In City of Heroes/City of Villains there is effectively no economy. There is no cash, but defeating mobs gets you "influence" (as a heroe, and its equivalent as a villain), that can be used to buy Enhancements that can augment your powers. The thing is those enhancements are also available from NPC vendors in shops, and are individually not worth much. As well when you get to higher levels, you are buried in influence and it becomes a non-factor really.
All in all the game is greatly improved by not having an economy and not having any "loot". Its refreshing I find...
Time to start fighting the war on Ignorance and Stupidity...
Oh wait, you president is probably amongst the 48% of immensely ignorant people isn't he? Nevermind, please carry on your slow slide into national collapse.
If you wish to produce an OSS Exchange Server equivalent to offer the public an alternative, it faces several major obstacles: * Its gotta be feature complete, offering everything Exchange does * Its gotta be Exchange Compatible because like it or not, most businesses that rely on Exchange are thoroughly tied into it, and it will have to work as well as Exchange with other Exchange servers etc. * You have to convince the CEOs that its worth switching. Within my (admittedly limited) experience of Exchange in a business environment, its the CEOs who want to schedule meetings who push for Exchange deployment, not the average person, who just wants their email.
He soars in to locate America's greatest suspected enemies, then escorts them to a third world country that is friendly to the US, so they can be tortured endlessly until they die. If they live, he takes them to Guantanamo Bay where they can be imprisoned without charges and held indefinitely "because someone thought they might possibly be guilty of something".
Its kind of a change from what America used to stand for, but it probably reflects the way the US is seen these days by a lot of foreigners a bit more accurately.
"I'm more concerned that people watching 24 will believe that terrorists are that capable. Seriously, I've heard people say that 24 shouldn't be aired because it will give terrorists working ideas on what to do. It's also sad that people believe there are an endless stream of highly skilled mercenaries and inside-men in the U.S. willing to murder thousands of innocent people for a million dollars."
There aren't thousands of skilled mercenaries/inside men in the US willing to murder thousands of innocent people for a million dollars? Damn, there goes that employment plan. I thought it was simple:
1). Get an H1B/Green Card (I am Canadian) 2). Get into a position of influence, preferably in the Los Angeles branch of the CTU - since all Terrorist related activities seem to focus on Hollywood (which in and of itself probably wouldn't be a bad thing) and not say, New York, 9/11 not-withstanding. 3). Get suborned by extremely rich terrorists for at least 1m dollars US. 4). Move to the Bahamas and live off my illict wealth.
Now, I admit there are a few problems with this plan. The first one is I have no desire to help terrorists. The second one is I have no useful knowledge to get me into CTU. The third is I highly suspect CTU doesn't exist and if it does under that name, not in LA. The fourth is I have no desire to live in the Bahamas. Still it seemed like a good plan when I thought of it...
Seriously, I am suprised that 24 is as popular as it is, given how *extremely* right-wing it is, how casually torture is accepted, and how predictable the plot is...
These days I tend to assume that any professionally done game review that appears in a magazine, is just marketing. The reviewers seem preconditioned to write mostly positive reviews about every game they review (with perhaps a negative review of some utterly unimportant and uninteresting title thrown in to make them look like responsible reviewers). Its often hard to find a review that seems to report the facts as they are, rather than as the Sales Dept of the developer would like them to read.
Now, online isn't much better. If the reviewer got paid to do the review, it probably isn't accurate. These people get shipped the game, or a beta of it etc, so that they can do a review. If the reviews start getting too negative - the developer will stop shipping the demos to them and they can't continue to do reviews. This pretty much ensures that most reviews won't be as scathing as they might have deserved.
Now, there are tons of bloggers out there writing their opinions on things. The problem with them is simply that a) most can't write their way out of a paper bag, and b) Most have no intention of being objective (the point of a blog is to get attention right? so you have to be a bit more extreme to garner that attention, or so I assume in a lot of cases). I don't rely on blogs much either.
My reviews tend to come from online forums and from actually playing the demo/beta myself if I can. Now, those are hardly bastions of impartiality either, but I have years of experience in separating the wheat from the chaff on various MMORPG forums, and I can often get a reasonable view of a game's problems and positive points. Forum trolls are hardly reluctant to point out weaknesses in games after all.
Mostly, I just no longer buy PC games. I play a few MMORPGs and thats usually it, and I think a lot of folks might be following the same trend. I think the games industry has brought this on themselves by releasing poorly designed titles and by stifling reviews that are negative.
Why should they support older hardware? They are in the business of selling *new* hardware. Simply not writing drivers for older hardware they sold to customers - hardware that admittedly might not be up to Vista compatibility requirements (but we will never know) - will enable them to sell more product. The computer hardware industry no doubt relies, at least in part, on MS OS upgrades to garner new sales for them. I can't see a compelling reason for a hardware manufacturer to write drivers for older hardware when they gain more by selling newer hardware and having to write fewer drivers as a result.
I do wish they would consider letting the open source community write drivers for that older equipment itself, by publishing the source code for the older drivers and making all the spec details freely available. That way their older customers win, the users of alternative operating systems win etc, but I can't see them being interested in it because again, it won't foster new sales.
Well, yeah. The Christian Right(tm) is a massive power in US politics, and since no one interferes in the politics of others like the USA at the moment, it is a concern. Didn't Bush admit that he had a dream that the US had invaded Iraq, and that was part of his reasoning behind the 2nd Gulf War? I got the impression that the President decided to invade Iraq, and then his flunkies/managers determined to find a reason for doing so - and WMD seemed like a good bet.
I worry considerably about the Christian Right. I don't think it has anyone but its own interests at heart, I think it has an agenda to bring Christianity *back* into the school system and to erode the separation of Church and State. I think overall its potentiall quite dangerous. Now, I am not blaming all Christians, or even all politically conservative Christians, its just that I feel some concern when I see a *religious* segment of the population being organized to exert *political* power. When you see Judges putting up the 10 commandments in a courthouse and refusing to remove them (and thus raising the spectre of a non-christian receiving unfair treatment in that court due to religious bias on the part of the presiding judges), when you see the constant bombardment of established scientific theory by hairbrained "Intelligent Design" advocates - and they aren't immediately laughed out of existence, and when you see constant attempts to reintroduce Christian Prayer back into the secular school system, I think its all a concern.
Yeah, I fear the Christian Right and its power to shape the opinions of well-meaning but often essentially uninformed people concerning political issues, in the country with the most military power in the world and with a government that is willing to use that might regularly.A government that is increasingly restricting its citizens rights to privacy and liberty, and denying its supposedly cherished rights and freedoms to anyone it thinks might be an enemy combatant.
So in other words, you haven't tried it, you have only seen some screenshots you didn't like the look of, and you are already a fan of WOW so why should you switch? And from this you draw the conclusion that no one should switch or consider playing the game. Just how subjective can a person be?
In fact, Vanguard has massive potential. Yes, its buggy and incomplete - but every single MMORPG released that I can recall has been buggy and missing some content at release. The fact is that these projects are so large scale and require so much development time that its inevitable that something will go wrong, something will be missing, something won't scale effectively, or it will need more work. Contents will change during the course of gameplay - so says the warning on all of them, and for good reason. If the game was complete at release, players would play it, finish exploring it, and move on. Things *have to change* and have to evolve to keep the players involved in the game and its progress. Things have to be added, expaded, altered, to maintain a level of interest. A completed game design, is a dead game.
