Yahoo! at least has some brand name left, while AOL is just a farce at this point. If they were going to do a merger, it should be the other way around.
Interesting side note: For the first time in over a year, I saw a commercial on TV that actually said "AOL Keyword". I haven't heard that phrase in a long time, which just shows how far off the map AOL has fallen.
SOE botched the whole SWG:NGE thing in an epic way. And they've admitted as much. The problem was, SWG was dying. The game was pretty lousy, and was losing players at a rate that was going to spell the end of the game. Which would have been a huge black eye. How could a Star Wars game fail? Movies were coming out, and the name was as popular as ever. So, SOE tried to do something to revive a dying game, and in the process of trying to attract new players with a better game experience, pissed off every single one or their subscribers that liked the game as is. Instead of one black eye, they had 2, plus a broken nose and broken jaw, and all their teeth knocked out. With that one move, SOE made potential players of all their games worry about what might happen in the future. SOE probably listens to its player base at least as well as Blizzard does, if not better. But the facial injuries endure.
I seriously believe that if it wasn't for the Station Pass, SOE would have pulled the plug on SWG a while ago. And when the new Star Wars MMO comes out, SWG will go out with a whimper.
I hate to tell you this, but SE is no different from just about every other MMO maker out there when it comes to player feedback during the closed beta. Yes, they do read what you send them. Most of the time, they fail to do what the players suggest.
Blizzard added the Paladin's talent trees in a final version less than 2 weeks from WoW's launch. So, they got no feedback that they could really use to make changes to the tree, because nobody had enough time to test everything, give feedback, and give Blizzard time to make changes. The player base was fairly vocal about not releasing it until the testing was done on the new tree. Blizzard released anyways, and the Paladin was a poor class at launch.
NCSoftt was told by the CoH closed beta player base that the instances for questing were just too repititious for long-term play during the closed beta. They released the game as it was, and after a few months, players left in droves for either EQ2 or WoW. When CoV came out, they CONTIUNED the same mistake. They knew better.
Look at SOE's famous SWG NGE fiasco. 'Nuff said. The only credit I give SOE is that they admit they made a horrible mistake. And they have listened to the player base of EQ2 a whole lot, and the game continues to improve. (Though my necro still needs a little more love, damnit! hehehe)
Most companies making a MMO are like that DM in D&D that came up with what he thought was this incredible scenario/dungeon he wanted players to go through. He spent all these hours making it challenging, interesting, and what he thought was fun. Then, the players try to wander in a different direction, and the DM is furious because he didn't PLAN for that. Why would anyone want to go THERE when he spent all this time creating this wonderful setting right HERE! That, in a nutshell, is the creative director behind just about every single MMO made. Little despots with bad cases of game-designer megalomania. THEY KNOW BETTER! The players just need time to adjust to their brilliant ideas.
We've seen it with Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. We saw it with that Richard Garriott futuristic shooter MMO. We're seeing it with FFXIV. We saw it with APB, which just went belly-up. We saw it with Hellgate: London. And we'll see it with several upcoming games.
Blizzard didn't invent the wheel with WoW. They refined a lot of existing things, made a game with a very low hardware requirement, and removed a good portion of the "Evercamp" factor. That's why they are the 11+ million player goliath they are.
This whole subject has little to do with software companies rushing out software in most cases. It has a whole lot more to do with breaking the zero-day pirating scene.
If they leave in certain bugs that are certain to break the game about 2-4hrs in, then the zero-day piracy crowd (which relies on the cracked game being available before or on the day of release) have a game that won't work for them. They either have to worry about cracking the patch, or buying the game.
What you buy when you get the game box is a very expensive demo copy. