I have been wondering what would happen if MS decided to Embrace and Extend Linux. If they produced MS Linux, made their MS Office suite compatible with just MS Linux (and still closed source), what variety of Linux would the typical user buy and run? Microsoft has the biggest name in software, anything they adopt or produce has a massive advantage in gaining acceptability because it has the MS monolith behind it and common recognition. It would end up leaving the rest of the linux distros in the dust.
Yes, they would lose out on OS revenue, but with the success (sic) of Vista, thats probably not as much of a factor as it might have been previously. Office on the other hand is definitely their mainstay and could continue to be so.
This would mean they were no longer competing on the Operating System front at all, just on the Office Suite front where they still have a clear advantage. They would be seen to actively support OSS and at once stifle a lot of opposition from the OSS community, they would eliminate a lot of the security problems that plague their previous versions of their software and they could make contributions to the WINE project to ensure that backwards compatibility was assured.
The GST Tax (General Services Tax) is currently at 6%, the Provincial Sales Tax (at least here in British Columbia) is at 7%, so here I pay a grand total of 13% tax on most purchased items and services. In Alberta there is no provincial sales tax.
We do pay both Federal and Provincial Income tax though.
However, after hearing the horror stories of people experiencing problems under the US health care system, I will take ours anytime. Its not perfect but its available to everyone.
Case in point: a friend of mine discovered he had a brain tumour the size of a grapefruit (which explained the headaches and vision problems he had). After 2 weeks or so waiting for a chance to get an operation, he was in, got the tumour removed, spending a few weeks in the hospital total, and was out without any problems and no complications thankfully. As far as I know it cost him absolutely nothing. That doesn't seem to be the case for a lot of Americans.
As for on topic: I would be highly honoured as a Canadian to have Stephen Hawking move here and work at Waterloo.
How are they going to get Joe/Jane Average to remember that its T-E-S-L-A and not T-E-L-S-A, which is the way I hear 90% of the people pronounce it (on those rare occasions that Nikolai manages to come up in conversations)?
English speakers in NA, do very poorly with anything that seems remotely foreign in spelling or pronunciation, and mostly seem non-motivated to try to get it even remotely correct
Well actually, DAOC has leveling by PvP. Sadly, its now a bit old in the tooth, and the population is dwindling but they recognized eventually that leveling by PvP would be the most popular approach, and you can level up pretty much entirely in the battlegrounds (which are limited by level ranges) in DAOC. Its still a pretty good game overall.
Thats one thing that gives me some hope for WAR, Mythic eventually got a lot of things right with DAOC - although they blew some calls in a major way IMHO - perhaps a bit too late as it turns out, but if they can capitalize on that learning experience, it should put them in a good position to make a very enjoyable PvP game.
There major flaw is the love of *fast* combat in PvP, which tends to reward the younger players, but hopefully they can learn from the combat system in POTBS, which has a slower pace but lots of tension as a result
While no MMORPG is ever complete, and thus never completed when released, releases like this in the past have caused major problems in getting people to accept the game in the past. Vanguard was released with major elements of the game incomplete, Pirates of the Burning Sea had similar problems (although it was mostly feature complete and the changes made after release were tweaking that could only be made after large enough populations were logging in).
The missing elements and poor gameplay in Vanguard resulted in a mass exodus of players after release, and a similar thing happened in POTBS (eventually resulting in a server merge that took the game from 12 servers down to 4 I believe). Its always important to make a good impression when selling a product, and its doubly so for MMORPGs I think.
Given that WAR is considered the next likely candidate to challenge the supremacy of Warcraft (a daunting prospect for the developers I am sure), I can't help but think that this is a very bad idea generally speaking. The game needs to be as complete and ready to play as possible in order to attract the required playerbase. Taking the game live in a partially developed manner is no longer a viable option I think. Prior to Warcraft this might have been possible - Dark Age of Camelot went live with many features missing, but what it had was enough to attract people away from Everquest (which was its only major competitor at the time), but with Warcraft being such a complete product and so well designed (I may dislike it but 8m+ people disagree with me), any game that comes out now needs to be able to put its full featureset into gameplay right from release or it risks losing the majority of players who are pretty jaded and expect *everything now*. The time for incomplete products has passed, thanks to Blizzard.
Not only that, but if its missing the Tankers on all sides specifically thats a very bad decision as well. This will undoubtedly slow PvE leveling and thats usually the focus of any MMORPG early in its history as players build up their characters in preparation for the end game (yes I know you can PvP at any level in WAR, but realistically people will want to race to the end levels first and likely avoid PvP as they do in so many other games, even though the game attempts to balance it at all levels).
Since Jacobs has stated this is nothing to do with EA, its most likely an internal decision based on lack of development time and a desire to make a November release date that is key to getting Christmas sales for the game. It may also be a reaction to the success of Age of Conan (which is doing well by reports, although I didn't keep my subscription going so I am out of touch), or to some other major release thats coming at the same time. MMORPGs and their expansions tend to be timed to coincide with releases from other companies and that often seems to shift dates.
Mythic had an extremely successful product with Dark Age of Camelot, although they blew it in the long run, overdeveloping the game in some areas and inconsistently designing it in many cases. I have high hopes they can produce an excellent game with WAR but we shall see.
