my friend has played CoH/CoV since it came out and he enjoys it very much; He certainly hasn't become jaded with it in the same way that I did WoW. It seems that CoH has innovated alot as a MMO and deserves a lot of respect. Unfortunately I can't say it's style interests me, preferring the more fantasy based WoW style stories. Infact that's what tears me up the most about leaving WoW is missing out on the ever growing Azerothian myths and legends, twists and turns and plots. I loved the lore and will truly miss it. the rest turned into a sewer though.
I sympathize with you man. This kind of treatment is why I gave up WoW. I haven't had to go through that terrible process myself, I just sick of the way people were being treated and cancelled my account, but to see you being blind-sided like that with no warning really makes my blood boil.
One of the most obvious problems with WoW these days is that there is this massive wall of low level employees (GMs, Billing & accounts etc) who don't have either the authority or time to really look after customers properly. Add to this Blizzards obvious contempt for it's playerbase as easymeat who are pretty much addicts so can be treated like trash and you have a situation where people will frequently get reamed like this with no way to prevent it.
You will of course get accused of botting by lots of players, but lots of players also happen to be 14 year old children who love to point fingers (not to say every 14 year old is like this, but the culture of WoW has shown to me that while there are exceptions if a player sounds like a 14 year, acts like a 14 year old and talks AOL trash talk then he's caek).
In the end Blizz and it's employees can pretty much act as they want and this is the most problematic part of it for me. There is no accountability, GMs have been to behave extremely innapropriately in the past, it's impossible to defend yourself from accusations of cheating because Blizz wants to be seen to having a strong anti-cheater policy so if false positives come up then it doesn't really matter. Amoung the thousands of cheaters those innocent will go unheard.
I suggest that you give up on WoW, and find a MMO that treats it's customers with at least a little common decency. Hmph that might be tricky though.
watching the sony PS3 unroll like a slow car crash infront of them? I'm sincerely puzzled as to what the frack Sony think they are up to, are they actually made!?
people really don't want to pay money to have less features in a product you dimwits [intel]. I hope AMD sues ya ass to kingdom come for anti-competative practices.
where are maxxas based, somewhere where they can't be served with a DMCA order?
well then i'll clarify, in my eyes the legal argument (although IANAL) for fair use allows google to index books for searching. I assumed people would recognise that I meant from a legal standpoint as I cited 'fair use'.
your argument is quite weak, firstly you are mixing media. If you downloaded a broad cross section of files from p2p networks you would end up with a massive array of stuff, from movies to tax returns (how the hell do they ever get on filesharing networks!) whereas with google books we are talking about just that, books. Secondly google are working in close company with some very esteemed universities on this project, it's not like this is #bookwarez on efnet; At no time are google going to give people access to books they don't own the copyright to, so your comparison is innapropriate. Google will make money off advertising using their very successful advertising model, all the authors guild wants to do is perform a shakedown and see if they can leech money off of google, who are taking something and simply improving it. The authors guild are a bunch of idiots if they don't see the potential to increase sales from this.
I would emphasize the potential for their project to increase sales, especially for books which are currently out of print, as while people frequently don't have access to out of print work now, with google books they will as so far something like 75% of the books scanned have been OOP. If the authors guild wants to argue about google making tiny paragraphs from OOP books available to search tools then let them, let them till they are blue in the face. Of course if some judge rules for them then I will just about give up hope for humanity.
here is a non-registration article at news.com explaining the reasons why google may be in trouble over their book scanning. to quote:
""I think the judge's decision completely sets up the case the authors have against Google," said Karen Frank, a partner at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, a San Francisco law firm, who is not involved in the lawsuit."
I still disagree though, and feel what google is doing constitutes fair use.
In my eyes googles book indexing service is still fair use as it's not abusing the copyright of the books they are indexing and as it's fair use they don't even need to ask anyone. I'm not sure how this case affects their book effort?
it's hardly surprising digg posted it first, their stories don't need to go through the same moderation process stories do on/. as they have a different news system which promotes stories more quickly. However on digg you can't expect to have any kind of decent conversation (ignoring rabid OSS fanboi's etc) so it balances out somewhat.
