The ps4 will most likely be sold at a loss the same way the ps3 and ps2 were, recouping money on accessories/games.
To make money, they have to make sure the PS3, or PS4 for that matter, get more than a handful of games that people really want to play on it and hence buy.
Here in the UK at least, PVR boxes are becoming a LOT more common (Sky+, V+, BT's new one), the most recent ones with HD content (1080i), and movies on demand or pretty close. As more of them move to integrate with high speed broadband, people will choose this as the preferred method to watch content otherwise published on Blu-Ray - it's more convenient, and probably cheaper.
Actually, their market share itself is rising, though they are still being outsold.
If at the start there are 1 million ps3s and 10 million xbox 360s, and every year the 360 sells 2 million and the ps3 1 million, market share will approach 33% from 10%.
But yes, they're third in a market of 3 at the moment.
TFA is a totally retarded bitch-fest, to put it mildly. The guy states that the first thing they look at when trying to develop an app, is what price range sells the most units, then complains that there aren't large enough margins on it?
To say nothing of all the other comments he makes such as programmers costing $200 an hour for a several-month project. Yeah right.
In all honesty, this guy just makes himself look like a huckster, trying to make a fast buck from selling iPhone software at a big profit. That is not what the app store was made for. It was made for people to develop their products and be able to get some money for it, whether it's enough to cover costs, or perhaps make a big profit by releasing something that gets popular. The point is to develop a suite of items for the iPhone, in which it succeeds.
Personally, I hope people who want to exploit that with the express purpose of jacking up prices to make a lot of money, lose everything. Stop complaining about the lack of price fixing, and start concentrating on making a program WORTH $40 or more. iPhone users are hardly people without disposable incomes, if someone creates an app that is WORTH that much to them, they will certainly pay it. This asshole just seems to want to release the same rubbish at a much higher price, trying to exploit developers to create a profit off their work.
Though, if you can get $200 an hour off this idiot just to code iPhone apps, I say go for it.
There is "depreciation" of a sort, in that while the game doesn't get any worse, the competition gets better over time - better graphics, newer concepts, faster performance and so forth. The car is basically unchanged over 50 years, and if they didn't degrade, there would be an argument for used ones selling for the same as new ones. But if new cars had massively improved mileage, features, performance, then the old ones would depreciate.
The resale of used items has to be absolute, it's all or nothing. Books, cars, CDs, games, houses, computers and so forth. I do believe it's a right protected by law. Though some people consider their output so precious that it should be exempt from that. Good luck to them next time they try to buy a car or a house.
Yeah, the difference is the WAR quests have been "Oh yeah go here", while in my example of the WoW Deadmines quests, there is a whole chain that leads you into it, gives you objectives in there and is altogether a bit more "hand-holding". WAR's approach to Gunbad has been closer to say the way WoW headed people towards Maraudon.
My bone isn't so much with that, but earlier ones like the Sacellum, or the level 11 boss in a cave in Chaos Tier 1, which I stumbled on entirely by accident.
I think the PvE can stand on its own, and certainly some endgame PvE looks like it should - I hope it will, or a lot of people will get bored.
And if you have some hints to make Tier 3 go a bit faster I'd be happy to hear them, it's been a bit more of a slog on my Chosen than my Witch Elf!
I have no problem with the graphics, I like the style. But they do not compare even closely with the top graphic game titles of the last year. Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and so on. They're not even closing on Oblivion, hence my comment.
I appreciate they're trying to improve it, but in some ways that makes it seem more dated, if you see what I mean.
They've done some changes in WAR to reflect those issues - geographical chat channels have a lot wider scope now, the open party system is a bit improved (but still needs work to get as good as WoW's LFG system). You do really need a good guild alliance or something to get a feel of how busy it is, however.
