As all things in security, it's not black and white.
What exactly does "strong" mean? That's the important password.
In most circumstances, your threat model why you need a "strong" password is password guessing. It is rarely an actual brute-force attack, because most systems these days prevent a brute-force attack (e.g. they lock you out or reset your password to a random one that they send you per mail if you try it more than X times).
If your threat model does not include brute-force attacks, what you need is a "difficult to guess" password. That means you don't use "password" or "secret" and you don't use your own name, the name of your significant other or dog, your birthday and so on.
And that's all there is to it, really. All the bullshit about using numbers, special characters, etc. is just that - bullshit. It's defense against a threat that's not important anymore.
IANAL, but I am a security professional. Most of my passwords contain no numbers, and where the systems enforce them, there's usually a single number at the end or beginning. But I can type all my passwords in about a second on a standard keyboard. That makes shoulder-surfing a lot more difficult. In fact, I can make fairly good guesses at most "hunt and peck" people's passwords when I watch them type it in from across a small room. And the more difficult it is, the longer it takes them to type it in, and the easier it is for me to spot it.
So it all depends on your threat model, as always. Know what you need to defend against, and you'll have a pretty good idea of how you need to defend.
Looks like after a decade or so, the "analysts" and "consultants" have finally come around to doing the math on the famous "15 minutes of fame" for everybody.
Some people can work hard and maintain a light weight.
Quite a few people have to put in a huge battle and really not get anywhere with it - or they make progress only to lose ground.
The fault in your equation is that you are assuming it's a single-player game.
It's not.
A whole industry - a lot larger than the music, movie and gaming industries combined is fighting on the other side. They're telling you to eat as much as possible, of the cheapest (for them) possible stuff.
I don't have a simple issue with self control. [...] On the other hand I have a huge problem eating small portions. If I do I literally walk around voraciously hungry.
So you do have an issue with self control, and you know it. You just can't admit it.
People who think it's a simple self control issue are idiots. Your makeup pre-disposes you to wanting to eat and to piling on weight. It's like looking at a dyslexic person and saying it's just a matter of self control when it comes to reading. It shows a profound lack of understanding of the issue.
Self control isn't always simple. But unless you have an actual medical condition, being fat is not comparable to being dyslexic. What it compares better to is the general amount of education that some people leave school with. Not doing your homework, not paying attention and not getting your info from some other place is also a matter of self control (as well as education, etc.).
One more that I picked up when my girlfriend studied the stuff. Many artificial sweeteners are actually pretty much the same thing, as they're broken down into glucose inside the body - same as sugar. In other words: The first step is different, everything else is identical.
"Diet" stuff is a big lie, start to finish. The only thing it's good for is people with diabetis.
That's why most aggro distances are so relatively short; otherwise, it's a huge gameplay concern that most of the userbase would quit over.
Exactly. That's why we don't see changes. WoW has opened up the MMORPG genre to lots of people who are not computer gamers very much. People whose "other games" aren't Morrowind or Far Cry, but Solitaire and Sims. It's dumbed down the entire genre. Which is exactly the whole point of this discussion: There's little challenge aside from "amount of time invested" in these games.
I can't honestly say whether or not this is a standard for MMO games, but... if you're playing games that don't have these features, then you should switch to ones that do.
Apparently, FF is the exception. Almost all the MMORPGs I've played over the years have this problem. In fact, one of the things that itches me most is becoming more common, not less - the fact that if you pull them too far from their original location, monsters "reset" and just go back, no matter what. "Uh yeah, you've killed all my friends and hurt me, but I'm a bit far from home now, I'd better go."
[Spawn Spheres example] if it's actually easy and would improve gameplay as much as you imply, then it should have been done by now.
I think the main reason is that it would make gameplay less predictable. For some reason I don't get, MMORPG designers apparently want the gameplay extremely predictable. I think it's a control-freak problem. They want to be sure that, say, the route from A to be B is blocked by at least X monster groups. With some randomness, after all, it would become possible to get from A to B without a fight under the right circumstances. Can't have that, can we? (uh, why not?)
Now unfortunately, that feature is a bad one. Most MMO's, especially at higher levels, have classes that flat out cannot take many hits (usually, anything that isn't a tank). Were you to have a feature like this, it means that one small screwup on the part of the healer would get him killed almost 100% of the time. How is that a positive improvement? For the sake of simulation?
