Not that I support Blizzard's handling of this lawsuit, but let me play the devil's advocate. This project is open source, which means any authentication code could be easily stripped out. Likely the bnetd people and Blizzard both knew this, which is why Blizzard rejected their offer. Its entirely possible that the whole reason the bnetd people contacted Blizzard was because they intended it for piracy use, and wanted to cover their butts. This way they could say "See? We tried!" I doubt it, but its possible, and its certainly an argument that Blizzard could make.
But actually, the main reason Blizzard started a lawsuit against bnetd was the leak of the Warcraft 3 beta. See, Blizzard didn't really seem to care, until someone forked the bnetd project to enable you to use the Warcraft 3 beta. That didn't make Blizzard happy at all. The lawsuit followed shortly after that. While its possible that it was simply a timing coincidence, I tend to believe that the WC3 leak triggered it, or at least caused Blizzard to take notice.
Because it weakens the fair-use argument and makes piracy seem like the motivating factor. Generally, people on Slashdot don't like to acknowledge when a product is mostly used for piracy, and instead try to trump up its legitimate uses.
Some people wrote an emulator for the server that Blizzard uses to match up internet games for their products. Much like P2P, this program has been used for some legitimate purposes, but mostly just so people can play their pirated copies of the game online.
Blizzard, of course, doesn't like this and sues. Slashdot readers yell as if they didn't know that it was mostly being used for piracy, and try to pretend that the majority of people only use it legitimately. Meanwhile Blizzard's lawsuit, while probably only intended to protect their games against piracy, cause a degradation of our fair use rights.
I blame both Blizzard and the vast majority of users of bnetd (who use it for piracy, please don't pretend that they don't) for this fiasco.
It might be that its fun and addictive because its simple. I think complexity can really detract from a game, because it can often cause frustration. I usually get annoyed with RPGs that make me keep track of billions of different systems for customizing your character. I actually stopped playing Vagrant Story for a long time because of this.
Think of some of the games that have been around the longest. Chess, Go, etc. The basic ruleset is incredibly simple. For chess, you have a set of pieces, and each piece can make certain moves. Thats about 90% of the rules.
As far as forgetting turns, do they have a timer like in professional chess? I had also thought of some ideas for a MMO strategy RPG, and that was the method I came up with for the turn problem.
Indeed, the main problem is capital. A full team of artists and programmers licensing a game engine can still take 1-2 years to actually get their idea on the shelf... and usually they aren't even done. How much longer is it going to take if you're doing it in addition to a full-time job? Most modern games cost millions to make.
So your game, while innovative, isn't going to have the latest and greatest graphics. You still have to get people to buy it, in an industry that is completely innundated with releases. You can distribute over the internet, but you're still going to have to advertise it, and that costs money. Lots of it.
Sometimes I have to wonder if the fact that game designers are avid game players doesn't help the fact. Most of the time, when I talk to people in our game developement club, their original and creative ideas involve taking x game and adding feature y. Said feature y probably comes from game z.
It makes me wonder how much having a large game library hampers your creative process. When you're exposed over and over to certain ways of implementing game ideas, do you tend to think out of the box less and less? I see this a lot with software too. How many open source projects are truly revolutionary, and not just a better implementation of something that already exists?
One of my friends told me that the creator of Katamari Damacy, possibly the most creative and innovative game in the past couple of years, had never played video games (and actually hated them). Is this true?
Bah, hit submit too fast. As for what I would like to see... I would honestly like to see some MMO strategy RPG games. I've been tossing around some design ideas in my head for one for several months now.
I'd also like to see an MMORPG that had more of a focus on social aspects (most just have a guild... how about alliances, guild halls, guild run quests), and one that eliminated grinding by having characters level up through long, story based quests. FFXI had missions, but they were short and spread out over too many levels. WoW flirted with the idea, but made all their quests a nice mask for grinding.
How about a truly casual MMORPG? WoW certainly tried, and it works until you hit the higher levels and then it turns into another EQ clone.
I don't think that the overall lack of creativity is diminishing, just that the game industry has been growing so large that the non-creative flavor of the year type games are completely drowning out all the truly creative games.
I'm truly enjoying Katamari Damacy. I also really enjoy the Nippon Ichi line of strategy games. While they're pretty incremental changes (they tend to take the previous game's engine and make changes instead of starting from scratch), they always have some creative new features or quirks that make them worthwhile.
While I do agree with you that we need more people working to make better games, the actual execution of that ideal is a lot harder than it seems.
A lot of people have visions of learning how to program, then designing and programming that AAA title that tears up the charts. The only problem is that most modern games take a large budget. There's exceptions but this is the general case.
That, in most cases, forces you to work for a game company that could care less about your vision for the perfect game. You're a programmer so you're going to be working 60-80 hour weeks writing code that other people are telling you to write, and not interesting code either.
