That happened to me with Dragon Age: Origins. Bought it early. Bought none of the DLC, as most Bioware DLC is horribly overpriced.
Now they have the "ultimate edition" which for less then the price of the original version has that, the expansion, and all DLC. But there's no DLC combo pack for people like me, I'd have to pay full price for all of it.
Result? I'm skipping the sequel until it has an "ultimate edition" too... and if I still care by then, maybe I'll get it. If not, Bioware can go fuck themselves.
These map packs work on peer pressure. Someone buys it, and pressures their friends to buy it too in order to keep playing. But that also works in reverse. If people start telling their friends "that's a waste of money and I won't buy it", they now have pressure to not use it in order to play with you.
It's kind of sad how many customers think they're powerless. We're the ones with the money. We have ALL the power in this equation. If we used it intelligently instead of like a bunch of crack addicited morons, the publishers would be begging for mercy.
When 75% of your sales come in the first week,and most of that comes from moron fanboys who pre-order and buy it on day 1, why would the company change?
People keep buying the same buggy crap over and over again. Hell, people KNOW it's going to be buggy and go buy it anyway. Internet complaints mean exactly nothing. It's money that talks.
This is an entirely market driven behavior. Gamers are a lot like crack addicted morons: they complain a lot, but they do it while forking money over to get their latest fix, so nobody gives a rats ass what they're saying.
As soon as people en-masse say "we refuse to buy the next Bethesda game until after it's been proven to be relatively bug free on release" this nonsense will continue.
And as a user of a program, I give a shit about the productivity of the developer... why?
I care about the productivity of the user: me. Eclipse is a lot of things. Fast is not one of them.
Hell, the worst example is probably SQL Developer, which is an Oracle product. In the same time it takes that thing to launch I can go get breakfast (or start Visual Studio, load a project, and be doing work). Bizzarely if you have the VS tools for Oracle installed (also an Oracle product), you can fire up VS, connect to Oracle, and load/edit procedures far faster then you can do it in Oracle's Java based tools.
Now maybe that's just Oracle sucking. But Flash Builder? Not exactly a speed demon either (and that's built off Eclipse). Hell, even something small like Gallery Remote is slow.
So yeah, maybe these miraculously fast Java UI's exist somewhere... or maybe your definition of "fast" isn't the same as mine. I'll take something written in C++ any day as a user.
I keep hearing this from people, but I've never seen a fast Java app. Is it just that anything done in Java with a UI runs like a beached whale, or is it just that most people who make Java UIs are doing it wrong?
I refuse to see any movie in 3d, because it's hard on my eyes and most of the conversions are terrible. As a result with some movies being hard to find in 2d, I spend $0 on them. Hollywood is doing a good job of saving me money, and I hope they convert everything in sight so I have no reason to ever visit a movie theatre again.
Laziness is good. Why would I waste time and effort on something that doesn't matter in the slightest, when I could instead do something useful? Or for that matter, do nothing?
He comes up with a bunch of ideas at the end that are out to lunch. Let's take a look:
Unicode has the entire gamut of Greek letters, mathematical and technical symbols, brackets, brockets, sprockets, and weird and wonderful glyphs such as "Dentistry symbol light down and horizontal with wave" (0x23c7). Why do we still have to name variables OmegaZero when our computers now know how to render 0x03a9+0x2080 properly?
Well, let's think. Possibly because nobody knows what 0x03a9+0x2080 does without looking it up, and nobody seeing the character it produces would know how to type said character again without looking it up? I know consulting a wall-sized "how to type X" chart is the first thing I want to do every 3 lines of code.
While we are at it, have you noticed that screens are getting wider and wider these days, and that today's text processing programs have absolutely no problem with multiple columns, insert displays, and hanging enclosures being placed in that space?
But programs are still decisively vertical, to the point of being horizontally challenged. Why can't we pull minor scopes and subroutines out in that right-hand space and thus make them supportive to the understanding of the main body of code?
