Seems obvious to me what the YouTube linked ad is about. It's showing how google's browser is lightweight and free of clutter as well as giving a basic feel for the actual interface. And it does that with a bit of an Arkanoid parody/inspiration (oblig wikipedia).
I was a little supprised to see a Google ad in during the game since they've never been much for TV advertising, although I have seen quite a few of those search stories ads on Hulu recently, as well as some other Chrome ads. It was definitely one of the better ads among the Super Bowl fare this year.
Also, you forgot "Doritos" in your last paragraph. (Does that mean it worked, even if I don't want any?)
I can see an argument that a well done system of unlocks or other RPG elements in these kind of situations can actually help a new player familiarize themselves with some the core concepts before branching out into whatever specializations they may want to make down the road. This allows you to have a more complex game without bombarding a new player with too much information or too many options they don't understand when they first start.
Sticking with the MW2 example in the summary. A new player will need to learn some basics before they can really make use of that stinger launcher, silencer, or claymore anyway. Depending on how new they are, they'll need to learn anything from how to move around and identify targets (new to the FPS genre) to getting some idea of the map layouts, and a general idea of what does what among the available equipment/perks/killstreak rewards (new to the specific game). Giving them a few decent premade classes to pick from while learning these basics rather than dropping them in with the full range of custom class options is not necessarily a bad thing. It can make the game more accessible by allowing the learning curve progress at a more gradual rate, without sacrificing complexity in the higher-end game.
Certainly, specifics details such as pacing of unlocks and placing objectively "better" pieces of equipment further up the tree can hurt such a system. Also, players who are already familiar with the game will most likely have a certain degree of annoyance about not having access to everything up front (but once again, good pacing can make this a minor issue). It's up to the individual developer to strike a balance between presenting new players a simpler version of the game, and allowing more skilled players to reach their desired specialization in a reasonable time frame. So-called RPG elements and equipment unlocks are a reasonable way to accomplish this.
tldr: A well paced unlock/RPG system allows new players to learn the basics before moving on to more specific and specialized roles.
I agree with your main point that the sign-out menu takes the full screen, and that is somewhere between annoyingly inconvenient to match critical if you want to sign out in the middle of a splitscreen game.
But how hard is it really to "memorize" Guide->X->Up->A. Presumably you already know you have to press the guide button, since you're complaining about it interrupting the gameplay. After that, pressing 'X' is the only "memorization" required, since the "Up->A" part of the sequence is just responding to the "Yes I actually want to sign out" pop up that shows up.
p.s. I thought Microsoft ran all the game servers on their X360 platform? Don't they have some kind of requirements for support of those servers?
Although I think that's usually the case, EA seems to think they know better. The handful of EA games I've played (Army of Two and BF1943 are the two that spring to mind) on the 360 use separate EA servers and some sort of separate "EA Account" that must be created, then promptly forgotten, before you can play. From a gamers perspective, it's basically just an extra headache for no benefit. Clearly EA sees some benefit from it though.
Guild Wars: beating a map, gaining several levels, and then getting a quest later that takes you through the same map. All the monsters are now the equivalent of chuck norris and it takes you two more days to get through the same stupid map.
FYI, Guild Wars has static maps (well, nearly-static, the classes of the mobs get shuffled a little each time). Although there are two difficulty modes for each map (normal/hard), the player has control over which mode they play in.
What you said sounds more like Oblivion, which repopulates areas you've already cleared after a few in-game days and levels NPCs to match the player. Especially painful if you haven't been min-maxing and your character has leveled through out-of-combat skills, since all the speech-craft in the world won't take down a level 20 Daedra.
Yes, we've all heard that argument before. Minute for minute versus a movie ticket.
Yes we have, and I'll admit to being more then a little tired of it (especially in discussion about MMOs and monthly costs). However, if you look closely, the person you replied to said that the increase in development costs of a game today compared to a game one or two console generations ago has been much higher then the increase in the retail price of the same game, which is a completely different statement.
Not that I usually like to hawk extensions/apps on/., but since it's kind of on the current sub-sub-topic...
When I looked at your screen shot I initially thought you were using Tree-Style Tabs (link) with only one tab open. Its a larger* extension than the one you're using, but it deafults to (and works best when) showing the tab section as a vertical bar that looks very similar to the one in your screen shot.