If you're lucky then maybe you can work your way up to a game designer where you get to have your ideas shot down by management who don't want to take a risk, and would rather just pump out some clone using code you wrote for another game.
What's needed is not creative talent going into the current game industry, but more people taking risks and being entrepeneurs. We need more indy game developement. We need to focus on the areas where low budget games can compete and work up.
While in college I wanted to be a game developer very badly. My senior year it sort-of lost its luster. After graduating some friends and I tried to start our own game company, but as we did research on our prospects, the others lost hope and dropped out. Plus with developer hours getting longer and longer, and games getting less innovative, the draw to find work at an existing company was practically nonexistant.
Now, I'm rather disillusioned with the whole industry, without having even worked in it. I'd rather work my 40-60 hour job, and work on games as a hobby (and thus get to make the kind of games I want to), than work 60-80 hours a week on Madden 2006.
But if you ever try a start-up, look me up. I'd definately be willing to try.
Then you go off on a tangent about how Linux makes it difficult to share files with other users on the same box because it lacks ACLs, while completely glossing over the fact that you almost have to constantly run as an Administrator under windows just to allow your apps to work.
I and people in my family have been running as users and power users in Windows for a long time. Modern Windows programs tend to work just fine in restricted access accounts these days. When they don't work, thats a problem with the software not the operating system.
There's plenty of CD players out there that will allow you to burn a CD full of MP3s and play it. I have one. The only problem with them are that they are as big as a normal CD player. I'm not sure if they have made any for DVD, as I now just use my iRiver.
I was referring to fanatical atheists who feel that religion should be outright banned... or that we shouldn't have the freedom to express religious beliefs in public. Or that feel that the government should try to support atheism. These do exist, and I have met several, in addition to people who believed that feeding Christians to lions was a good thing and a service to humanity. Seriously.
Thats what I meant by saying that moderates of both sides have a lot of common ground, and we need to get back control. Because just as much as you don't want religion pushed down the throats of people, I don't want that either. And I would rather the government take an agnostic point of view in their dealings as opposed to a theistic or atheistic point of view.
There's plenty of us around. In fact, we're the majority. Its just we're not very vocal since we'd prefer to be left to our beliefs, and don't see what all the fuss with teaching evolution is about.
We're just pissed off that the ones that get on TV are the fanatics. Thats kinda why people overseas think we're all fanatics.
Ok, just to put this in some sort of perspective, was this ridicule for believing in DNA just one or two people, or was it something systematic? By peers or very uneducated people? What percentage of the people you deal with? Could it have been that 2 religious people out of a hundred ridiculed you, thus making your experience an anomoly?
I say this because my experience is pretty much the opposite. I've never been ridiculed for believing in evolution even when stating it in my church (and in fact the majority of the people I was having the discussion with agreed with me). My experience is that mostly people don't feel that there is a conflict between science and religion, and that there is a minority of people, an anomoly if you will, trying to create one.
I am a Christian and I support the freedom to believe or not. I believe that Christianity shouldn't be in the government.
The problem is visibility. You don't see moderate Christians who hold these sort of beliefs, because they're more likely to talk to you about the weather or whatnot than start screaming Bible verses at you. Thats because they're moderates. You see the fanatics because they're more vocal about their opinions. Thats part of being fanatic. It also means that they get air time on TV, since having a screaming lunatic is better for ratings than a calm and rational person.
I could definately say the same thing about atheists and whatnot. A small sampling of Christians at my church produced the opinion that "they didn't know why all these atheists were attacking them, they just wanted to be left alone with thier beliefs, because they weren't trying to change government policy or push their beliefs on other people." Would it surprise you to know that a lot of moderate Christians find atheists in particular to be rather intolerant, bigoted, and arrogent towards them and their religion? It goes counter to your ancedotal evidence, for the same reason that your experience with Christians goes counter to my ancedotal evidence.
I just wish more people realized this, because it seems that the solution to having more harmony between different beliefs is for us to realize that the people driving wedges between us are the fanatics, and should probably be ignored.
What you can't seem to get through yours is that there ARE fanatical atheists that are trying to advocate atheism. Its just that they are more visible to people of faith than they are to you, just as fanatical people of faith are more visible to you than moderate ones.
What is needed is for the moderates on both sides to get control again. There's actually a lot of common ground, but the fanatics on both side are driving a wedge between those who wish for the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I support Blizzard's handling of this lawsuit, but let me play the devil's advocate. This project is open source, which means any authentication code could be easily stripped out. Likely the bnetd people and Blizzard both knew this, which is why Blizzard rejected their offer. Its entirely possible that the whole reason the bnetd people contacted Blizzard was because they intended it for piracy use, and wanted to cover their butts. This way they could say "See? We tried!" I doubt it, but its possible, and its certainly an argument that Blizzard could make.