If forced to teach ID as Science, then set your kids the task of coming up with experiments that prove ID, just as you would with any other Scientific principle. When they can't come up with any good means to prove or disprove ID, you can then fail them all.
Maybe when trying to teach ID as Science results in 40 kids failing a Science Course, it will get enough attention to show that Legislatures have no business passing laws that tell teachers they have to treat batshit-insane crap as if it was a serious teaching subject.
If a mob of 1,000,000 people march on the white house with pitchforks and tourches demanding justice, there will be justice.
No, they will be labeled a "Violent Mob", and the Anti-Riot control Sonic weapon vehicles can be deployed to drive away the protesters. Or the National Guard, Military etc.
You Americans may have the right to unseat an unwanted government via a second revolution, but the Government also has the right and duty to preserve the peace and can use any means required to stop a violent protest can't it?. I have never understood that dichotomy personally speaking
To me it looks like the US is sliding slowly down the path to fascism of a sort, all in the name of supporting corporate profits and the continuation of the current government. Its kind of frightening to watch actually, but I hope it all turns out well:P
I spent a few years in the Canadian Military, and we have the same mindset up here. Every year my unit was allocated $X for purchasing rounds for the range. During the first Gulf War, my unit was deployed to the Middle East (and I sadly didn't get to go). When our range qualification time came up, they had us (about 20 out of 250 or so troops) drive out to the range, and then fire off enough rounds to account for the entire unit qualifying - even though they were deployed to a *war* - because otherwise next year's budget would have excluded the money for the rounds required on the range.
At the same time they had an initiative that offered a reward for suggestions that helped the military save money. The obvious submission garnered no response of course
I grew up in BC, and had to take French from grade 7 through to 10. I could never see the point of learning French during that whole period - but then the first *native* speaker of French I met was the teacher they hired immediately after I was done my last French class. On the other hand, all of my 3 closest friends spoke German, but it wasn't an option, go figure. I ended up taking Grade 11 Russian via correspondance, and later in University - because my family *might* be partially Russian (not sure).
A second language is *always* worth learning, and makes learning the third language that much easier
Not to diss goats, but I can actually say that my mother's property (only 1.5 acres) had sheep on it specifically so we didn't need to mow all of it. Worked quite well overall, provided you can deal with sheep - which are *remarkably* stupid, I mean stupid with some real force and intention behind it.
That said, let me be the first to welcome our new Goatish Overlords
As a Canadian, I have come to expect the worst from the US Government in most cases, and in most cases it has failed to disappoint. I sincerely hope your representatives listen and this bill is defeated, but I expect it will pass with flying colours. After all the US has "the best government money can buy":P
Whatever happens down there south of the border, we can expect the Tories to enact similar legislation up here sooner or later. Finlandization is well underway, sadly...
Well of course it all has to come down to the opinion of the author, but they can try to look at things in a dispassionate way.
I can write that "Pirates of the Burning Sea is an MMORPG game that is very oriented towards PvP gameplay, and much less suited to those who don't enjoy player versus player content in their online gaming. While it is possible to play the game without engaging in PvP you will find yourself waiting for a port to leave contention quite frequently, and this will disrupt your gameplay. The alternative is to try to minimize the effect of PvP on your gameplaying experience by avoiding ports in contention, but this is not always possible. That said, the PvP is quite a bit of fun for many players and the game has an excellent combat system at sea".
Or I can write: "This game has terrific PvP gameplay but like EVE Online its not for wusses, and failure it comes at a cost, so enter a battle prepared to risk your ship and its enhancements if you lose. The combat system is complex and requires planning to score a victory in many cases, battles can take a considerable time period between well matched opponents, although ganking teams are pretty prevalent on most servers, so be aware that one lone pirate you attack probably has 5 friends in hiding. Although the game does have crafting and there are roleplayers present on some servers, most carebears need not apply - this is not a game for people who don't have the cojones to participate in Player versus player combat, and of course there are other games that offer that sort of gameplay. If you aren't a PvPer, I highly suggest you avoid Pirates of the Burning Sea and go play CarebearsOnline(tm) instead" or something to that effect.
I have seen comments that were closer to the later than the former in game reviews. The former is me trying to provide a balanced view for all players and would of course elaborate on its points, the later is me attempting to take the view that PvP is the only "real" and "valid" gameplay and that all those who don't like participating in it are somehow limp-wristed failures (an attitude accepted and promulgated by many PvPers on various forums). If I was one of these narrow minded PvPer types I would be most likely to write a review like the later if I wasn't experienced at writing reviews from a more balanced perspective.
Now naturally any review should point out what the reviewer liked about the game, disliked about the game, some examples of their direct experience etc, but those should all be clearly labeled as such and separated from the rest of the review somewhat so they can be seen as less objective.
A hastily written example but hopefully you see my point.
Yeah, I think if Apple was smart they would keep their current design style, but ensure that the graphics card could be swapped out, just as you can add memory etc. It would go a long way towards keeping the Imac uptodate. I imagine we can expect this in the future if the mac continues to gain market share.
Certainly its got a gorgeous LCD screen, good enough sound etc. The video is good enough for the moment (its a very recent Imac) but when the next generation of games comes out, I am more or less hooped until I want to upgrade the whole box:P
Oh, I'm sorry, I guess I should stop playing PC games on my Imac dual-booted to XP using Bootcamp then.
