Not that I'm nessisarily disagreeing with you, but I sometimes work the equation the other way as well. In a cost per hour versus other common entertainment sort of way.
Here's how that one works out. Movie + popcorn is roughly $15 for 2 hours of entertainment, which is $7.50 per hour. I'm figuring on 10 hours a week for an MMO. That's an hour a day on weekdays and 2 and a half hours on weekends, which is probably overly conservative. So that's 40 hours a month, which works out to roughly $0.37 per hour. Obviously that equation gets better if you play more, and vice versa.
You may not go out to movies eather, I don't much do it myself, but I do find that looking at the MMO fees in that way can provide perspective.
I'm a Graduate Student and I take my Powerbook to all classes. I pay for University and I'll be damned if a Professor will tell me how I'm going to learn and if I can/can't take my laptop to the class I am paying for.
You're not paying for an individual class, you're paying for an education as presented by the University you chose. If a professor decided that laptops are detrimental to that education, and the University agrees with him, then a ban is perfectly legitimate.
If you find that the education your school provides is not compatible with your needs, you are certainly allowed to find another University. Just as the University is allowed, if they find you are not meeting their standards, to kick you out.
The University isn't simply selling you a product. The are certifying that you meet a certain set of standards. That means that the mere fact that you are paying to attend classes does not allow you to do whatever you like in those classes.
I know these threads are always full of the "I only pay X for video cards, Y is too much. My stuff all plays fine."
Articles like this are not for you. Your stuff plays fine for you. It does not play fine for the target audience of setups like are discussed above. A Ford gets you down the road well enough for most people, but not for a car enthusiast. This is no different.
We're all proud of your frugalness, and are glad you're having a good experience with the games you play. But others like to compare and discuss the bleeding edge of graphics technology, and comments of the formula above don't really add to that.
What we need is for Perot and Nader to run at the same time. If we can keep symmetry in the left/right spectrum, then the "throwing away your vote" aregument carries much less weight.
From his writeup, he wasn't using an attack macro, he was using the button to switch equipment. Functionality that is included in legitimate add-ons, and I think supported thru the in-game macros.
As I gather, he was just using the game's built-in, normal auto-attack feature. While in combat characters will do their plain vanilla attacks at a regular rate for as long as the combat lasts. He was just doing that to an enemy that could heal, and thus would never die to that sort of attack. He didn't alter game mechanics in any way as far as I can tell.
If we're going to kick this dead horse some more, then here goes...
Taco's prefix clearly refers to a military rank. The honor system in game uses military type ranks, though it may not use Commander specificaly, the use of Commander or a derivitive of such could clearly be confused by some players as an actual honor rank, and thus can't be allowed. Titles such as Sir or Mr are distanced enough from the honor system so as to be low priority. Blizz made a fair call.
You can watch a movie based on Shakespear's works today. Same work in a different form. I suspect that will be the case with games, new forms, same ideas.
However, as to which game? Not GTA, not Final Fantasy. It'll be Tetris. That game will never go away, it's made the transition to every new platform that has come out since it's conception, and it will contiue to do so indefinitaly. Tetris' combination of simplicity and addictivness will give it staying power well into the time where GTA's game mechanic looks antiquated and silly.
Yes, but hotels try for the most appealing use of their land space, not the most efficent. You could give everyone a window office, but it'll cost you. I imagine the price per day per square foot is much higher in a hotel than an office building.
It is, of course, entirely possible that the cost will be worth it, due to the incresed productivity, reduced stress, and general worker well being. It's just not as straight forward as it may appear.
It's also posible that they expect Halo 3 will sell well because Bungie is a great developer that makes good, fun to play, games. You are self-admitedly not a xbox/halo fan, so I'm not so sure your analasys of Halo and the reasons Halo 2 sold are exactly spot on, but we don't need to go into how easy it is to kill sniper campers once you get into the game just now.
The point is Halo had several well done innovative aspects to it. Halo 2 had several more, though probably not quite as innovative as the first. I would expect the 3rd iteration will have a few more innovations, and will round out the story, which wasn't finished in Halo 2. It seems pretty clear that Bungie always intended the series to be a trillogy, and that's fine. A trillogy is a far cry from Madden 2kX or Pokemon 328 Purple flower version.
The Halo series does some new things and tells a story, the other examples are iteration just for iteration's sake, changing only stats and minor graphical upgrades. I would think the former is what we would hope for from games, the latter should be avoided.
Re:Tree climbing robot for space exploration!
on
Tree Climbing Robot
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Climbing a vertical surface shares similarities with clinging to an astroid with very little gravity, both can be bad when you let go.
