The last video card I bought was an ATI Radeon 9200 SE, 128 MB, came with Half-life 2 for free, and a $40 mail-in rebate. $99 in-store.
It was an unbelievable deal at the time (right before half-life 2 was supposed to come out), and I have no plans to get anything better for a while, although my dream machine would have two of those SLI cards.
Yeah, one of the other factors is getting something early. If you can pirate "attack of the clones" three days before release, watch it, and delete it, then that will also influence your decision.
That doesn't really fit into the equation though, since we're talking about products already on the market.
The biggest industry affected by this isn't going to be software, though, it's magazines. I haven't subscribed to a single magazine since I got broadband, and it's purely because of early access. Why pay $2-10 an issue for information I already know? Why pay $8 for a ticket to a movie on opening day, when I can watch it illegally days before anyone else can, and if I like it, save up the $20 to buy it on DVD?
"Stacking modifiers for combat - While initially appearing like a simple idea, it actually is very complex, because you're adding, for example with a missile weapon, your base combat bonus, your dexterity bonus, your range bonus, any bonuses that are applicable because of class abilities or feats, and magic bonuses. Further, not all of these bonuses apply in every situation, so one can quickly lose track of what they should be adding together and what they should not. Again, this is bean counting that does not enhance game play."
read this as: "the old way of rolling and consulting a chart was MUCH better than rolling a number and adding 2-4 numbers to it to see if you beat a target number"
"Feats - although some may argue a way to individualize a character, actually complicate the process of level advancement tremendously. Further, with the possible exception of a handful of them, they seem largely geared towards producing the power-character... a character who is, by the time he reaches 20th level, a pen and paper version of some sort of anime fighter character from Dragonball Z."
First of all, the vast majority of characters created in 3.0+ d&d are significantly less cheesy and anime-ish than the olde editions. NO LONGER can you become as strong as a god by adding 5 to your strength score. (assuming you have a strength of 20)
"Any class can do anything at the cost of a feat or cross class skill - This option almost completely dissolves the class archetypes that were once a staple of fantasy roleplaying games."
Good. your old system was fucking stupid. The idea that a race can be contrained to as little as one CLASS is so inherently wrong that I'm surprised you know how to use the internet. Yeah. remember way back when Elves were rogues, and they were just called "elves"?
"And speaking of reaching 20th level - WTF??? I can count on one hand the number of characters I played for years in pre3e AD&D that even made it past level 8, and I only had one ever make it as high as level 12. With WotC's new rules, a player can very easily and within the framework of the rules as given acquire a 20th level character within a few months of gaming a few hours every week."
COMPLETELY up to the DM. No book writes in stone how much XP the players get any given adventure. If you don't like it, DON'T DO IT!
"Overall mechanics - 3e, when all is said and done, is little more than a pen and paper version of a computer game like Diablo or some such thing. It is a poor, poor replacement for classic AD&D and I, for one, mourn its loss. AD&D had a balanced ruleset in the sense that making changes to the game, or house-ruling, was not only possible, but encouraged, and that doing so was unlikely to cause any serious ramifications outside of the domain in which the house rule was made. However, 3e goes overboard, trying to meticulously "overbalance" the rules, and the result is a result so firmly laid out that sometimes even the simplest change by a DM can have far reaching implications that throw game balance out the proverbial window."
HA! You do realize that Diablo had more robust character creation than the old D&D game? You've taken everything bad about the old D&D, attributed it to the new D&D (which fixed those problems) and then claimed that the new D&D sucks because of it. I don't think there's even a name for a fallacy this stupid.
This is about as "Insightful" as when President Bush, the most liberal President America has ever seen, uses the word 'Liberal' as a 4-letter word and accuses his opposition of being "As Liberal as they can be" and at the same time "a flip-flopper."
More like Pirates are waking those geese up to the fact that they can't sell $100 worth of gold in the form of an egg for ten times what people are willing to pay.
Piracy is not an indicator that suddenly 50% of the country is willing to break the law.
It's a very strong indicator that prices are WAY too high. There is no other explanation for it. People simply aren't willing to pay what the industry is charging, and the representatives of the industry are trying to preserve what little bit of a monopoly they have left.
The ONLY WAY that these idiots can save their money and their shareholders' money is to drastically slash prices to the point where people stop downloading videos through torrents.
Remember that even the person doing the downloading has to make an opportunity cost comparison. "is this video worth the Gigabyte of storage it'll take up?"