But actually, the main reason Blizzard started a lawsuit against bnetd was the leak of the Warcraft 3 beta. See, Blizzard didn't really seem to care, until someone forked the bnetd project to enable you to use the Warcraft 3 beta. That didn't make Blizzard happy at all. The lawsuit followed shortly after that. While its possible that it was simply a timing coincidence, I tend to believe that the WC3 leak triggered it, or at least caused Blizzard to take notice.
Because it weakens the fair-use argument and makes piracy seem like the motivating factor. Generally, people on Slashdot don't like to acknowledge when a product is mostly used for piracy, and instead try to trump up its legitimate uses.
Some people wrote an emulator for the server that Blizzard uses to match up internet games for their products. Much like P2P, this program has been used for some legitimate purposes, but mostly just so people can play their pirated copies of the game online.
Blizzard, of course, doesn't like this and sues. Slashdot readers yell as if they didn't know that it was mostly being used for piracy, and try to pretend that the majority of people only use it legitimately. Meanwhile Blizzard's lawsuit, while probably only intended to protect their games against piracy, cause a degradation of our fair use rights.
I blame both Blizzard and the vast majority of users of bnetd (who use it for piracy, please don't pretend that they don't) for this fiasco.
Yes this is the case. BNet games are played peer to peer.
It might be that its fun and addictive because its simple. I think complexity can really detract from a game, because it can often cause frustration. I usually get annoyed with RPGs that make me keep track of billions of different systems for customizing your character. I actually stopped playing Vagrant Story for a long time because of this.
Think of some of the games that have been around the longest. Chess, Go, etc. The basic ruleset is incredibly simple. For chess, you have a set of pieces, and each piece can make certain moves. Thats about 90% of the rules.
Yeah I've looked at Eve and I want to try it out. Its on the list when I finish Makai Kingdom and have some free time (I've been pretty busy lately).
Awesome, thanks for the link!
As far as forgetting turns, do they have a timer like in professional chess? I had also thought of some ideas for a MMO strategy RPG, and that was the method I came up with for the turn problem.
Indeed, the main problem is capital. A full team of artists and programmers licensing a game engine can still take 1-2 years to actually get their idea on the shelf... and usually they aren't even done. How much longer is it going to take if you're doing it in addition to a full-time job? Most modern games cost millions to make.
So your game, while innovative, isn't going to have the latest and greatest graphics. You still have to get people to buy it, in an industry that is completely innundated with releases. You can distribute over the internet, but you're still going to have to advertise it, and that costs money. Lots of it.
Sometimes I have to wonder if the fact that game designers are avid game players doesn't help the fact. Most of the time, when I talk to people in our game developement club, their original and creative ideas involve taking x game and adding feature y. Said feature y probably comes from game z.
It makes me wonder how much having a large game library hampers your creative process. When you're exposed over and over to certain ways of implementing game ideas, do you tend to think out of the box less and less? I see this a lot with software too. How many open source projects are truly revolutionary, and not just a better implementation of something that already exists?
One of my friends told me that the creator of Katamari Damacy, possibly the most creative and innovative game in the past couple of years, had never played video games (and actually hated them). Is this true?
Bah, hit submit too fast. As for what I would like to see... I would honestly like to see some MMO strategy RPG games. I've been tossing around some design ideas in my head for one for several months now.
I'd also like to see an MMORPG that had more of a focus on social aspects (most just have a guild... how about alliances, guild halls, guild run quests), and one that eliminated grinding by having characters level up through long, story based quests. FFXI had missions, but they were short and spread out over too many levels. WoW flirted with the idea, but made all their quests a nice mask for grinding.
How about a truly casual MMORPG? WoW certainly tried, and it works until you hit the higher levels and then it turns into another EQ clone.
I don't think that the overall lack of creativity is diminishing, just that the game industry has been growing so large that the non-creative flavor of the year type games are completely drowning out all the truly creative games.
I'm truly enjoying Katamari Damacy. I also really enjoy the Nippon Ichi line of strategy games. While they're pretty incremental changes (they tend to take the previous game's engine and make changes instead of starting from scratch), they always have some creative new features or quirks that make them worthwhile.
While I do agree with you that we need more people working to make better games, the actual execution of that ideal is a lot harder than it seems.
A lot of people have visions of learning how to program, then designing and programming that AAA title that tears up the charts. The only problem is that most modern games take a large budget. There's exceptions but this is the general case.
That, in most cases, forces you to work for a game company that could care less about your vision for the perfect game. You're a programmer so you're going to be working 60-80 hour weeks writing code that other people are telling you to write, and not interesting code either.
If you're lucky then maybe you can work your way up to a game designer where you get to have your ideas shot down by management who don't want to take a risk, and would rather just pump out some clone using code you wrote for another game.