Its not the best platform for playing games, but its let me play Starwars Galaxies, City of Heroes, Age of Conan and Pirates of the Burning Sea effectively enough, some of them even run quite well.
Now I would prefer to have native OS/X versions of these games of course, but the Imac seems to run XP just fine in the meantime. The only downside is that Apple is very slow to update their drivers for XP under bootcamp so some games suffer when the publisher moves to the latest driver and Apple hasn't played catch up yet.
Finally, even native speakers may find the tone of their voice inadequate or do not want to give away their age or gender by speaking. I heard stories about charismatic MMOGs team leaders that lost all their credibility when somebody discovered them to be 12 year old boys or so. Actually, this proves that the adult team members were some fools caring more about their pride than about the skills of the leader, but also that the pre-teen leader had good reasons to hide himself behind a textual chat.
Ah good point, text-based chat also provides anonymity for people who want to preserve it. A lot of female players get hassled endlessly in many MMORPGs, primarily because no one can reach out and "instruct" them on why that is not appreciated. I know my wife got a lot of sexual harassment in DAOC for a while there (people moving their toons behind hers and simulating sex acts (using physical/emote commands) for instance as well as a lot of verbal abuse, requests for cyber etc). I can understand a strong desire to avoid that on many people's part, and using voice chat will make that rather difficult to say the least.
Now it would be handy if some developer built in speech recognition that rendered your spoken words as chat text and thus let you operate keyboard free as I suggested above, but given lag and other problems endemic to MMORPGs, I can't see that working all that much better than the current system.
MMORPGs owe their origins to the world of MUSHes and MUDs, which were essentially chat interfaces oriented around playing a game as a common activity.
Much of my time in any MMORPG is spent talking with my group, whether determining tactics for the next fight, discussing game issues and features, or just finding out how things are going in their lives. All of that requires a convenient means to communicate, and while some people use voice communications for much of this, most still use typed chat. A console is simply not chat-friendly in the same manner that any PC is. Voice chat is less useful in many cases because you are not provided with any visual tag as to who is speaking as you are with in game typed chat (and when the female elf you have been playing with turns out to have a deep male voice, its harder to associate the spoken voice with the character at least at first). Its fine when you *know* the people from regular contact or in real life, but when playing in a pickup group (PUG), thats not the case.
Now if a console system were to integrate a decent keyboard with the game instead of various controllers then this might change, but consoles appeal to a different style of gameplay (one I fail to appreciate) and often a different type of player. While standard games may be steadily moving to the console format in many cases, MMORPGs will remain PC oriented until new technology arises (some new form of voice recognition chat that puts what you say on screen as speech balloons say, rather than hearing it as voice, or more than likely in addition to doing so) that makes playing them possible and convenient. Personally speaking I know I could never use the substandard control available from a controller more effectively than the control gained from keyboard+mouse, although I am trying to adapt to using a Nostromo in some games at the moment. Even then its not as effective for me.
All that WOW seems to have done right is rehash all of the concepts present in earlier games in a new format with very few problems. I tried it at release and didn't last the first month because it offered nothing new, just old concepts redone in an easy but boring format. Its been marketed to a massive audience of former Blizzard customers and done extremely well I admit, but most of those customers have never played another MMO to compare it to.They will get bored and move to a new game when the right one comes along that does things at least as well as WOW.
To quote a woman I met recently "Oh my husband and I have been playing WOW for about 8 months now, but we are getting a bit bored. Are you saying there are *other* mmorpgs like WOW out there?"
Overall as someone who has played dozens of MMOs, WOW is of minimal interest to me. If you want an excellent MMO, try City of Heroes in my opinion. Yes, like WOW its not very good for PvP so don't go there if thats your thing, but otherwise its the best engineered game I have ever seen, and has proven extremely enjoyable to me and my friends ever since its release.
Mythic has the advantage of its experience with Dark Age of Camelot, and thats a tremendous heads up with regards to RvR. They set the standard and no one has come even close to DAOC in that regard, although Mythic did overengineer things in the end and ruin it in many people's opinion
DAOC in its first few years was the best gaming experience I have had or am ever likely to have. I can hope WHO comes close or exceeds it, but I doubt thats possible.
There are a few factors at work in a game review - and I speak as someone who wrote dozens of them for a now defunct website
Most reviewers have only a short bit of time to actually play the game in question, prior to quickly writing up a review for publication and then heading to the next one. I am sure they try to put in all the time they can but its often not possible when your editor wants it *now*.
Most websites (and undoubtedly magazines) want to be able to continue to review new games. if they diss anything other than an extremely bad game, the publisher will simply not send them the advance copy for review, leaving them out in the cold. Only the top end publishers and websites can probably be all that honest in reviews because of this. I stopped reading game reviews from most places when I realized the scores were essentially bought and paid for in this manner. Luckily for me, my reviews were honest - because I was unpaid:P
Most reviewers couldn't write their way out of a wet paper bag, and have little or no ability to separate their opinion from an objective loook at the game. A lot of reviews show a heavy bias and one sided reporting. I no longer read most reviews for this reason. In the end they tell me almost nothing about the game in an objective manner
I have given up on game reviews for PC games. There are very few sources for good review information these days, almost everyone is biased in some way or another and few articles focus on providing facts concerning the game and focus on hype or the author's opinion as fact, rather than opinion.
