EVE is large in that everyone is in the same universe, they have not had to partition into separte "worlds" because their implementation of space travel makes it possible to move players from server to server as they jump from system to system.
EVE today has a fatal design flaw and will not be growing significantly past the current subscriber base. The earlier players have an insurmountable advantage over newer players so the new player can never catch up. Nobody wants to play a game where they have no chance to compete. It's boring. So the typical newbie experience in EVE goes like this:
1. Work hard to figure out how to mine effectively. Get skills and equipment up by running missions until you've got a strip miner. Try mining. Figure out how to overcome the non-player pirates. Get ready to turn-in a few million credits worth of ore. Get jumped by human pirates. Lose ship, die, realize there's no way you'll get anywhere mining. So, try just running missions.
2. Run missions until you get skills and money to get a battle cruiser. Get jumped by human pirates, lose ship. Repeat until bored.
3. Join corporation. Traveling to the corporation, get podded repeatedly by human pirates. Repeat until bored.
4. Cancel subscription because you realize that if you wanted a frustrating computer-related experience doing mindless and meaningless tasks with little reward, you'd just stay at the office.
WoW rewards more people more effectively than EVE or even EQ2 or Vanguard. That's why it's got 10x as many subscribers as #2 in the market.
Rocking back and forth with his eyes closed, shouting out obscenities. He's like the friggin' rainman.
However, he did manage to inspire most of his software developers in the late 1980's, early 1990's. I have stories from 4-5 of my friends who went to work for him in Seattle in the middle years. They were all like cult members, thrilled to get an email from BillG.
How many programmers have worked for any large ($100 million / year or more) company with a CEO who actually knew iteration from recursion? Not many. No corporate culture is perfect. They're all pscyho (based on 10 years consluting for 20+ Fortune 500 companies). It's just how are they psycho and is it a psycho you can live with?
Apparently BillG has grown out of most of that behavior. Maybe it was having kids? Maybe he's just refined his acting in public. He's a damn-sight less psycho than Ellison.
Let's look at Bill through another lens...a scary twilight-zone question lens: Who'd you rather have babysit your 4-year-old for a weekend?
Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, Bill Joy or Richard Stallman?
Why should I have to hire you if you're genetically prone to stupidity? Or lazyness? Why can't I hire only smart motivated people?
It is what we try to do, but we cannot currently use genetic testing to determine your stupdiity or lazyness. We have to be clever and motivated ourselves and figure out less precise ways to predict your stupidity or your lazyness. It's what interviews are all about.
For all the problems of parents who actually attack teachers for mentioning problems with their kids, there is, in my experience, a more widespread problem of parents who do not care enough to take the time.
For example parents need to take the time with kids to:
learn to enjoy reading (read to kids, every night at bedtime until they don't want you to do it anymore) learn the alphabet learn their times tables learn to read make sure the kids are learning to organize their homework assignments and get them turned in
Parents show their kids what is and is not important, by example. If the parents do not place value on education, it's useless to expect the kids to place value on education.
Today, many MD's make less in absolute terms than in previous generations. Primary care, internal medicine, family practice, pediatrics...all are making significantly less money than in the past. I make more as a software consultant and I do not have to go to college, medical school or put up with the internships and fellowships. The result?
"After a six-year decline, the number of applicants to U.S. medical schools is on the rise, according to data released today by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Almost 35,000 individuals applied to attend medical school in the 2003-2004 school year, a 3.4 percent increase over last year's applicant pool of 33,625. The main reason for the increase was the number of women applicants - 17,672 - an almost seven percent rise over last year's total."
Some of what you say...stay fit, buy high deductible insurance...don't go to the doctor every time you have a cold...these are sensible things.
However, you quickly take a long walk off a short logic pier with some of your other assertions.
>> After the HMO Act of 1973, healthcare quickly degraded. http://www.who.int/countries/en/ and take a look at the health stats for a variety of countries.