* By which I mean, does a lot more stuff but is less likely to play nice with other tab-related extensions you might be using.
Acutally, this guy said it, but you may not have seen his post since he's modded -1 Flamebait. Do note that this entire thread is in reply to his post.
Also, when the guy you replied to said "GP to your post" he meant "Grand-parent." The post you replied to was the parent to your post (and does not say that Pan's Labyrinth sucked), the post he replied to was the grand-parent to your post (and he did say that). It can easily be found (even if hidden by moderation) by clicking on that handy "Parent" button at the bottom of the post.
Investigation revealed that some of the newer Macbook Pros and the Macbook Air have an inaccessible battery. They have a replacement plan to replace the battery for you, either at the store by appointment (though probably walk in would work unless they're that busy), or mail in over a few days.
13' Macbooks look to be pretty much the same as everything else, press a latch and slide the battery out.
15' Macbooks have a slightly more annoying latch (requires a coin or screwdriver to unlock the battery area), but are otherwise basically the same.
IANA.. whatever's relevant here. However, I'd think that if a journalist flat out made up defaming quotes from "Anonymous Sources" (and you could prove it), they would be liable for any libel charges relating to those quotes. Its just that (and I agree, necessary) laws protecting them and their sources make proving the quote is made up much harder.
No offense, but here's the situation you outlined:
The BSA comes up and asks to check your business computers for pirated software. You tell me to fuck off, so they leave, not forgetting to stop by the nearest relevant court house. They go and get a court order* to check your computer for same pirated software and come back (lets call it) a week later with the order. They find out that in the mean time, you spent the last month switching to free/open-source equivalents for all or most of the software They thought you had pirated.
Now, why wouldn't that be pretty good circumstantial evidence that you had "something to hide" ?
*Making no claims on the upstanding legal merits of the process or high quality evidence they use to obtain such a court order, simply taking it as a given that the order is granted as per the GP post.
There are a few programs like that out there now (Listchecker and GHost++ being the two that I see most often).
Also, your comment about switching. DotA recently added a command to switch two players on opposite teams. The intention is if you are in a situation where one team outnumbers the other by two or more because of leavers, you can switch someone from the bigger team to the smaller. Unfortunately, though depending on who switched, the game is usually still fairly imbalanced afterwords due to the team-based nature of the game.
On the contrary, there are no physical limits that stop me from replacing all my pawns with queens in a chess game, or merely pretending my pawns are queens and moving or using them as if they were. A chess board has no built in limits that prevent this. Similarly, there's no built in limitation in WoW or any other MMO that stops me from paying someone else real money outside the game for in-game money.
In both games, the actions described are "against the rules," though. In chess, you have only the one queen and pawns move in a much more limited manner. In the rules for WoW as set forth in the TOS, RMT is not aloud.
The core of the problem is something you touched on:
You can play a handicap game, where one person starts with fewer pieces, but only by consent of both players.
(emphasis mine) In chess, if the other guy decides all his pawns are actually queens, the rules are enforced because nobody will play with him, not because his chess board won't allow it. He won't be allowed to play in any chess leagues because the organizers won't allow him to play with his rules.
In an MMO, if one guy decides to buy a couple million gold for his level 10 whathaveyou, he can still play with everyone else. This is because the much broader scope of the "gameplay rules" for WoW makes it hard to determine who is cheating in this way and who isn't (for example, by giving a gift to a friend or getting an alt ready for action), and impossible to exclude only those who cheat (as any enforcement method will have some false positives and some will figure out how to slip by).
The short of it is, the analogy to chess doesn't hold because the same enforcement mechanism doesn't work in the much more complicated environment of an MMO, not because chess is a better designed game*.
* Chess is a better designed game in my opinion, and one might even argue that it's relative simplicity is one of the reasons. But that's not the issue here;)
Speaking of Counterstrike, the multi-player is supposed to be the central crowning jewel of the game. Problem is, there are no consequences for it: death and failure are meaningless, you do not lose money on death and the loss of a round or even an entire match are barely noticed. Within a short period of time, any weapon or equipment can be reaquired. The entire exercise quickly begins to feel repetitive and boring. You have no personal stake in saving the hostage/disarming the bomb and therefore no real incentive to help.