Agreed, that change alone would have downsides as well. But it wasn't intended to be the only thing to change, just one example of things that could be changed without much effort. Of course, gameplay would have to be re-balanced. For example, giving healers more options to defend themselves, maybe at the expensive of their main job (i.e. if the group wants to be healed, it should keep the healer out of aggro, because in self-defense mode he can survive a while, but he can't heal others).
Yes, it starts becoming non-trivial. Then again, quite a few of those problems are part of the problem all by themselves. I never liked the strict class systems anyways. Again, I feel they're part of the control-freak problem. "Uh, we can't allow players to progress on their own. Who knows what they come up with?"
Clearly, smart enemy AI isn't one in most commercial games, which can be a shame.
That was the point, yes.
Heck, you can even integrate it into the mainstream MMORPGs. Who says your hard instances have to be just tougher? Why do the elite monsters have to have more hitpoints, but otherwise be the same? If you don't want to offend the Solitaire players, keep the intelligent monsters in the higher-level raids. But I personally would love if so-called elite enemies were actually smarter, and not just the same generic monster with more hitpoints.
and you are clearly not a game developer if you think that is a trivial addition
I am, and I do, in a sense. I know what amount of work goes into 3D models, animation, sounds, etc. - the actual coding is not the main effort in almost every computer game developed in the recent past. I didn't mean "trivial" - but compared to the other stuff that is being done without making a gameplay difference, it would be well doable.
And that's for something that's completely show; implementing strategy into AI to fight differently based on the player's strategy isn't even implemented in any commercial game that I know of.
But it's not hard to do. Remember that we're always aiming for apparent intelligence, not real intelligence. As I said, tuning aggro distance based on the monster (maybe its perception, or its own movement speed) along would do a lot to make monsters appear less uniform, because pulling techniques have to change. Changing group behaviour of monsters (e.g. if you pull, does just one come or the whole group?) can be done with a few hours of additional work, essentially adding a few conditionals again based on monster type. Making monsters react more intelligently to the players based on player actions is not difficult. I'm always amazed when humanoid monsters completely ignore me when I'm just out of aggro distance, but even more when I'm at that time busy slaying their comrades. Doubling aggro distance, but only having the monster react when the player in the 2nd "circle" is in combat mode (a distinction most MMORPGs already make, so it's a simple check) would be what? Two hours of work?
You seem to have this grand illusion that code is magic and that you can do anything you want with it.
I've been coding for over 20 years. Please check your assumptions.
I'm talking about the magic of controlled randomness and emergent behaviour here. One more example: It is trivial to use spawn areas instead of spawn points. That technology is at least 10 years old. In an MMORPG it would change tactics dramatically. "Whoops, today we can't pull only mob 1, it's too close to mob 2". Or simply giving monsters a "stubborn" factor that affects aggro would change a lot. What if a monster acted more like a player in that it doesn't change its target that easily? A few simple checks would do, along the lines of how players think. e.g. "if you want to switch targets, but your current one will likely be dead in three more blows, give him those three before you switch".
Changes like that require no new animations, sounds or models, just some coding. Now what would you rather have in the MMORPG of your choice? A new dance, or more challenging monsters?
At this time, many hundreds of man-hours are invested to make practically identical monsters look, sound, move, etc. differently. Having them behave differently can't be that much additional burden, if you have a fairly solid system in the background. Heck, a lot of single-player games manage to.
You could even start right now by changing some values that for some mysterious reason seem to be identical for all monsters in all the MMORPGs. Stuff like aggro distance, for example, are tuned to be just within reach of the players long-range weapons, and not tuned to the monsters.
I don't consider Morrowind to be pure skill-based. It is usage-based. You get XP for using a skill, not for using it well. The best example is athletics - a skill you can quickly raise to ridiculous levels simply by bunny-hopping around all the time (because you get a few XP for every jump).
You missed my point. The whole idea is to make things so that there isn't a rote formula that you can just put in your macro program and go shopping, if you want to go the skill-based route.
Sure there would be guides. But if it's skill-based, then the guide "have a 90% hit rate to get the X bonus" doesn't gain you as much, you still need to be able to hit.