Another thing, if we take a clear look at US healthcare spending, we see a couple of things...
1. Like you said, we don't do a very good job on personal responsibility for health maintenance. The largest part of this is traceable to a bad diet. We eat crap and we eat too much of it. The next big factor is lack of regular exercise.
2. We do not know how to die. Our generally accepted view of death is: avoid it at any cost. Most of us think we are going to win the powerball and be the 1 in 100 who survives stage 4 lung cancer. The result is, on average, each of us spends most of the money on healthcare in the last 6 months of our life in a vain effort to fend off the inevitable. We need a better way to approach the end of life. With hospice, we're starting to change this.
3. We have a lot of inefficiency in the system. We take the inefficiency of government control (medicare dictates pricing in many markets for many populations) and we compound it with the profit-motive so we have insurance companies skimming 10-20% off the top. One place, ironically, where we do not have a big portion of our expense, is the place government and insurance companies direct our attention...malpractice. The total of insurance premiums and legal fees and settlements is less than 3% of overall medical spending. People bring up the cost of the defensive medicine, but lack any realistic way to quantify it because they cannot get inside the physicians' heads and figure out which tests are being run because the physician is afraid of a law suit and which are being run because they're just not sure what's wrong with a patient.
If the CEO's asking you to benchmark your IT group, do not JUST measure your uptime or other simple availability metrics, that's just silly.
Either you're reliable or you're not. But reliability, while important, is only part of the picture.
For struggling, barely competent IT guys, maybe reliability is all they can hope to achieve, but let's assume that's not you and yours. Let's assume you've got reliability down pat. Why do I make this blithe assumption? Because we can purchase reliability off the shelf today for not very much money. Windows XP boxes on programmers desks regularly go 2-3 weeks without requiring a reboot. Servers can run even longer if properly configured, fed and cared for, even running Windows.
So, where do we go from 99.999% reliable with an IT department? We start consulting with our business managers. We work with them as a partner to help select and adopt technology that will make the business more efficient and/or more effective. And we benchmark these efforts by measuring the productivity of the business function before and after the new technology/system is deployed. This is where we show the strategic value of IT. Not in uptime.
And, we take into account cost. If we can get 99.999% reliable and your competitors IT group can get 99.999% reliable, the budget becomes the tiebreaker and the winner is the one that does it for less money.
For instance, if a business is indexing large document sets for the litigation support market and we can figure out how to move that function from Dallas to India thus cutting labor costs by 60% without a loss in quality or responsiveness by cleverly deploying networking technology and low-end PC's into Madras, we have provided an easily quantifiable cost structure improvement which can give our company an important competitive advantage. This is an example of the big payout from IT. The other big one is quality improvement. And the really rare one is opening up a whole new way of doing business...disruptive technology.
... a long war without the nation's support. If soldiers' blogs show us what's really going on in the war zone, most of us won't support the war effort and the military will lose. The military knows exactly what they are doing when it comes to controlling the flow of information from the "theater" of operation to the home front.
Sebastopol, I agree with your description of ideal/fun paper D&D. I was imprecise in my post. Torgo's got the idea in his response.
The problem is the work to play ratio or more precisely the ratio of time/effort that goes into content creation vs. the time/enjoyment it provides the players. I was referring to the loop/grind which became the computer RPG's solution to the creation to play time ratio.
Microsoft's business rule was a simple one...if it's software and the total annual market value is in excess of $500 million in revenue, they're going to try to dominate it.
As a small software maker, the rule works both ways. Just go after markets with total value in the $10 million to $100 million annual revenue range and you don't have to compete with Microsoft.
IT people work for Companies. Companies need customers or, in the long run, they will cease to exist. And there go all the IT jobs.
Women (with 30-90 seconds of assitance from men, early in the process) make the new customers. Without women making new customers, the company has no long-term growth prospects. Women recognize this. Men, as usual, are a bit slow on the uptake.