Personally I'm not a fan of WoW's cut scenes so far (the in-game ones, the rendered ones are of course fantastic), and really the lore feels a bit stretched to me now (the big baddy is nefarian... no wait it's those guys in AQ... no wait it's kel'thuzad... oh we forgot about outland, magtheridon, vashj and kael'thas... oh wait, there's illidan too... and kael'thas *again* except this time he's a pushover...), the world hasn't changed to reflect any of these changes, so it loses credibility.
From what I hear it depends on the server, but where I am (Burlok) damn yes, Open RVR is incredibly busy in all tiers.
They upped the experience and renown you get for Open RVR kills, and recently added a bonus where those attacking a keep get a small periodic bonus, and those defending it a large periodic bonus - encouraging people to hold a keep rather than just let it flip and reclaim it.
I would rate Wow's PvE as excellent, and PvP as poor. For Warhammer, the PvE as average, the PvP as excellent.
The Warhammer PvE content can be somewhat dynamic, pushing a long chain of public quests toward the end gets a lot of attention and more people joining in, and changes the monster population of certain areas, though it's only for a matter of minutes while it's completed. Even that is a bonus in itself, WoW doesn't seem to have anything that has that effect.
The PvE in Warhammer is actually not bad. If they had more instances at low levels and directed the player toward them (in the way say that WoW directs players to Deadmines. Mount Gunbad is a good equivalent, but the nudges towards it are vague. The Sacellum gets almost no press at all), and also benefitted from the city "hubs" that WoW introduces earlier on, it would be a big improvement. How to do that without disrupting RvR is an issue though:)
I am interested to see what happens in WAR over the next 6 months, if the model has longevity. WoW's PvE one simply has massive longevity because there is so much of it. The PvP is stagnant with the same 4 (5?) battlegrounds throughout the entire game. Arena is too smale a scale to matter.
Long-time WoW player (5 70s), current Warhamemr player, and mug who bought AoC and desubscribed after level 30 (like everyone else) here...
I agree the quality of the content Blizzard put in is second to none. The polish is *awesome* and even just trying out WotLK showed me that again. The quality storytelling is good, and I'm glad that's back, though it was an omission from TBC rather than something new.
What always bugged me about WoW was the world didn't really change. Two factions in open war, and all you can do is gank each other in remote areas. No city sieges, no territory control, anything like that. PvP seemed to be added on as an afterthought, and world PvP actually *punished* you to begin with (dishonor for killing npcs), so you couldn't mess with the opposition's cities or anything.
This is why I got into Warhammer. The ability to really get into the opposition's city, mess with it before you get pushed back, and where it really is a control for territory, grabbed me. And it does it pretty well so far.
A lot of what is new in WoW is stuff from Warhammer. Public Quests are a far better implementation than these "instanced" quests, which brigns back awful memories of AoC's instanced cities. Oh god. And the PvP quests, there is a lot of that in Warhammer, and not just the "kill X players" type - scouting, finding items, killing a specific combination of player classes, taking a keep, and so forth.
What I like is a lot of the game world is tied into that - If you want a renown trainer to train your pvp abilities or get gear, after the starter area, these are only available in keeps. and if the keep is owned by the other side... well you're out of luck. Go get the keep back first. And if your capital city is overrun... you can't go there for 24 hours! Serve you right for losing it in the first place!
WoW will always have a place in my heart (a gaping 3 year hole, haha) but wotlk seems more like they're playing it safe than taking risks and delivering something really innovative and a good improvement.
The raid bosses require an enormous amount of organisation and coordination between players, but not the traditional "skill" that gamers usually refer to, reflexes, aim, timing and tactics.
You're fighting something that never changes (or changes according to set patterns), you just need to stick exactly to the script.
PvP is of course a bit more demanding, but a lot of the engine gets rid of those "skill" elements. There is a global cooldown, pretty much getting rid of the reflexes requirement. There is no aim - a fireball or sword never misses according to aim. You just have to be close enough and pointing in the right direction.
PvP fighting in WoW becomes sort of like a script as well, eg wait til the lock casts something from his shadow school then counterspell it. Or wait for the rogue to pop cloak of shadows before you use your big spells. Of course, some people break that mold but it holds for the most part. It certainly does not compare at all to something like Counterstrike or Team Fortress, where 1 on 1 combat is concerned.
