at all. That is especially important to fields they will never pursue. Not when they learned that they can make up stuff (aka, be creative).
You can not understand context without information. You can not judge relevance without information. You can not synthesis without information. You can not think critically without information etc...
Learning is important skill, but good initial seed of facts is just as important.
Old copies? They will be there, sure. But they will not release new stuff as it was obvious that new stuff will be either leaked or just pirated by "customers". Why continue giving them freebie? Why continue competing with "free as beer" P2P while supplying em with new content at same time?
What would you propose, keep current service as "legacy"? To compete with piratebay? With no future? No profitability? Waste of manpower.
Considering reaction of typical slashdotter (which shattered some illusions about this crowd) to this news, i think i am entitled to little rage. ANd its not nerf hate, its self righetous pirate hate.
Yes, d&d is overpriced crap. But:
There is business competition all over the place.
There are even great free rulesets.
Hell, people can play games with homebrewn rules. No books needed.
Sumplemental materials from any ruleset can be converted to any other ruleset with little imagination. Or people can be creative (they play rpgs, creative is supposedly one of requirements)
Yet people still want D&D while they have plenty of options (and are not shy to rationalize torrenting it)
(And yes, anything other than basic survival is luxury. Even if we raise level, i.e. to "just" powerty or "just comfortable life", spending several hours a week on pricey entertainment IS a luxury. No sympathies here for people who can't afford that.)
I say, publisher followed simple supply/demand law and set price that people would actually pay otherwise they would have gone bancrupt already. As far as being customer goes, simple calculation of buck-per-hour should show you how much value you get.
Yes, they will add DRM, just like your library. And people here will cry and conveniently forget reason why it was added.
So, they remedy their mistake of releasing everything in P2P-ready format which was superior to crappy scans. I say, good call.
What do you expect them to do? Bend over and let p2p fuck em in ass?
And its not like people have slightest justification for doing that:
* Crappy product? Obviously, you want to p2p it so it has to have some value or you would not waste time searching for it.
* eeeevil drm? werent those files put to p2p woutht any crack necessary? hell, they went path of least resistance: just crappy watermarks.
* Prices? Can't afford it? I think I am confused. Is playing d&d some basic need that all humans have inherent right to?
* Freedom? Get GNU-RPG.
All I see is company that made right moves (which pirate apologists say they want to happen for them to stop pirating) but was fucked by customers.
They will be back eventually. With all the DRM they can pack. And we have 8 assholes to thanks for that.
Here is lesson:
Do not do zero drm. Do not offer quality material. Average person, even smart one will act like douche and offer no thanks. Whole amount of "deserved", "go party with mafiaa", "they r desprit" and such from nerds who discovered that their future d&n books will once again be crappy scans is enough evidence that they did right thing. And
Slashdot Mirror
All this comes at cost thou. Needless annoyance makes people not to log in again.
I prefer cruel challenge that stays between me and juicy rewards, bling bling should be connected to boss-related nightmares.
But basic gameplay should not be designed to frustrate. I play roguelikes for that :).
I disagree.
I would compare my time in WoW:
Despite being multiplayer and bumping to other people, most of them played alone, not in groups. Certain quests forced people together, but it was pita to set up group that was destined to break apart in seconds afte completition of hardest objective (waiting for 30 minutes for someone arrive just for that? oh come on.), and since they were optional ...
Even when doing instances, groups dissolved asap last boss was reached. Only real thing where working together with players was worth it were raids. Yawn.
Best thing that MP did for me was ability to be "nice" to strangers by casting long lasting buffs on them.
In guildwars, I can be anywhere in seconds. Seconds, at not cost. Is there anything more awesome MMO can do to help socialization? All people in friends list are one second away. I can join group for any dungeon/mission i fancy in seconds. World is huge for me, not limited by where i can travel during my gaming session.
Compared to wow where i would pretend being afk when asked for help because i simply could not bear zepelin/windrider/mount timesink.
Hint: you do not build comunity by forcing people to play together.
You build community by giving people tools to easily meet and play together.
"Half Sharding" like Guildwars has solves that.
Is town too busy? Boom, new set of districts is spawned! They will be probably located on different server too, making players overcrowding non issue. Players can switch them at will (as bonus, they are grouped by geolocation and laguange, but can still switch to different ones.