It's difficult to be on-call 24/7 and make new customers. New customers are demanding little beasts. Even more than IT bosses. So, women are finding other jobs where they can continue to do something which is, in the long run, far more important than keeping the servers running.
I've been playing my way through game content since 1974. Here's what the dungeon games all resolve down to:
for (iLevel = 1; iLevel iMaxLevelAllowed; iLevel++) {
currentMonsters.hitPoints = X * iLevel;
currentMonsters.attackStrength = Y * iLevel;
currentMonsters.graphics = GetMonsterGraphics(iLevel);
currentTreasures.value = Z * iLevel; }
And we players crank through the iLevel loop and get bored about the third or fourth time through. It's been this way since D&D was played only on paper with dice. Even with EQ2 and WoW it's still basically the same.
Why?
Two reasons. First, because there are far more players than content producers. And because computers are good at looping. So, the content producers, in a natural attempt to provide more play-time given a limited amount of content production resource use looping and repetition...this is why player's grind.
What does this have to do with LOTR MMO? Not much, except it's still going to, ultimately, be a boring grind.
To get past the boredom, we need an open RPG game where people are encouraged to produce content for other players. Maybe 2nd life fits that criteria. I dunno because 2nd Life doesn't have monsters and spells and wizards, so I've got no interest in it.
Does the OLPC laptop purify water? Make crops grow in poor soil/drought conditions? Vaccinate against River Blindness?
Why do I ask these seeimingly irrelevant questions? Because these are the things 1/2 the human population needs. As near as I can tell, LOGO or Linux or Netscape or cheapo suites from Microsoft do not provide these basic physical needs.
If you don't have enough to eat or clean drinking water, a PC is irrelevant.
Maslow's hierarchy is still operating. Seems to me that this is one thing Gates got right when he decided to give his fortune away in pursuit of better public health in the developing world.
Six of Nine...aka Borg Barbie. And those aren't breasts, they're special-purpose cybernetic processing implants...silicone chips, as it were. Mooohahah...I'd like to peta her flops.
Ferdinand Marcos elected for another term as President with 3,000,000,000 votes. Runner up, D4v1d 3. P3t3rs0n had only 2,000,000,000 votes. Second runner up, Nikolay Sokratov from St. Petersberg had 1,5000,000,000 votes and the remaining 10,000,000,000 votes were split among 1,000,000,000 minor party candidates.
Or has anyone else noticed the Microsoft Advertisement between the original topic and the replies is running in a Flash player?
I admit that I enjoy using Microsoft Visual Studio 2003, C#, and MS-SQL Server. They're expensive compared to the alternatives, but they're worth the money in the time they save me.
That said, I'm working on a project that needs to be O/S independent and Adobe Flex in Flash player seems like the way to go. Microsoft's vested interest, keeping us all on Windows, is too strong for me to put much faith in any Microsoft controlled cross-platform solution.
Maybe I'm naive here, but just which feature of Vista what stops me from plugging the output from one sound producing device, playing a DRM'd music file, into the sound-card input line and "recording" it into a non-DRM'd file?
Sure, it's not a pure 100% digital copy, but then, my worn-out ears and worn-out brain probably won't be able to tell the difference.
Women on-line out-number men? Of course...look at any of the pictures, you'll see two, sometimes three or four women in the picutre with just one guy. What? You weren't talking about the pictures? Oh...nevermind.
Slashdot Mirror
EVE is large in that everyone is in the same universe, they have not had to partition into separte "worlds" because their implementation of space travel makes it possible to move players from server to server as they jump from system to system.
EVE today has a fatal design flaw and will not be growing significantly past the current subscriber base. The earlier players have an insurmountable advantage over newer players so the new player can never catch up. Nobody wants to play a game where they have no chance to compete. It's boring. So the typical newbie experience in EVE goes like this:
1. Work hard to figure out how to mine effectively. Get skills and equipment up by running missions until you've got a strip miner. Try mining. Figure out how to overcome the non-player pirates. Get ready to turn-in a few million credits worth of ore. Get jumped by human pirates. Lose ship, die, realize there's no way you'll get anywhere mining. So, try just running missions.