Complexity is an interesting beast. It is fairly easy to create something that is complex, but very hard to disassemble it into its component parts. That's the basic principle behind cryptography. I don't see why it can't be applied to games. Knowing an algorithm does not always magically give you the solution to all possible input values. More importantly, knowing what the required result is for max XP does not automatically tell you how to create it.
Very simple example: If the result is "five successive hits with a +5 or higher skill" you still have to actually score those hits. Remember that I also said this only works if you make hitting something that requires player skill instead of just the press of a button.
One idea I just had was that it's often easier to specify the opposite. Maybe give monsters an encounter value, but substract from it for everything that goes wrong. If someone in the party dies - less XP for the healers and the tank. If the monsters get to use their skills too often, less XP for the debuffers. If it survives for too long, less XP for the damage dealers, and so on.
Maybe this way around it's easier to define the specifics, while at the same time making it harder to game.
Yes, that's why anything that can be scripted, etc. should not be rewarded.
Now I can't say how exactly such a system would look like (if I could, I'd try to sell it to someone). It's a bit like obscenity: Can't define it, but I know it when I see it.
As humans, we usually know skill from level. Someone who can shoot straight will be more successful in an FPS than someone who can't. So rewarding hitting more than shooting rewards skill. That's the basic idea.
No, you misunderstood me. That would be rote playing which I specifically do not want to reward.
It's hard to come up with a good system along this line of thought. The basic idea is that anything that's trivial to do should give trivial (or no) XP. Simply waiting until the others are low on health is trivial to do.
One simple change could be to make progression depend on skill, not trivial success and grinding.
Or, in simpler terms, something that every dofus could do should give no XP at all. And yes, that includes the death of a monster. Instead, why not give XP for successful attacks, combos, or whatever defines your class? Balancing would be a lot more difficult than the current "monster is worth 123 XP, share between party members" system, but it could be more fair and more rewarding, and eliminate grinding.
What if combat would not give you XP for killing monsters, but for how well you fought? You get XP for every attack, depending on your skill of execution. Of course, that would require replacing the simple "click here for an attack, you'll automatically hit" system. But it would allow you to gain your XP slowly by very low XP per boring standard attack, or more rapidly if you know how to fight. Healers, mages, etc. would get XP for their successes, i.e. healing wounded party members, etc. - again, not on a flat system, healing someone who really needed it would give more XP than the standard "I'm throwing a group heal around, just in case anyone needs it".
Absolutely non-trivial to implement and balance, so it's probably not the end of the idea. But it might be a start.
Basically, imagine Oblivion where your athletics skill doesn't increase just because you bunny-hop through the world, but only if you actually use it for something useful.
Mix the two. I'd just love a game where I have both approaches available. Where I could bring my personal skills to the game, but where I don't have any or find it too exhausting (i.e. not fun) to use them, compensate with points, levels, whatever.
The main problem of game design is to make sure it's a complementary, but not additive system. You should be able to offset lack of skill by points, but not have it add up. Someone with the maximum level but no skill should be equal to someone with the highest skill but no level, should be equal to someone with both the skill and the level. If you make it any other way, the game will simply change into one where you need both instead of either.
Most of today's FPS games have such a design in one aspect: You can fire single shots or short bursts and aim them well, or you can fire more or less blindly in long bursts. Due to the random spread increasing with fire rate, you can't do both. It's not the perfect example, but serves to illustrate what I mean.
Adapting that to some MMORPG concepts is, of course, non-trivial. The combat, weapon, magic and other systems of these games are very strongly geared towards level-based playing.
Was this from the archives? There've been videos of the car in action, reports from TV car shows, websites and a whole bunch of other stuff for well over a year at least. And none of them said it's a prototype or something.
We're all used to/. being occasionally "out of touch" with reality a little, but this is "olds", not "news", and 5 seconds with Google would've told the editors.
It's the modern equivalent of location-based trading that we've had for thousands of years. Traders main purpose for most of human history has been to move products from A to B, and it is only reasonable (economically) for them to do so, if they are cheaper in A than in B. Through this trade, however, prices equalize between A and B, because traders start to undercut each other until the price difference is equal to the cost of transportation.
