MMOs rely heavily on numbers. I know that City of Heroes at least logs a stream of data on various aspects of player stats and usage, then use a program to wean out the relevant data they're looking for.
A background in Econometrics or statistics would be a huge boon to MMO developers in charge of game balance. Massaging numbers to identify leading factors and weighting their impact on a result is the core function of this area of study. It's perfectly suited for MMO balancing.
A heavily dumbed down example: If the economist can identify the weights associated with the variables in a formula for overall damage taken per second, they can figure out how to adjust gameplay for a desired result. Let's say there is X amount of damage taken by the enemy(Rate of fire X damage per hit) minus average healing rate Y (heal per second), and you have the resulting amount of aggregate health gain or loss which is the overall damage taken per second. Complications in this simple formula can be explained with more formulas, X = ROI times Damage per second times (average accuracy rate - accuracy debuff)
It all works out quite simply though there may be several layers of depth. Since the data-logging readily provides these numbers over a very large sample(each player), balancing formulas out involves just a bit of math.
An FPS for example makes things more complicated with the unpredictably stemming from human variability, but by too much more if there's sufficient data logging to graph out a large sample.
Blowing off the modpoints I've already spent in this thread to comment, but I think this comment would serve to improve the thread quality more than a few points of moderation.
I'm seeing a great deal of cynicism about the corporate process. I don't doubt that there are problems within the structure, but I have trouble believing that there is no consideration of merit behind the CEO selection process. This is a capitalist process and the benefits from a proper selection would bring profit to those making the selection. It's how the stock market is used to direct investments towards profitable enterprises.
I would think that it is also an evolutionary process. If we have two companies with one trying to choose the best man for the job, and the other choosing someone who fails to benefit the company, and all other things being held equal, I think that the company with the proper selection process would see the benefit. If the process generates a long tradition of incompetency, then it would be in the shareholder's best interests to improve the process or just bail out, leaving the company to die and investing in a company that does it right. Economic Darwinism.
While this might fail in the short-term in small samplings, I would think that in the long-term with a large sampling, this should bear out. People will see what works and what doesn't and try to use the better processes particularly when they get to enjoy the profits.
That's why I would think that the CEOs actually do have merits that the CIOs do not if the CEOs are continually selected over the CIOs.
However, I understand that such processes can fail, like how democracy has gotten us some bad presidents.
I don't think the parent should really be modded insightful. Making Firefox the ad-less browser makes fire-fox compatibility pointless at best, and damaging at worst for many websites that offer content or services for free if their revenue stream is ad-dependent.
Advertisements aren't always a bad thing.
I do have adblock installed, but I use blocking judiciously. I only block advertisers that are instrusive or obstructive. If the ads don't hassle me, I don't mind seeing the ad on the off-chance that it may have something of interest to me, benefitting both me and the advertiser.
...I'm afraid to click that link. Even if it is Wikipedia. My cursor just doesn't want to go near it.
That is the solution that was eventually introduced into Natural Selection. All aliens in the area are awarded a share of experience(Often a teammate acted as bait as an important contribution to the kill, but that doesn't always involve damage.) however, the kill count problem persisted though the experience side was alleviated somewhat.
However, the experience was divided between players. So what if a leech just sits there eating XP by just sitting around a corner nearby? It's hard to determine credit here.
If Microsoft is hiring these editors to place facts onto the entries and not opinions, then there's nothing wrong with that. Corrections are good if they're valid.
If what they're placing is half-true but disputable, then truths from both sides should be placed in the entry and tagged as being under dispute.
If outright lies, then hopefully they can keep reverting the page to older revisions.
Also, hearing: "Oh YEAH baby! dese nuts in yo MAYYOOUUUTTHHH!!! UNF! UNF! UNF!" from the enemy ninja-assasins might break the atmosphere of a singleplayer storyline pretty quickly.
You may or may not(probably not) have heard of Natural Selection. A HL1 mod. This pitted teams of Marines against teams of Aliens. The marines begin with rifles, while Aliens begin with teeth and the ability to walk on walls and ceilings. When playing in the RTS/FPS hybrid mode where a commander builds a base and commands players like units in an RTS, the players received all upgrades, armor, ammo, and weaponry from the commander, or would otherwise begin equipped with just the basic equipment. Aliens have no commander, but receive points for killing marines and structures in order to evolve to higher lifeforms.