2. Run missions until you get skills and money to get a battle cruiser. Get jumped by human pirates, lose ship. Repeat until bored.
3. Join corporation. Traveling to the corporation, get podded repeatedly by human pirates. Repeat until bored.
4. Cancel subscription because you realize that if you wanted a frustrating computer-related experience doing mindless and meaningless tasks with little reward, you'd just stay at the office.
WoW rewards more people more effectively than EVE or even EQ2 or Vanguard. That's why it's got 10x as many subscribers as #2 in the market.
Rocking back and forth with his eyes closed, shouting out obscenities. He's like the friggin' rainman.
However, he did manage to inspire most of his software developers in the late 1980's, early 1990's. I have stories from 4-5 of my friends who went to work for him in Seattle in the middle years. They were all like cult members, thrilled to get an email from BillG.
How many programmers have worked for any large ($100 million / year or more) company with a CEO who actually knew iteration from recursion? Not many. No corporate culture is perfect. They're all pscyho (based on 10 years consluting for 20+ Fortune 500 companies). It's just how are they psycho and is it a psycho you can live with?
Apparently BillG has grown out of most of that behavior. Maybe it was having kids? Maybe he's just refined his acting in public. He's a damn-sight less psycho than Ellison.
Let's look at Bill through another lens...a scary twilight-zone question lens: Who'd you rather have babysit your 4-year-old for a weekend?
Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, Bill Joy or Richard Stallman?
Why should I have to hire you if you're genetically prone to stupidity? Or lazyness? Why can't I hire only smart motivated people?
It is what we try to do, but we cannot currently use genetic testing to determine your stupdiity or lazyness. We have to be clever and motivated ourselves and figure out less precise ways to predict your stupidity or your lazyness. It's what interviews are all about.
He's a conservative, right?
As such, I expect he will protect the quality of the wine, cheese, and poulet de bresse. That's all I can really hope for from a politician.
For all the problems of parents who actually attack teachers for mentioning problems with their kids, there is, in my experience, a more widespread problem of parents who do not care enough to take the time.
For example parents need to take the time with kids to:
learn to enjoy reading (read to kids, every night at bedtime until they don't want you to do it anymore)
learn the alphabet
learn their times tables
learn to read
make sure the kids are learning to organize their homework assignments and get them turned in
Parents show their kids what is and is not important, by example. If the parents do not place value on education, it's useless to expect the kids to place value on education.
How does one virtually rape another?
Today, many MD's make less in absolute terms than in previous generations. Primary care, internal medicine, family practice, pediatrics...all are making significantly less money than in the past. I make more as a software consultant and I do not have to go to college, medical school or put up with the internships and fellowships. The result?
. htm
http://www.aamc.org/newsroom/pressrel/2003/031104
"After a six-year decline, the number of applicants to U.S. medical schools is on the rise, according to data released today by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Almost 35,000 individuals applied to attend medical school in the 2003-2004 school year, a 3.4 percent increase over last year's applicant pool of 33,625. The main reason for the increase was the number of women applicants - 17,672 - an almost seven percent rise over last year's total."
Note the first phrase...a six-year decline.
Some of what you say...stay fit, buy high deductible insurance...don't go to the doctor every time you have a cold...these are sensible things.
However, you quickly take a long walk off a short logic pier with some of your other assertions.
>> After the HMO Act of 1973, healthcare quickly degraded. http://www.who.int/countries/en/ and take a look at the health stats for a variety of countries.
Another thing, if we take a clear look at US healthcare spending, we see a couple of things...