The only way to handle rush of thousands of players to one area when special events happen. 5 thousands of players want to participate in xmass feestival? no problem, just spawn 50 districts in that town.
See? They care about shashdotters thaaat much!
As conspiracy theory, i would rate this "D, put some effort, but is utterly unconvincing"
It is same as it always was: Power. They know pretty much everything is shitty, they don't care. Current situation is worth preserving because it is the one with them in power.
Not different from any other historical situation.
Ban is not just passive filtering (whitelisting btw, cat is quite dangerous when it is ordered to stop being friend and takes advantage of all its options) Ban could also mean fines or worse. French three strikes, anyone?
Not to mention that protocol change is annoyance that severely hurts networks, end user experience and may end up making p2p useless for anyone except hardcore. There is limit of annoyance after which ordinary user just gives up.
Ban on unwaranted encryption.
Two can play this game and nothing good will come out of it for anyone.
Fishined product would be too obvious show of no "cease and desist" happening, regardless of how anonymous torrent would be.
As far as last-minute letters go, I think that publishers do not want to cause pointless damage (most such projects never take off so it is pointless to scout for them and send letters asap - that leaves big that of pissed people who now have target to point at "look, our project was great and we had skill and determination to pull it off, but these evil guys stopped us.", same people that would give up/loose interest after few weeks.)
You will love it when they add functional approach and constructs. Declarative style in php for more points!
Diablo is, of course, simplified because of visuals versus verbosity conflict. But it still retains core - Randomized adventure, dungeon discovery. atmosphere.
There is nothing bad at throwing out kitchen sink and doing spring cleaning. Away with steep learning curve, leave core of game.
Problem solving, for example - typical problem solving in RL basically consists of having the luck of having right item in inventory. (and remembering to pray if everything else fails) There are gonna be lots of nuances, obscure mechanics that can be abused, lots of different options to dealing with something. But it all can be condesned to "was i lucky enough to have x in backpack?". Might as well just simplify it. For example, condesate all the "equipment rusting/melting/breaking" events to simple durability loss, or all the harm character in interesting way effects to health loss, etc ...
Discovery another - in heart, discovery in roguelikes is as shallow as in Diablos - just uncover level to find enemies/loot, proceed to next level. But it works.
Depth of roguelike is in player imagination, rich enviroment that adds event to trigger more imagination (meeting rust monster beating it with wooden sword), its not just that enviroment alone - without player imagination it is just pointlessly overcomplicated dungeon crawl slash roulette.
I would not even call ascii primitive audiovisuals. It is more of a abstraction. And it enourages developers to work on important stuff: gameplay. And if game is fun without graphics, you just hit jackpot.
But of course awesome things happen if someone manages to take that roguelike core and adds fitting graphics ( Diablo series. )
How is that different from using scripting laguage to include inclue?
Hint: It is really not. If anything, your mega 1000 site requies some kind of cms and server side includes anyway.
Also, what about trying to understand what was conceptually wrong with frames instead of getting your paties in bunch and crying fowl when someone smirks at your frame based site? It broke too many things (deep linking, web search engines, etc...) that benefit user to justify its dubious benefits for developer.
Maybe they should stop themselves "Pirate party" and remove that "it should be okay to pirate stuff" from list of their goals, they will not have that many problems. Everything else is great list of civil liberties that are worth fighting for ... but including piracy in there? What for? To piss of big companies and get more votes?
Definitelly, it is 2$.
Here is my reasoning:
a) Value of pirated item is basically what pirate would pay if pirating was not an option.
That is anytime from zero (zero being, be puts no value into item and would not even bother pirating it.) to several times of pricetag.
However, my observation is that 1-3$ DVDs on newstands here basically "ruined" piracy of whatever movies came out like that, sop rice would be around there.
Or:
b) Expenditures that pirate has to make to pirate.
That includes time (it take time to looup source, tap it and deal with resulting file), Knowledge (How-tos take some), Bandwidths costs (especially if you have fup caps), HD costs (that file has to sit somewhere), etc ...
For me, that would be around 2$, but i imagine that some basement dweller would price it for cents and on the other hand for someone else it would be hundreds of $ wasted time.
I would say Outer Space ( http://www.ospace.net/ ) was there even before that.