Re:How can you trust this article?
on
Review: Halo Wars
·
· Score: 1
This might have been true when the first Halo came out. There certainly was no competition on the same level at that time, and the Console FPS market was mostly badly done ports of PC titles. The current console market, almost 8 years later, has plenty of competition.
Just to put out some recent examples, the newer Call of Duty games are popular cross platform shooters. They're available on PC, XBox, and PS3. They're popular on both consoles at least, I'm not sure about PCs. On the PS3, Resistance and Killzone both get a lot of noise when they come out. I haven't played them personally, but they're definitely marketed as competition to Halo. On the 360, the Gears of War series (although technically a third person shooter) is in fairly direct competition with Halo. Finally, some of the Tom Clancy games (Rainbow 6 and Ghost Recon spring to mind, though there might be some others) are another set of fairly popular cross platform console FPSes.
These are just a few of the better examples from the current generation, almost all of which are newer then the most recent Halo. To say that Halo is still "the only fish in the water" for the Console FPS market is simply no longer true.
I have to agree with this. I player a matrix mod for Unreal Tournament once that allowed one player (at random?) to be "The One" and gave that player a time-slowing ability. One of my friends would use this exclusively for himself, and most of the rest of us would have the fun of walking down a hallway very slowly (at the best of times) or having our timing completely thrown off by the seemingly random in-and-out bullet time (at the worst of times). I can only imagine what it would be like if anyone could initiate the slow mode.
Conclusion: Perfectly code-able (since at least 2000), terrible mechanic for multiplayer.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems obvious to me what the YouTube linked ad is about. It's showing how google's browser is lightweight and free of clutter as well as giving a basic feel for the actual interface. And it does that with a bit of an Arkanoid parody/inspiration (oblig wikipedia).
I was a little supprised to see a Google ad in during the game since they've never been much for TV advertising, although I have seen quite a few of those search stories ads on Hulu recently, as well as some other Chrome ads. It was definitely one of the better ads among the Super Bowl fare this year.
Also, you forgot "Doritos" in your last paragraph. (Does that mean it worked, even if I don't want any?)
I can see an argument that a well done system of unlocks or other RPG elements in these kind of situations can actually help a new player familiarize themselves with some the core concepts before branching out into whatever specializations they may want to make down the road. This allows you to have a more complex game without bombarding a new player with too much information or too many options they don't understand when they first start.
Sticking with the MW2 example in the summary. A new player will need to learn some basics before they can really make use of that stinger launcher, silencer, or claymore anyway. Depending on how new they are, they'll need to learn anything from how to move around and identify targets (new to the FPS genre) to getting some idea of the map layouts, and a general idea of what does what among the available equipment/perks/killstreak rewards (new to the specific game). Giving them a few decent premade classes to pick from while learning these basics rather than dropping them in with the full range of custom class options is not necessarily a bad thing. It can make the game more accessible by allowing the learning curve progress at a more gradual rate, without sacrificing complexity in the higher-end game.
Certainly, specifics details such as pacing of unlocks and placing objectively "better" pieces of equipment further up the tree can hurt such a system. Also, players who are already familiar with the game will most likely have a certain degree of annoyance about not having access to everything up front (but once again, good pacing can make this a minor issue). It's up to the individual developer to strike a balance between presenting new players a simpler version of the game, and allowing more skilled players to reach their desired specialization in a reasonable time frame. So-called RPG elements and equipment unlocks are a reasonable way to accomplish this.
tldr: A well paced unlock/RPG system allows new players to learn the basics before moving on to more specific and specialized roles.
I agree with your main point that the sign-out menu takes the full screen, and that is somewhere between annoyingly inconvenient to match critical if you want to sign out in the middle of a splitscreen game.
But how hard is it really to "memorize" Guide->X->Up->A. Presumably you already know you have to press the guide button, since you're complaining about it interrupting the gameplay. After that, pressing 'X' is the only "memorization" required, since the "Up->A" part of the sequence is just responding to the "Yes I actually want to sign out" pop up that shows up.
p.s. I thought Microsoft ran all the game servers on their X360 platform? Don't they have some kind of requirements for support of those servers?