1. Like you said, we don't do a very good job on personal responsibility for health maintenance. The largest part of this is traceable to a bad diet. We eat crap and we eat too much of it. The next big factor is lack of regular exercise.
2. We do not know how to die. Our generally accepted view of death is: avoid it at any cost. Most of us think we are going to win the powerball and be the 1 in 100 who survives stage 4 lung cancer. The result is, on average, each of us spends most of the money on healthcare in the last 6 months of our life in a vain effort to fend off the inevitable. We need a better way to approach the end of life. With hospice, we're starting to change this.
3. We have a lot of inefficiency in the system. We take the inefficiency of government control (medicare dictates pricing in many markets for many populations) and we compound it with the profit-motive so we have insurance companies skimming 10-20% off the top. One place, ironically, where we do not have a big portion of our expense, is the place government and insurance companies direct our attention...malpractice. The total of insurance premiums and legal fees and settlements is less than 3% of overall medical spending. People bring up the cost of the defensive medicine, but lack any realistic way to quantify it because they cannot get inside the physicians' heads and figure out which tests are being run because the physician is afraid of a law suit and which are being run because they're just not sure what's wrong with a patient.
If the CEO's asking you to benchmark your IT group, do not JUST measure your uptime or other simple availability metrics, that's just silly.
Either you're reliable or you're not. But reliability, while important, is only part of the picture.
For struggling, barely competent IT guys, maybe reliability is all they can hope to achieve, but let's assume that's not you and yours. Let's assume you've got reliability down pat. Why do I make this blithe assumption? Because we can purchase reliability off the shelf today for not very much money. Windows XP boxes on programmers desks regularly go 2-3 weeks without requiring a reboot. Servers can run even longer if properly configured, fed and cared for, even running Windows.
So, where do we go from 99.999% reliable with an IT department? We start consulting with our business managers. We work with them as a partner to help select and adopt technology that will make the business more efficient and/or more effective. And we benchmark these efforts by measuring the productivity of the business function before and after the new technology/system is deployed. This is where we show the strategic value of IT. Not in uptime.
And, we take into account cost. If we can get 99.999% reliable and your competitors IT group can get 99.999% reliable, the budget becomes the tiebreaker and the winner is the one that does it for less money.
For instance, if a business is indexing large document sets for the litigation support market and we can figure out how to move that function from Dallas to India thus cutting labor costs by 60% without a loss in quality or responsiveness by cleverly deploying networking technology and low-end PC's into Madras, we have provided an easily quantifiable cost structure improvement which can give our company an important competitive advantage. This is an example of the big payout from IT. The other big one is quality improvement. And the really rare one is opening up a whole new way of doing business...disruptive technology.
... a long war without the nation's support. If soldiers' blogs show us what's really going on in the war zone, most of us won't support the war effort and the military will lose. The military knows exactly what they are doing when it comes to controlling the flow of information from the "theater" of operation to the home front.
m l
Here's another example...Bagdhad ER...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/gabe/archive/010138.ht
if they'd pre-install a few trial offers from AOL, MSN, Adobe and Symantec and maybe Nestle and Teen Beat and Mattel and....
But what I really want to know is, if this takes off and a billion kids get laptops in the developing world how will the Runescape servers keep up?
I don't think so. It's golf and prayer meetings.
Sebastopol, I agree with your description of ideal/fun paper D&D. I was imprecise in my post. Torgo's got the idea in his response. The problem is the work to play ratio or more precisely the ratio of time/effort that goes into content creation vs. the time/enjoyment it provides the players. I was referring to the loop/grind which became the computer RPG's solution to the creation to play time ratio.
Microsoft's business rule was a simple one...if it's software and the total annual market value is in excess of $500 million in revenue, they're going to try to dominate it.
As a small software maker, the rule works both ways. Just go after markets with total value in the $10 million to $100 million annual revenue range and you don't have to compete with Microsoft.
You don't get it.