1) The time they set the game in has 2 known Jedi. This allows for perhaps 100 unknown Jedi. No ammount of NPC balancing is going to fix the balance there. Furthermore there are plenty of "Hero's Journeys" to be had in the Star Wars universe without being a Jedi.
2) This isn't that part of the continuity. And you know very well that I wasn't talking about the story arc specificaly. The universe has a feel to it, and you wreck that feel by having too many assclown jedi where none should exist.
3) You are born with your connection to the force. To be a Jedi still requires a lifetime of dedication, unless you're Luke. And no one is Luke except Luke.
4) Baffels me too. Still, even in an era with many Jedi, they should still be no more than 10% of the population, and that's probably still too many.
The point is too many retarded Jedi will always wreck the game for people who care about the continuity and enjoy the Star Wars univers. These people are your target audience for a Star Wars MMO, and if you just want to run around as a Jedi and slice shit up with your lightsaber, Jedi Academy is the game for you. If you make it incredibly difficult to be a Jedi, as it originaly was, then not only do you balance the population propperly, then it's a pretty safe bet that anyone who actualy went to all that trouble to be a jedi probably cares enough to play it properly. And an MMO where people play their characters properly should be the holy grail of the genra.
I think there's a bigger picture here. Aside from education, inteligence, or any other valued trait of the human race, I think simple self-awareness stands a very good chance of being selected out.
A non-self aware creature breeds every time it is able. A self-aware creature, such as a human, breeds only when it chooses. We humans still choose to fairly often, but I would think on the grand scale, our self-awareness would be slowly (even for an evolutonary process) be selected out.
It might be cyclical though. If we selecte away from inteligence (the "ability to reason" kind, not the "I'm smarter than you" kind) then civilisation will fall, making it much harder to live, and the ability to reason will become more of a survival trait again, and thus be selected back in.
It's this kind of thing that makes thinking about the evolutionary mechanics of inteligence useful. Using it to try to argue that some subgroup is/will be more or less inteligent is silly. We're in the evolutionary game as a whole species.
You are considered a failure if you do not make 40K+ a year and work morethan 10 hour days along with your 1+ hour commute = no time for family. And then you get the work that follows you home the Crackberry that assumes you are at it's beck and call 24/7 etc....
For the record: I make over 40k a year, work less than 8 hours a day, commute 10 minutes, and have plenty of time for my family, or would if I had children. I drive an economy car, and don't even have a blackberry. I don't think I'm a falure in anyone's book.
Also, in the 1800s the purpose of children wasn't some moraly high-minded family value, it was cheap labor. Fact of the matter is you don't have to pay your son to till the field for you. I think I prefer todays societal standards to that.
The problem with that is that if everyone is a jedi, it isn't Star Wars. That's a big part of the problem with the crap they're doing now. It doesn't feel like Star Wars if it's not incredibly hard to be a jedi.
Stormtroopers, Fighter Pilots, Smugglers, everyone can be all that, and having the universe be primarily combat oriented is fine. But 10,000 assclowns runing around named "1337j3d1" swingin their lightsabers around is not Star Wars.
Yes, I'll depend on the theater keeping the repeater up. Given all the other technologies theaters seem to be able to keep running, I think it'll be fine.
And if someone has a job where they cannot under any curcumstances be incommunicado for 2 hours, then they just don't get to go see movies or plays. They chose that job, and having that job doesn't give them the right to degrade the experience for the other 200-1000 people who paid to see an uniterupted event.
I would dissagree with you there. I'd again ask that you point out the problem.
If someone is functioning at or above expectations in all areas of their life, yet plays games for 12 hours at a time occasionaly, why is that a bad thing? A functioning addict with a chemical dependancy might have some health risks, but that situation doesn't apply here. Gaming isn't inherantly unhealthy.
My point is not about admiting a problem or not, I'm saying that in the case of game addiction, many of the indicators they use to identify gaming addiction will show up when in fact no problem exists at all.
Gaming seems to be a hobby that not many people outside of it's participants can relate to. So when someone spends a considerable amount of time persuing that hobby, a lot of hand wringing occures and people get worried, and everyone thinks "Something should be done." 36 holes of golf will take 8 hours. The time to build a model car or airplane is simmilar to the time to complete an RPG. A lot of people spend upwards of 20 hours a week in the gym. Yet no one is up in arms about those activities. Should your golf score go up after your first round of the day to encourage you to take a break? Should the gym put limits on how much time you spend on the treadmill in order to encourage you to have a social life? People have died doing all those things, should we ban them?