If you actually look at word processing programs, the document is also highly vertical. The horizontal stuff is stuff like notes, comments, revisions, and so on. Putting source code comments on the side might be a useful idea, but putting the code over there won't be unless the goal is to make it harder to read. (That said, widescreen monitors suck for programming.)
And need I remind anybody that you cannot buy a monochrome screen anymore? Syntax-coloring editors are the default. Why not make color part of the syntax? Why not tell the compiler about protected code regions by putting them on a framed light gray background? Or provide hints about likely and unlikely code paths with a green or red background tint?
So anybody who has some color-blindness (which is not a small number) can't understand your program? Or maybe we should make a red + do something different then a blue +? That's great once you do it six times, then it's just a mess. (Now if you want to have the code editor put protected regions on a framed light gray background, sure. But there's nothing wrong with sticking "protected" in front of it to define what it is.)
It seems like he's trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist by doing something that's a whole lot worse.
Then it's a shame that we don't teach financial literacy, isn't it?
High school math would be a lot more useful in the real world if they spent less time on obscure things that 90% of the people in the room will never use, and more time on things like "how does the interest on your credit card work?"
When the "game" has 5 hours of content and is easy, you can beat it in one day and still have a life. We call those days "Saturday" and "Sunday".
Seriously, this "attack the poster" mentality is idiotic. Games today are unquestionably easier then games from 15 years ago. Making games that most people can't play is bad for business. WoW is a great example: if hard modes were the only modes for raids, most of the playerbase would never be able to raid and they'd lose all those customers. Catering to the top 10% of your players is a good way to get rid of the other 90%.
Because that opinion hasn't been cleared by the Apple approval board. When Jobs or his cronies say its okay to see that opinion on your phone, then the iSheep will accept it.
Because they made the same mistake with their last game, which has been going on for many years now? They consider it to be a good thing, showing just how disconnected from reality Square HQ really is.
(As if we didn't know from the corridor simulator that is FF 13.)
Yeah, because you might not need to go start up Ventrilo, or look something up, or wait while flying somewhere, or wait for a party, or take a break during a raid...
Then they're fucking morons, and anybody who believes them is a moron fanboy.
Alt+Tab is one of those core windows things. It's REQUIRED for GFW certification. Even if you want to disable it, the correct way to handle it is to pop up some kind of message about blocking it, not just crashing.
Crashing happens when the engine can't handle what the user is doing, which is the real problem. They didn't deal with this bug, and now they're coming up with a bullshit excuse to try and cover their asses. Sadly, it's always true that there's at least one raging fanboy who will believe anything a developer says, no matter how retarded it is.
"Games must not attempt to disable standard task switching. Games must not disable the ALT+TAB keyboard shortcut. Games are allowed to disable accessibility keyboard shortcuts, as described in Disabling Shortcut Keys in Games. "
Few people who aren't rabid fanboys aren't arguing that an AH isn't necessary. Even the devs seem to have figured it out now that they're promising to add a search function (which is the most basic feature of an AH).
When the game's crafting and itemization are both built around being able to make things, which other players use to make bigger things, which are then sold, a minor detail like "you can't actually find what you want to buy" is a rather big deal. It's almost as stupid a design decision as the lack of mail.
There are differnet levels of "buggy as hell". There's "some skills don't work right", and then there's "the entire market system is fundamentally broken at the design level and will never work."
This game is more broken then your standard MMO launch, by a long shot.
Square is a highly insular company. They seem to think that they still know what they're doing and that the market hasn't moved on from 2003. There's no excuse for a UI this terrible in 2010 when you can do better simply by ripping off what everyone else is doing.
FF 11's UI was bad for its time. For a modern game it's a disgrace.
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That happened to me with Dragon Age: Origins. Bought it early. Bought none of the DLC, as most Bioware DLC is horribly overpriced.
Now they have the "ultimate edition" which for less then the price of the original version has that, the expansion, and all DLC. But there's no DLC combo pack for people like me, I'd have to pay full price for all of it.
Result? I'm skipping the sequel until it has an "ultimate edition" too... and if I still care by then, maybe I'll get it. If not, Bioware can go fuck themselves.