Dark Age of Camelot had a pretty smooth release, I was there and I enjoyed it immensely. Yes it needed work, yes the changes they made to it thereafter generally betrayed the original design concept and the game steadily evolved downhill (in my opinion at least). However, if Mythic had had to wait until everything was perfect, they would never have released the game. Its been 5 years and they are still making changes, adding expansions, and changing the class balance. MMORPGs are *never* finished. By definition they will constantly evolve. There are simply too many factors in any such game to possibly allow for all possible permutations of the code and design, to allow for all the possible misuses/abuses/exploits that players will discover and take advantage of - usually to the gross disadvantage of the game. DAOC was more or less designed to address the most common complaints of EQ players at the time - and to introduce large scale PvP in the form of Realm vs Realm combat. It was immensely successful in every regard. I was an EQ player (yes I play a lot of MMORPGs), and I switched immediately based on feedback I got from a coworker who was in the beta.
SWG was buggy as hell at release, and in fact on the first day you couldn't even log in at all. I was there and dutifully attempted to log in for a few hours, but was unsuccessful until the following evening. The game was missing a lot of its details, but the overall design was innovative and ambitious. Its player-based economy was the most ambitious element of any MMORPG I have seen I think, and I played primarily as a crafter for the first 2 years I played the game. SOE couldn't manage the game design and improvements well enough and the game has devolved sadly since. In its current iteration its a pale shadow of its former glory and all of the innovations have effectively been lost by inept designers making moronic changes. Its the text book example of how NOT to evolve a game, particularly one with such a huge provenance.
City of Heroes and City of Villains had a fantastic release, virtually bug free. It still took a long time to get a design that was more or less balanced. I was there too at release, and enjoyed playing the game at all levels - and I still play it now and again. Cryptic are the unsung heroes of MMORPG game design, their game is a niche game admittedly, but its extremely well designed, very stable, well written and quite enjoyable if you like the niche it fills. Overall I think its the best piece of game coding - possibly the best piece of coding period - that I have ever seen. Nonetheless, both versions have required constant updates and changes - because the players continue to find ways to exploit design flaws, and the designers must allow for that and make suitable changes to ensure the gameplay runs the way it was intended to originally. Its still an immensely enjoyable game and I recommend anyone who hasn't tried it g
Well, I am not an engineer. I have known a few who were majoring in Engineering and employed as various types of Engineers thereafter. Pretty much all of them noted a low female Engineering population in University. For the most part this was seen by them as being due to the fact that Male Engineers resented the presence of women in their faculty, and tended to actively (and often boorishly) discourage them by making sure they knew they were not wanted. It wouldn't suprise me to see this attitude in those professors teaching Engineering as well.
I know when women entered the Infantry up here in Canada (CFB Petawawa if you are interested), I was working at one of the Regimental Training schools - and the CO called all of the personnel in the unit into a huge meeting. They were of course all male, as I am. He let it be known that the first women were about to be processed through the school shortly - and he wanted everyone to know that they would failed, and ensure we worked to that end because he knew that women were unsuitable to the trade. What he said was approximately "We all know the first female infanteers are coming here to the RCR Battleschool in the next few weeks. We all know they *will* fail the course, right? I just want to make sure we are all on the same page. There will be no women in the Infantry".
I wouldn't be suprised to see that its the Enginners themselves who are discouraging women from getting involved in Engineering. I know a female friend of mine attempted to major in it and I think she gave up due to the endless hassling she received from other (male) students. I wouldn't be at all suprised to hear that that was a common experience for women getting involved in any aspect of Engineering. I sincerely hope I am wrong and the low population is due to some other cause.
Well, no. See for well over a century we have been an independant country up here in Canada. Yes, we are still a member of the Commonwealth (along with a lot of other countries you might know like Australia and New Zealand etc), and the Queen is still a symbolic head of the Commonwealth, but we are a completely independant country with our own Constitution, Laws and everything. In practice the Queen has zero political power in Canada, its all symbolic and traditional nothing more. Thus we have our own awards.
The thing is, most of us don't see that as a bad thing, whereas you US folks have this pre-conditioned distrust of Royalty for some unfathomable reason - probably something to do with that whole "Tea" issue in Boston way back when. I admit it, the King made a mistake back then OK?. If you would just get over that though, I am sure we could let you back into the Commonwealth:)
Or perhaps, the Large Corporations pay for the election of the Politicians they prefer, suggest policy to them via various lobby groups, and thus get the laws that tend to favour them enacted much of the time. Then they control your opinions via the media which is entirely corporate controlled, and thus shape your preferences in ways you are undoubtedly unaware of since so much effective marketing is extremely subtle. We as tiny worker bees in the huge Capitalist system go about our days mostly working for one of those corporations or at least as part of the overall system and spend our money like good consumers so that those companies can make their profits and benefit those rich enough to invest in them or own them. The economic disparities continue to evolve and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Because its possible for a small percentage of the poor to claw their way to the rich side of society, we consider this a "good thing". We ignore the thousands of extremely poor people living on the street because they don't fit societies norms and we don't care to pay for their treatment or help. We ignore the fact that much fo the stuff we buy is made by effectively slave labour in third world countries.
As a result many westerners spend a substantial portion of our lives working off debts for items that while no doubt enjoyable to have, were not strictly necessary and are often more in the line of luxuries that we might not have chosen to purchase if we had been aware of the longterm cost when we did so.
For instance, I currently pay around $975 a month in rent. Thats a substantial part of the income my wife and I earn at the moment. When I visited Russia in 1980, I met a couple of women who shared an apartment in Leningrad. Sure, the apartment was not great, but it was actually comparable to the one I live in at the moment, minus the balcony. Their rent? 6 Roubles a month, which was about 1.6% of their income if I recall correctly.
Now, I am not arguing that Soviet Communism was a better system, but blindly supporting Consumerist Capitalism, and worse yet, associating that Capitalism closely with your concepts concerning Democracy is utterly rediculous. Freedom of speech, freedom to elect your officials, freedom to move and act in any way you want inside of your country's laws, etc does not automatically imply that THE ONE TRUE ONLY WAY IS CAPITALISM(tm). Its possible to have a bit of Socialism mixed in their quite effectively. Blindly supporting Captialism in all its glory (sarcasm in case you didn't get it) without questioning it, is just as pathetically mindless as supporting Communism without questioning it in any way.
Yeah people keep pointing out how poor Cuba is - poorest country in the Western Hemisphere etc, etc. Its worth pointing out that Cuba *is* so poor because the US continues to enforce its trade embargos over Cuba, simply because the US has abbrogated to itself the right to interfere in neighbouring country's politics.
Is it worth pointing out to those policy makers in the US, that if they lifted the trade embargos against Cuba, the influx of new trade, exchange of information, and monetary flow that would inevitably occur would not only result in great improvements in the Cuban economy, but probably a much greater push towards democratic rights for the citizens of Cuba? Look at China, while of course its still under the heal of the most repressive government on earth, capitalism is flourishing there because its essential for the country's growth, and some small freedoms are worming their way into the people's lives. Not much mind you, but some. The exact same thing could be happening in Cuba, if only the US could get its head out of its arse, and realize that while it may wish to actively promote democracy, the way to do so is by encouraging other countries and by example, not by punitively punishing countries because they are different.