At some point, when the prices go down, sales will go up, and people will slow down and stop their piracy simply because it isn't convenient.
Any effort to preserve the high prices may result in recovering your losses in out-of-court settlements, if that, but even then, you're losing millions, if not billions, in the long term.
Actually, most female players play female characters. some play male characters.
But most of the female characters in the game are played by men. Depending on the game. I don't know if statistics have been released for Oblivion yet, but if it's anything like any other mainstream RPG, then you can't say that most females play male characters.
Reminds me about a contest way back where the objective was to write a program with a deliberate security vulnerability in it that was hard to detect.
The winner had a seemingly innocuous simple program with a triple-equals (===) where a double-equals (==) was needed. A non-standard font may have even further complicated it.
I have no clue what the result of that was, but I believe it resulted in a user gaining access where they shouldn't have.
Just goes to show you how easy it is to gloss over these kinds of things.
Re:I can't wait for Spore!
on
EA's E3 Lineup
·
· Score: 1
You're looking at it backwards.
You all seem to think that the hype is what causes the bad game. Publishers look at the game, they have people test it and play it, and then they determine how much hype and advertising will be needed in order to sell the product.
If the game sucks, it needs more hype. if the game is intended for a smaller audience, which is not prone to heavy spending habits, it needs more hype. If the game stands on its own two feet, release lots of videos, and the people on the internet will BECOME the hype.
Take Guild Wars for example: In E34E, Guild Wars was quite simply the best game ever created. It was not only very fun, but if you played games slow, GW could accomodate. if you were a freakish speed-demon and demanded the fastest gameplay available, you got it. If you wanted a pretty game, GW delivered in spades. The best graphics in the entire industry at the speed you'd get from another game with the video settings turned all the way down. The result was spectacular.
From that event alone, GW secured the pocketbooks of millions of customers, and began what would be the biggest user-driven hype event ever. People still laud GW of E3 that year, and many who play now wish it was reverted back to that state. (the biggest complaint now is that you have to "unlock" skills and runes and weapon upgrades, whereas before, during the 3-day events, everything was open to you.)
Spore has driven people crazy with just a live demonstration of the game, in which Will Wright performed some amazing things. If you haven't gotten a chance to see it, go search google for it, dodge chairs if necessary (I'm looking at you, Ballmer Jr.), and then make the judgement call yourself.
Completely banning a product to a subset of the population is Communist.
Now that's not to say that everyone who does it IS communist, but that's where the idea comes from.
It has its roots way back in the olde days of Chinese philosophy. Legalism (on which nearly ALL of our current governments are based) emphasized the idea of using "Carrot-on-a-string" approaches to government. Either threaten the people with punishment for what they do, or reward them for what they do.
In America, we chose the former because of a very simple reason. Our founding fathers supported the idea of Freedom (yes, with a capital F) as something so important that we must even protect it from ourselves. This is why there's a second amendment that protects our rights to arms. We, as a people, have the Freedom to break the law, should we be willing to accept the punishment associated with that action.
Take a look at the legislation:
You are prohibiting children from purchasing certain games. Not a real big deal, since kids can always find ways to play the games at a friend's house or to get it through some shady source. The question is which one is easier, or more convenient. If it's more convenient to get mom and dad to pay for it, congratulations! You've supported a healthy family lifestyle, without costing americans their jobs or income.
If, however, it becomes far more convenient for the child to illegally download the game, then you've only made a bad situation worse, by contributing to software piracy.
Five Dollars (in pesos) says that these laws were deliberately designed with flaws, so that the next wave of "family-first conservative" politicians have yet another weapon to use in their campaign to get elected. I mean, what better way to preserve your complete and total Political Oligopoly (great word to look up if you don't know what it means), than by creating problems you can "solve."
The word will get around as to what retailers will sell them what games. 42% just means that there's a hole. And anything short of pure dictatorshp won't stop it.
Any legislation that prohibits sales of games to minors fails completely at its goal. Which is, of course, to prevent them from playing those games.
Still, I'd expect political doublespeak out the wazoo for a while, saying that they've been "wonderfully successful" at getting mature games out of the hands of children, and that there's "work still to be done."
I hereby copyright those phrases. Any politician using them must immediately resign and pay me an amount of money equal to all of the money they will ever earn (and have earned) in their entire lifetime, plus one Mexican peso.
Ex-player here as well. Nobody seems to be posting their character's history or their play experience, so let me be the first.