What the original article and many people seem to be discussing mostly here is Narrative gameplay - where a storyline is created and more or less followed by the player one step at a time. It may be branching so that decisions made by the player - or failure to achieve specific goals - result in different outcomes, but at its core its still a railroad. You still follow one of the paths chosen by the developer who wrote the storyline in the end
Emerging Gameplay is where the game sets conditions and possible actions, but leaves the path up to the player, and what happens emerges from the results of those actions. Most people don't see this as a "storyline" per se, but really what your character does becomes their story in the end. This style of game design is immensely complex to implement but is the only one that will result in truly dynamic and evolving gameplay. In most modern MMOs, the character is free to do whatever they want (subject to level restrictions for access to a zone etc) and thats all emerging gameplay, but when they take a quest or a mission, its essentially a mini-narrative in a lot of cases (say City of Heroes/Villains). As such the quests all start to look alike pretty quickly.
Narrative gameplay will always be limited by the time and imagination of the developer/level designer/whatever and thus players will always be able to burn through the content pretty quickly, certainly far far faster than it can be developed
Emerging gameplay has more potential. If a game could be developed with sufficient AI on the part of the NPC characters in the game such that they react to the conditions of the world, then we can see the potential for Emerging gameplay come into its own. If for instance in some fantasy world, kiling off all the mobs around a town made it easier for the NPC Bandit King to invade and conquer the town, and the AI for that entity was sufficient for it to recognize the condiditions under which that would be an advantageous action, then player actions collectively might result in a change to the game environment, even if its the unintentional result of many players individually hunting the mobs around that town because the pelts are worth selling. If each NPC could be imbued with defining characteristics to their character then perhaps the timid Bandit King might act less aggressively than the Driven Bandit King and killing the latter off might result in the former inheriting and not being able to keep control of the village etc. Then the quest to free the town is open to whichever group discovers the problem and decides they must fight their way to the Bandit Camp and defeat the leader there to break his hold on the bandits and thus their hold on the town etc. None of this would be scripted, it would all emerge from the conditions and characteristics inherent in the game design. This would happen when the conditions made it the viable choice for the NPCs involved. Beefing up the guard at the township might mean the whole bandit camp moves to some other area entirely etc.
Thats what the next generation of MMOs needs to offer - or at least treat as their Holy Grail I think.
What a ridiculous notion. Activity in most MMOs is repetitive and seldom follows a logical story arc, as you would expect with a regular TV show or movie. Watching someone take on their 100th rat outside the starter village will not make an exiting first episode.
They don't dare use any dialog encountered in the game as the average player in an MMO couldn't form a coherent sentance if their life depended on it. Speaking generally, most players of MMOs are some of the stupidest examples of humanity judging by what they utter in game. I am sure thats not the case but it would be hard to prove it wrong. Somehow the anonymity provided by playing an MMO brings out the moron in most people it seems.
The only way this would work is if it was a sarcastic comedy about MMOs written for an audience who has played those games. Considering how badly Hollywood/The TV Industry has portrayed MMOs so far in shows I don't think they will get it though*
* I just watched a first season episode of NCIS, where they had a player of an MMO (on a Naval ship at sea no less) who ended up dead because he and another guy who played on his ship decided to have a duel, and he ended up drowning at sea (its a long story and not worth relating). Among the evidence they got from the victim's quarters was his MMO Character Charter (I am sure they meant Character Sheet but got it wrong), as if anyone has a paper sheet for their MMO characters. I *love* NCIS as a show but this was utterly beyond lame. Obviously the writer of this episode knew nothing and thought they didn't have to do any research, that just mentioning MMOs would be enough to make it cool and relevant etc. Of course, they also had to portray players of MMOs as wierd freaks as well.
Sorry this event took place in the Corporate States of America (featuring "The best politicians money can buy"). At worst MD will get a minor fine and an injunction to engage in similar behaviour in the future and will then change its name and carry on regardless. No one in charge at MD will bear any ill effects from this I expect.
I no longer expect Justice where a corporation with any substantial influence is concerned. Fines, sure, but never anything substantial enough to be a real penalty.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if every machine in your organization suddenly decides its not authorized and refuses to boot, it won't help you at all. The IT staff will be blamed even if they recommended against it.
We did the same thing with regards to MS Exchange at a place I worked at a few years ago. The company hired a new VP for Tech, and he was a seagull manager (fly in, shit all over everything and then fly out again) who had no idea what was what. He insisted we move to MS Exchange and easily sold it to the top execs because of the stupid scheduling feature. We spent probably 250k or more in upgrades and licensing. We replaced one reliable Linux box with 2 Top end servers, a DB server, 3 expensive tape back up units and a loadbalancing setup, and it was no more reliable than the linux box, but boy could you schedule a meeting easily:(
When it went down, we had the boss of the company standing in the center of the IT space screaming out that it was costing the company $10k a minute when the email was down (he worked it out apparently). The VP then left the company a month after we were done implementing things.
Actually, its not a CD key with most MMORPGs, its an account key that you get. I can install any of the MMOs I have on any computer I want, but I have to have an active account (determined by my registering the key the first time I play the game) to do so.