You have a major problem with the scale of providing search results. What you are proposing here is that individual users *rate* websites in some manner according to their merit. Leaving aside the fact that users are no inherently qualified to rate websites, the fact that a given website may have great merit for a given subject, but not others, and the fact that people will actively find a way to "game" this system just as they have all the others, how big exactly is the internet? lets assume there are 10m useful websites on the web (analy extracting a number). How exactly do you expect the users of this new system to manually rate all of those websites? What is their individual reward for doing so? Even spending 5s to select a number between 1 and 10 for 100 websites on a regular basis is going to occupy considerable time for no apparent reward beyond "helping the system". Most users are probably not that philanthropic, they will simply want to gain benefits from the effort of others. In other words the system will depend on those individuals willing to participate and give up their free time. Now, granted you get all this participation to occur, why would the results be any different or better than those of Google or the other major search engines.
In the original thesis paper that gave rise to the Google algorithm, they essentially worked off a couple of simple concepts - that are no doubt very difficult to implement. They called the key factors "Hubs" and "Authorities". A Hub is a page that contains many hyper-links to other pages. An Authority is a page that is linked to from many other pages. Google's algorithm not only rates each page according to how hub-like or authority-like it is, but it also increases the ranking of the page according to the ranking score of the pages it links to, and more importantly the pages that link to it. In other words if lots of other pages think your page is important and link to it, you gain a higher ranking, if you link to lots of high ranking pages that too is weighed to some degree. As well the actual contents of your page are rated according to their relevance to the search query a user enters at google. Now there are of course thousands of other rules that have been added to avoid all the various tricks that arsehat website developers have attempted to use to fool the system and garner a higher ranking, but the end result is a pretty efficient and accurate search system - probably the best around given google's popularity. The key thing being that of course all this indexing can be done automatically.
How exactly is any manual system going to improve on that? how can it hope to keep up with the billions of webpages out there that are constantly being updated and improved, deleted, moved etc? The manual system can only rate individual websites, not pages - that simply wouldn't be practical. In an ideal world where one website dealt exclusively with one subject and one subject only, this might work, but most websites have dozens if not hundreds of different informational elements that might be of interest to a user, and there is no manual way to determine that, in other words any such meritocratic system is still going to have to fall back on indexing the individual pages using a spider, and the only real result of the meritocratic system is to determine the user's perspective on how valuable the information on that site is - and thats entirely subjective. Google is more objective by far, and any approach to a search engine pretty much has to be as objective as possible.
I don't honestly think any manually driven system has a hope of keeping up with the web. There is simply far too much data being generated, edited, deleted and moved daily for any such effort to offer any real economy of scale.
Its a minor point but it has always bugged me (right from when I bought the first white-boxed set of D&D back in 1978), that gaming culture uses the term "race" when it means "species", and this has carried over to computer/console/online games naturally enough.
When I play City of Heroes or City of Villains, and the main differentiation in Race is skin color, I tend to pick what suits the costume. I have several White characters, at least 1 Asian character, and a couple of Black characters. No Hispanic or Native Characters (although I had one at one point) simply because I haven't had a character concept.
When it comes to Fantasy games - where we are really talking different Species not Races, well I tend to pick the toughest looking male characters and the most attractive looking female characters (as I am male). In DAOC, I played mostly Trolls, Kobolds, Dwarves and Norsemen because they all looked tough to me (Kobolds less so mind you). In my brief stint in WOW (before I wrote it off as tripe), I played only on the Horde side, mostly Orcs. In EQ I played one of those lizardmen.
I play all "races" in game more or less depending on my character concept (in games that really allow that, and I can't conceive of someone choosing not to play a particular species just because it is similar to a RL racial choice. The only exception I make is I never choose to play the "cutesy" species option that many games feature (ie Lurikeen in DAOC, Gnome in WOW etc) mostly because I detest the other people who seem to glom onto "cutesy" and then run around trying to be ultracute. It gets tiring and boring.
Now, what I am very tired of, is the stereotyping you see in games, based on Racial Stereotypes. Blacks and Hispanics are criminals, or at least very tough and not as bright etc. Asians are smart, all know martial arts, and are good at math (plus they speak with a heavy accent). Whites are nerdy, boring, or very macho but the most competent overall etc. Surely we can dispense with this 1950's mode of thinking. Sure, there are people who fit those stereotypes, but they are not the norm and portraying them that way only perpetuates those stereotypes. I am always happy when I see someone include a character that violates those stereotypes deliberately. Its not a major thing but its time to get over that crap I think.
Are you not reading the news lately and in particular the OP? The teacher who received pictures like this from some student attempting blackmail will be in an immediate bind: If they don't report the pictures and it comes out, they will of course suffer the consequences of seemingly requesting illegal pictures in return for special treatment. However, if they do report it they will immediately be implicated in the same - sure, with no evidence, but that doesn't seem to matter these days. As with this situation, merely suspecting the possibility of being guilty will be enough to cause a massive uproar, investigation, etc. The teacher in question will no longer be trusted by any Schoolboard or Parent, even if exonerated later on. Their lives will be torn apart by the legal system - who to be fair would have to investigate them as a matter of course - and the results will be devastating.
I suppose its only a matter of time before this happens as well, given the tools are readily available, and paranoia and misunderstanding concerning internet technology is high. At least when it happens, the concerned individuals will still be likely to get a trial - no matter how biased it might be - which is better than if they were "Enemies of the State" and could just be thrown into Guantanamo without recourse to a trial or lawyers:P
The US seems to be on a long, slippery road to losing complete sight of its ideals and founding principals, I sincerely hope that it can turn around and find them again
Yes, this approach to treating foreign suspects proves that the current US government has lost sight of the ideals that gave birth to the US as a nation. If the USA treats foreigners as less than citizens, gives them effectively no rights under US law, how can it claim to be a bastion of truth and democracy? Guantanamo Bay proves that is an utter lie. Extrordinary Rendition (ie sending people off to be more severely tortured than is legal at Guantanamo Bay for whatever reasons they use to justify it), only further tarnishes the US claim to be superior to other nations in its concepts of rights and freedoms. In short, the US has lost its way, lost its willingness and determination to support the ideals of its founding fathers regardless of the cost, because its citizens believe those ideals to be pure and true and a thing that all people should aspire to.
Instead, the US is shown to be yet another petty nation, whose adherence to its supposed ideals is merely for show. Right now the US (in Guantanamo Bay and in its use of Torture) is morally about the equivalent of Soviet Russia. True, you don't have Gulags yet, but that may be merely a matter of time if the continuous erosion of the US Constitution continues down its current path. The apparent loss of the concept of Habeus Corpus under some circumstances I believe I recall reading about is a sure sign things are not well.
I sincerely hope things change down there (I am up in Canada), because the US is a great nation, and I hope it continues to be a great nation. Sadly it doesn't seem headed that way at the moment.
Or so it seems to me. There are very few sandbox style games out there these days in MMORPG land. I think this stems from most players lacking the imagination to take on an open world and find their own entertainment, probably because their prefered gameplay styles have evolved on other games and that shapes their preferences - although generalizations of that sort are naturally quite dangerous and notoriously unreliable. I am sure most people dislike sandbox games to whatever degree for a variety of reasons. I see less in the way of open ended game designs these days though, and most seem to feature some pretty heavy handed guidance for players to ensure they travel down the right (limited number of ) rails on their pass through the game.
Of course, the population of gamers who prefer to really Roleplay in game seems to also be dwindling. This may be a factor in the decline of the Sandbox game as well. Its only natural for those who prefer to engage in roleplaying to want to pop into a Sandbox environment, rub their hands together and say "Ok, now what shall we do first?". More traditional gamers who don't associate as directly with their characters are much more likely to approach the game from a Gamer perspective, and thus view it as a series of obstacles to be overcome, or perhaps a series of goals to be achieved, and set about resolving those as efficiently as possible. This probably ties into Bartle's MUD personality survey, which suggests there are 4 types of MUD gameplayers: Explorers, Achievers, Socializers and Killers. Roleplayers of course fall heavily on the Explorer and Socializer side of things. I think most standard gamers, coming from other types of gameplay will tend to fall into the Acheiver and Killer sides of things since those are emphacized more heavily in most computer and console games.