Although I think that's usually the case, EA seems to think they know better. The handful of EA games I've played (Army of Two and BF1943 are the two that spring to mind) on the 360 use separate EA servers and some sort of separate "EA Account" that must be created, then promptly forgotten, before you can play. From a gamers perspective, it's basically just an extra headache for no benefit. Clearly EA sees some benefit from it though.
Slashdot needs a -1 informative mod...
If you just dropped those two short sentences separating this little contradiction, I wouldn't even have had to put them in separate quotes.
FYI, Guild Wars has static maps (well, nearly-static, the classes of the mobs get shuffled a little each time). Although there are two difficulty modes for each map (normal/hard), the player has control over which mode they play in.
What you said sounds more like Oblivion, which repopulates areas you've already cleared after a few in-game days and levels NPCs to match the player. Especially painful if you haven't been min-maxing and your character has leveled through out-of-combat skills, since all the speech-craft in the world won't take down a level 20 Daedra.
Its even worse for them then you thought: 1.5m / 100 = 15k, not 150k.
If I had to guess what GP was talking about, I'd say this. First thing that I thought of, anyway.
Yes, we've all heard that argument before. Minute for minute versus a movie ticket.
Yes we have, and I'll admit to being more then a little tired of it (especially in discussion about MMOs and monthly costs). However, if you look closely, the person you replied to said that the increase in development costs of a game today compared to a game one or two console generations ago has been much higher then the increase in the retail price of the same game, which is a completely different statement.
Not that I usually like to hawk extensions/apps on /., but since it's kind of on the current sub-sub-topic...
When I looked at your screen shot I initially thought you were using Tree-Style Tabs (link) with only one tab open. Its a larger* extension than the one you're using, but it deafults to (and works best when) showing the tab section as a vertical bar that looks very similar to the one in your screen shot.
* By which I mean, does a lot more stuff but is less likely to play nice with other tab-related extensions you might be using.
Acutally, this guy said it, but you may not have seen his post since he's modded -1 Flamebait. Do note that this entire thread is in reply to his post.
Also, when the guy you replied to said "GP to your post" he meant "Grand-parent." The post you replied to was the parent to your post (and does not say that Pan's Labyrinth sucked), the post he replied to was the grand-parent to your post (and he did say that). It can easily be found (even if hidden by moderation) by clicking on that handy "Parent" button at the bottom of the post.
I was curious, so I checked the Apple support docs and (when for a minute I couldn't find anything there) some related stuff:
Apple Support: Battery Service
Apple Support: Replacement Batteries
Ars Technica: New Macbook Pro Battery Replacement Information
Apple KB: How to replace a Macbook battery
Investigation revealed that some of the newer Macbook Pros and the Macbook Air have an inaccessible battery. They have a replacement plan to replace the battery for you, either at the store by appointment (though probably walk in would work unless they're that busy), or mail in over a few days.
13' Macbooks look to be pretty much the same as everything else, press a latch and slide the battery out. 15' Macbooks have a slightly more annoying latch (requires a coin or screwdriver to unlock the battery area), but are otherwise basically the same.
So there you have it.
IANA.. whatever's relevant here. However, I'd think that if a journalist flat out made up defaming quotes from "Anonymous Sources" (and you could prove it), they would be liable for any libel charges relating to those quotes. Its just that (and I agree, necessary) laws protecting them and their sources make proving the quote is made up much harder.
See: Jayson Blair
That was supposed to be "Funny" .. sorry about the bad mod.
Also, whoever is modding this troll needs to get one of those iLife things I read about elsewhere in the thread.
No offense, but here's the situation you outlined:
The BSA comes up and asks to check your business computers for pirated software. You tell me to fuck off, so they leave, not forgetting to stop by the nearest relevant court house. They go and get a court order* to check your computer for same pirated software and come back (lets call it) a week later with the order. They find out that in the mean time, you spent the last month switching to free/open-source equivalents for all or most of the software They thought you had pirated.
Now, why wouldn't that be pretty good circumstantial evidence that you had "something to hide" ?
*Making no claims on the upstanding legal merits of the process or high quality evidence they use to obtain such a court order, simply taking it as a given that the order is granted as per the GP post.