If you have City of Heroes/City of Villains, Star Wars Galaxies or Age of Conan on your system, I can use your computer to log into my account and play any time.
When you buy MMO software, what you are buying is the license key for an account, plus any other stuff that came with the box in the way of manuals, maps, in game bonus items etc. The contents of the CD are there but not tied to the account directly in any way.
Since you *MUST* log into one of their servers to play the game, this system is enough in the way of security in most instances. The only problems come when someone manages to find out how to generate their own keys, in which case they may register their account with the illegitimate generated key before you can do so, in that case the person who can send in the manual with the key on the back usually gets awarded the account.
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I have been wondering what would happen if MS decided to Embrace and Extend Linux. If they produced MS Linux, made their MS Office suite compatible with just MS Linux (and still closed source), what variety of Linux would the typical user buy and run? Microsoft has the biggest name in software, anything they adopt or produce has a massive advantage in gaining acceptability because it has the MS monolith behind it and common recognition. It would end up leaving the rest of the linux distros in the dust.
Yes, they would lose out on OS revenue, but with the success (sic) of Vista, thats probably not as much of a factor as it might have been previously. Office on the other hand is definitely their mainstay and could continue to be so.
This would mean they were no longer competing on the Operating System front at all, just on the Office Suite front where they still have a clear advantage. They would be seen to actively support OSS and at once stifle a lot of opposition from the OSS community, they would eliminate a lot of the security problems that plague their previous versions of their software and they could make contributions to the WINE project to ensure that backwards compatibility was assured.
Completely off topic of course but:
The GST Tax (General Services Tax) is currently at 6%, the Provincial Sales Tax (at least here in British Columbia) is at 7%, so here I pay a grand total of 13% tax on most purchased items and services. In Alberta there is no provincial sales tax.
We do pay both Federal and Provincial Income tax though.
However, after hearing the horror stories of people experiencing problems under the US health care system, I will take ours anytime. Its not perfect but its available to everyone.
Case in point: a friend of mine discovered he had a brain tumour the size of a grapefruit (which explained the headaches and vision problems he had). After 2 weeks or so waiting for a chance to get an operation, he was in, got the tumour removed, spending a few weeks in the hospital total, and was out without any problems and no complications thankfully. As far as I know it cost him absolutely nothing. That doesn't seem to be the case for a lot of Americans.
As for on topic: I would be highly honoured as a Canadian to have Stephen Hawking move here and work at Waterloo.
How are they going to get Joe/Jane Average to remember that its T-E-S-L-A and not T-E-L-S-A, which is the way I hear 90% of the people pronounce it (on those rare occasions that Nikolai manages to come up in conversations)?
English speakers in NA, do very poorly with anything that seems remotely foreign in spelling or pronunciation, and mostly seem non-motivated to try to get it even remotely correct
Well actually, DAOC has leveling by PvP. Sadly, its now a bit old in the tooth, and the population is dwindling but they recognized eventually that leveling by PvP would be the most popular approach, and you can level up pretty much entirely in the battlegrounds (which are limited by level ranges) in DAOC. Its still a pretty good game overall.
Thats one thing that gives me some hope for WAR, Mythic eventually got a lot of things right with DAOC - although they blew some calls in a major way IMHO - perhaps a bit too late as it turns out, but if they can capitalize on that learning experience, it should put them in a good position to make a very enjoyable PvP game.
There major flaw is the love of *fast* combat in PvP, which tends to reward the younger players, but hopefully they can learn from the combat system in POTBS, which has a slower pace but lots of tension as a result
While no MMORPG is ever complete, and thus never completed when released, releases like this in the past have caused major problems in getting people to accept the game in the past. Vanguard was released with major elements of the game incomplete, Pirates of the Burning Sea had similar problems (although it was mostly feature complete and the changes made after release were tweaking that could only be made after large enough populations were logging in).
The missing elements and poor gameplay in Vanguard resulted in a mass exodus of players after release, and a similar thing happened in POTBS (eventually resulting in a server merge that took the game from 12 servers down to 4 I believe). Its always important to make a good impression when selling a product, and its doubly so for MMORPGs I think.
Given that WAR is considered the next likely candidate to challenge the supremacy of Warcraft (a daunting prospect for the developers I am sure), I can't help but think that this is a very bad idea generally speaking. The game needs to be as complete and ready to play as possible in order to attract the required playerbase. Taking the game live in a partially developed manner is no longer a viable option I think. Prior to Warcraft this might have been possible - Dark Age of Camelot went live with many features missing, but what it had was enough to attract people away from Everquest (which was its only major competitor at the time), but with Warcraft being such a complete product and so well designed (I may dislike it but 8m+ people disagree with me), any game that comes out now needs to be able to put its full featureset into gameplay right from release or it risks losing the majority of players who are pretty jaded and expect *everything now*. The time for incomplete products has passed, thanks to Blizzard.
Not only that, but if its missing the Tankers on all sides specifically thats a very bad decision as well. This will undoubtedly slow PvE leveling and thats usually the focus of any MMORPG early in its history as players build up their characters in preparation for the end game (yes I know you can PvP at any level in WAR, but realistically people will want to race to the end levels first and likely avoid PvP as they do in so many other games, even though the game attempts to balance it at all levels).