Star Wars Galaxies used to be the one of the best examples of a true Sandbox game in its original iteration. It has undergone 2 major revisions to its game mechanics, and each one in turn has reduced the "sandboxy" elements of the gameplay considerably. The current iteration - the so-called New Game Enhancement - is the least sandbox like game design I have ever seen, and the only vestiges of sandbox gameplay are those elements of the game that have not yet been revamped. The game is also all but dead as a result of these changes. Ultima Online is of course the granddaddy of MMORPGs effectively, and it, along with Asheron's Call and Everquest, were all more or less Sandboxy in design. All have also more or less fallen by the wayside these days.
New MMORPG offerings tend to be more linear, more structured, more quest-based and often link leveling of characters to elements of the game in a manner they need not have chosen to do. For instance in Warcraft a person interested primarily in crafting, is also forced to level up their character in combat, since crafting level is linked to character level for some reason. This is the antithesis of sandbox design. Dungeons & Dragons Online is almost entirely quest based, as are City of Heroes/City of Villains (where we can replace the word quest with mission), and most other games currently on the market.
Many of course offer a bit of both. The now venerable Dark Age of Camelot offers accelerated advancement in levels by either hunting or doing quests or instanced missions - mostly this is an attempt to let people get to the end game faster and thus retain subscribers I am sure. This game is also sadly dying, although the next offering from Mythic (Warhammer Online) will no doubt build on the successes of DAOC.
Vanguard Saga of Heroes is a modern Sandbox game, although it does offer questing as well. You can take up Crafting or Diplomacy and progress in those areas independant of your character's combat level. Its a very promising game, although it has high end equipment requirements
The flexbility of sandbox gaming is perhaps not structured enough for most individuals.
I have read many times that its the lack of MS Exchange on *nix desktops that is the major stumbling block for a lot of businesses that have considered switching. If so, its fine by me if Google can offer an alternative to Exchange functionality for business users. Its much more likely that any google solution will be *nix compatible than anything MS will offer in the future.
Now, if there was only some way Google could wrest control over the games industry from Microsoft and let game developers develop for alternative platforms a bit easier. My gaming habits are the only thing keeping me from leaving XP completely. I am not likely to stop gaming, I can't/won't play consoles, and the future looks pretty MS monopolistic to me unless something changes. I think there are a lot of people like me out there too.
That our government - like most Western governments - is firmly in the grasp of big business, and no longer really represents the will or interests of the people. Welcome to the "Illusion of Democracy". Government seems to consistently represent the interests of corporations over the interests of the people, at least at the Federal level.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives got in based on support of a lot of the older demographic, mostly in reaction to the horrid Liberal Government we had for years. The only thing I can't believe is that they were willing to elect Stephen Harper. The guy seems so insincere, so slimey, I wouldn't buy a used car from him. I can't believe hes head of the country at the moment. Its a sad period for Canada.
Time to contact your MP and protest I suppose, although I no longer have much hope that can accomplish anything. Our country seems to have the best politicians money can buy:(
Having participated at least on the fringes in the writing process for 3 games (2 of which never saw the light of day), I can say that writing for a game is a very subtle artform if done well. Good writing augments the gameplay without restricting the user's actions, it provides colour and background to the events in the game but is flexible enough that it makes sense whatever the user does, and is hopefully not repetitive. I haven't seen that many good examples of clever and well conceived writing in a lot of games. Myst as someone said wasn't bad (even though I disliked the game myself), and I think the writing in the MMORPGs City of Heroes/City of Villains is excellent. A lot of the old Sierra titles were very well done as well.
Good writing can't supplant the gameplay but it can add to it in such a manner than you can choose to participate in it or more or less ignore it and carry on with playing the game.
One of the projects I participated in was an analysis of how much writing would be required for an MMORPG style game that never saw the light of day to the best of my knowledge (it had no title at the time), and our involvement was limited to determining how much dialog writing would be required given the design the designers had conceived of. They decided not to proceed with that concept when we told them they would end up needing roughly 60,000 pages of dialog when they were done. Obviously a poorly designed concept, which is what we told them.
Uh, it's Jack Layton, not Leighton. Svend 'It has a "d"' Robinson was a back-bencher on the NDP and isn't currently an MP, having resigned in 2004 and lost in the 2006 election after that theft scandal. Trudeau's DEAD, dude. He died about 4 years ago. Trudeau's son isn't even officially in politics. Joe Clark was about 25 years ago. He's not really anyone now.
Well lets see. Okay so I got his name spelled wrong. I know he heads the NDP at the moment and they are effectively a non-entity at the moment politically speaking. So Svend has a D in his name, whatever. Yeah I know hes out of politics at the moment - and probably permanently due to that scandal. I was talking about Politicians I respected here in Canada, not current politicians if you read what I posted. As for Trudeau, yeah I know hes dead, and I know his son isn't a politician, again I was talking about the father not the son. You know, the one who was PM here for a good number of years and is considered to be one of our most effective politicians todate? Yeah that one. Joe Clark is still around, and was head of the Conservatives until Harper took over if I recall correctly - and I might be wrong on that I admit. Again, politicians I respected, but then you seem to have missed my point entirely. Perhaps you didn't read before you flamed.
As for 25 years ago, whatever. I am 47, I was voting 22 years ago and still am. Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember things back then, whatever.
Frankly, I don't think you know anything at all or are qualified to talk about Canadian politics. Full stop.
Luckily your opinion of my qualifications or opinions doesn't mean jack shit. Next time read (and perhaps comprehend) before you go shooting your mouth off.
My opinion stand and are not the least bit altered by your pointless criticism. You are welcome to your opinion though, thats what this country is all about after all...
You know, it is possible for non-US citizens such as myself to disgree strongly with US foreign Policy, dislike the government of the US etc, without actually hating the US, what it stands for, or its political system. That is in fact how I feel most of the time. I have never actually met an American I didn't like, or find friendly. I am sure they exist, just as tons of nasty offensive Canadians probably exist, but I haven't met any from the US.
A lot of people dislike things about the US, its Gov't and Foreign Policy. They have that right. Its not automatically "Rhetoric" because it takes a negative view on some aspect of the US. Despite what many Americans seem to think, you are not perfect:)
Now, what I have noticed is that many Americans who will openly criticize elements of their culture, politics, religious behaviour etc with each other, immediately go on the defensive if a "foreigner" makes the same points. You folks seem pretty touchy about any criticism - not all of you of course, but a lot of you who post to forums. Make a comment against the US and bang! up come the smarmy remarks, insults, denegrations of whatever the poster said as mere Rhetoric etc. If you can feel free to criticize elements of the US, give others the freedom to do so as well. Accept they have a viewpoint that might differ from yours - even if you think its ill-informed or outright wrong. Isn't that what that whole free speech thing is about?
Point of fact I like the US a lot and have enjoyed travelling there a few times in the past, I just disagree with much (but not all) of its Foreign Policy over the past 20 years or so. Mostly, your government worries me:|
Slashdot Mirror
In City of Heroes/City of Villains there is effectively no economy. There is no cash, but defeating mobs gets you "influence" (as a heroe, and its equivalent as a villain), that can be used to buy Enhancements that can augment your powers. The thing is those enhancements are also available from NPC vendors in shops, and are individually not worth much. As well when you get to higher levels, you are buried in influence and it becomes a non-factor really.