What would happen is that Aliens spend most of the game as the fragile but damaging Skulk, but then they may encounter a marine that the commander stacked resources on, and is now decked out in Heavy Armor, and a Heavy Machine gun. And it would take the entire team zerging that one marine only to get blown away countless times before finally whittling him down.
And who gets the credit? The one who killed the marine. That's not very satisfying for the other 7 or so aliens who helped you bring the super-powered marine down. And it wasn't all that fun to run into inevitable doom, knowing that you'll die, but just hoping to wound the enemy just enough to get them several ambushes down the line. It involved a lot of waiting to respawn and a lot of just running. A chore to get strangers to work with you on ambushes instead of just charging in and giving away everyone's position.
This is just one rare situation in that game, and is NOT representative of Natural Selection as a whole. But when this occurs, I think it parallels the idea of a single uber-player up against a horde of weak "NPC" players. It's not very fun for the "NPC" players who get reamed by such odds, and kill credit is only given to one NPC.
The skill matching mechanism better be top notch. It will suffice to say that I am good at FPS games. I would have a blast as the Elite. But god save the poor bastard who has me spawn into their story-game. They will be tea-bagged to hell and back for hours. *Ahem*/could be/ I mean. I would never do something so crass, and I certainly wouldn't repeat such an action until the victim becomes fed up and quits the game forever in frustrated anger.
But it is indeed a valid possibility that these developers may want to take into consideration.
Actually, it was at www.google.com for the last week, though it appears to be gone now. It's a relatively blank start page, so the one line that Google Checkout used was actually a fairly significant portion of the otherwise bare page.
I seriously doubt that a dramatic boost in speed can be attributed to Vista. Not because it's Microsoft, but because it's just a pretty outrageous claim. I would think that the ISP changed something, or that the previous OS installation was horribly misconfigured or handicapped in someway, rather than a miraculous feat of genius in coding. And really, to provide 3x speed under standard usage conditions would be pretty miraculous with just a software change. It'd be on par with the invention of Bittorrent, probably even more impressive than that.
I'm on board with everything you've just said Omestes, but unfair prices?
I don't think I can agree with the prices. The only 2 prices I can think of that would be unfair would be anti-competitively low pricing used to undercut small start-up competitors until they go out of business so that they can jack them up again. Or, monopoly pricing a necessity out of people's reach.
But since this is a luxury good, it should be fine for them to price however they like. At higher prices, they'll get less sales, and lower prices, they get a lower return on each sale. If they're pricing higher than the profit-maximizing point(i.e making less money than they could by pricing high rather than pricing low), that's their loss, but also their business.
Buying movies after they've been out for awhile gets a cheaper price too, since you pay a premium to see a movie as soon as possible.
Same here, I will only buy a product after reading a review with negative comments.
If they haven't taken the time to make note of negative qualities, then anything positive they have to say is suspect. No product is perfect. If I wanted only positive comments I could read the product summary from the manufacturer. I read review to see the negative comments. If they didn't mention negatives I could buy the product and get slapped in the face by a suprise flaw. If they mentioned small ones, then I would be at least a little more confident that I won't be finding unwelcome suprises.
The ideal review for a product will have good points, followed by several small flaws, followed by a comment stating that the owner enjoyed the product despite the shortcomings. That's when I feel safe to buy something.
A nice plump banana and a glass of OJ(That's about 250-300 calories). A blast of easily converted energy to wake you up early, and digests quickly so you don't feel bloated and heavy.
Sometimes I also have some yummy fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt (200ish) from a good brand. I've tried a lot of them and the differences between the brands is enormous.
I like a satisfying dinner so the breakfast has to be light to stay inside calorie boundaries.
This is probably how Vista will propagate though. I bought a new laptop recently, and of course the windows tax was exacted from me so that XP media center 2005 came bundled.
Dell is offering the comparable vista edition for the price of shipping ($10 bucks, they're probably skimming some money off that to ship a cd for 10 bucks). So I'll be using Vista Home Premium when it arrives.
When I replace my PC this summer it will likely come with Vista as well. I have no desire to upgrade to vista through a voluntary purchase. But I'll still be running Vista on both my laptop and desktop because that's just what came with them. I know I can get rid of Vista and get my money back through that long arduous EULA rejection as posted on digg an other sites, but like the majority of consumers, I'm not going to.