I started out as a Twi'lek dancer, on naboo. It was quickly apparent that the Empire ran the planet, and I considered moving to a different one. Left for Tattooine, picked up some pistol skills and some scouting experience.
Then I actually ran into a decent-sized group that was going to go out "hunting." They said they needed some entertainment, so I hopped along. we went to Dantooine. Hunted pikets for a while and someone suggested that we go hunt some critters way off in the distance. everyone else was interested so I followed. That was the first time I actually stood slack-jawed at the game. We were fighting something two... no, three... no, TEN times the size of me. They were huge! I can't for the life of me remember what they were called but I was convinced at that point the game was awesome.
That same character later on would master the dancing profession, and then take up crafting and build landspeeders, speederbikes, and other vehicles to pay for what would be my goal of becoming a Bioengineer.
That day arrived, and I immediately began going out into the wilderness collecting "samples." This was the single most fun thing I'd ever done in the MMO up 'till then. My "sampling" would either instantly kill the target, fail and cause it to one-shot me (I had very little combat skill), or get a sample but not kill the creature. Using mask scent, I could sneak up BEHIND monsters and kill them in this way. I even went and got samples from those gigantic creatures I'd been hunting before.
What did I do with these samples? Why, I made critters, of course! But in my special case, they were small furry cat-like critters that spit acid at 100 yards and had fire resistance. Quite fun, and very lucrative.
Now, after all of this amazing fun that I had: I can tell you that SOE still ruined it. You can make your judgement calls from there, but I want you to know the extent of their damage.
Oh, and the Bioengineer is no longer a character class in the game. And neither is the creature handler.
Slashdot Mirror
Michael Johnson's design is the best.
very simple, very nice, and it keeps the pretty shade of green that site users have grown to love.
That, and it reminds me of a pill.
What better way to hit the "Submit" button on a daily basis?
I could continue the joke from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but instead, I'll just say this to anyone who read the above:
:)
Go read the book.
And may your birthday be duped many a time.
Yeah, I've felt the same way for a while.
The last video card I bought was an ATI Radeon 9200 SE, 128 MB, came with Half-life 2 for free, and a $40 mail-in rebate.
$99 in-store.
It was an unbelievable deal at the time (right before half-life 2 was supposed to come out), and I have no plans to get anything better for a while, although my dream machine would have two of those SLI cards.
Yeah, one of the other factors is getting something early.
If you can pirate "attack of the clones" three days before release, watch it, and delete it, then that will also influence your decision.
That doesn't really fit into the equation though, since we're talking about products already on the market.
The biggest industry affected by this isn't going to be software, though, it's magazines. I haven't subscribed to a single magazine since I got broadband, and it's purely because of early access. Why pay $2-10 an issue for information I already know? Why pay $8 for a ticket to a movie on opening day, when I can watch it illegally days before anyone else can, and if I like it, save up the $20 to buy it on DVD?
How the hell was this modded insightful?
None of these statements are true.
"Stacking modifiers for combat - While initially appearing like a simple idea, it actually is very complex, because you're adding, for example with a missile weapon, your base combat bonus, your dexterity bonus, your range bonus, any bonuses that are applicable because of class abilities or feats, and magic bonuses. Further, not all of these bonuses apply in every situation, so one can quickly lose track of what they should be adding together and what they should not. Again, this is bean counting that does not enhance game play."
read this as: "the old way of rolling and consulting a chart was MUCH better than rolling a number and adding 2-4 numbers to it to see if you beat a target number"
"Feats - although some may argue a way to individualize a character, actually complicate the process of level advancement tremendously. Further, with the possible exception of a handful of them, they seem largely geared towards producing the power-character... a character who is, by the time he reaches 20th level, a pen and paper version of some sort of anime fighter character from Dragonball Z."
First of all, the vast majority of characters created in 3.0+ d&d are significantly less cheesy and anime-ish than the olde editions. NO LONGER can you become as strong as a god by adding 5 to your strength score. (assuming you have a strength of 20)
"Any class can do anything at the cost of a feat or cross class skill - This option almost completely dissolves the class archetypes that were once a staple of fantasy roleplaying games."
Good. your old system was fucking stupid. The idea that a race can be contrained to as little as one CLASS is so inherently wrong that I'm surprised you know how to use the internet.
Yeah. remember way back when Elves were rogues, and they were just called "elves"?