Appreciate your thoughts, thought I'd add my review too.
WotLK doesn't really do anything new. All the "new" things in the original review are tweaks/combinations of previous things. I point people in particular to AQ40/old Naxx bosses, for instance.
The storytelling questing is pretty good, but IMHO not a patch on the original Onyxia chain or anything like that. TBC had almost no decent "storytelling" questing, the original WoW did. A lot of people sadly missed out on the whole BRD/BRS/MC/BWL chain around Nefarian and Onyxia, for instance, because they just powered to 58 and went to outland.
The graphics are better, yes. There is definite Blizzard polish, and I have to say in the first two hours I was thinking "Wow, it's good to be back", referring to being able to explore new content and such. However, the graphics cannot compete with anything released in the last couple of years. Good for WoW, definitely, but that makes it good for 2003.
Overall though, the game is just more of the same. The additions tweak it a bit but it really is very, very much the same thing. Some people will love that. I.... well, I played it for about 10 hours over 3 days, then went back to Warhammer. Considering I played WoW almost religiously until a few months ago, I fully expected to be dragged back and amazed at the new stuff.
It's not amazing, it's slightly better, but it's definitely treading the exact same ground. I give it 7/10, while I'm off to play a world that really DOES mold around the players (well, at least when it doesn't crash when sieging a capital city, that is...)
Having upgraded my system from a year-old XPSP2 (32bit) to Vista SP1 (64 bit), I have to say Vista runs a LOT faster. With everything on, even Aero. It's a lot snappier, programs open faster.
Sure my system is hardly entry level (Q6600, 4GB PC6400, P45, 4870, 2TB SATA drives) but it seems Vista is making better use of the resources than XP was.
On the other hand, my motherboard went a week ago, and in the course of diagnosing it I tried running Vista on just 2G of memory, and that was pretty painful when running a lot of apps. Vista itself may run quite well, but some people may be greatly underestimating the resources it is optimised for.
It's non-combat, based around social interaction, development and construction. Very tightly knit community. I'd really give it a try, monthly fee but first 24 hours of play are free.
My advice is, developing for mobile phones is generally more fiddly than for most platforms. Eg if you're used to developing J2EE/J2SE, J2ME is going to be familiar but irritatingly different.
The low hanging fruit is definitely the iPhone. I tried to develop for it. I failed. Here are my personal pros and cons:
Pro: Great API exposing all the unique functionality quite well. Good quality documentation, when you can find it. (See below) That functionality itself is great too. Easy to develop free apps and getting them into the iTunes application store is actually pretty reasonable and easy.
Cons Objective C. I really just don't like it. REALLY don't like it. As a Java developer, it has some niggles that set my teeth on edge. The development environment. If you're used to Eclipse for instance, you might not like XCode. I didn't. Documentation on slightly deeper subjects is not always easy to find. I was sometimes left scratching my head at strange behaviour that seemed undocumented, with no recourse to investigation other than Google. This is poor. Buying an iPhone is not cheap, specially with the contract. Guess you could get away with an iPod Touch for most functionality.
YMMV. I decided to use someone else's apps, who was already developing something close to what I wanted to do anyway. Pity, but it just wasn't worth the pain to me.
I agree somewhat, the reason I have all those characters too is I enjoy the levelling more than the endgame grind when you hit 70. However when the content converges pretty strongly onto 2 or 3 routes in some of the middle levels, it's quite tough to just go over the same areas again and again. Levelling the character itself IS fun, but that interminable run from 40-58 where it's almost impossible to get a group for an instance since TBC came out, and you have to do tanaris/feralas/un'goro, or hinterlands/wpl/epl yet again, is too grindy. Hell, it's enough to make you want to do felwood;)
but until that happens, that doesn't mean real solutions for those with dexterity problems (whether from amputation, physical defect, or nerve damage) should be disallowed or destroyed.