Faster and cheaper transportation speeds up the process.
Now add immaterial trade goods to the mix. These goods can be traded without actually moving a physical object, so the "trade speed" is equal to the communications speed.
From there, it's a little step towards this insane system. I agree it's insane. But where, exactly, do you draw the line?
For second, the previous poster and yourself both assume that the trading application suffered from the OS not providing some feature. That is not proved yet.
It matters little. In his case, the vendor for both was the same. We can safely assume that MS used every feature and trick of windos available, including some not available in the public APIs. And they still couldn't make it work. On a very, very high profile project, with all of their resources behind it.
If they can't do it under this circumstances, I claim it's unlikely that someone can. Since it's been proven that it is possible - on other platforms - Occam's Razor tells me that platform is the cause.
Did you ever stop to think that there might be something fundamentally wrong with a financial system where fortunes are made and lost based on a split-millisecond of "trading time"?
Absolutely, yes. In fact, I believe this is the living reductio ad absurdum of our entire financial system.
The OS is irrelevant - every modern server OS performs well enough to support sanely written software and sanely designed infrastructure. Only the people living in the past and the ones having no clue will argue otherwise.
Or the ones who don't know what they're talking about, like you.
This is one of the main stock exchanges in the world. Billions of dollars of trade rely on microsecond-precise handling. There are whole companies (and not small ones) that do stuff like inter-exchange trading which is the buzzword for "buy for $1,5678 in London, sell for $1,5679 in Tokyo before anyone else does and the prices equalize". These are companies that are willing to put down five to six digit sums per month if they can get an Internet connection with a few milliseconds less latency.
For this environment, you don't need "sanely managed". Any delay whatsoever in the transactions is bad. Any time a transaction can not be handled properly due to delay, queues or any fucking other reason, one of your traders is unhappy. And you don't want unhappy traders when they are your business.
Slashdot Mirror
As all things in security, it's not black and white.
What exactly does "strong" mean? That's the important password.
In most circumstances, your threat model why you need a "strong" password is password guessing. It is rarely an actual brute-force attack, because most systems these days prevent a brute-force attack (e.g. they lock you out or reset your password to a random one that they send you per mail if you try it more than X times).
If your threat model does not include brute-force attacks, what you need is a "difficult to guess" password. That means you don't use "password" or "secret" and you don't use your own name, the name of your significant other or dog, your birthday and so on.
And that's all there is to it, really. All the bullshit about using numbers, special characters, etc. is just that - bullshit. It's defense against a threat that's not important anymore.
IANAL, but I am a security professional. Most of my passwords contain no numbers, and where the systems enforce them, there's usually a single number at the end or beginning. But I can type all my passwords in about a second on a standard keyboard. That makes shoulder-surfing a lot more difficult. In fact, I can make fairly good guesses at most "hunt and peck" people's passwords when I watch them type it in from across a small room. And the more difficult it is, the longer it takes them to type it in, and the easier it is for me to spot it.
So it all depends on your threat model, as always. Know what you need to defend against, and you'll have a pretty good idea of how you need to defend.
Looks like after a decade or so, the "analysts" and "consultants" have finally come around to doing the math on the famous "15 minutes of fame" for everybody.
Some people can work hard and maintain a light weight.
Quite a few people have to put in a huge battle and really not get anywhere with it - or they make progress only to lose ground.
The fault in your equation is that you are assuming it's a single-player game.
It's not.
A whole industry - a lot larger than the music, movie and gaming industries combined is fighting on the other side. They're telling you to eat as much as possible, of the cheapest (for them) possible stuff.
I don't have a simple issue with self control. [...] On the other hand I have a huge problem eating small portions. If I do I literally walk around voraciously hungry.
So you do have an issue with self control, and you know it. You just can't admit it.
People who think it's a simple self control issue are idiots. Your makeup pre-disposes you to wanting to eat and to piling on weight. It's like looking at a dyslexic person and saying it's just a matter of self control when it comes to reading. It shows a profound lack of understanding of the issue.
Self control isn't always simple. But unless you have an actual medical condition, being fat is not comparable to being dyslexic. What it compares better to is the general amount of education that some people leave school with. Not doing your homework, not paying attention and not getting your info from some other place is also a matter of self control (as well as education, etc.).