In the end, in spite of the DRM issues and the lackluster improvements, I'll still be running Vista because it's pretty much dumped in my lap. It doesn't look like a big step forward but it's not a big step backward in terms of real-world use for me. I won't be buying HDCP media even though my graphics cards and displays are already HDCP compliant. I just don't want to buy the media in general.
What's at stake is not whether I like Vista or not, it's whether I hate it enough to reject it for a superior alternative. And the other OSes don't offer a significant improvement to my practical usage. I'm not going to argue that they aren't better. They're just not better enough to be worth the hassle.
It's not that different from how IE gained it's dominance. It won the market beacause it was already put there and it's good enough for most people's needs. However, the good news is that Firefox shows that alternatives can oust the incumbent with sufficiently superior quality of use.
I think that there are good odds that I will end up on a non-windows OS someday. Just not yet.
What about dual-monitor setups? I'm using my PC and xbox360 on an HDCP compliant 20" LCD too(Dell 2007FPW). However, I also have another one that isn't HDCP compliant (Dell 2005FPW).
So what happens when I run the movie? Does it show up on the 2007fpw monitor but blur out when I drag it over to the other desktop?
I'm thinking that they'll probably just screw me and blur it out on both until I disconnect the other monitor.
For all the FUD about advertising and Valve arbitrarily taking my access to games I paid for, and the grandmother rape stuff...
My experience thus far has been nothing but positive. I look at the news window and see a release. I decide I want it, I buy it, and then I play it.
Potential future issues are still there, but irrelevant to me. I'm done with the games. If Valve died somehow so that I couldn't use steam to play my games, it'd be trivial for them to release a tiny patch to allow us to keep playing and burn our own backups. But I wouldn't care, by the time they could die, I'm already done with their games and I don't care anymore.
The bottom line, is that with all the/potential/ for abuse, the actual experience for me has been better than buying the physical media.
Obviously, I can't speak for other people, but I'm just laying out my opinion same as the others who don't like Steam.
They were also around in Hitman games, I never cared for the silent assasin, stealth, 1-kill-and-exit approach. I just killed everybody and piled up the dead in the bathroom. Good times.
Die by the sword had persistent corpses, along with dismemberment. So you could cut off a kobold's head, throw it at it's partner, then hack off the kobold's limb to beat the partner to death with it. Fun.
It's not really a cartel, it's more of a highly differentiated product. The differentiation is such that it grants them monopoly powers. You want Britney spears? Well, if you don't like the DRM, then here, listen to some Jack Johnson. There's lots of different kinds of music out there, but there's not always in direct competition since you're not looking to buy a song, you're looking to buy a specific song, and they have monopoly power in that situation since others can't offer you what you want.
The thing is there's lots of DRM-free music if you want to look for it.
But the problem is, there's lots of DRM-free music/if you want to look for it/.
The majority of people do not, and that's the service the RIAA provides. They don't want to hunt down good artists, they want it shown to them, so the RIAA picks out what they think will sell and show it to the masses who will buy what they're shown. It's advertising.
Whether or not the independent artist is better or not becomes irrelevant if the market doesn't know about them. So it the DRM is just something you accept in order to buy the music that has been advertised to you.
If at somepoint the DRM becomes too bothersome, or the music offered becomes too distasteful, people will look for alternatives. It's when they look for alternatives that they find them. People will choose what they find more favorable, RIAA-music without searching, or indie-music without DRM, but with searching. Hopefully in the future there will be labels who will provide the advertisement without the DRM and stay competitive. This problem will end up solving itself eventually.
Displaying contempt and disrespect in communication is a deficiency in social skills. Whether it stems from an unwillingness or an inability, the absence itself is the practical measurement. Being able to do something without taking the effort to do it is just as useless for social skills as it is with intelligent pursuits. The courtesy to address each other with grace and civility to prevent the conversation from degrading to such a state is itself an important part of communication.
When communicating, there needs to be a purpose. Is the objective to insult the other? Or to actually get an idea across? Condescension and insults are never useful for the latter, since it causes the audience to focus on the insult(authentic or perceived) rather than the actual message. If the purpose is solely to insult, what is the reason for insulting them? What does this gain and why do you want it? A brief moment of introspection should occur before entangling yourself in conflict, determining why the conflict should be pursued is important.