The fact is gaming is a recriational activity like any other, and it is no more or less dangerous than any other recreational activity that humans find pleasure in. We need to stop pretending gaming is different.
As a matter of fact, I too have a serious girlfreind. And while I do spend a lot of time with her, I don't find that the relationship is mutualy exclusive with occasional 13 hour gaming sessions.
The point is that it's not really possible to identify game addiction mearly by play time. And the mere fact that a person likes to game for long sessions does not point to a deeper problem, or mean that they are nessisarily missing out on some other aspect of life. It can be indicative of those things, but it isn't always.
Thus trying to apply solutions to the problem on anything more than a personal level is very likely going to be inefficent and have a negative effect on the lives of people who aren't in need of help.
As a parent, I agree with you, now there are two of us.
Seriously though, what makes one feel that they are entitled to require the whole world to be coated in a 3 foot layer of nerf, just because their toddler might fall down and bump his knee.
Parenting is a hard job. The world isn't all kid friendly, but it's your job to keep your kids safe, not the governments, not sociaties, not your neighbors, and certainly not mine. It's your job, quit trying to pawn it off on other people.
Slashdot Mirror
kthxbye
Here's how that one works out. Movie + popcorn is roughly $15 for 2 hours of entertainment, which is $7.50 per hour. I'm figuring on 10 hours a week for an MMO. That's an hour a day on weekdays and 2 and a half hours on weekends, which is probably overly conservative. So that's 40 hours a month, which works out to roughly $0.37 per hour. Obviously that equation gets better if you play more, and vice versa.
You may not go out to movies eather, I don't much do it myself, but I do find that looking at the MMO fees in that way can provide perspective.
You're not paying for an individual class, you're paying for an education as presented by the University you chose. If a professor decided that laptops are detrimental to that education, and the University agrees with him, then a ban is perfectly legitimate.
If you find that the education your school provides is not compatible with your needs, you are certainly allowed to find another University. Just as the University is allowed, if they find you are not meeting their standards, to kick you out.
The University isn't simply selling you a product. The are certifying that you meet a certain set of standards. That means that the mere fact that you are paying to attend classes does not allow you to do whatever you like in those classes.
Articles like this are not for you. Your stuff plays fine for you. It does not play fine for the target audience of setups like are discussed above. A Ford gets you down the road well enough for most people, but not for a car enthusiast. This is no different.
We're all proud of your frugalness, and are glad you're having a good experience with the games you play. But others like to compare and discuss the bleeding edge of graphics technology, and comments of the formula above don't really add to that.
What we need is for Perot and Nader to run at the same time. If we can keep symmetry in the left/right spectrum, then the "throwing away your vote" aregument carries much less weight.
As I gather, he was just using the game's built-in, normal auto-attack feature. While in combat characters will do their plain vanilla attacks at a regular rate for as long as the combat lasts. He was just doing that to an enemy that could heal, and thus would never die to that sort of attack. He didn't alter game mechanics in any way as far as I can tell.
Taco's prefix clearly refers to a military rank. The honor system in game uses military type ranks, though it may not use Commander specificaly, the use of Commander or a derivitive of such could clearly be confused by some players as an actual honor rank, and thus can't be allowed. Titles such as Sir or Mr are distanced enough from the honor system so as to be low priority. Blizz made a fair call.
However, as to which game? Not GTA, not Final Fantasy. It'll be Tetris. That game will never go away, it's made the transition to every new platform that has come out since it's conception, and it will contiue to do so indefinitaly. Tetris' combination of simplicity and addictivness will give it staying power well into the time where GTA's game mechanic looks antiquated and silly.
It is, of course, entirely possible that the cost will be worth it, due to the incresed productivity, reduced stress, and general worker well being. It's just not as straight forward as it may appear.
The point is Halo had several well done innovative aspects to it. Halo 2 had several more, though probably not quite as innovative as the first. I would expect the 3rd iteration will have a few more innovations, and will round out the story, which wasn't finished in Halo 2. It seems pretty clear that Bungie always intended the series to be a trillogy, and that's fine. A trillogy is a far cry from Madden 2kX or Pokemon 328 Purple flower version.
The Halo series does some new things and tells a story, the other examples are iteration just for iteration's sake, changing only stats and minor graphical upgrades. I would think the former is what we would hope for from games, the latter should be avoided.
Climbing a vertical surface shares similarities with clinging to an astroid with very little gravity, both can be bad when you let go.
Good point, I hadn't considered that. Perhaps our self-awareness is safe from the evolutionary chopping block after all.
The very lucky among us have done that and not had it suck the fun out of said activity.
Seems you're a little trigger happy there spooje, GP said the same thing. You both agree that DS > PSP, which is pretty universaly true.