Interesting point.
One more that I picked up when my girlfriend studied the stuff. Many artificial sweeteners are actually pretty much the same thing, as they're broken down into glucose inside the body - same as sugar. In other words: The first step is different, everything else is identical.
"Diet" stuff is a big lie, start to finish. The only thing it's good for is people with diabetis.
That's why most aggro distances are so relatively short; otherwise, it's a huge gameplay concern that most of the userbase would quit over.
Exactly. That's why we don't see changes. WoW has opened up the MMORPG genre to lots of people who are not computer gamers very much. People whose "other games" aren't Morrowind or Far Cry, but Solitaire and Sims. It's dumbed down the entire genre. Which is exactly the whole point of this discussion: There's little challenge aside from "amount of time invested" in these games.
I can't honestly say whether or not this is a standard for MMO games, but... if you're playing games that don't have these features, then you should switch to ones that do.
Apparently, FF is the exception. Almost all the MMORPGs I've played over the years have this problem. In fact, one of the things that itches me most is becoming more common, not less - the fact that if you pull them too far from their original location, monsters "reset" and just go back, no matter what. "Uh yeah, you've killed all my friends and hurt me, but I'm a bit far from home now, I'd better go."
[Spawn Spheres example] if it's actually easy and would improve gameplay as much as you imply, then it should have been done by now.
I think the main reason is that it would make gameplay less predictable. For some reason I don't get, MMORPG designers apparently want the gameplay extremely predictable. I think it's a control-freak problem. They want to be sure that, say, the route from A to be B is blocked by at least X monster groups. With some randomness, after all, it would become possible to get from A to B without a fight under the right circumstances. Can't have that, can we? (uh, why not?)
Now unfortunately, that feature is a bad one. Most MMO's, especially at higher levels, have classes that flat out cannot take many hits (usually, anything that isn't a tank). Were you to have a feature like this, it means that one small screwup on the part of the healer would get him killed almost 100% of the time. How is that a positive improvement? For the sake of simulation?
Agreed, that change alone would have downsides as well. But it wasn't intended to be the only thing to change, just one example of things that could be changed without much effort. Of course, gameplay would have to be re-balanced. For example, giving healers more options to defend themselves, maybe at the expensive of their main job (i.e. if the group wants to be healed, it should keep the healer out of aggro, because in self-defense mode he can survive a while, but he can't heal others).
Yes, it starts becoming non-trivial. Then again, quite a few of those problems are part of the problem all by themselves. I never liked the strict class systems anyways. Again, I feel they're part of the control-freak problem. "Uh, we can't allow players to progress on their own. Who knows what they come up with?"
Clearly, smart enemy AI isn't one in most commercial games, which can be a shame.
That was the point, yes.
Heck, you can even integrate it into the mainstream MMORPGs. Who says your hard instances have to be just tougher? Why do the elite monsters have to have more hitpoints, but otherwise be the same? If you don't want to offend the Solitaire players, keep the intelligent monsters in the higher-level raids. But I personally would love if so-called elite enemies were actually smarter, and not just the same generic monster with more hitpoints.
Thanks. "Classic Design" alone makes things a ton better.
and you are clearly not a game developer if you think that is a trivial addition
I am, and I do, in a sense. I know what amount of work goes into 3D models, animation, sounds, etc. - the actual coding is not the main effort in almost every computer game developed in the recent past. I didn't mean "trivial" - but compared to the other stuff that is being done without making a gameplay difference, it would be well doable.
And that's for something that's completely show; implementing strategy into AI to fight differently based on the player's strategy isn't even implemented in any commercial game that I know of.
But it's not hard to do. Remember that we're always aiming for apparent intelligence, not real intelligence. As I said, tuning aggro distance based on the monster (maybe its perception, or its own movement speed) along would do a lot to make monsters appear less uniform, because pulling techniques have to change. Changing group behaviour of monsters (e.g. if you pull, does just one come or the whole group?) can be done with a few hours of additional work, essentially adding a few conditionals again based on monster type. Making monsters react more intelligently to the players based on player actions is not difficult. I'm always amazed when humanoid monsters completely ignore me when I'm just out of aggro distance, but even more when I'm at that time busy slaying their comrades. Doubling aggro distance, but only having the monster react when the player in the 2nd "circle" is in combat mode (a distinction most MMORPGs already make, so it's a simple check) would be what? Two hours of work?