All in all the game is greatly improved by not having an economy and not having any "loot". Its refreshing I find...
Time to start fighting the war on Ignorance and Stupidity...
Oh wait, you president is probably amongst the 48% of immensely ignorant people isn't he? Nevermind, please carry on your slow slide into national collapse.
If you wish to produce an OSS Exchange Server equivalent to offer the public an alternative, it faces several major obstacles:
* Its gotta be feature complete, offering everything Exchange does
* Its gotta be Exchange Compatible because like it or not, most businesses that rely on Exchange are thoroughly tied into it, and it will have to work as well as Exchange with other Exchange servers etc.
* You have to convince the CEOs that its worth switching. Within my (admittedly limited) experience of Exchange in a business environment, its the CEOs who want to schedule meetings who push for Exchange deployment, not the average person, who just wants their email.
He soars in to locate America's greatest suspected enemies, then escorts them to a third world country that is friendly to the US, so they can be tortured endlessly until they die. If they live, he takes them to Guantanamo Bay where they can be imprisoned without charges and held indefinitely "because someone thought they might possibly be guilty of something".
Its kind of a change from what America used to stand for, but it probably reflects the way the US is seen these days by a lot of foreigners a bit more accurately.
"I'm more concerned that people watching 24 will believe that terrorists are that capable. Seriously, I've heard people say that 24 shouldn't be aired because it will give terrorists working ideas on what to do. It's also sad that people believe there are an endless stream of highly skilled mercenaries and inside-men in the U.S. willing to murder thousands of innocent people for a million dollars."
There aren't thousands of skilled mercenaries/inside men in the US willing to murder thousands of innocent people for a million dollars? Damn, there goes that employment plan. I thought it was simple:
1). Get an H1B/Green Card (I am Canadian)
2). Get into a position of influence, preferably in the Los Angeles branch of the CTU - since all Terrorist related activities seem to focus on Hollywood (which in and of itself probably wouldn't be a bad thing) and not say, New York, 9/11 not-withstanding.
3). Get suborned by extremely rich terrorists for at least 1m dollars US.
4). Move to the Bahamas and live off my illict wealth.
Now, I admit there are a few problems with this plan. The first one is I have no desire to help terrorists. The second one is I have no useful knowledge to get me into CTU. The third is I highly suspect CTU doesn't exist and if it does under that name, not in LA. The fourth is I have no desire to live in the Bahamas. Still it seemed like a good plan when I thought of it...
Seriously, I am suprised that 24 is as popular as it is, given how *extremely* right-wing it is, how casually torture is accepted, and how predictable the plot is...
These days I tend to assume that any professionally done game review that appears in a magazine, is just marketing. The reviewers seem preconditioned to write mostly positive reviews about every game they review (with perhaps a negative review of some utterly unimportant and uninteresting title thrown in to make them look like responsible reviewers). Its often hard to find a review that seems to report the facts as they are, rather than as the Sales Dept of the developer would like them to read.
Now, online isn't much better. If the reviewer got paid to do the review, it probably isn't accurate. These people get shipped the game, or a beta of it etc, so that they can do a review. If the reviews start getting too negative - the developer will stop shipping the demos to them and they can't continue to do reviews. This pretty much ensures that most reviews won't be as scathing as they might have deserved.
Now, there are tons of bloggers out there writing their opinions on things. The problem with them is simply that a) most can't write their way out of a paper bag, and b) Most have no intention of being objective (the point of a blog is to get attention right? so you have to be a bit more extreme to garner that attention, or so I assume in a lot of cases). I don't rely on blogs much either.
My reviews tend to come from online forums and from actually playing the demo/beta myself if I can. Now, those are hardly bastions of impartiality either, but I have years of experience in separating the wheat from the chaff on various MMORPG forums, and I can often get a reasonable view of a game's problems and positive points. Forum trolls are hardly reluctant to point out weaknesses in games after all.
Mostly, I just no longer buy PC games. I play a few MMORPGs and thats usually it, and I think a lot of folks might be following the same trend. I think the games industry has brought this on themselves by releasing poorly designed titles and by stifling reviews that are negative.
Why should they support older hardware? They are in the business of selling *new* hardware. Simply not writing drivers for older hardware they sold to customers - hardware that admittedly might not be up to Vista compatibility requirements (but we will never know) - will enable them to sell more product. The computer hardware industry no doubt relies, at least in part, on MS OS upgrades to garner new sales for them. I can't see a compelling reason for a hardware manufacturer to write drivers for older hardware when they gain more by selling newer hardware and having to write fewer drivers as a result.
I do wish they would consider letting the open source community write drivers for that older equipment itself, by publishing the source code for the older drivers and making all the spec details freely available. That way their older customers win, the users of alternative operating systems win etc, but I can't see them being interested in it because again, it won't foster new sales.
Well, yeah. The Christian Right(tm) is a massive power in US politics, and since no one interferes in the politics of others like the USA at the moment, it is a concern. Didn't Bush admit that he had a dream that the US had invaded Iraq, and that was part of his reasoning behind the 2nd Gulf War? I got the impression that the President decided to invade Iraq, and then his flunkies/managers determined to find a reason for doing so - and WMD seemed like a good bet.
I worry considerably about the Christian Right. I don't think it has anyone but its own interests at heart, I think it has an agenda to bring Christianity *back* into the school system and to erode the separation of Church and State. I think overall its potentiall quite dangerous. Now, I am not blaming all Christians, or even all politically conservative Christians, its just that I feel some concern when I see a *religious* segment of the population being organized to exert *political* power. When you see Judges putting up the 10 commandments in a courthouse and refusing to remove them (and thus raising the spectre of a non-christian receiving unfair treatment in that court due to religious bias on the part of the presiding judges), when you see the constant bombardment of established scientific theory by hairbrained "Intelligent Design" advocates - and they aren't immediately laughed out of existence, and when you see constant attempts to reintroduce Christian Prayer back into the secular school system, I think its all a concern.
Yeah, I fear the Christian Right and its power to shape the opinions of well-meaning but often essentially uninformed people concerning political issues, in the country with the most military power in the world and with a government that is willing to use that might regularly.A government that is increasingly restricting its citizens rights to privacy and liberty, and denying its supposedly cherished rights and freedoms to anyone it thinks might be an enemy combatant.
So in other words, you haven't tried it, you have only seen some screenshots you didn't like the look of, and you are already a fan of WOW so why should you switch? And from this you draw the conclusion that no one should switch or consider playing the game. Just how subjective can a person be?
In fact, Vanguard has massive potential. Yes, its buggy and incomplete - but every single MMORPG released that I can recall has been buggy and missing some content at release. The fact is that these projects are so large scale and require so much development time that its inevitable that something will go wrong, something will be missing, something won't scale effectively, or it will need more work. Contents will change during the course of gameplay - so says the warning on all of them, and for good reason. If the game was complete at release, players would play it, finish exploring it, and move on. Things *have to change* and have to evolve to keep the players involved in the game and its progress. Things have to be added, expaded, altered, to maintain a level of interest. A completed game design, is a dead game.