Just because something COULD be used by someone for a positive purpose, doesn't mean it is therefore unattackable for all sorts of bad purposes it could be used for.
Yeesh, way to have a blinkered view. You're treating this as though Blizzard specifically banned MMOGlider to hurt disabled people (which, if you see my other post regarding your inaccurate view on MMOGLider, is not on target to begin with). Disabled people's use of WoW is entirely orthogonal to this argument.
I hope you don't take it as offensive that I consider this the inverse of Godwin's Law - mentioning that something (MMOGlider in this case) helps disabled people in such a way that any attack on the program is seen as an attack on disabled people. Actually, I'm not overly bothered if you are offended by it, as it's a rather underhanded argument you're making there.
Your research is also poor, as MMOGlider does not make playing for disabled people easier - the point is that IT PLAYS THE GAME FOR YOU. Anyone can sit there and watch the bot play the game. Running MMOGlider, you're not playing the game, whether you're disabled or not.
The primary audience for MMOGlider is people levelling alts in WoW. When you've seen the content 2, 3 times or more, but you want a 70 of another class, it's a grind. I have 5 70s, I know what I'm talking about;) (And no, I didn't use any bots). To just grind the levels with a bot makes it less painful than trying to do the now boring 30-58 level span.
That is the badly designed part of the game, that you have to play the low level content of the game again whether you want to or not, if you want an alt. They have tacitly agreed with this, given the next expansion gives you a new class... that you can start at level 55. Arguments above the parent post of "That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game" and the like are particularly ill-informed.
Back to the matter of disabled users and WoW. There are many, many ways to set up the game so those who can only (or even, only want to) mash one button and play the game can do so. It is not the default setting, of course, because most able-bodied people want more of a challenge of coordination. Balancing the requirements of those who want their abilities challenged, versus the requirements of those with challenged abilities, is essentially impossible for most computer games where the interface is so central.
Phrases like "For some reason, however, the WoW designers don't want disabled gamers playing their game" are distasteful, you know fully well the implied discrimination is indefensible. Factually it is inaccurate (hell, I was able to set up one of my characters to be playable only with a 3-button mouse, for instance, including macros to cast spells in sequence using the scroll wheel), both on the customisability of WoW and MMOGlider's suitability to replace the interface. The tone implying that it is an insult to disabled people because it doesn't do what you or someone else wants it to do, is a distortion of political correctness for your own ends, and is foul.
Ultimately, Blizzard is under no legal or other requirement to make the interface to their game function in any particular way. Disabled people should vote with their dollars to buy games that they are able to play. Trying to insist that every single game cater exclusively to their needs is on a par with idiot parents trying to censor the world so their children don't have to deal with any of it.
I fully understand the game, when playing it it's a simple platformer. My gripe is that performing basic moves seemed difficult to the users. A poor interface can make even a very simple game frustrating.
From the two videos I saw, seemed a lot of the time was people wrestling with the controls, trying to execute a jump or hold onto something. A LOT of the time. Gives the impression the controls are fiddly and inaccurate, if you assume that the people operating the characters in the videos are at least familiar with PS3 controls.
I would say I certainly saw how some moves are distinct, eg the disciple of khaine's melee moves, they have different animations. Also the bright wizard's spells have different movements. I'm not sure if this translates across the entire gamut of abilities.
However, PvP is far less "twitchy" than in WoW, you won't get Pom-Pyrod and dead in 2 seconds, so I'm not sure it will be quite as important as it is in WoW
The activation servers have had the problems and non-availability. That's all been sorted out for a couple of days, however.
As a closed-beta user, I didn't really see any of that, I have to admit, as I was already activated. But if you think that means I'm making all this up, you need to do something with all that pent-up anger before you break your keyboard. Try playing WAR, only a week or so til release;)
Slashdot Mirror
The ps4 will most likely be sold at a loss the same way the ps3 and ps2 were, recouping money on accessories/games.
To make money, they have to make sure the PS3, or PS4 for that matter, get more than a handful of games that people really want to play on it and hence buy.