You mean the machine I'm using right now can do other things?
I guess technically it can also read comments posted to slashdot...
There are a few programs like that out there now (Listchecker and GHost++ being the two that I see most often).
Also, your comment about switching. DotA recently added a command to switch two players on opposite teams. The intention is if you are in a situation where one team outnumbers the other by two or more because of leavers, you can switch someone from the bigger team to the smaller. Unfortunately, though depending on who switched, the game is usually still fairly imbalanced afterwords due to the team-based nature of the game.
Also, you could drop a few lines by moving that pay_bonus() call out of the if statements (since it really isn't conditional on anything anyway).
The new Slashcode includes a feature that randomly changes punctuation marks on clicking Submit?
OK: maybe not; but with all the other weird things happening around here lately... can you really rule it out!
Fixed
On the contrary, there are no physical limits that stop me from replacing all my pawns with queens in a chess game, or merely pretending my pawns are queens and moving or using them as if they were. A chess board has no built in limits that prevent this. Similarly, there's no built in limitation in WoW or any other MMO that stops me from paying someone else real money outside the game for in-game money.
In both games, the actions described are "against the rules," though. In chess, you have only the one queen and pawns move in a much more limited manner. In the rules for WoW as set forth in the TOS, RMT is not aloud.
The core of the problem is something you touched on:
(emphasis mine)
In chess, if the other guy decides all his pawns are actually queens, the rules are enforced because nobody will play with him, not because his chess board won't allow it. He won't be allowed to play in any chess leagues because the organizers won't allow him to play with his rules.
In an MMO, if one guy decides to buy a couple million gold for his level 10 whathaveyou, he can still play with everyone else. This is because the much broader scope of the "gameplay rules" for WoW makes it hard to determine who is cheating in this way and who isn't (for example, by giving a gift to a friend or getting an alt ready for action), and impossible to exclude only those who cheat (as any enforcement method will have some false positives and some will figure out how to slip by).
The short of it is, the analogy to chess doesn't hold because the same enforcement mechanism doesn't work in the much more complicated environment of an MMO, not because chess is a better designed game*.
* Chess is a better designed game in my opinion, and one might even argue that it's relative simplicity is one of the reasons. But that's not the issue here ;)
Doing a little replacement game...
Speaking of Counterstrike, the multi-player is supposed to be the central crowning jewel of the game. Problem is, there are no consequences for it: death and failure are meaningless, you do not lose money on death and the loss of a round or even an entire match are barely noticed. Within a short period of time, any weapon or equipment can be reaquired. The entire exercise quickly begins to feel repetitive and boring. You have no personal stake in saving the hostage/disarming the bomb and therefore no real incentive to help.
This might have been true when the first Halo came out. There certainly was no competition on the same level at that time, and the Console FPS market was mostly badly done ports of PC titles. The current console market, almost 8 years later, has plenty of competition.
Just to put out some recent examples, the newer Call of Duty games are popular cross platform shooters. They're available on PC, XBox, and PS3. They're popular on both consoles at least, I'm not sure about PCs. On the PS3, Resistance and Killzone both get a lot of noise when they come out. I haven't played them personally, but they're definitely marketed as competition to Halo. On the 360, the Gears of War series (although technically a third person shooter) is in fairly direct competition with Halo. Finally, some of the Tom Clancy games (Rainbow 6 and Ghost Recon spring to mind, though there might be some others) are another set of fairly popular cross platform console FPSes.
These are just a few of the better examples from the current generation, almost all of which are newer then the most recent Halo. To say that Halo is still "the only fish in the water" for the Console FPS market is simply no longer true.
I have to agree with this. I player a matrix mod for Unreal Tournament once that allowed one player (at random?) to be "The One" and gave that player a time-slowing ability. One of my friends would use this exclusively for himself, and most of the rest of us would have the fun of walking down a hallway very slowly (at the best of times) or having our timing completely thrown off by the seemingly random in-and-out bullet time (at the worst of times). I can only imagine what it would be like if anyone could initiate the slow mode.
Conclusion: Perfectly code-able (since at least 2000), terrible mechanic for multiplayer.
Technically boxes qualify under both his categories. Or at least I've yet to encounter an armed box or one that can fight back.