Dark Age of Camelot had a pretty smooth release, I was there and I enjoyed it immensely. Yes it needed work, yes the changes they made to it thereafter generally betrayed the original design concept and the game steadily evolved downhill (in my opinion at least). However, if Mythic had had to wait until everything was perfect, they would never have released the game. Its been 5 years and they are still making changes, adding expansions, and changing the class balance. MMORPGs are *never* finished. By definition they will constantly evolve. There are simply too many factors in any such game to possibly allow for all possible permutations of the code and design, to allow for all the possible misuses/abuses/exploits that players will discover and take advantage of - usually to the gross disadvantage of the game. DAOC was more or less designed to address the most common complaints of EQ players at the time - and to introduce large scale PvP in the form of Realm vs Realm combat. It was immensely successful in every regard. I was an EQ player (yes I play a lot of MMORPGs), and I switched immediately based on feedback I got from a coworker who was in the beta.
SWG was buggy as hell at release, and in fact on the first day you couldn't even log in at all. I was there and dutifully attempted to log in for a few hours, but was unsuccessful until the following evening. The game was missing a lot of its details, but the overall design was innovative and ambitious. Its player-based economy was the most ambitious element of any MMORPG I have seen I think, and I played primarily as a crafter for the first 2 years I played the game. SOE couldn't manage the game design and improvements well enough and the game has devolved sadly since. In its current iteration its a pale shadow of its former glory and all of the innovations have effectively been lost by inept designers making moronic changes. Its the text book example of how NOT to evolve a game, particularly one with such a huge provenance.
City of Heroes and City of Villains had a fantastic release, virtually bug free. It still took a long time to get a design that was more or less balanced. I was there too at release, and enjoyed playing the game at all levels - and I still play it now and again. Cryptic are the unsung heroes of MMORPG game design, their game is a niche game admittedly, but its extremely well designed, very stable, well written and quite enjoyable if you like the niche it fills. Overall I think its the best piece of game coding - possibly the best piece of coding period - that I have ever seen. Nonetheless, both versions have required constant updates and changes - because the players continue to find ways to exploit design flaws, and the designers must allow for that and make suitable changes to ensure the gameplay runs the way it was intended to originally. Its still an immensely enjoyable game and I recommend anyone who hasn't tried it g
Well, I am not an engineer. I have known a few who were majoring in Engineering and employed as various types of Engineers thereafter. Pretty much all of them noted a low female Engineering population in University. For the most part this was seen by them as being due to the fact that Male Engineers resented the presence of women in their faculty, and tended to actively (and often boorishly) discourage them by making sure they knew they were not wanted. It wouldn't suprise me to see this attitude in those professors teaching Engineering as well.
I know when women entered the Infantry up here in Canada (CFB Petawawa if you are interested), I was working at one of the Regimental Training schools - and the CO called all of the personnel in the unit into a huge meeting. They were of course all male, as I am. He let it be known that the first women were about to be processed through the school shortly - and he wanted everyone to know that they would failed, and ensure we worked to that end because he knew that women were unsuitable to the trade. What he said was approximately "We all know the first female infanteers are coming here to the RCR Battleschool in the next few weeks. We all know they *will* fail the course, right? I just want to make sure we are all on the same page. There will be no women in the Infantry".
I wouldn't be suprised to see that its the Enginners themselves who are discouraging women from getting involved in Engineering. I know a female friend of mine attempted to major in it and I think she gave up due to the endless hassling she received from other (male) students. I wouldn't be at all suprised to hear that that was a common experience for women getting involved in any aspect of Engineering. I sincerely hope I am wrong and the low population is due to some other cause.
... will be when we discover a planet with a huge hole in its ozone layer? :P
Well, no. See for well over a century we have been an independant country up here in Canada. Yes, we are still a member of the Commonwealth (along with a lot of other countries you might know like Australia and New Zealand etc), and the Queen is still a symbolic head of the Commonwealth, but we are a completely independant country with our own Constitution, Laws and everything. In practice the Queen has zero political power in Canada, its all symbolic and traditional nothing more. Thus we have our own awards.
:)
The thing is, most of us don't see that as a bad thing, whereas you US folks have this pre-conditioned distrust of Royalty for some unfathomable reason - probably something to do with that whole "Tea" issue in Boston way back when. I admit it, the King made a mistake back then OK?. If you would just get over that though, I am sure we could let you back into the Commonwealth
Or perhaps, the Large Corporations pay for the election of the Politicians they prefer, suggest policy to them via various lobby groups, and thus get the laws that tend to favour them enacted much of the time. Then they control your opinions via the media which is entirely corporate controlled, and thus shape your preferences in ways you are undoubtedly unaware of since so much effective marketing is extremely subtle. We as tiny worker bees in the huge Capitalist system go about our days mostly working for one of those corporations or at least as part of the overall system and spend our money like good consumers so that those companies can make their profits and benefit those rich enough to invest in them or own them. The economic disparities continue to evolve and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Because its possible for a small percentage of the poor to claw their way to the rich side of society, we consider this a "good thing". We ignore the thousands of extremely poor people living on the street because they don't fit societies norms and we don't care to pay for their treatment or help. We ignore the fact that much fo the stuff we buy is made by effectively slave labour in third world countries.
As a result many westerners spend a substantial portion of our lives working off debts for items that while no doubt enjoyable to have, were not strictly necessary and are often more in the line of luxuries that we might not have chosen to purchase if we had been aware of the longterm cost when we did so.
For instance, I currently pay around $975 a month in rent. Thats a substantial part of the income my wife and I earn at the moment. When I visited Russia in 1980, I met a couple of women who shared an apartment in Leningrad. Sure, the apartment was not great, but it was actually comparable to the one I live in at the moment, minus the balcony. Their rent? 6 Roubles a month, which was about 1.6% of their income if I recall correctly.
Now, I am not arguing that Soviet Communism was a better system, but blindly supporting Consumerist Capitalism, and worse yet, associating that Capitalism closely with your concepts concerning Democracy is utterly rediculous. Freedom of speech, freedom to elect your officials, freedom to move and act in any way you want inside of your country's laws, etc does not automatically imply that THE ONE TRUE ONLY WAY IS CAPITALISM(tm). Its possible to have a bit of Socialism mixed in their quite effectively. Blindly supporting Captialism in all its glory (sarcasm in case you didn't get it) without questioning it, is just as pathetically mindless as supporting Communism without questioning it in any way.
Yeah people keep pointing out how poor Cuba is - poorest country in the Western Hemisphere etc, etc. Its worth pointing out that Cuba *is* so poor because the US continues to enforce its trade embargos over Cuba, simply because the US has abbrogated to itself the right to interfere in neighbouring country's politics.
Is it worth pointing out to those policy makers in the US, that if they lifted the trade embargos against Cuba, the influx of new trade, exchange of information, and monetary flow that would inevitably occur would not only result in great improvements in the Cuban economy, but probably a much greater push towards democratic rights for the citizens of Cuba? Look at China, while of course its still under the heal of the most repressive government on earth, capitalism is flourishing there because its essential for the country's growth, and some small freedoms are worming their way into the people's lives. Not much mind you, but some. The exact same thing could be happening in Cuba, if only the US could get its head out of its arse, and realize that while it may wish to actively promote democracy, the way to do so is by encouraging other countries and by example, not by punitively punishing countries because they are different.