Here in the UK at least, PVR boxes are becoming a LOT more common (Sky+, V+, BT's new one), the most recent ones with HD content (1080i), and movies on demand or pretty close. As more of them move to integrate with high speed broadband, people will choose this as the preferred method to watch content otherwise published on Blu-Ray - it's more convenient, and probably cheaper.
Actually, their market share itself is rising, though they are still being outsold.
If at the start there are 1 million ps3s and 10 million xbox 360s, and every year the 360 sells 2 million and the ps3 1 million, market share will approach 33% from 10%.
But yes, they're third in a market of 3 at the moment.
TFA is a totally retarded bitch-fest, to put it mildly. The guy states that the first thing they look at when trying to develop an app, is what price range sells the most units, then complains that there aren't large enough margins on it?
To say nothing of all the other comments he makes such as programmers costing $200 an hour for a several-month project. Yeah right.
In all honesty, this guy just makes himself look like a huckster, trying to make a fast buck from selling iPhone software at a big profit. That is not what the app store was made for. It was made for people to develop their products and be able to get some money for it, whether it's enough to cover costs, or perhaps make a big profit by releasing something that gets popular. The point is to develop a suite of items for the iPhone, in which it succeeds.
Personally, I hope people who want to exploit that with the express purpose of jacking up prices to make a lot of money, lose everything. Stop complaining about the lack of price fixing, and start concentrating on making a program WORTH $40 or more. iPhone users are hardly people without disposable incomes, if someone creates an app that is WORTH that much to them, they will certainly pay it. This asshole just seems to want to release the same rubbish at a much higher price, trying to exploit developers to create a profit off their work.
Though, if you can get $200 an hour off this idiot just to code iPhone apps, I say go for it.
There is "depreciation" of a sort, in that while the game doesn't get any worse, the competition gets better over time - better graphics, newer concepts, faster performance and so forth. The car is basically unchanged over 50 years, and if they didn't degrade, there would be an argument for used ones selling for the same as new ones. But if new cars had massively improved mileage, features, performance, then the old ones would depreciate.
The resale of used items has to be absolute, it's all or nothing. Books, cars, CDs, games, houses, computers and so forth. I do believe it's a right protected by law. Though some people consider their output so precious that it should be exempt from that. Good luck to them next time they try to buy a car or a house.
Yeah, the difference is the WAR quests have been "Oh yeah go here", while in my example of the WoW Deadmines quests, there is a whole chain that leads you into it, gives you objectives in there and is altogether a bit more "hand-holding". WAR's approach to Gunbad has been closer to say the way WoW headed people towards Maraudon.
My bone isn't so much with that, but earlier ones like the Sacellum, or the level 11 boss in a cave in Chaos Tier 1, which I stumbled on entirely by accident.
I think the PvE can stand on its own, and certainly some endgame PvE looks like it should - I hope it will, or a lot of people will get bored.
And if you have some hints to make Tier 3 go a bit faster I'd be happy to hear them, it's been a bit more of a slog on my Chosen than my Witch Elf!
I have no problem with the graphics, I like the style. But they do not compare even closely with the top graphic game titles of the last year. Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and so on. They're not even closing on Oblivion, hence my comment.
I appreciate they're trying to improve it, but in some ways that makes it seem more dated, if you see what I mean.
They've done some changes in WAR to reflect those issues - geographical chat channels have a lot wider scope now, the open party system is a bit improved (but still needs work to get as good as WoW's LFG system). You do really need a good guild alliance or something to get a feel of how busy it is, however.
Personally I'm not a fan of WoW's cut scenes so far (the in-game ones, the rendered ones are of course fantastic), and really the lore feels a bit stretched to me now (the big baddy is nefarian... no wait it's those guys in AQ... no wait it's kel'thuzad... oh we forgot about outland, magtheridon, vashj and kael'thas... oh wait, there's illidan too... and kael'thas *again* except this time he's a pushover...), the world hasn't changed to reflect any of these changes, so it loses credibility.