"And speaking of reaching 20th level - WTF??? I can count on one hand the number of characters I played for years in pre3e AD&D that even made it past level 8, and I only had one ever make it as high as level 12. With WotC's new rules, a player can very easily and within the framework of the rules as given acquire a 20th level character within a few months of gaming a few hours every week."
COMPLETELY up to the DM. No book writes in stone how much XP the players get any given adventure. If you don't like it, DON'T DO IT!
"Overall mechanics - 3e, when all is said and done, is little more than a pen and paper version of a computer game like Diablo or some such thing. It is a poor, poor replacement for classic AD&D and I, for one, mourn its loss. AD&D had a balanced ruleset in the sense that making changes to the game, or house-ruling, was not only possible, but encouraged, and that doing so was unlikely to cause any serious ramifications outside of the domain in which the house rule was made. However, 3e goes overboard, trying to meticulously "overbalance" the rules, and the result is a result so firmly laid out that sometimes even the simplest change by a DM can have far reaching implications that throw game balance out the proverbial window."
HA! You do realize that Diablo had more robust character creation than the old D&D game? You've taken everything bad about the old D&D, attributed it to the new D&D (which fixed those problems) and then claimed that the new D&D sucks because of it. I don't think there's even a name for a fallacy this stupid.
This is about as "Insightful" as when President Bush, the most liberal President America has ever seen, uses the word 'Liberal' as a 4-letter word and accuses his opposition of being "As Liberal as they can be" and at the same time "a flip-flopper."
More like Pirates are waking those geese up to the fact that they can't sell $100 worth of gold in the form of an egg for ten times what people are willing to pay.
Piracy is not an indicator that suddenly 50% of the country is willing to break the law.
It's a very strong indicator that prices are WAY too high.
There is no other explanation for it. People simply aren't willing to pay what the industry is charging, and the representatives of the industry are trying to preserve what little bit of a monopoly they have left.
The ONLY WAY that these idiots can save their money and their shareholders' money is to drastically slash prices to the point where people stop downloading videos through torrents.
Remember that even the person doing the downloading has to make an opportunity cost comparison.
"is this video worth the Gigabyte of storage it'll take up?"
At some point, when the prices go down, sales will go up, and people will slow down and stop their piracy simply because it isn't convenient.
Any effort to preserve the high prices may result in recovering your losses in out-of-court settlements, if that, but even then, you're losing millions, if not billions, in the long term.
Indeed, it was exactly that. Thank you for the link.
Actually, most female players play female characters. some play male characters.
But most of the female characters in the game are played by men. Depending on the game.
I don't know if statistics have been released for Oblivion yet, but if it's anything like any other mainstream RPG, then you can't say that most females play male characters.
didn't you mean BSOD?
Reminds me about a contest way back where the objective was to write a program with a deliberate security vulnerability in it that was hard to detect.
The winner had a seemingly innocuous simple program with a triple-equals (===) where a double-equals (==) was needed. A non-standard font may have even further complicated it.
I have no clue what the result of that was, but I believe it resulted in a user gaining access where they shouldn't have.
Just goes to show you how easy it is to gloss over these kinds of things.
You're looking at it backwards.
You all seem to think that the hype is what causes the bad game.
Publishers look at the game, they have people test it and play it, and then they determine how much hype and advertising will be needed in order to sell the product.
If the game sucks, it needs more hype. if the game is intended for a smaller audience, which is not prone to heavy spending habits, it needs more hype. If the game stands on its own two feet, release lots of videos, and the people on the internet will BECOME the hype.
Take Guild Wars for example:
In E34E, Guild Wars was quite simply the best game ever created. It was not only very fun, but if you played games slow, GW could accomodate. if you were a freakish speed-demon and demanded the fastest gameplay available, you got it. If you wanted a pretty game, GW delivered in spades. The best graphics in the entire industry at the speed you'd get from another game with the video settings turned all the way down. The result was spectacular.
From that event alone, GW secured the pocketbooks of millions of customers, and began what would be the biggest user-driven hype event ever. People still laud GW of E3 that year, and many who play now wish it was reverted back to that state. (the biggest complaint now is that you have to "unlock" skills and runes and weapon upgrades, whereas before, during the 3-day events, everything was open to you.)
Spore has driven people crazy with just a live demonstration of the game, in which Will Wright performed some amazing things. If you haven't gotten a chance to see it, go search google for it, dodge chairs if necessary (I'm looking at you, Ballmer Jr.), and then make the judgement call yourself.
Did you have trouble unsticking those quotes after you put them together?
Naaaay.
Now they're out of a job.