Since Jacobs has stated this is nothing to do with EA, its most likely an internal decision based on lack of development time and a desire to make a November release date that is key to getting Christmas sales for the game. It may also be a reaction to the success of Age of Conan (which is doing well by reports, although I didn't keep my subscription going so I am out of touch), or to some other major release thats coming at the same time. MMORPGs and their expansions tend to be timed to coincide with releases from other companies and that often seems to shift dates.
Mythic had an extremely successful product with Dark Age of Camelot, although they blew it in the long run, overdeveloping the game in some areas and inconsistently designing it in many cases. I have high hopes they can produce an excellent game with WAR but we shall see.
If forced to teach ID as Science , then set your kids the task of coming up with experiments that prove ID, just as you would with any other Scientific principle. When they can't come up with any good means to prove or disprove ID, you can then fail them all.
Maybe when trying to teach ID as Science results in 40 kids failing a Science Course, it will get enough attention to show that Legislatures have no business passing laws that tell teachers they have to treat batshit-insane crap as if it was a serious teaching subject.
If a mob of 1,000,000 people march on the white house with pitchforks and tourches demanding justice, there will be justice.
No, they will be labeled a "Violent Mob", and the Anti-Riot control Sonic weapon vehicles can be deployed to drive away the protesters. Or the National Guard, Military etc.
You Americans may have the right to unseat an unwanted government via a second revolution, but the Government also has the right and duty to preserve the peace and can use any means required to stop a violent protest can't it?. I have never understood that dichotomy personally speaking
To me it looks like the US is sliding slowly down the path to fascism of a sort, all in the name of supporting corporate profits and the continuation of the current government. Its kind of frightening to watch actually, but I hope it all turns out well :P
I spent a few years in the Canadian Military, and we have the same mindset up here. Every year my unit was allocated $X for purchasing rounds for the range. During the first Gulf War, my unit was deployed to the Middle East (and I sadly didn't get to go). When our range qualification time came up, they had us (about 20 out of 250 or so troops) drive out to the range, and then fire off enough rounds to account for the entire unit qualifying - even though they were deployed to a *war* - because otherwise next year's budget would have excluded the money for the rounds required on the range.
At the same time they had an initiative that offered a reward for suggestions that helped the military save money. The obvious submission garnered no response of course
I grew up in BC, and had to take French from grade 7 through to 10. I could never see the point of learning French during that whole period - but then the first *native* speaker of French I met was the teacher they hired immediately after I was done my last French class. On the other hand, all of my 3 closest friends spoke German, but it wasn't an option, go figure. I ended up taking Grade 11 Russian via correspondance, and later in University - because my family *might* be partially Russian (not sure).
A second language is *always* worth learning, and makes learning the third language that much easier
Perhaps they have, considering its been marked +5 Informative, and not Humorous...
Not to diss goats, but I can actually say that my mother's property (only 1.5 acres) had sheep on it specifically so we didn't need to mow all of it. Worked quite well overall, provided you can deal with sheep - which are *remarkably* stupid, I mean stupid with some real force and intention behind it.
That said, let me be the first to welcome our new Goatish Overlords
As a Canadian, I have come to expect the worst from the US Government in most cases, and in most cases it has failed to disappoint. I sincerely hope your representatives listen and this bill is defeated, but I expect it will pass with flying colours. After all the US has "the best government money can buy" :P
Whatever happens down there south of the border, we can expect the Tories to enact similar legislation up here sooner or later. Finlandization is well underway, sadly...
Well of course it all has to come down to the opinion of the author, but they can try to look at things in a dispassionate way.
I can write that "Pirates of the Burning Sea is an MMORPG game that is very oriented towards PvP gameplay, and much less suited to those who don't enjoy player versus player content in their online gaming. While it is possible to play the game without engaging in PvP you will find yourself waiting for a port to leave contention quite frequently, and this will disrupt your gameplay. The alternative is to try to minimize the effect of PvP on your gameplaying experience by avoiding ports in contention, but this is not always possible. That said, the PvP is quite a bit of fun for many players and the game has an excellent combat system at sea".
Or I can write: "This game has terrific PvP gameplay but like EVE Online its not for wusses, and failure it comes at a cost, so enter a battle prepared to risk your ship and its enhancements if you lose. The combat system is complex and requires planning to score a victory in many cases, battles can take a considerable time period between well matched opponents, although ganking teams are pretty prevalent on most servers, so be aware that one lone pirate you attack probably has 5 friends in hiding. Although the game does have crafting and there are roleplayers present on some servers, most carebears need not apply - this is not a game for people who don't have the cojones to participate in Player versus player combat, and of course there are other games that offer that sort of gameplay. If you aren't a PvPer, I highly suggest you avoid Pirates of the Burning Sea and go play CarebearsOnline(tm) instead" or something to that effect.
I have seen comments that were closer to the later than the former in game reviews. The former is me trying to provide a balanced view for all players and would of course elaborate on its points, the later is me attempting to take the view that PvP is the only "real" and "valid" gameplay and that all those who don't like participating in it are somehow limp-wristed failures (an attitude accepted and promulgated by many PvPers on various forums). If I was one of these narrow minded PvPer types I would be most likely to write a review like the later if I wasn't experienced at writing reviews from a more balanced perspective.
Now naturally any review should point out what the reviewer liked about the game, disliked about the game, some examples of their direct experience etc, but those should all be clearly labeled as such and separated from the rest of the review somewhat so they can be seen as less objective.