Go to digg for the latest news, come here to chat about it.
it's not such an unfeasable idea though. We store more and more of our thoughts and thought processes externally on our computers and servers. While letting a third party company store our memories is questionable, storing them on an external medium seems like a way forward.
Look at it like this, there are levels of privacy in our thought processes, there are things we are happy to share with strangers, things we will only share with friends and things we won't share with anyone. If I have a thought that is completely public then why need I waste brainspace on it at all, surely it would be better to store it externally; And also if it's a piece of public info then there is a great chance other people have the same info, so you could just store that information once and share it between hosts/distributed brains.
there is definately room for improvement, in that I agree with you. However I feel that the improvements I'd like to see the most are not technological but social, including how social interaction takes place in these worlds and the importance of players moderating theirselves more closely. What spoils any MMORPG the most for me is the childish and inane chatter in general. In that respect I would be very happy to see an MMO with a minimum age requirement.
Like I've said before, I think any rating system will be abused, whatever protections are put in place. However as that's my main gripe I'll ignore that problem for now and think about it in a different way. I can imagine a system of Karma in WoW for instance, that effects for instance loot drops, Money drops and faction. Say for instance I play nice, I get a good rating from other players, in the long this means that on average rarer loot drops, more money drops per mob etc. Of course this would have to be balanced in a reasonable way, but it is an exciting idea.
It might also help with rep grinding. Say for instance I get a good rating from player X and player X happens to be aligned with a given faction (e.g. revered/exhalted), it goes in turn that if that player approves of me, then that faction also does. This converts into a rep bonus when grinding, making the grind shorter.
OK so I guess now I'm thinking about it there are some things about the idea that I do like, however I do think it's still untenable from a practical point of view, as I've seen without a doubt that if people are good at anything it's finding loopholes. e.g. now that there is a deserter debuff in battlegrounds in WoW rather than AFK'ing out people are just sitting and waiting for the other side to win as quickly as possible. This kind of abuse of game mechanics should be punishable but nothing happens. I guess when a system gets to a certain point of complexity where you can no longer predict all the outcomes this is what happens.
don't underestimate peoples desire to slander off others. If someone has multiple characters it's easy to relog with a character your victim doesn't know, join their party, spend the prerequisite time with them and then give them a black mark. Then rinse, wash and repeat. One thing I've seen great evidence of is that when people want to they can be extremely malicious which is why I think a system like that, at least in an MMORPG would not work.
I've been playing on my WoW server for a year now with no transfers so the community is well established. Obviously PUGs aren't that common now as most people are guilded but in the instances where I don't do guild runs the PUGS I do are hand picked people I know are good at their roles. This comes about through knowing the community I'm part of. Any ninja's on the server are pretty well known and are pretty much avoided; If some poor PUG is unlucky enough to pick up a ninja then what they learn from that experience is in my opinion quite valuable anyhow. A burning rite of passage if you will. I simply feel that giving people ticks or minuses like school records detracts from the immersiveness of the experience. Also on a more personal note if another rep grind was added to WoW I think my feet would probably drop off in disgust! And people always, always find a way to abuse a system like that. I know from personal experience, having seen guilds cascade MC, abuse the PvP honour system, afk out of BG. There is no system that a company can build that can't be exploited. Word of mouth is king. It might not be the most reliable form of recommendation, it is of course open to abuse and lies and one persons word against another, but that's life.
having another Reputation grind in WoW is definately not what we need. Especially with the kind of elitism and backstabbing that goes on. Also there is another element to this, which is that a rating system is only useful if you don't know someone. On the average WoW server where the population is well established most people know each other or or at least know peoples reputations. This is because it's an immersive world rather than a a single purpose based game like Quake. In either case we don't need ebay style ratings to tell us whether someone is an angel or a bastard, that's what chat is for!
that's not so. Think about the difference between/. and a MMORPG. If a guy has bad karma on/. then so what, it's just a forum and it's a place for chucking mud and stick and stones; However if a guy has a bad rating in an MMORPG then it becomes impossible to group, whether the rating is deserved or not. So if people find a way to manipulate ratings and attack someone in that manner then it ends up detracting massively from the victims playing experience.