Quote from Baldur's Gate:
Xzar: "I always wanted the infravision of the elves, but apparently it takes more than just their eyes."
But can they build him faster? stronger?
Is it just me, or is this article summary just written as an excuse to use the word "bladder" as may times as possible?
That, and you really only need the first three D&D core books. After that, the more work the DM puts into a game, the better.
It will get me one peso.
It will get them in jail, for however long it will be in order for them to earn one peso's worth of jail sentence.
Incorrect friend.
Completely banning a product to a subset of the population is Communist.
Now that's not to say that everyone who does it IS communist, but that's where the idea comes from.
It has its roots way back in the olde days of Chinese philosophy. Legalism (on which nearly ALL of our current governments are based) emphasized the idea of using "Carrot-on-a-string" approaches to government. Either threaten the people with punishment for what they do, or reward them for what they do.
In America, we chose the former because of a very simple reason. Our founding fathers supported the idea of Freedom (yes, with a capital F) as something so important that we must even protect it from ourselves. This is why there's a second amendment that protects our rights to arms. We, as a people, have the Freedom to break the law, should we be willing to accept the punishment associated with that action.
Take a look at the legislation:
You are prohibiting children from purchasing certain games. Not a real big deal, since kids can always find ways to play the games at a friend's house or to get it through some shady source. The question is which one is easier, or more convenient. If it's more convenient to get mom and dad to pay for it, congratulations! You've supported a healthy family lifestyle, without costing americans their jobs or income.
If, however, it becomes far more convenient for the child to illegally download the game, then you've only made a bad situation worse, by contributing to software piracy.
Five Dollars (in pesos) says that these laws were deliberately designed with flaws, so that the next wave of "family-first conservative" politicians have yet another weapon to use in their campaign to get elected. I mean, what better way to preserve your complete and total Political Oligopoly (great word to look up if you don't know what it means), than by creating problems you can "solve."
Children are not stupid.
The word will get around as to what retailers will sell them what games. 42% just means that there's a hole. And anything short of pure dictatorshp won't stop it.
Any legislation that prohibits sales of games to minors fails completely at its goal. Which is, of course, to prevent them from playing those games.
Still, I'd expect political doublespeak out the wazoo for a while, saying that they've been "wonderfully successful" at getting mature games out of the hands of children, and that there's "work still to be done."
I hereby copyright those phrases. Any politician using them must immediately resign and pay me an amount of money equal to all of the money they will ever earn (and have earned) in their entire lifetime, plus one Mexican peso.
if you enabled subtitles, it said
"Hey there. Would you like to take a look at me diddies?"
Ex-player here as well. Nobody seems to be posting their character's history or their play experience, so let me be the first.
I started out as a Twi'lek dancer, on naboo. It was quickly apparent that the Empire ran the planet, and I considered moving to a different one. Left for Tattooine, picked up some pistol skills and some scouting experience.
Then I actually ran into a decent-sized group that was going to go out "hunting." They said they needed some entertainment, so I hopped along. we went to Dantooine. Hunted pikets for a while and someone suggested that we go hunt some critters way off in the distance. everyone else was interested so I followed. That was the first time I actually stood slack-jawed at the game. We were fighting something two... no, three... no, TEN times the size of me. They were huge! I can't for the life of me remember what they were called but I was convinced at that point the game was awesome.
That same character later on would master the dancing profession, and then take up crafting and build landspeeders, speederbikes, and other vehicles to pay for what would be my goal of becoming a Bioengineer.
That day arrived, and I immediately began going out into the wilderness collecting "samples." This was the single most fun thing I'd ever done in the MMO up 'till then. My "sampling" would either instantly kill the target, fail and cause it to one-shot me (I had very little combat skill), or get a sample but not kill the creature. Using mask scent, I could sneak up BEHIND monsters and kill them in this way. I even went and got samples from those gigantic creatures I'd been hunting before.
What did I do with these samples? Why, I made critters, of course! But in my special case, they were small furry cat-like critters that spit acid at 100 yards and had fire resistance. Quite fun, and very lucrative.
Now, after all of this amazing fun that I had:
I can tell you that SOE still ruined it. You can make your judgement calls from there, but I want you to know the extent of their damage.
Oh, and the Bioengineer is no longer a character class in the game. And neither is the creature handler.
By all means, if you operate a lab with equipment that can cause "Resonance cascades", DO NOT HIRE THIS MAN.
Heads rolling?
BALLMER!