You have a major problem with the scale of providing search results. What you are proposing here is that individual users *rate* websites in some manner according to their merit. Leaving aside the fact that users are no inherently qualified to rate websites, the fact that a given website may have great merit for a given subject, but not others, and the fact that people will actively find a way to "game" this system just as they have all the others, how big exactly is the internet? lets assume there are 10m useful websites on the web (analy extracting a number). How exactly do you expect the users of this new system to manually rate all of those websites? What is their individual reward for doing so? Even spending 5s to select a number between 1 and 10 for 100 websites on a regular basis is going to occupy considerable time for no apparent reward beyond "helping the system". Most users are probably not that philanthropic, they will simply want to gain benefits from the effort of others. In other words the system will depend on those individuals willing to participate and give up their free time. Now, granted you get all this participation to occur, why would the results be any different or better than those of Google or the other major search engines.
In the original thesis paper that gave rise to the Google algorithm, they essentially worked off a couple of simple concepts - that are no doubt very difficult to implement. They called the key factors "Hubs" and "Authorities". A Hub is a page that contains many hyper-links to other pages. An Authority is a page that is linked to from many other pages. Google's algorithm not only rates each page according to how hub-like or authority-like it is, but it also increases the ranking of the page according to the ranking score of the pages it links to, and more importantly the pages that link to it. In other words if lots of other pages think your page is important and link to it, you gain a higher ranking, if you link to lots of high ranking pages that too is weighed to some degree. As well the actual contents of your page are rated according to their relevance to the search query a user enters at google. Now there are of course thousands of other rules that have been added to avoid all the various tricks that arsehat website developers have attempted to use to fool the system and garner a higher ranking, but the end result is a pretty efficient and accurate search system - probably the best around given google's popularity. The key thing being that of course all this indexing can be done automatically.
How exactly is any manual system going to improve on that? how can it hope to keep up with the billions of webpages out there that are constantly being updated and improved, deleted, moved etc? The manual system can only rate individual websites, not pages - that simply wouldn't be practical. In an ideal world where one website dealt exclusively with one subject and one subject only, this might work, but most websites have dozens if not hundreds of different informational elements that might be of interest to a user, and there is no manual way to determine that, in other words any such meritocratic system is still going to have to fall back on indexing the individual pages using a spider, and the only real result of the meritocratic system is to determine the user's perspective on how valuable the information on that site is - and thats entirely subjective. Google is more objective by far, and any approach to a search engine pretty much has to be as objective as possible.
I don't honestly think any manually driven system has a hope of keeping up with the web. There is simply far too much data being generated, edited, deleted and moved daily for any such effort to offer any real economy of scale.
Its a minor point but it has always bugged me (right from when I bought the first white-boxed set of D&D back in 1978), that gaming culture uses the term "race" when it means "species", and this has carried over to computer/console/online games naturally enough.
When I play City of Heroes or City of Villains, and the main differentiation in Race is skin color, I tend to pick what suits the costume. I have several White characters, at least 1 Asian character, and a couple of Black characters. No Hispanic or Native Characters (although I had one at one point) simply because I haven't had a character concept.
When it comes to Fantasy games - where we are really talking different Species not Races, well I tend to pick the toughest looking male characters and the most attractive looking female characters (as I am male). In DAOC, I played mostly Trolls, Kobolds, Dwarves and Norsemen because they all looked tough to me (Kobolds less so mind you). In my brief stint in WOW (before I wrote it off as tripe), I played only on the Horde side, mostly Orcs. In EQ I played one of those lizardmen.
I play all "races" in game more or less depending on my character concept (in games that really allow that, and I can't conceive of someone choosing not to play a particular species just because it is similar to a RL racial choice. The only exception I make is I never choose to play the "cutesy" species option that many games feature (ie Lurikeen in DAOC, Gnome in WOW etc) mostly because I detest the other people who seem to glom onto "cutesy" and then run around trying to be ultracute. It gets tiring and boring.
Now, what I am very tired of, is the stereotyping you see in games, based on Racial Stereotypes. Blacks and Hispanics are criminals, or at least very tough and not as bright etc. Asians are smart, all know martial arts, and are good at math (plus they speak with a heavy accent). Whites are nerdy, boring, or very macho but the most competent overall etc. Surely we can dispense with this 1950's mode of thinking. Sure, there are people who fit those stereotypes, but they are not the norm and portraying them that way only perpetuates those stereotypes. I am always happy when I see someone include a character that violates those stereotypes deliberately. Its not a major thing but its time to get over that crap I think.
Are you not reading the news lately and in particular the OP? The teacher who received pictures like this from some student attempting blackmail will be in an immediate bind: If they don't report the pictures and it comes out, they will of course suffer the consequences of seemingly requesting illegal pictures in return for special treatment. However, if they do report it they will immediately be implicated in the same - sure, with no evidence, but that doesn't seem to matter these days. As with this situation, merely suspecting the possibility of being guilty will be enough to cause a massive uproar, investigation, etc. The teacher in question will no longer be trusted by any Schoolboard or Parent, even if exonerated later on. Their lives will be torn apart by the legal system - who to be fair would have to investigate them as a matter of course - and the results will be devastating.
I suppose its only a matter of time before this happens as well, given the tools are readily available, and paranoia and misunderstanding concerning internet technology is high. At least when it happens, the concerned individuals will still be likely to get a trial - no matter how biased it might be - which is better than if they were "Enemies of the State" and could just be thrown into Guantanamo without recourse to a trial or lawyers :P
The US seems to be on a long, slippery road to losing complete sight of its ideals and founding principals, I sincerely hope that it can turn around and find them again
Yes, this approach to treating foreign suspects proves that the current US government has lost sight of the ideals that gave birth to the US as a nation. If the USA treats foreigners as less than citizens, gives them effectively no rights under US law, how can it claim to be a bastion of truth and democracy? Guantanamo Bay proves that is an utter lie. Extrordinary Rendition (ie sending people off to be more severely tortured than is legal at Guantanamo Bay for whatever reasons they use to justify it), only further tarnishes the US claim to be superior to other nations in its concepts of rights and freedoms. In short, the US has lost its way, lost its willingness and determination to support the ideals of its founding fathers regardless of the cost, because its citizens believe those ideals to be pure and true and a thing that all people should aspire to.
Instead, the US is shown to be yet another petty nation, whose adherence to its supposed ideals is merely for show. Right now the US (in Guantanamo Bay and in its use of Torture) is morally about the equivalent of Soviet Russia. True, you don't have Gulags yet, but that may be merely a matter of time if the continuous erosion of the US Constitution continues down its current path. The apparent loss of the concept of Habeus Corpus under some circumstances I believe I recall reading about is a sure sign things are not well.
I sincerely hope things change down there (I am up in Canada), because the US is a great nation, and I hope it continues to be a great nation. Sadly it doesn't seem headed that way at the moment.
You can solo the whole way in either of these games (which are related of course). Sure, not every class can do so very effectively but a lot can.
Or so it seems to me. There are very few sandbox style games out there these days in MMORPG land. I think this stems from most players lacking the imagination to take on an open world and find their own entertainment, probably because their prefered gameplay styles have evolved on other games and that shapes their preferences - although generalizations of that sort are naturally quite dangerous and notoriously unreliable. I am sure most people dislike sandbox games to whatever degree for a variety of reasons. I see less in the way of open ended game designs these days though, and most seem to feature some pretty heavy handed guidance for players to ensure they travel down the right (limited number of ) rails on their pass through the game.