the problem stems though from the poor game masters that blizzard employs and their policy towards gold selling. If a certain character was flagged by dozens of people as a gold-seller it would make fuck all difference to a GM because it's simply not important to them. they don't care. I say this because every single thing that is said, whether/tells or in general chat is logged. If it was in Blizzs interest to stop gold sellers they would. They simply don't have the capacity to stop the gold sellers either, so it's another problem swept under the carpet, like teleports, hacks, pvp bullshit ect ect.
it's called/yell in Ironforge. Seriously though, A MMORPG is such because it's an immersive world where people not only quest for 'phat lewtz' but spend a good amount of time sitting around, idling and chatting. I don't need a feedback system to tell me that X is a ninja or that Y is an excellent healer or tank that I would be happy to have in my party, I know from experience and communication. Jeez it almost sounds like handing out gold stars.
Plus a system like that is open to massive abuse, especially when you put it into the hands of a bunch of 14 year old boys who decide that they don't like a particular player. Sounds like another shitty rep grind. no bloody way.
I myself feel more comfortable relying on other peoples music tastes than a computers estimation of the qualities of a piece of music so prefer last.fm for that reason. Your metaphor is apt and true.
We believe at acme words Co. that a synergy between form and function should drive our market forward in a proactive sideways shuffle, spinning ever spinning, twirling, ever twirling!
really? I just like the word. Plus IMO this kind of tech is vapourware and belongs in the same realm as market-speak.
it's just as feasible to create mesh grids of this puppies so you could download your neighbours nighbours songs as easily as if they were just one hop away, not 5 or 6, and of course like you say they could be used to send any kind of info. The only caveat is who make these machines, and I'm sure that SONY is not going to bring out a push enabled meshp3 player soon; And if big companies shoot down the idea - as they will - the joe public will never find out about it, and the thing that really makes any p2p network fail is lack of users.
the idea is to have it work on the basis that it learns your listening habits, what you enjoy and then proactively retrieves music from other push enabled music players on the fly. If you don't listen to the Backstreet boys or music like that it will be very unlikely to pick that it.
Kind of like last.fm but more aggressive.
Slashdot Mirror
my friend has played CoH/CoV since it came out and he enjoys it very much; He certainly hasn't become jaded with it in the same way that I did WoW. It seems that CoH has innovated alot as a MMO and deserves a lot of respect. Unfortunately I can't say it's style interests me, preferring the more fantasy based WoW style stories. Infact that's what tears me up the most about leaving WoW is missing out on the ever growing Azerothian myths and legends, twists and turns and plots. I loved the lore and will truly miss it. the rest turned into a sewer though.
I sympathize with you man. This kind of treatment is why I gave up WoW. I haven't had to go through that terrible process myself, I just sick of the way people were being treated and cancelled my account, but to see you being blind-sided like that with no warning really makes my blood boil.
One of the most obvious problems with WoW these days is that there is this massive wall of low level employees (GMs, Billing & accounts etc) who don't have either the authority or time to really look after customers properly. Add to this Blizzards obvious contempt for it's playerbase as easymeat who are pretty much addicts so can be treated like trash and you have a situation where people will frequently get reamed like this with no way to prevent it.
You will of course get accused of botting by lots of players, but lots of players also happen to be 14 year old children who love to point fingers (not to say every 14 year old is like this, but the culture of WoW has shown to me that while there are exceptions if a player sounds like a 14 year, acts like a 14 year old and talks AOL trash talk then he's caek).
In the end Blizz and it's employees can pretty much act as they want and this is the most problematic part of it for me. There is no accountability, GMs have been to behave extremely innapropriately in the past, it's impossible to defend yourself from accusations of cheating because Blizz wants to be seen to having a strong anti-cheater policy so if false positives come up then it doesn't really matter. Amoung the thousands of cheaters those innocent will go unheard.