Whenever it looks like you're running low on work, you could start pulling some plugs and inserting some errors. Then get called and fix it in minutes, now you're a hero!
The OP is touching over a point I just discussed in Hardforum a few days ago.
A capitalistic system rewards those who outcompete the others. This is good, but there's an implicit downside in that having winners in this competition means that some are losing. South Park framed it as "Gods and Clods", rich people need poor people to flip burgers and pump gas. Capitalism is great because the idea of reaping what you sow incites each person to work their hardest at each level of the system, rather than riding the curve of the group by being judged as a whole and being rewarded as a whole.
Capitalism is the best we've got right now because of how this approach generates efficiency, but it will always have this downside of some people who will have to lose because they just aren't capable of competing.
If they're non-competitive because they're lazy and just don't want to be competitive, then that's fine. But what about the elderly, infirm, and uneducated(by circumstance rather than by choice)? I can understand a viewpoint where the elderly and infirm ought to fail from a mercilessly efficient standpoint, but as for the uneducated, it would be a shame if a potentially productive person does not receive the necessary investment of resources to return a positive ROI.
I'd say capitalism works best with a little bit of intelligently managed socialist policies sprinkled through it. The seperation of the successful and the failures is a good thing for the most part, so long as it is tempered from both ends. Tempering the high-end so that there won't be self-perpetuating successes allowing the unproductive to ride a reward for previous works(Paris Hilton, anti-competitive monopoly practices, etc.). And tempering the low-end so as to avoid the economic tragedy of a lost potential investments, or for those who would be bothered by it, the moral tragedy of grinding poverty.
Slashdot Mirror
MMOs rely heavily on numbers. I know that City of Heroes at least logs a stream of data on various aspects of player stats and usage, then use a program to wean out the relevant data they're looking for.
A background in Econometrics or statistics would be a huge boon to MMO developers in charge of game balance. Massaging numbers to identify leading factors and weighting their impact on a result is the core function of this area of study. It's perfectly suited for MMO balancing.
A heavily dumbed down example: If the economist can identify the weights associated with the variables in a formula for overall damage taken per second, they can figure out how to adjust gameplay for a desired result. Let's say there is X amount of damage taken by the enemy(Rate of fire X damage per hit) minus average healing rate Y (heal per second), and you have the resulting amount of aggregate health gain or loss which is the overall damage taken per second. Complications in this simple formula can be explained with more formulas, X = ROI times Damage per second times (average accuracy rate - accuracy debuff)
It all works out quite simply though there may be several layers of depth. Since the data-logging readily provides these numbers over a very large sample(each player), balancing formulas out involves just a bit of math.
An FPS for example makes things more complicated with the unpredictably stemming from human variability, but by too much more if there's sufficient data logging to graph out a large sample.
Blowing off the modpoints I've already spent in this thread to comment, but I think this comment would serve to improve the thread quality more than a few points of moderation.
I'm seeing a great deal of cynicism about the corporate process. I don't doubt that there are problems within the structure, but I have trouble believing that there is no consideration of merit behind the CEO selection process. This is a capitalist process and the benefits from a proper selection would bring profit to those making the selection. It's how the stock market is used to direct investments towards profitable enterprises.
I would think that it is also an evolutionary process. If we have two companies with one trying to choose the best man for the job, and the other choosing someone who fails to benefit the company, and all other things being held equal, I think that the company with the proper selection process would see the benefit. If the process generates a long tradition of incompetency, then it would be in the shareholder's best interests to improve the process or just bail out, leaving the company to die and investing in a company that does it right. Economic Darwinism.
While this might fail in the short-term in small samplings, I would think that in the long-term with a large sampling, this should bear out. People will see what works and what doesn't and try to use the better processes particularly when they get to enjoy the profits.
That's why I would think that the CEOs actually do have merits that the CIOs do not if the CEOs are continually selected over the CIOs.
However, I understand that such processes can fail, like how democracy has gotten us some bad presidents.
I don't think the parent should really be modded insightful. Making Firefox the ad-less browser makes fire-fox compatibility pointless at best, and damaging at worst for many websites that offer content or services for free if their revenue stream is ad-dependent.