You seem to have this grand illusion that code is magic and that you can do anything you want with it.
I've been coding for over 20 years. Please check your assumptions.
I'm talking about the magic of controlled randomness and emergent behaviour here. One more example: It is trivial to use spawn areas instead of spawn points. That technology is at least 10 years old. In an MMORPG it would change tactics dramatically. "Whoops, today we can't pull only mob 1, it's too close to mob 2".
Or simply giving monsters a "stubborn" factor that affects aggro would change a lot. What if a monster acted more like a player in that it doesn't change its target that easily? A few simple checks would do, along the lines of how players think. e.g. "if you want to switch targets, but your current one will likely be dead in three more blows, give him those three before you switch".
Changes like that require no new animations, sounds or models, just some coding. Now what would you rather have in the MMORPG of your choice? A new dance, or more challenging monsters?
You think that's something? :-)
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I don't think that's the case, really.
At this time, many hundreds of man-hours are invested to make practically identical monsters look, sound, move, etc. differently. Having them behave differently can't be that much additional burden, if you have a fairly solid system in the background. Heck, a lot of single-player games manage to.
You could even start right now by changing some values that for some mysterious reason seem to be identical for all monsters in all the MMORPGs. Stuff like aggro distance, for example, are tuned to be just within reach of the players long-range weapons, and not tuned to the monsters.
I don't consider Morrowind to be pure skill-based. It is usage-based. You get XP for using a skill, not for using it well. The best example is athletics - a skill you can quickly raise to ridiculous levels simply by bunny-hopping around all the time (because you get a few XP for every jump).
You missed my point. The whole idea is to make things so that there isn't a rote formula that you can just put in your macro program and go shopping, if you want to go the skill-based route.
Sure there would be guides. But if it's skill-based, then the guide "have a 90% hit rate to get the X bonus" doesn't gain you as much, you still need to be able to hit.
Not necessarily.
Complexity is an interesting beast. It is fairly easy to create something that is complex, but very hard to disassemble it into its component parts. That's the basic principle behind cryptography. I don't see why it can't be applied to games. Knowing an algorithm does not always magically give you the solution to all possible input values. More importantly, knowing what the required result is for max XP does not automatically tell you how to create it.
Very simple example: If the result is "five successive hits with a +5 or higher skill" you still have to actually score those hits. Remember that I also said this only works if you make hitting something that requires player skill instead of just the press of a button.
Yes, that's quite true.
One idea I just had was that it's often easier to specify the opposite. Maybe give monsters an encounter value, but substract from it for everything that goes wrong. If someone in the party dies - less XP for the healers and the tank. If the monsters get to use their skills too often, less XP for the debuffers. If it survives for too long, less XP for the damage dealers, and so on.
Maybe this way around it's easier to define the specifics, while at the same time making it harder to game.
True, there's that. These odd "skills" like pulling, crowd control, aggro ping-pong and so on. Skills that are somewhat out-of-game.
Yes, that's why anything that can be scripted, etc. should not be rewarded.
Now I can't say how exactly such a system would look like (if I could, I'd try to sell it to someone). It's a bit like obscenity: Can't define it, but I know it when I see it.
As humans, we usually know skill from level. Someone who can shoot straight will be more successful in an FPS than someone who can't. So rewarding hitting more than shooting rewards skill. That's the basic idea.
No, you misunderstood me. That would be rote playing which I specifically do not want to reward.
It's hard to come up with a good system along this line of thought. The basic idea is that anything that's trivial to do should give trivial (or no) XP. Simply waiting until the others are low on health is trivial to do.
One simple change could be to make progression depend on skill, not trivial success and grinding.
Or, in simpler terms, something that every dofus could do should give no XP at all. And yes, that includes the death of a monster. Instead, why not give XP for successful attacks, combos, or whatever defines your class? Balancing would be a lot more difficult than the current "monster is worth 123 XP, share between party members" system, but it could be more fair and more rewarding, and eliminate grinding.