I suggest that you give up on WoW, and find a MMO that treats it's customers with at least a little common decency. Hmph that might be tricky though.
watching the sony PS3 unroll like a slow car crash infront of them? I'm sincerely puzzled as to what the frack Sony think they are up to, are they actually made!?
people really don't want to pay money to have less features in a product you dimwits [intel]. I hope AMD sues ya ass to kingdom come for anti-competative practices. where are maxxas based, somewhere where they can't be served with a DMCA order?
well then i'll clarify, in my eyes the legal argument (although IANAL) for fair use allows google to index books for searching. I assumed people would recognise that I meant from a legal standpoint as I cited 'fair use'.
your argument is quite weak, firstly you are mixing media. If you downloaded a broad cross section of files from p2p networks you would end up with a massive array of stuff, from movies to tax returns (how the hell do they ever get on filesharing networks!) whereas with google books we are talking about just that, books. Secondly google are working in close company with some very esteemed universities on this project, it's not like this is #bookwarez on efnet; At no time are google going to give people access to books they don't own the copyright to, so your comparison is innapropriate. Google will make money off advertising using their very successful advertising model, all the authors guild wants to do is perform a shakedown and see if they can leech money off of google, who are taking something and simply improving it. The authors guild are a bunch of idiots if they don't see the potential to increase sales from this.
I would emphasize the potential for their project to increase sales, especially for books which are currently out of print, as while people frequently don't have access to out of print work now, with google books they will as so far something like 75% of the books scanned have been OOP. If the authors guild wants to argue about google making tiny paragraphs from OOP books available to search tools then let them, let them till they are blue in the face. Of course if some judge rules for them then I will just about give up hope for humanity.
here is a non-registration article at news.com explaining the reasons why google may be in trouble over their book scanning. to quote:
""I think the judge's decision completely sets up the case the authors have against Google," said Karen Frank, a partner at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, a San Francisco law firm, who is not involved in the lawsuit."
I still disagree though, and feel what google is doing constitutes fair use.
In my eyes googles book indexing service is still fair use as it's not abusing the copyright of the books they are indexing and as it's fair use they don't even need to ask anyone. I'm not sure how this case affects their book effort?
it's hardly surprising digg posted it first, their stories don't need to go through the same moderation process stories do on /. as they have a different news system which promotes stories more quickly. However on digg you can't expect to have any kind of decent conversation (ignoring rabid OSS fanboi's etc) so it balances out somewhat.
Go to digg for the latest news, come here to chat about it.
This story should be pulled too. What a waste of space. Slow sunday.
it's not such an unfeasable idea though. We store more and more of our thoughts and thought processes externally on our computers and servers. While letting a third party company store our memories is questionable, storing them on an external medium seems like a way forward. Look at it like this, there are levels of privacy in our thought processes, there are things we are happy to share with strangers, things we will only share with friends and things we won't share with anyone. If I have a thought that is completely public then why need I waste brainspace on it at all, surely it would be better to store it externally; And also if it's a piece of public info then there is a great chance other people have the same info, so you could just store that information once and share it between hosts/distributed brains.
can they see gods fingerprints on the fossils? Maybe they better take the images down to the crime labs to run them through the database!
there is definately room for improvement, in that I agree with you. However I feel that the improvements I'd like to see the most are not technological but social, including how social interaction takes place in these worlds and the importance of players moderating theirselves more closely. What spoils any MMORPG the most for me is the childish and inane chatter in general. In that respect I would be very happy to see an MMO with a minimum age requirement. Like I've said before, I think any rating system will be abused, whatever protections are put in place. However as that's my main gripe I'll ignore that problem for now and think about it in a different way. I can imagine a system of Karma in WoW for instance, that effects for instance loot drops, Money drops and faction. Say for instance I play nice, I get a good rating from other players, in the long this means that on average rarer loot drops, more money drops per mob etc. Of course this would have to be balanced in a reasonable way, but it is an exciting idea. It might also help with rep grinding. Say for instance I get a good rating from player X and player X happens to be aligned with a given faction (e.g. revered/exhalted), it goes in turn that if that player approves of me, then that faction also does. This converts into a rep bonus when grinding, making the grind shorter. OK so I guess now I'm thinking about it there are some things about the idea that I do like, however I do think it's still untenable from a practical point of view, as I've seen without a doubt that if people are good at anything it's finding loopholes. e.g. now that there is a deserter debuff in battlegrounds in WoW rather than AFK'ing out people are just sitting and waiting for the other side to win as quickly as possible. This kind of abuse of game mechanics should be punishable but nothing happens. I guess when a system gets to a certain point of complexity where you can no longer predict all the outcomes this is what happens.
don't underestimate peoples desire to slander off others. If someone has multiple characters it's easy to relog with a character your victim doesn't know, join their party, spend the prerequisite time with them and then give them a black mark. Then rinse, wash and repeat. One thing I've seen great evidence of is that when people want to they can be extremely malicious which is why I think a system like that, at least in an MMORPG would not work.