Advertisements aren't always a bad thing.
I do have adblock installed, but I use blocking judiciously. I only block advertisers that are instrusive or obstructive. If the ads don't hassle me, I don't mind seeing the ad on the off-chance that it may have something of interest to me, benefitting both me and the advertiser.
...I'm afraid to click that link. Even if it is Wikipedia. My cursor just doesn't want to go near it.
That is the solution that was eventually introduced into Natural Selection. All aliens in the area are awarded a share of experience(Often a teammate acted as bait as an important contribution to the kill, but that doesn't always involve damage.) however, the kill count problem persisted though the experience side was alleviated somewhat.
However, the experience was divided between players. So what if a leech just sits there eating XP by just sitting around a corner nearby? It's hard to determine credit here.
Parent has a good point.
If Microsoft is hiring these editors to place facts onto the entries and not opinions, then there's nothing wrong with that. Corrections are good if they're valid.
If what they're placing is half-true but disputable, then truths from both sides should be placed in the entry and tagged as being under dispute.
If outright lies, then hopefully they can keep reverting the page to older revisions.
Also, hearing: "Oh YEAH baby! dese nuts in yo MAYYOOUUUTTHHH!!! UNF! UNF! UNF!" from the enemy ninja-assasins might break the atmosphere of a singleplayer storyline pretty quickly.
You may or may not(probably not) have heard of Natural Selection. A HL1 mod. This pitted teams of Marines against teams of Aliens. The marines begin with rifles, while Aliens begin with teeth and the ability to walk on walls and ceilings. When playing in the RTS/FPS hybrid mode where a commander builds a base and commands players like units in an RTS, the players received all upgrades, armor, ammo, and weaponry from the commander, or would otherwise begin equipped with just the basic equipment. Aliens have no commander, but receive points for killing marines and structures in order to evolve to higher lifeforms.
What would happen is that Aliens spend most of the game as the fragile but damaging Skulk, but then they may encounter a marine that the commander stacked resources on, and is now decked out in Heavy Armor, and a Heavy Machine gun. And it would take the entire team zerging that one marine only to get blown away countless times before finally whittling him down.
And who gets the credit? The one who killed the marine. That's not very satisfying for the other 7 or so aliens who helped you bring the super-powered marine down. And it wasn't all that fun to run into inevitable doom, knowing that you'll die, but just hoping to wound the enemy just enough to get them several ambushes down the line. It involved a lot of waiting to respawn and a lot of just running. A chore to get strangers to work with you on ambushes instead of just charging in and giving away everyone's position.
This is just one rare situation in that game, and is NOT representative of Natural Selection as a whole. But when this occurs, I think it parallels the idea of a single uber-player up against a horde of weak "NPC" players. It's not very fun for the "NPC" players who get reamed by such odds, and kill credit is only given to one NPC.
The skill matching mechanism better be top notch. It will suffice to say that I am good at FPS games. I would have a blast as the Elite. But god save the poor bastard who has me spawn into their story-game. They will be tea-bagged to hell and back for hours. *Ahem* /could be/ I mean. I would never do something so crass, and I certainly wouldn't repeat such an action until the victim becomes fed up and quits the game forever in frustrated anger.
But it is indeed a valid possibility that these developers may want to take into consideration.
Stonyfield is also available here in NJ. And for what it's worth, it tastes @#^&ing AMAZING. God. It's like an orgy in my mouth...
(Because it is!)
Death Star datacenters can be a dangerous place to work.
It's only a matter of time before some asshole jedi comes along and blows you away along with millions of innocent contract workers.
I wonder if this may fudge the ratings a bit. People not knowing where Google Checkout's responsibility ends and where the merchant's begins.
All I did was put in payment once and then Google checkout only used 1 brief page and a click for me to buy on buy.com, used it 3-5 times since then.
Actually, it was at www.google.com for the last week, though it appears to be gone now. It's a relatively blank start page, so the one line that Google Checkout used was actually a fairly significant portion of the otherwise bare page.
I seriously doubt that a dramatic boost in speed can be attributed to Vista. Not because it's Microsoft, but because it's just a pretty outrageous claim. I would think that the ISP changed something, or that the previous OS installation was horribly misconfigured or handicapped in someway, rather than a miraculous feat of genius in coding. And really, to provide 3x speed under standard usage conditions would be pretty miraculous with just a software change. It'd be on par with the invention of Bittorrent, probably even more impressive than that.