IT people work for Companies. Companies need customers or, in the long run, they will cease to exist. And there go all the IT jobs.
Women (with 30-90 seconds of assitance from men, early in the process) make the new customers. Without women making new customers, the company has no long-term growth prospects. Women recognize this. Men, as usual, are a bit slow on the uptake.
It's difficult to be on-call 24/7 and make new customers. New customers are demanding little beasts. Even more than IT bosses. So, women are finding other jobs where they can continue to do something which is, in the long run, far more important than keeping the servers running.
I've been playing my way through game content since 1974. Here's what the dungeon games all resolve down to:
for (iLevel = 1; iLevel iMaxLevelAllowed; iLevel++)
{
currentMonsters.hitPoints = X * iLevel;
currentMonsters.attackStrength = Y * iLevel;
currentMonsters.graphics = GetMonsterGraphics(iLevel);
currentTreasures.value = Z * iLevel;
}
And we players crank through the iLevel loop and get bored about the third or fourth time through. It's been this way since D&D was played only on paper with dice. Even with EQ2 and WoW it's still basically the same.
Why?
Two reasons. First, because there are far more players than content producers. And because computers are good at looping. So, the content producers, in a natural attempt to provide more play-time given a limited amount of content production resource use looping and repetition...this is why player's grind.
What does this have to do with LOTR MMO? Not much, except it's still going to, ultimately, be a boring grind.
To get past the boredom, we need an open RPG game where people are encouraged to produce content for other players. Maybe 2nd life fits that criteria. I dunno because 2nd Life doesn't have monsters and spells and wizards, so I've got no interest in it.
...and it'll be accurate.
At leat the blimps won't make as much noise as the police helicopters over much of LA in the night.
Does the OLPC laptop purify water? Make crops grow in poor soil/drought conditions? Vaccinate against River Blindness?
Why do I ask these seeimingly irrelevant questions? Because these are the things 1/2 the human population needs. As near as I can tell, LOGO or Linux or Netscape or cheapo suites from Microsoft do not provide these basic physical needs.
If you don't have enough to eat or clean drinking water, a PC is irrelevant.
Maslow's hierarchy is still operating. Seems to me that this is one thing Gates got right when he decided to give his fortune away in pursuit of better public health in the developing world.
Six of Nine...aka Borg Barbie. And those aren't breasts, they're special-purpose cybernetic processing implants...silicone chips, as it were. Mooohahah...I'd like to peta her flops.
Ferdinand Marcos elected for another term as President with 3,000,000,000 votes. Runner up, D4v1d 3. P3t3rs0n had only 2,000,000,000 votes. Second runner up, Nikolay Sokratov from St. Petersberg had 1,5000,000,000 votes and the remaining 10,000,000,000 votes were split among 1,000,000,000 minor party candidates.
Or has anyone else noticed the Microsoft Advertisement between the original topic and the replies is running in a Flash player?
I admit that I enjoy using Microsoft Visual Studio 2003, C#, and MS-SQL Server. They're expensive compared to the alternatives, but they're worth the money in the time they save me.
That said, I'm working on a project that needs to be O/S independent and Adobe Flex in Flash player seems like the way to go. Microsoft's vested interest, keeping us all on Windows, is too strong for me to put much faith in any Microsoft controlled cross-platform solution.
Maybe I'm naive here, but just which feature of Vista what stops me from plugging the output from one sound producing device, playing a DRM'd music file, into the sound-card input line and "recording" it into a non-DRM'd file?
Sure, it's not a pure 100% digital copy, but then, my worn-out ears and worn-out brain probably won't be able to tell the difference.
...that's not good enough for Dick Cheney.
This century is buy no music century. When we all stop buying music, the RIAA will be unable to afford to sue us.
Women on-line out-number men? Of course...look at any of the pictures, you'll see two, sometimes three or four women in the picutre with just one guy. What? You weren't talking about the pictures? Oh...nevermind.