From what I hear it depends on the server, but where I am (Burlok) damn yes, Open RVR is incredibly busy in all tiers.
They upped the experience and renown you get for Open RVR kills, and recently added a bonus where those attacking a keep get a small periodic bonus, and those defending it a large periodic bonus - encouraging people to hold a keep rather than just let it flip and reclaim it.
I would rate Wow's PvE as excellent, and PvP as poor. For Warhammer, the PvE as average, the PvP as excellent.
The Warhammer PvE content can be somewhat dynamic, pushing a long chain of public quests toward the end gets a lot of attention and more people joining in, and changes the monster population of certain areas, though it's only for a matter of minutes while it's completed. Even that is a bonus in itself, WoW doesn't seem to have anything that has that effect.
The PvE in Warhammer is actually not bad. If they had more instances at low levels and directed the player toward them (in the way say that WoW directs players to Deadmines. Mount Gunbad is a good equivalent, but the nudges towards it are vague. The Sacellum gets almost no press at all), and also benefitted from the city "hubs" that WoW introduces earlier on, it would be a big improvement. How to do that without disrupting RvR is an issue though :)
I am interested to see what happens in WAR over the next 6 months, if the model has longevity. WoW's PvE one simply has massive longevity because there is so much of it. The PvP is stagnant with the same 4 (5?) battlegrounds throughout the entire game. Arena is too smale a scale to matter.
Long-time WoW player (5 70s), current Warhamemr player, and mug who bought AoC and desubscribed after level 30 (like everyone else) here...
I agree the quality of the content Blizzard put in is second to none. The polish is *awesome* and even just trying out WotLK showed me that again. The quality storytelling is good, and I'm glad that's back, though it was an omission from TBC rather than something new.
What always bugged me about WoW was the world didn't really change. Two factions in open war, and all you can do is gank each other in remote areas. No city sieges, no territory control, anything like that. PvP seemed to be added on as an afterthought, and world PvP actually *punished* you to begin with (dishonor for killing npcs), so you couldn't mess with the opposition's cities or anything.
This is why I got into Warhammer. The ability to really get into the opposition's city, mess with it before you get pushed back, and where it really is a control for territory, grabbed me. And it does it pretty well so far.
A lot of what is new in WoW is stuff from Warhammer. Public Quests are a far better implementation than these "instanced" quests, which brigns back awful memories of AoC's instanced cities. Oh god. And the PvP quests, there is a lot of that in Warhammer, and not just the "kill X players" type - scouting, finding items, killing a specific combination of player classes, taking a keep, and so forth.
What I like is a lot of the game world is tied into that - If you want a renown trainer to train your pvp abilities or get gear, after the starter area, these are only available in keeps. and if the keep is owned by the other side... well you're out of luck. Go get the keep back first. And if your capital city is overrun... you can't go there for 24 hours! Serve you right for losing it in the first place!
WoW will always have a place in my heart (a gaping 3 year hole, haha) but wotlk seems more like they're playing it safe than taking risks and delivering something really innovative and a good improvement.
The raid bosses require an enormous amount of organisation and coordination between players, but not the traditional "skill" that gamers usually refer to, reflexes, aim, timing and tactics.
You're fighting something that never changes (or changes according to set patterns), you just need to stick exactly to the script.
PvP is of course a bit more demanding, but a lot of the engine gets rid of those "skill" elements. There is a global cooldown, pretty much getting rid of the reflexes requirement. There is no aim - a fireball or sword never misses according to aim. You just have to be close enough and pointing in the right direction.
PvP fighting in WoW becomes sort of like a script as well, eg wait til the lock casts something from his shadow school then counterspell it. Or wait for the rogue to pop cloak of shadows before you use your big spells. Of course, some people break that mold but it holds for the most part. It certainly does not compare at all to something like Counterstrike or Team Fortress, where 1 on 1 combat is concerned.
Appreciate your thoughts, thought I'd add my review too.