What's needed is not creative talent going into the current game industry, but more people taking risks and being entrepeneurs. We need more indy game developement. We need to focus on the areas where low budget games can compete and work up.
While in college I wanted to be a game developer very badly. My senior year it sort-of lost its luster. After graduating some friends and I tried to start our own game company, but as we did research on our prospects, the others lost hope and dropped out. Plus with developer hours getting longer and longer, and games getting less innovative, the draw to find work at an existing company was practically nonexistant.
Now, I'm rather disillusioned with the whole industry, without having even worked in it. I'd rather work my 40-60 hour job, and work on games as a hobby (and thus get to make the kind of games I want to), than work 60-80 hours a week on Madden 2006.
But if you ever try a start-up, look me up. I'd definately be willing to try.
On the other hand, the cost of Microsoft installs tend to be small compared to the cost of staffing, energy, and space.
Yeah, a lot of us (Americans) are shaking our heads at that one. What happened is pretty devestating, but comparing it to the tsunami is overreacting.
Poll at work: "Reporters and politicians have been calling Katrina "our tsunami". Is that reasonable?"
Yes: 0
No: 12
Thank you for your aid. Rest assured that those of us without our heads up our arses appreciate it.
Then you go off on a tangent about how Linux makes it difficult to share files with other users on the same box because it lacks ACLs, while completely glossing over the fact that you almost have to constantly run as an Administrator under windows just to allow your apps to work.
I and people in my family have been running as users and power users in Windows for a long time. Modern Windows programs tend to work just fine in restricted access accounts these days. When they don't work, thats a problem with the software not the operating system.
There's plenty of CD players out there that will allow you to burn a CD full of MP3s and play it. I have one. The only problem with them are that they are as big as a normal CD player. I'm not sure if they have made any for DVD, as I now just use my iRiver.
In fact I would agree with you.
I was referring to fanatical atheists who feel that religion should be outright banned... or that we shouldn't have the freedom to express religious beliefs in public. Or that feel that the government should try to support atheism. These do exist, and I have met several, in addition to people who believed that feeding Christians to lions was a good thing and a service to humanity. Seriously.
Thats what I meant by saying that moderates of both sides have a lot of common ground, and we need to get back control. Because just as much as you don't want religion pushed down the throats of people, I don't want that either. And I would rather the government take an agnostic point of view in their dealings as opposed to a theistic or atheistic point of view.
There's plenty of us around. In fact, we're the majority. Its just we're not very vocal since we'd prefer to be left to our beliefs, and don't see what all the fuss with teaching evolution is about.
We're just pissed off that the ones that get on TV are the fanatics. Thats kinda why people overseas think we're all fanatics.
Greetings from the US.
Ok, just to put this in some sort of perspective, was this ridicule for believing in DNA just one or two people, or was it something systematic? By peers or very uneducated people? What percentage of the people you deal with? Could it have been that 2 religious people out of a hundred ridiculed you, thus making your experience an anomoly?
I say this because my experience is pretty much the opposite. I've never been ridiculed for believing in evolution even when stating it in my church (and in fact the majority of the people I was having the discussion with agreed with me). My experience is that mostly people don't feel that there is a conflict between science and religion, and that there is a minority of people, an anomoly if you will, trying to create one.
I am a Christian and I support the freedom to believe or not. I believe that Christianity shouldn't be in the government.
The problem is visibility. You don't see moderate Christians who hold these sort of beliefs, because they're more likely to talk to you about the weather or whatnot than start screaming Bible verses at you. Thats because they're moderates. You see the fanatics because they're more vocal about their opinions. Thats part of being fanatic. It also means that they get air time on TV, since having a screaming lunatic is better for ratings than a calm and rational person.
I could definately say the same thing about atheists and whatnot. A small sampling of Christians at my church produced the opinion that "they didn't know why all these atheists were attacking them, they just wanted to be left alone with thier beliefs, because they weren't trying to change government policy or push their beliefs on other people." Would it surprise you to know that a lot of moderate Christians find atheists in particular to be rather intolerant, bigoted, and arrogent towards them and their religion? It goes counter to your ancedotal evidence, for the same reason that your experience with Christians goes counter to my ancedotal evidence.
I just wish more people realized this, because it seems that the solution to having more harmony between different beliefs is for us to realize that the people driving wedges between us are the fanatics, and should probably be ignored.
What you can't seem to get through yours is that there ARE fanatical atheists that are trying to advocate atheism. Its just that they are more visible to people of faith than they are to you, just as fanatical people of faith are more visible to you than moderate ones.
What is needed is for the moderates on both sides to get control again. There's actually a lot of common ground, but the fanatics on both side are driving a wedge between those who wish for the same thing.
Very interesting link. It certainly makes me believe that much of the objection to stem cell research comes from common misunderstandings.
The parents. Or perhaps the school administration.
Death by snoo snoo!