What if combat would not give you XP for killing monsters, but for how well you fought? You get XP for every attack, depending on your skill of execution. Of course, that would require replacing the simple "click here for an attack, you'll automatically hit" system. But it would allow you to gain your XP slowly by very low XP per boring standard attack, or more rapidly if you know how to fight. Healers, mages, etc. would get XP for their successes, i.e. healing wounded party members, etc. - again, not on a flat system, healing someone who really needed it would give more XP than the standard "I'm throwing a group heal around, just in case anyone needs it".
Absolutely non-trivial to implement and balance, so it's probably not the end of the idea. But it might be a start.
Basically, imagine Oblivion where your athletics skill doesn't increase just because you bunny-hop through the world, but only if you actually use it for something useful.
Reward not use, but useful use.
My take on the situation:
Mix the two. I'd just love a game where I have both approaches available. Where I could bring my personal skills to the game, but where I don't have any or find it too exhausting (i.e. not fun) to use them, compensate with points, levels, whatever.
The main problem of game design is to make sure it's a complementary, but not additive system. You should be able to offset lack of skill by points, but not have it add up. Someone with the maximum level but no skill should be equal to someone with the highest skill but no level, should be equal to someone with both the skill and the level. If you make it any other way, the game will simply change into one where you need both instead of either.
Most of today's FPS games have such a design in one aspect: You can fire single shots or short bursts and aim them well, or you can fire more or less blindly in long bursts. Due to the random spread increasing with fire rate, you can't do both. It's not the perfect example, but serves to illustrate what I mean.
Adapting that to some MMORPG concepts is, of course, non-trivial. The combat, weapon, magic and other systems of these games are very strongly geared towards level-based playing.
Was this from the archives? There've been videos of the car in action, reports from TV car shows, websites and a whole bunch of other stuff for well over a year at least. And none of them said it's a prototype or something.
We're all used to /. being occasionally "out of touch" with reality a little, but this is "olds", not "news", and 5 seconds with Google would've told the editors.
I agree that it's insane.
The morals are slightly more tricky, though.
It's the modern equivalent of location-based trading that we've had for thousands of years. Traders main purpose for most of human history has been to move products from A to B, and it is only reasonable (economically) for them to do so, if they are cheaper in A than in B. Through this trade, however, prices equalize between A and B, because traders start to undercut each other until the price difference is equal to the cost of transportation.
Faster and cheaper transportation speeds up the process.
Now add immaterial trade goods to the mix. These goods can be traded without actually moving a physical object, so the "trade speed" is equal to the communications speed.
From there, it's a little step towards this insane system. I agree it's insane. But where, exactly, do you draw the line?
For second, the previous poster and yourself both assume that the trading application suffered from the OS not providing some feature. That is not proved yet.
It matters little. In his case, the vendor for both was the same. We can safely assume that MS used every feature and trick of windos available, including some not available in the public APIs. And they still couldn't make it work. On a very, very high profile project, with all of their resources behind it.
If they can't do it under this circumstances, I claim it's unlikely that someone can. Since it's been proven that it is possible - on other platforms - Occam's Razor tells me that platform is the cause.
Did you ever stop to think that there might be something fundamentally wrong with a financial system where fortunes are made and lost based on a split-millisecond of "trading time"?
Absolutely, yes. In fact, I believe this is the living reductio ad absurdum of our entire financial system.
I agree, in this particular case the big outage was way more important than any delays, etc.
The OS is irrelevant - every modern server OS performs well enough to support sanely written software and sanely designed infrastructure. Only the people living in the past and the ones having no clue will argue otherwise.
Or the ones who don't know what they're talking about, like you.
This is one of the main stock exchanges in the world. Billions of dollars of trade rely on microsecond-precise handling. There are whole companies (and not small ones) that do stuff like inter-exchange trading which is the buzzword for "buy for $1,5678 in London, sell for $1,5679 in Tokyo before anyone else does and the prices equalize". These are companies that are willing to put down five to six digit sums per month if they can get an Internet connection with a few milliseconds less latency.
For this environment, you don't need "sanely managed". Any delay whatsoever in the transactions is bad. Any time a transaction can not be handled properly due to delay, queues or any fucking other reason, one of your traders is unhappy. And you don't want unhappy traders when they are your business.