I'm on board with everything you've just said Omestes, but unfair prices?
I don't think I can agree with the prices. The only 2 prices I can think of that would be unfair would be anti-competitively low pricing used to undercut small start-up competitors until they go out of business so that they can jack them up again. Or, monopoly pricing a necessity out of people's reach.
But since this is a luxury good, it should be fine for them to price however they like. At higher prices, they'll get less sales, and lower prices, they get a lower return on each sale. If they're pricing higher than the profit-maximizing point(i.e making less money than they could by pricing high rather than pricing low), that's their loss, but also their business.
Buying movies after they've been out for awhile gets a cheaper price too, since you pay a premium to see a movie as soon as possible.
Same here, I will only buy a product after reading a review with negative comments.
If they haven't taken the time to make note of negative qualities, then anything positive they have to say is suspect. No product is perfect. If I wanted only positive comments I could read the product summary from the manufacturer. I read review to see the negative comments. If they didn't mention negatives I could buy the product and get slapped in the face by a suprise flaw. If they mentioned small ones, then I would be at least a little more confident that I won't be finding unwelcome suprises.
The ideal review for a product will have good points, followed by several small flaws, followed by a comment stating that the owner enjoyed the product despite the shortcomings. That's when I feel safe to buy something.
A nice plump banana and a glass of OJ(That's about 250-300 calories). A blast of easily converted energy to wake you up early, and digests quickly so you don't feel bloated and heavy.
Sometimes I also have some yummy fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt (200ish) from a good brand. I've tried a lot of them and the differences between the brands is enormous.
I like a satisfying dinner so the breakfast has to be light to stay inside calorie boundaries.
This is probably how Vista will propagate though. I bought a new laptop recently, and of course the windows tax was exacted from me so that XP media center 2005 came bundled.
Dell is offering the comparable vista edition for the price of shipping ($10 bucks, they're probably skimming some money off that to ship a cd for 10 bucks). So I'll be using Vista Home Premium when it arrives.
When I replace my PC this summer it will likely come with Vista as well. I have no desire to upgrade to vista through a voluntary purchase. But I'll still be running Vista on both my laptop and desktop because that's just what came with them. I know I can get rid of Vista and get my money back through that long arduous EULA rejection as posted on digg an other sites, but like the majority of consumers, I'm not going to.
In the end, in spite of the DRM issues and the lackluster improvements, I'll still be running Vista because it's pretty much dumped in my lap. It doesn't look like a big step forward but it's not a big step backward in terms of real-world use for me. I won't be buying HDCP media even though my graphics cards and displays are already HDCP compliant. I just don't want to buy the media in general.
What's at stake is not whether I like Vista or not, it's whether I hate it enough to reject it for a superior alternative. And the other OSes don't offer a significant improvement to my practical usage. I'm not going to argue that they aren't better. They're just not better enough to be worth the hassle.
It's not that different from how IE gained it's dominance. It won the market beacause it was already put there and it's good enough for most people's needs. However, the good news is that Firefox shows that alternatives can oust the incumbent with sufficiently superior quality of use.
I think that there are good odds that I will end up on a non-windows OS someday. Just not yet.
What about dual-monitor setups? I'm using my PC and xbox360 on an HDCP compliant 20" LCD too(Dell 2007FPW). However, I also have another one that isn't HDCP compliant (Dell 2005FPW).
So what happens when I run the movie? Does it show up on the 2007fpw monitor but blur out when I drag it over to the other desktop?
I'm thinking that they'll probably just screw me and blur it out on both until I disconnect the other monitor.
(spoilers)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slylandro
For those who don't remember the reference. And if you haven't played it, you should just bypass the link entirely for this one:
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
Play the full game for free, legally.
For all the FUD about advertising and Valve arbitrarily taking my access to games I paid for, and the grandmother rape stuff...
/potential/ for abuse, the actual experience for me has been better than buying the physical media.
My experience thus far has been nothing but positive. I look at the news window and see a release. I decide I want it, I buy it, and then I play it.