2) This isn't that part of the continuity. And you know very well that I wasn't talking about the story arc specificaly. The universe has a feel to it, and you wreck that feel by having too many assclown jedi where none should exist.
3) You are born with your connection to the force. To be a Jedi still requires a lifetime of dedication, unless you're Luke. And no one is Luke except Luke.
4) Baffels me too. Still, even in an era with many Jedi, they should still be no more than 10% of the population, and that's probably still too many.
The point is too many retarded Jedi will always wreck the game for people who care about the continuity and enjoy the Star Wars univers. These people are your target audience for a Star Wars MMO, and if you just want to run around as a Jedi and slice shit up with your lightsaber, Jedi Academy is the game for you. If you make it incredibly difficult to be a Jedi, as it originaly was, then not only do you balance the population propperly, then it's a pretty safe bet that anyone who actualy went to all that trouble to be a jedi probably cares enough to play it properly. And an MMO where people play their characters properly should be the holy grail of the genra.
A non-self aware creature breeds every time it is able. A self-aware creature, such as a human, breeds only when it chooses. We humans still choose to fairly often, but I would think on the grand scale, our self-awareness would be slowly (even for an evolutonary process) be selected out.
It might be cyclical though. If we selecte away from inteligence (the "ability to reason" kind, not the "I'm smarter than you" kind) then civilisation will fall, making it much harder to live, and the ability to reason will become more of a survival trait again, and thus be selected back in.
It's this kind of thing that makes thinking about the evolutionary mechanics of inteligence useful. Using it to try to argue that some subgroup is/will be more or less inteligent is silly. We're in the evolutionary game as a whole species.
For the record: I make over 40k a year, work less than 8 hours a day, commute 10 minutes, and have plenty of time for my family, or would if I had children. I drive an economy car, and don't even have a blackberry. I don't think I'm a falure in anyone's book.
Also, in the 1800s the purpose of children wasn't some moraly high-minded family value, it was cheap labor. Fact of the matter is you don't have to pay your son to till the field for you. I think I prefer todays societal standards to that.
Stormtroopers, Fighter Pilots, Smugglers, everyone can be all that, and having the universe be primarily combat oriented is fine. But 10,000 assclowns runing around named "1337j3d1" swingin their lightsabers around is not Star Wars.
And if someone has a job where they cannot under any curcumstances be incommunicado for 2 hours, then they just don't get to go see movies or plays. They chose that job, and having that job doesn't give them the right to degrade the experience for the other 200-1000 people who paid to see an uniterupted event.
If someone is functioning at or above expectations in all areas of their life, yet plays games for 12 hours at a time occasionaly, why is that a bad thing? A functioning addict with a chemical dependancy might have some health risks, but that situation doesn't apply here. Gaming isn't inherantly unhealthy.
My point is not about admiting a problem or not, I'm saying that in the case of game addiction, many of the indicators they use to identify gaming addiction will show up when in fact no problem exists at all.
Gaming seems to be a hobby that not many people outside of it's participants can relate to. So when someone spends a considerable amount of time persuing that hobby, a lot of hand wringing occures and people get worried, and everyone thinks "Something should be done." 36 holes of golf will take 8 hours. The time to build a model car or airplane is simmilar to the time to complete an RPG. A lot of people spend upwards of 20 hours a week in the gym. Yet no one is up in arms about those activities. Should your golf score go up after your first round of the day to encourage you to take a break? Should the gym put limits on how much time you spend on the treadmill in order to encourage you to have a social life? People have died doing all those things, should we ban them?
The fact is gaming is a recriational activity like any other, and it is no more or less dangerous than any other recreational activity that humans find pleasure in. We need to stop pretending gaming is different.
The point is that it's not really possible to identify game addiction mearly by play time. And the mere fact that a person likes to game for long sessions does not point to a deeper problem, or mean that they are nessisarily missing out on some other aspect of life. It can be indicative of those things, but it isn't always.
Thus trying to apply solutions to the problem on anything more than a personal level is very likely going to be inefficent and have a negative effect on the lives of people who aren't in need of help.
Yea, they sound like shit if you're in the frat boy halo2/madden demographic...
Just because the turtles bounce like they should doesn't mean Mario can't have super-human abilities.
Seriously though, what makes one feel that they are entitled to require the whole world to be coated in a 3 foot layer of nerf, just because their toddler might fall down and bump his knee.
Parenting is a hard job. The world isn't all kid friendly, but it's your job to keep your kids safe, not the governments, not sociaties, not your neighbors, and certainly not mine. It's your job, quit trying to pawn it off on other people.