Because we control the demand. Their supply is useless without demand.
Games are not food. You can in fact refuse to buy them. Easily. Enough people do that for any length of time and the industry will beg for mercy.
I don't. Clearly it's a failure.
Or they could not buy the DLC?
These map packs work on peer pressure. Someone buys it, and pressures their friends to buy it too in order to keep playing. But that also works in reverse. If people start telling their friends "that's a waste of money and I won't buy it", they now have pressure to not use it in order to play with you.
It's kind of sad how many customers think they're powerless. We're the ones with the money. We have ALL the power in this equation. If we used it intelligently instead of like a bunch of crack addicited morons, the publishers would be begging for mercy.
Wait for a demo. Wait for 2 weeks and see how many forums light up with suckers who bought on day 1 complaining about how broken it is.
There's no reason why you have to buy the game on day 1. It'll still be on the shelf in two weeks.
"Not refundable" is a great reason to exercise some bloody self-restraint.
"this nonsense will continue"... by which of course I mean "this nonsense will stop."
That's what I get for commenting in the morning. :P
When 75% of your sales come in the first week,and most of that comes from moron fanboys who pre-order and buy it on day 1, why would the company change?
People keep buying the same buggy crap over and over again. Hell, people KNOW it's going to be buggy and go buy it anyway. Internet complaints mean exactly nothing. It's money that talks.
This is an entirely market driven behavior. Gamers are a lot like crack addicted morons: they complain a lot, but they do it while forking money over to get their latest fix, so nobody gives a rats ass what they're saying.
As soon as people en-masse say "we refuse to buy the next Bethesda game until after it's been proven to be relatively bug free on release" this nonsense will continue.
I won't bet on it failing until Gartner predicts that it'll be making $2 billion in revenue by 2014.
And as a user of a program, I give a shit about the productivity of the developer... why?
I care about the productivity of the user: me. Eclipse is a lot of things. Fast is not one of them.
Hell, the worst example is probably SQL Developer, which is an Oracle product. In the same time it takes that thing to launch I can go get breakfast (or start Visual Studio, load a project, and be doing work). Bizzarely if you have the VS tools for Oracle installed (also an Oracle product), you can fire up VS, connect to Oracle, and load/edit procedures far faster then you can do it in Oracle's Java based tools.
Now maybe that's just Oracle sucking. But Flash Builder? Not exactly a speed demon either (and that's built off Eclipse). Hell, even something small like Gallery Remote is slow.
So yeah, maybe these miraculously fast Java UI's exist somewhere... or maybe your definition of "fast" isn't the same as mine. I'll take something written in C++ any day as a user.
I keep hearing this from people, but I've never seen a fast Java app. Is it just that anything done in Java with a UI runs like a beached whale, or is it just that most people who make Java UIs are doing it wrong?
It's natural selection in action. We catch and punish the stupid criminals more often, which allows the smart ones to thrive.
"Defective by design" is the design mantra at Apple HQ.
I refuse to see any movie in 3d, because it's hard on my eyes and most of the conversions are terrible. As a result with some movies being hard to find in 2d, I spend $0 on them. Hollywood is doing a good job of saving me money, and I hope they convert everything in sight so I have no reason to ever visit a movie theatre again.
Laziness is good. Why would I waste time and effort on something that doesn't matter in the slightest, when I could instead do something useful? Or for that matter, do nothing?
Unicode has the entire gamut of Greek letters, mathematical and technical symbols, brackets, brockets, sprockets, and weird and wonderful glyphs such as "Dentistry symbol light down and horizontal with wave" (0x23c7). Why do we still have to name variables OmegaZero when our computers now know how to render 0x03a9+0x2080 properly?
Well, let's think. Possibly because nobody knows what 0x03a9+0x2080 does without looking it up, and nobody seeing the character it produces would know how to type said character again without looking it up? I know consulting a wall-sized "how to type X" chart is the first thing I want to do every 3 lines of code.