Potential future issues are still there, but irrelevant to me. I'm done with the games. If Valve died somehow so that I couldn't use steam to play my games, it'd be trivial for them to release a tiny patch to allow us to keep playing and burn our own backups. But I wouldn't care, by the time they could die, I'm already done with their games and I don't care anymore.
The bottom line, is that with all the
Obviously, I can't speak for other people, but I'm just laying out my opinion same as the others who don't like Steam.
They were also around in Hitman games, I never cared for the silent assasin, stealth, 1-kill-and-exit approach. I just killed everybody and piled up the dead in the bathroom. Good times.
Die by the sword had persistent corpses, along with dismemberment. So you could cut off a kobold's head, throw it at it's partner, then hack off the kobold's limb to beat the partner to death with it. Fun.
It's not really a cartel, it's more of a highly differentiated product. The differentiation is such that it grants them monopoly powers. You want Britney spears? Well, if you don't like the DRM, then here, listen to some Jack Johnson. There's lots of different kinds of music out there, but there's not always in direct competition since you're not looking to buy a song, you're looking to buy a specific song, and they have monopoly power in that situation since others can't offer you what you want.
/if you want to look for it/.
The thing is there's lots of DRM-free music if you want to look for it.
But the problem is, there's lots of DRM-free music
The majority of people do not, and that's the service the RIAA provides. They don't want to hunt down good artists, they want it shown to them, so the RIAA picks out what they think will sell and show it to the masses who will buy what they're shown. It's advertising.
Whether or not the independent artist is better or not becomes irrelevant if the market doesn't know about them. So it the DRM is just something you accept in order to buy the music that has been advertised to you.
If at somepoint the DRM becomes too bothersome, or the music offered becomes too distasteful, people will look for alternatives. It's when they look for alternatives that they find them. People will choose what they find more favorable, RIAA-music without searching, or indie-music without DRM, but with searching. Hopefully in the future there will be labels who will provide the advertisement without the DRM and stay competitive. This problem will end up solving itself eventually.
Displaying contempt and disrespect in communication is a deficiency in social skills. Whether it stems from an unwillingness or an inability, the absence itself is the practical measurement. Being able to do something without taking the effort to do it is just as useless for social skills as it is with intelligent pursuits. The courtesy to address each other with grace and civility to prevent the conversation from degrading to such a state is itself an important part of communication.
When communicating, there needs to be a purpose. Is the objective to insult the other? Or to actually get an idea across? Condescension and insults are never useful for the latter, since it causes the audience to focus on the insult(authentic or perceived) rather than the actual message. If the purpose is solely to insult, what is the reason for insulting them? What does this gain and why do you want it? A brief moment of introspection should occur before entangling yourself in conflict, determining why the conflict should be pursued is important.
Whenever it looks like you're running low on work, you could start pulling some plugs and inserting some errors. Then get called and fix it in minutes, now you're a hero!
Just kidding...or am i?
The OP is touching over a point I just discussed in Hardforum a few days ago.
A capitalistic system rewards those who outcompete the others. This is good, but there's an implicit downside in that having winners in this competition means that some are losing. South Park framed it as "Gods and Clods", rich people need poor people to flip burgers and pump gas. Capitalism is great because the idea of reaping what you sow incites each person to work their hardest at each level of the system, rather than riding the curve of the group by being judged as a whole and being rewarded as a whole.
Capitalism is the best we've got right now because of how this approach generates efficiency, but it will always have this downside of some people who will have to lose because they just aren't capable of competing.
If they're non-competitive because they're lazy and just don't want to be competitive, then that's fine. But what about the elderly, infirm, and uneducated(by circumstance rather than by choice)? I can understand a viewpoint where the elderly and infirm ought to fail from a mercilessly efficient standpoint, but as for the uneducated, it would be a shame if a potentially productive person does not receive the necessary investment of resources to return a positive ROI.
I'd say capitalism works best with a little bit of intelligently managed socialist policies sprinkled through it. The seperation of the successful and the failures is a good thing for the most part, so long as it is tempered from both ends. Tempering the high-end so that there won't be self-perpetuating successes allowing the unproductive to ride a reward for previous works(Paris Hilton, anti-competitive monopoly practices, etc.). And tempering the low-end so as to avoid the economic tragedy of a lost potential investments, or for those who would be bothered by it, the moral tragedy of grinding poverty.