I've been playing on my WoW server for a year now with no transfers so the community is well established. Obviously PUGs aren't that common now as most people are guilded but in the instances where I don't do guild runs the PUGS I do are hand picked people I know are good at their roles. This comes about through knowing the community I'm part of. Any ninja's on the server are pretty well known and are pretty much avoided; If some poor PUG is unlucky enough to pick up a ninja then what they learn from that experience is in my opinion quite valuable anyhow. A burning rite of passage if you will. I simply feel that giving people ticks or minuses like school records detracts from the immersiveness of the experience. Also on a more personal note if another rep grind was added to WoW I think my feet would probably drop off in disgust! And people always, always find a way to abuse a system like that. I know from personal experience, having seen guilds cascade MC, abuse the PvP honour system, afk out of BG. There is no system that a company can build that can't be exploited. Word of mouth is king. It might not be the most reliable form of recommendation, it is of course open to abuse and lies and one persons word against another, but that's life.
having another Reputation grind in WoW is definately not what we need. Especially with the kind of elitism and backstabbing that goes on. Also there is another element to this, which is that a rating system is only useful if you don't know someone. On the average WoW server where the population is well established most people know each other or or at least know peoples reputations. This is because it's an immersive world rather than a a single purpose based game like Quake. In either case we don't need ebay style ratings to tell us whether someone is an angel or a bastard, that's what chat is for!
that's not so. Think about the difference between /. and a MMORPG. If a guy has bad karma on /. then so what, it's just a forum and it's a place for chucking mud and stick and stones; However if a guy has a bad rating in an MMORPG then it becomes impossible to group, whether the rating is deserved or not. So if people find a way to manipulate ratings and attack someone in that manner then it ends up detracting massively from the victims playing experience.
the problem stems though from the poor game masters that blizzard employs and their policy towards gold selling. If a certain character was flagged by dozens of people as a gold-seller it would make fuck all difference to a GM because it's simply not important to them. they don't care. I say this because every single thing that is said, whether /tells or in general chat is logged. If it was in Blizzs interest to stop gold sellers they would. They simply don't have the capacity to stop the gold sellers either, so it's another problem swept under the carpet, like teleports, hacks, pvp bullshit ect ect.
it's called /yell in Ironforge. Seriously though, A MMORPG is such because it's an immersive world where people not only quest for 'phat lewtz' but spend a good amount of time sitting around, idling and chatting. I don't need a feedback system to tell me that X is a ninja or that Y is an excellent healer or tank that I would be happy to have in my party, I know from experience and communication. Jeez it almost sounds like handing out gold stars.
Plus a system like that is open to massive abuse, especially when you put it into the hands of a bunch of 14 year old boys who decide that they don't like a particular player. Sounds like another shitty rep grind. no bloody way.
I myself feel more comfortable relying on other peoples music tastes than a computers estimation of the qualities of a piece of music so prefer last.fm for that reason. Your metaphor is apt and true.
http://www.apple.com/ has been updated with new yummies! go look
We believe at acme words Co. that a synergy between form and function should drive our market forward in a proactive sideways shuffle, spinning ever spinning, twirling, ever twirling!
really? I just like the word. Plus IMO this kind of tech is vapourware and belongs in the same realm as market-speak.
it's just as feasible to create mesh grids of this puppies so you could download your neighbours nighbours songs as easily as if they were just one hop away, not 5 or 6, and of course like you say they could be used to send any kind of info. The only caveat is who make these machines, and I'm sure that SONY is not going to bring out a push enabled meshp3 player soon; And if big companies shoot down the idea - as they will - the joe public will never find out about it, and the thing that really makes any p2p network fail is lack of users.
the idea is to have it work on the basis that it learns your listening habits, what you enjoy and then proactively retrieves music from other push enabled music players on the fly. If you don't listen to the Backstreet boys or music like that it will be very unlikely to pick that it.
Kind of like last.fm but more aggressive.