Of course, the population of gamers who prefer to really Roleplay in game seems to also be dwindling. This may be a factor in the decline of the Sandbox game as well. Its only natural for those who prefer to engage in roleplaying to want to pop into a Sandbox environment, rub their hands together and say "Ok, now what shall we do first?". More traditional gamers who don't associate as directly with their characters are much more likely to approach the game from a Gamer perspective, and thus view it as a series of obstacles to be overcome, or perhaps a series of goals to be achieved, and set about resolving those as efficiently as possible. This probably ties into Bartle's MUD personality survey, which suggests there are 4 types of MUD gameplayers: Explorers, Achievers, Socializers and Killers. Roleplayers of course fall heavily on the Explorer and Socializer side of things. I think most standard gamers, coming from other types of gameplay will tend to fall into the Acheiver and Killer sides of things since those are emphacized more heavily in most computer and console games.
Star Wars Galaxies used to be the one of the best examples of a true Sandbox game in its original iteration. It has undergone 2 major revisions to its game mechanics, and each one in turn has reduced the "sandboxy" elements of the gameplay considerably. The current iteration - the so-called New Game Enhancement - is the least sandbox like game design I have ever seen, and the only vestiges of sandbox gameplay are those elements of the game that have not yet been revamped. The game is also all but dead as a result of these changes. Ultima Online is of course the granddaddy of MMORPGs effectively, and it, along with Asheron's Call and Everquest, were all more or less Sandboxy in design. All have also more or less fallen by the wayside these days.
New MMORPG offerings tend to be more linear, more structured, more quest-based and often link leveling of characters to elements of the game in a manner they need not have chosen to do. For instance in Warcraft a person interested primarily in crafting, is also forced to level up their character in combat, since crafting level is linked to character level for some reason. This is the antithesis of sandbox design. Dungeons & Dragons Online is almost entirely quest based, as are City of Heroes/City of Villains (where we can replace the word quest with mission), and most other games currently on the market.
Many of course offer a bit of both. The now venerable Dark Age of Camelot offers accelerated advancement in levels by either hunting or doing quests or instanced missions - mostly this is an attempt to let people get to the end game faster and thus retain subscribers I am sure. This game is also sadly dying, although the next offering from Mythic (Warhammer Online) will no doubt build on the successes of DAOC.
Vanguard Saga of Heroes is a modern Sandbox game, although it does offer questing as well. You can take up Crafting or Diplomacy and progress in those areas independant of your character's combat level. Its a very promising game, although it has high end equipment requirements
The flexbility of sandbox gaming is perhaps not structured enough for most individuals.
I have read many times that its the lack of MS Exchange on *nix desktops that is the major stumbling block for a lot of businesses that have considered switching. If so, its fine by me if Google can offer an alternative to Exchange functionality for business users. Its much more likely that any google solution will be *nix compatible than anything MS will offer in the future.
Now, if there was only some way Google could wrest control over the games industry from Microsoft and let game developers develop for alternative platforms a bit easier. My gaming habits are the only thing keeping me from leaving XP completely. I am not likely to stop gaming, I can't/won't play consoles, and the future looks pretty MS monopolistic to me unless something changes. I think there are a lot of people like me out there too.
That our government - like most Western governments - is firmly in the grasp of big business, and no longer really represents the will or interests of the people. Welcome to the "Illusion of Democracy". Government seems to consistently represent the interests of corporations over the interests of the people, at least at the Federal level.
:(
Unfortunately, the Conservatives got in based on support of a lot of the older demographic, mostly in reaction to the horrid Liberal Government we had for years. The only thing I can't believe is that they were willing to elect Stephen Harper. The guy seems so insincere, so slimey, I wouldn't buy a used car from him. I can't believe hes head of the country at the moment. Its a sad period for Canada.
Time to contact your MP and protest I suppose, although I no longer have much hope that can accomplish anything. Our country seems to have the best politicians money can buy
Having participated at least on the fringes in the writing process for 3 games (2 of which never saw the light of day), I can say that writing for a game is a very subtle artform if done well. Good writing augments the gameplay without restricting the user's actions, it provides colour and background to the events in the game but is flexible enough that it makes sense whatever the user does, and is hopefully not repetitive. I haven't seen that many good examples of clever and well conceived writing in a lot of games. Myst as someone said wasn't bad (even though I disliked the game myself), and I think the writing in the MMORPGs City of Heroes/City of Villains is excellent. A lot of the old Sierra titles were very well done as well.
Good writing can't supplant the gameplay but it can add to it in such a manner than you can choose to participate in it or more or less ignore it and carry on with playing the game.
One of the projects I participated in was an analysis of how much writing would be required for an MMORPG style game that never saw the light of day to the best of my knowledge (it had no title at the time), and our involvement was limited to determining how much dialog writing would be required given the design the designers had conceived of. They decided not to proceed with that concept when we told them they would end up needing roughly 60,000 pages of dialog when they were done. Obviously a poorly designed concept, which is what we told them.
Uh, it's Jack Layton, not Leighton. Svend 'It has a "d"' Robinson was a back-bencher on the NDP and isn't currently an MP, having resigned in 2004 and lost in the 2006 election after that theft scandal. Trudeau's DEAD, dude. He died about 4 years ago. Trudeau's son isn't even officially in politics. Joe Clark was about 25 years ago. He's not really anyone now.
Well lets see. Okay so I got his name spelled wrong. I know he heads the NDP at the moment and they are effectively a non-entity at the moment politically speaking. So Svend has a D in his name, whatever. Yeah I know hes out of politics at the moment - and probably permanently due to that scandal. I was talking about Politicians I respected here in Canada, not current politicians if you read what I posted. As for Trudeau, yeah I know hes dead, and I know his son isn't a politician, again I was talking about the father not the son. You know, the one who was PM here for a good number of years and is considered to be one of our most effective politicians todate? Yeah that one. Joe Clark is still around, and was head of the Conservatives until Harper took over if I recall correctly - and I might be wrong on that I admit. Again, politicians I respected, but then you seem to have missed my point entirely. Perhaps you didn't read before you flamed.
As for 25 years ago, whatever. I am 47, I was voting 22 years ago and still am. Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember things back then, whatever.
Frankly, I don't think you know anything at all or are qualified to talk about Canadian politics. Full stop.
Luckily your opinion of my qualifications or opinions doesn't mean jack shit. Next time read (and perhaps comprehend) before you go shooting your mouth off.
My opinion stand and are not the least bit altered by your pointless criticism. You are welcome to your opinion though, thats what this country is all about after all...
You know, it is possible for non-US citizens such as myself to disgree strongly with US foreign Policy, dislike the government of the US etc, without actually hating the US, what it stands for, or its political system. That is in fact how I feel most of the time. I have never actually met an American I didn't like, or find friendly. I am sure they exist, just as tons of nasty offensive Canadians probably exist, but I haven't met any from the US.
:)
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A lot of people dislike things about the US, its Gov't and Foreign Policy. They have that right. Its not automatically "Rhetoric" because it takes a negative view on some aspect of the US. Despite what many Americans seem to think, you are not perfect
Now, what I have noticed is that many Americans who will openly criticize elements of their culture, politics, religious behaviour etc with each other, immediately go on the defensive if a "foreigner" makes the same points. You folks seem pretty touchy about any criticism - not all of you of course, but a lot of you who post to forums. Make a comment against the US and bang! up come the smarmy remarks, insults, denegrations of whatever the poster said as mere Rhetoric etc. If you can feel free to criticize elements of the US, give others the freedom to do so as well. Accept they have a viewpoint that might differ from yours - even if you think its ill-informed or outright wrong. Isn't that what that whole free speech thing is about?
Point of fact I like the US a lot and have enjoyed travelling there a few times in the past, I just disagree with much (but not all) of its Foreign Policy over the past 20 years or so. Mostly, your government worries me