While we are at it, have you noticed that screens are getting wider and wider these days, and that today's text processing programs have absolutely no problem with multiple columns, insert displays, and hanging enclosures being placed in that space? But programs are still decisively vertical, to the point of being horizontally challenged. Why can't we pull minor scopes and subroutines out in that right-hand space and thus make them supportive to the understanding of the main body of code?
If you actually look at word processing programs, the document is also highly vertical. The horizontal stuff is stuff like notes, comments, revisions, and so on. Putting source code comments on the side might be a useful idea, but putting the code over there won't be unless the goal is to make it harder to read. (That said, widescreen monitors suck for programming.)
And need I remind anybody that you cannot buy a monochrome screen anymore? Syntax-coloring editors are the default. Why not make color part of the syntax? Why not tell the compiler about protected code regions by putting them on a framed light gray background? Or provide hints about likely and unlikely code paths with a green or red background tint?
So anybody who has some color-blindness (which is not a small number) can't understand your program? Or maybe we should make a red + do something different then a blue +? That's great once you do it six times, then it's just a mess. (Now if you want to have the code editor put protected regions on a framed light gray background, sure. But there's nothing wrong with sticking "protected" in front of it to define what it is.) It seems like he's trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist by doing something that's a whole lot worse.
Then it's a shame that we don't teach financial literacy, isn't it?
High school math would be a lot more useful in the real world if they spent less time on obscure things that 90% of the people in the room will never use, and more time on things like "how does the interest on your credit card work?"
When the "game" has 5 hours of content and is easy, you can beat it in one day and still have a life. We call those days "Saturday" and "Sunday".
Seriously, this "attack the poster" mentality is idiotic. Games today are unquestionably easier then games from 15 years ago. Making games that most people can't play is bad for business. WoW is a great example: if hard modes were the only modes for raids, most of the playerbase would never be able to raid and they'd lose all those customers. Catering to the top 10% of your players is a good way to get rid of the other 90%.
Because that opinion hasn't been cleared by the Apple approval board. When Jobs or his cronies say its okay to see that opinion on your phone, then the iSheep will accept it.
Because they made the same mistake with their last game, which has been going on for many years now? They consider it to be a good thing, showing just how disconnected from reality Square HQ really is.
(As if we didn't know from the corridor simulator that is FF 13.)
Yeah, because you might not need to go start up Ventrilo, or look something up, or wait while flying somewhere, or wait for a party, or take a break during a raid...
Then they're fucking morons, and anybody who believes them is a moron fanboy.
Alt+Tab is one of those core windows things. It's REQUIRED for GFW certification. Even if you want to disable it, the correct way to handle it is to pop up some kind of message about blocking it, not just crashing.
Crashing happens when the engine can't handle what the user is doing, which is the real problem. They didn't deal with this bug, and now they're coming up with a bullshit excuse to try and cover their asses. Sadly, it's always true that there's at least one raging fanboy who will believe anything a developer says, no matter how retarded it is.
It does. Being able to alt+tab without crashing is a fairly basic requirement. See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee417691(VS.85).aspx
"Games must not attempt to disable standard task switching. Games must not disable the ALT+TAB keyboard shortcut. Games are allowed to disable accessibility keyboard shortcuts, as described in Disabling Shortcut Keys in Games. "
Few people who aren't rabid fanboys aren't arguing that an AH isn't necessary. Even the devs seem to have figured it out now that they're promising to add a search function (which is the most basic feature of an AH).
When the game's crafting and itemization are both built around being able to make things, which other players use to make bigger things, which are then sold, a minor detail like "you can't actually find what you want to buy" is a rather big deal. It's almost as stupid a design decision as the lack of mail.
There are differnet levels of "buggy as hell". There's "some skills don't work right", and then there's "the entire market system is fundamentally broken at the design level and will never work."
This game is more broken then your standard MMO launch, by a long shot.
Square is a highly insular company. They seem to think that they still know what they're doing and that the market hasn't moved on from 2003. There's no excuse for a UI this terrible in 2010 when you can do better simply by ripping off what everyone else is doing.
FF 11's UI was bad for its time. For a modern game it's a disgrace.