A hastily written example but hopefully you see my point.
Yeah, I think if Apple was smart they would keep their current design style, but ensure that the graphics card could be swapped out, just as you can add memory etc. It would go a long way towards keeping the Imac uptodate. I imagine we can expect this in the future if the mac continues to gain market share.
:P
Certainly its got a gorgeous LCD screen, good enough sound etc. The video is good enough for the moment (its a very recent Imac) but when the next generation of games comes out, I am more or less hooped until I want to upgrade the whole box
Oh, I'm sorry, I guess I should stop playing PC games on my Imac dual-booted to XP using Bootcamp then.
Its not the best platform for playing games, but its let me play Starwars Galaxies, City of Heroes, Age of Conan and Pirates of the Burning Sea effectively enough, some of them even run quite well.
Now I would prefer to have native OS/X versions of these games of course, but the Imac seems to run XP just fine in the meantime. The only downside is that Apple is very slow to update their drivers for XP under bootcamp so some games suffer when the publisher moves to the latest driver and Apple hasn't played catch up yet.
Finally, even native speakers may find the tone of their voice inadequate or do not want to give away their age or gender by speaking. I heard stories about charismatic MMOGs team leaders that lost all their credibility when somebody discovered them to be 12 year old boys or so. Actually, this proves that the adult team members were some fools caring more about their pride than about the skills of the leader, but also that the pre-teen leader had good reasons to hide himself behind a textual chat.
Ah good point, text-based chat also provides anonymity for people who want to preserve it. A lot of female players get hassled endlessly in many MMORPGs, primarily because no one can reach out and "instruct" them on why that is not appreciated. I know my wife got a lot of sexual harassment in DAOC for a while there (people moving their toons behind hers and simulating sex acts (using physical /emote commands) for instance as well as a lot of verbal abuse, requests for cyber etc). I can understand a strong desire to avoid that on many people's part, and using voice chat will make that rather difficult to say the least.
Now it would be handy if some developer built in speech recognition that rendered your spoken words as chat text and thus let you operate keyboard free as I suggested above, but given lag and other problems endemic to MMORPGs, I can't see that working all that much better than the current system.
...and its hard to chat with no keyboard.
MMORPGs owe their origins to the world of MUSHes and MUDs, which were essentially chat interfaces oriented around playing a game as a common activity.
Much of my time in any MMORPG is spent talking with my group, whether determining tactics for the next fight, discussing game issues and features, or just finding out how things are going in their lives. All of that requires a convenient means to communicate, and while some people use voice communications for much of this, most still use typed chat. A console is simply not chat-friendly in the same manner that any PC is. Voice chat is less useful in many cases because you are not provided with any visual tag as to who is speaking as you are with in game typed chat (and when the female elf you have been playing with turns out to have a deep male voice, its harder to associate the spoken voice with the character at least at first). Its fine when you *know* the people from regular contact or in real life, but when playing in a pickup group (PUG), thats not the case.
Now if a console system were to integrate a decent keyboard with the game instead of various controllers then this might change, but consoles appeal to a different style of gameplay (one I fail to appreciate) and often a different type of player. While standard games may be steadily moving to the console format in many cases, MMORPGs will remain PC oriented until new technology arises (some new form of voice recognition chat that puts what you say on screen as speech balloons say, rather than hearing it as voice, or more than likely in addition to doing so) that makes playing them possible and convenient. Personally speaking I know I could never use the substandard control available from a controller more effectively than the control gained from keyboard+mouse, although I am trying to adapt to using a Nostromo in some games at the moment. Even then its not as effective for me.
To quote a woman I met recently "Oh my husband and I have been playing WOW for about 8 months now, but we are getting a bit bored. Are you saying there are *other* mmorpgs like WOW out there?"
Overall as someone who has played dozens of MMOs, WOW is of minimal interest to me. If you want an excellent MMO, try City of Heroes in my opinion. Yes, like WOW its not very good for PvP so don't go there if thats your thing, but otherwise its the best engineered game I have ever seen, and has proven extremely enjoyable to me and my friends ever since its release.
Mythic has the advantage of its experience with Dark Age of Camelot, and thats a tremendous heads up with regards to RvR. They set the standard and no one has come even close to DAOC in that regard, although Mythic did overengineer things in the end and ruin it in many people's opinion
DAOC in its first few years was the best gaming experience I have had or am ever likely to have. I can hope WHO comes close or exceeds it, but I doubt thats possible.
There are a few factors at work in a game review - and I speak as someone who wrote dozens of them for a now defunct website
I have given up on game reviews for PC games. There are very few sources for good review information these days, almost everyone is biased in some way or another and few articles focus on providing facts concerning the game and focus on hype or the author's opinion as fact, rather than opinion.
What the original article and many people seem to be discussing mostly here is Narrative gameplay - where a storyline is created and more or less followed by the player one step at a time. It may be branching so that decisions made by the player - or failure to achieve specific goals - result in different outcomes, but at its core its still a railroad. You still follow one of the paths chosen by the developer who wrote the storyline in the end
Emerging Gameplay is where the game sets conditions and possible actions, but leaves the path up to the player, and what happens emerges from the results of those actions. Most people don't see this as a "storyline" per se, but really what your character does becomes their story in the end. This style of game design is immensely complex to implement but is the only one that will result in truly dynamic and evolving gameplay. In most modern MMOs, the character is free to do whatever they want (subject to level restrictions for access to a zone etc) and thats all emerging gameplay, but when they take a quest or a mission, its essentially a mini-narrative in a lot of cases (say City of Heroes/Villains). As such the quests all start to look alike pretty quickly.