WotLK doesn't really do anything new. All the "new" things in the original review are tweaks/combinations of previous things. I point people in particular to AQ40/old Naxx bosses, for instance.
The storytelling questing is pretty good, but IMHO not a patch on the original Onyxia chain or anything like that. TBC had almost no decent "storytelling" questing, the original WoW did. A lot of people sadly missed out on the whole BRD/BRS/MC/BWL chain around Nefarian and Onyxia, for instance, because they just powered to 58 and went to outland.
The graphics are better, yes. There is definite Blizzard polish, and I have to say in the first two hours I was thinking "Wow, it's good to be back", referring to being able to explore new content and such. However, the graphics cannot compete with anything released in the last couple of years. Good for WoW, definitely, but that makes it good for 2003.
Overall though, the game is just more of the same. The additions tweak it a bit but it really is very, very much the same thing. Some people will love that. I.... well, I played it for about 10 hours over 3 days, then went back to Warhammer. Considering I played WoW almost religiously until a few months ago, I fully expected to be dragged back and amazed at the new stuff.
It's not amazing, it's slightly better, but it's definitely treading the exact same ground. I give it 7/10, while I'm off to play a world that really DOES mold around the players (well, at least when it doesn't crash when sieging a capital city, that is...)
Having upgraded my system from a year-old XPSP2 (32bit) to Vista SP1 (64 bit), I have to say Vista runs a LOT faster. With everything on, even Aero. It's a lot snappier, programs open faster.
Sure my system is hardly entry level (Q6600, 4GB PC6400, P45, 4870, 2TB SATA drives) but it seems Vista is making better use of the resources than XP was.
On the other hand, my motherboard went a week ago, and in the course of diagnosing it I tried running Vista on just 2G of memory, and that was pretty painful when running a lot of apps. Vista itself may run quite well, but some people may be greatly underestimating the resources it is optimised for.
http://www.atitd.com/
(Damn slashdot javascript ate my comment)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_in_the_Desert
It's non-combat, based around social interaction, development and construction. Very tightly knit community. I'd really give it a try, monthly fee but first 24 hours of play are free.
My advice is, developing for mobile phones is generally more fiddly than for most platforms. Eg if you're used to developing J2EE/J2SE, J2ME is going to be familiar but irritatingly different.
The low hanging fruit is definitely the iPhone. I tried to develop for it. I failed. Here are my personal pros and cons:
Pro:
Great API exposing all the unique functionality quite well.
Good quality documentation, when you can find it. (See below)
That functionality itself is great too.
Easy to develop free apps and getting them into the iTunes application store is actually pretty reasonable and easy.
Cons
Objective C. I really just don't like it. REALLY don't like it. As a Java developer, it has some niggles that set my teeth on edge.
The development environment. If you're used to Eclipse for instance, you might not like XCode. I didn't.
Documentation on slightly deeper subjects is not always easy to find. I was sometimes left scratching my head at strange behaviour that seemed undocumented, with no recourse to investigation other than Google. This is poor.
Buying an iPhone is not cheap, specially with the contract. Guess you could get away with an iPod Touch for most functionality.
YMMV. I decided to use someone else's apps, who was already developing something close to what I wanted to do anyway. Pity, but it just wasn't worth the pain to me.
You need a different server - most Open RvR skirmishes I've been in involve 10-15 people a side.
Does depend on the map though, tier 1 Chaos/Order is great as it's dense, tier 1 Elves is too sparse.
How long does that last, when you're in a party with that person? And any of your characters on the account?
I agree somewhat, the reason I have all those characters too is I enjoy the levelling more than the endgame grind when you hit 70. However when the content converges pretty strongly onto 2 or 3 routes in some of the middle levels, it's quite tough to just go over the same areas again and again. Levelling the character itself IS fun, but that interminable run from 40-58 where it's almost impossible to get a group for an instance since TBC came out, and you have to do tanaris/feralas/un'goro, or hinterlands/wpl/epl yet again, is too grindy. Hell, it's enough to make you want to do felwood ;)
but until that happens, that doesn't mean real solutions for those with dexterity problems (whether from amputation, physical defect, or nerve damage) should be disallowed or destroyed.