Its just that it is played in slow motion. But hey, its still RTS if you have to wake up at 4am to queue units and micro battle!!
You are assuming one thing: They they will leave you alone, merrily obfuscating your stuff be if they discover what you are doing.
They don't have to. And will not sit idly if this becomes widespread enough.
What kind of fines would you expect?
Loss of "internet access privileges"?
Some dirt digged?
Freedom of speech is not freedom to steal. If you want to make point, boycot abusive companies, don't continue using their products, because even if you steal it, you still support em. Go to competition.
People should support real heroes of this fight ( http://www.eff.org/ ), not couple of populists who just surf wave of people wanting free stuff and who are now scared of consequences.
People do not look up facts anymore, one click away is one click too far for wast majority. Not being exposed to them in school means not being exposed to them at all. That is especially important to fields they will never pursue. Not when they learned that they can make up stuff (aka, be creative).
You can not understand context without information. ...
You can not judge relevance without information.
You can not synthesis without information.
You can not think critically without information
etc
Learning is important skill, but good initial seed of facts is just as important.
Time to outlaw "unregulated internet"
"Did you know that kid across street? He is coming out of jail in few weeks. Served 3 years for providing access to freedomNet."
However that created distinctive feel of Fallout. 1950s Science Fiction. Remove that and it is yet another generic postap.
They are providing torrent files. Plain text files. On which no copyright lies, or at least nobody minds that they copy those.
There is no ambiguity to what theese files mean.
Their content, their filenames, comments, submit description, everything scream one thing: piracy.
They *know* what purpose of those files is, and they made it clear they know what users intent and what submitters intent.
Prefect "accessory to crime".
No wishfull-thinking leagleese gets around that.
Bad art direction makes good engine look unimpressive.
And good art will make feature lacking engines look awesome.
Old copies? They will be there, sure. But they will not release new stuff as it was obvious that new stuff will be either leaked or just pirated by "customers". Why continue giving them freebie? Why continue competing with "free as beer" P2P while supplying em with new content at same time?
What would you propose, keep current service as "legacy"? To compete with piratebay? With no future? No profitability? Waste of manpower.
Considering reaction of typical slashdotter (which shattered some illusions about this crowd) to this news, i think i am entitled to little rage. ANd its not nerf hate, its self righetous pirate hate.
Yes, d&d is overpriced crap. But:
There is business competition all over the place.
There are even great free rulesets.
Hell, people can play games with homebrewn rules. No books needed.
Sumplemental materials from any ruleset can be converted to any other ruleset with little imagination. Or people can be creative (they play rpgs, creative is supposedly one of requirements)
Yet people still want D&D while they have plenty of options (and are not shy to rationalize torrenting it)
(And yes, anything other than basic survival is luxury. Even if we raise level, i.e. to "just" powerty or "just comfortable life", spending several hours a week on pricey entertainment IS a luxury. No sympathies here for people who can't afford that.)
I say, publisher followed simple supply/demand law and set price that people would actually pay otherwise they would have gone bancrupt already. As far as being customer goes, simple calculation of buck-per-hour should show you how much value you get.
Yes, they will add DRM, just like your library. And people here will cry and conveniently forget reason why it was added.
So, they remedy their mistake of releasing everything in P2P-ready format which was superior to crappy scans. I say, good call.
What do you expect them to do? Bend over and let p2p fuck em in ass?
And its not like people have slightest justification for doing that:
* Crappy product? Obviously, you want to p2p it so it has to have some value or you would not waste time searching for it.
* eeeevil drm? werent those files put to p2p woutht any crack necessary? hell, they went path of least resistance: just crappy watermarks.
* Prices? Can't afford it? I think I am confused. Is playing d&d some basic need that all humans have inherent right to?
* Freedom? Get GNU-RPG.
All I see is company that made right moves (which pirate apologists say they want to happen for them to stop pirating) but was fucked by customers.
They will be back eventually. With all the DRM they can pack. And we have 8 assholes to thanks for that.
Here is lesson:
Do not do zero drm. Do not offer quality material. Average person, even smart one will act like douche and offer no thanks. Whole amount of "deserved", "go party with mafiaa", "they r desprit" and such from nerds who discovered that their future d&n books will once again be crappy scans is enough evidence that they did right thing. And