Narrative gameplay will always be limited by the time and imagination of the developer/level designer/whatever and thus players will always be able to burn through the content pretty quickly, certainly far far faster than it can be developed
Emerging gameplay has more potential. If a game could be developed with sufficient AI on the part of the NPC characters in the game such that they react to the conditions of the world, then we can see the potential for Emerging gameplay come into its own. If for instance in some fantasy world, kiling off all the mobs around a town made it easier for the NPC Bandit King to invade and conquer the town, and the AI for that entity was sufficient for it to recognize the condiditions under which that would be an advantageous action, then player actions collectively might result in a change to the game environment, even if its the unintentional result of many players individually hunting the mobs around that town because the pelts are worth selling. If each NPC could be imbued with defining characteristics to their character then perhaps the timid Bandit King might act less aggressively than the Driven Bandit King and killing the latter off might result in the former inheriting and not being able to keep control of the village etc. Then the quest to free the town is open to whichever group discovers the problem and decides they must fight their way to the Bandit Camp and defeat the leader there to break his hold on the bandits and thus their hold on the town etc. None of this would be scripted, it would all emerge from the conditions and characteristics inherent in the game design. This would happen when the conditions made it the viable choice for the NPCs involved. Beefing up the guard at the township might mean the whole bandit camp moves to some other area entirely etc.
Thats what the next generation of MMOs needs to offer - or at least treat as their Holy Grail I think.
What a ridiculous notion. Activity in most MMOs is repetitive and seldom follows a logical story arc, as you would expect with a regular TV show or movie. Watching someone take on their 100th rat outside the starter village will not make an exiting first episode.
They don't dare use any dialog encountered in the game as the average player in an MMO couldn't form a coherent sentance if their life depended on it. Speaking generally, most players of MMOs are some of the stupidest examples of humanity judging by what they utter in game. I am sure thats not the case but it would be hard to prove it wrong. Somehow the anonymity provided by playing an MMO brings out the moron in most people it seems.
The only way this would work is if it was a sarcastic comedy about MMOs written for an audience who has played those games. Considering how badly Hollywood/The TV Industry has portrayed MMOs so far in shows I don't think they will get it though*
* I just watched a first season episode of NCIS, where they had a player of an MMO (on a Naval ship at sea no less) who ended up dead because he and another guy who played on his ship decided to have a duel, and he ended up drowning at sea (its a long story and not worth relating). Among the evidence they got from the victim's quarters was his MMO Character Charter (I am sure they meant Character Sheet but got it wrong), as if anyone has a paper sheet for their MMO characters. I *love* NCIS as a show but this was utterly beyond lame. Obviously the writer of this episode knew nothing and thought they didn't have to do any research, that just mentioning MMOs would be enough to make it cool and relevant etc. Of course, they also had to portray players of MMOs as wierd freaks as well.
Sorry this event took place in the Corporate States of America (featuring "The best politicians money can buy"). At worst MD will get a minor fine and an injunction to engage in similar behaviour in the future and will then change its name and carry on regardless. No one in charge at MD will bear any ill effects from this I expect. I no longer expect Justice where a corporation with any substantial influence is concerned. Fines, sure, but never anything substantial enough to be a real penalty.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if every machine in your organization suddenly decides its not authorized and refuses to boot, it won't help you at all. The IT staff will be blamed even if they recommended against it. We did the same thing with regards to MS Exchange at a place I worked at a few years ago. The company hired a new VP for Tech, and he was a seagull manager (fly in, shit all over everything and then fly out again) who had no idea what was what. He insisted we move to MS Exchange and easily sold it to the top execs because of the stupid scheduling feature. We spent probably 250k or more in upgrades and licensing. We replaced one reliable Linux box with 2 Top end servers, a DB server, 3 expensive tape back up units and a loadbalancing setup, and it was no more reliable than the linux box, but boy could you schedule a meeting easily :(
When it went down, we had the boss of the company standing in the center of the IT space screaming out that it was costing the company $10k a minute when the email was down (he worked it out apparently). The VP then left the company a month after we were done implementing things.
err, post I mean
Actually, its not a CD key with most MMORPGs, its an account key that you get. I can install any of the MMOs I have on any computer I want, but I have to have an active account (determined by my registering the key the first time I play the game) to do so. If you have City of Heroes/City of Villains, Star Wars Galaxies or Age of Conan on your system, I can use your computer to log into my account and play any time. When you buy MMO software, what you are buying is the license key for an account, plus any other stuff that came with the box in the way of manuals, maps, in game bonus items etc. The contents of the CD are there but not tied to the account directly in any way. Since you *MUST* log into one of their servers to play the game, this system is enough in the way of security in most instances. The only problems come when someone manages to find out how to generate their own keys, in which case they may register their account with the illegitimate generated key before you can do so, in that case the person who can send in the manual with the key on the back usually gets awarded the account.