Just because something COULD be used by someone for a positive purpose, doesn't mean it is therefore unattackable for all sorts of bad purposes it could be used for.
Yeesh, way to have a blinkered view. You're treating this as though Blizzard specifically banned MMOGlider to hurt disabled people (which, if you see my other post regarding your inaccurate view on MMOGLider, is not on target to begin with). Disabled people's use of WoW is entirely orthogonal to this argument.
I hope you don't take it as offensive that I consider this the inverse of Godwin's Law - mentioning that something (MMOGlider in this case) helps disabled people in such a way that any attack on the program is seen as an attack on disabled people. Actually, I'm not overly bothered if you are offended by it, as it's a rather underhanded argument you're making there.
Your research is also poor, as MMOGlider does not make playing for disabled people easier - the point is that IT PLAYS THE GAME FOR YOU. Anyone can sit there and watch the bot play the game. Running MMOGlider, you're not playing the game, whether you're disabled or not.
The primary audience for MMOGlider is people levelling alts in WoW. When you've seen the content 2, 3 times or more, but you want a 70 of another class, it's a grind. I have 5 70s, I know what I'm talking about ;) (And no, I didn't use any bots). To just grind the levels with a bot makes it less painful than trying to do the now boring 30-58 level span.
That is the badly designed part of the game, that you have to play the low level content of the game again whether you want to or not, if you want an alt. They have tacitly agreed with this, given the next expansion gives you a new class... that you can start at level 55. Arguments above the parent post of "That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game" and the like are particularly ill-informed.
Back to the matter of disabled users and WoW. There are many, many ways to set up the game so those who can only (or even, only want to) mash one button and play the game can do so. It is not the default setting, of course, because most able-bodied people want more of a challenge of coordination. Balancing the requirements of those who want their abilities challenged, versus the requirements of those with challenged abilities, is essentially impossible for most computer games where the interface is so central.
Phrases like "For some reason, however, the WoW designers don't want disabled gamers playing their game" are distasteful, you know fully well the implied discrimination is indefensible. Factually it is inaccurate (hell, I was able to set up one of my characters to be playable only with a 3-button mouse, for instance, including macros to cast spells in sequence using the scroll wheel), both on the customisability of WoW and MMOGlider's suitability to replace the interface. The tone implying that it is an insult to disabled people because it doesn't do what you or someone else wants it to do, is a distortion of political correctness for your own ends, and is foul.
Ultimately, Blizzard is under no legal or other requirement to make the interface to their game function in any particular way. Disabled people should vote with their dollars to buy games that they are able to play. Trying to insist that every single game cater exclusively to their needs is on a par with idiot parents trying to censor the world so their children don't have to deal with any of it.
I fully understand the game, when playing it it's a simple platformer. My gripe is that performing basic moves seemed difficult to the users. A poor interface can make even a very simple game frustrating.
From the two videos I saw, seemed a lot of the time was people wrestling with the controls, trying to execute a jump or hold onto something. A LOT of the time. Gives the impression the controls are fiddly and inaccurate, if you assume that the people operating the characters in the videos are at least familiar with PS3 controls.
I would say I certainly saw how some moves are distinct, eg the disciple of khaine's melee moves, they have different animations. Also the bright wizard's spells have different movements. I'm not sure if this translates across the entire gamut of abilities.
However, PvP is far less "twitchy" than in WoW, you won't get Pom-Pyrod and dead in 2 seconds, so I'm not sure it will be quite as important as it is in WoW
The activation servers have had the problems and non-availability. That's all been sorted out for a couple of days, however.
As a closed-beta user, I didn't really see any of that, I have to admit, as I was already activated. But if you think that means I'm making all this up, you need to do something with all that pent-up anger before you break your keyboard. Try playing WAR, only a week or so til release ;)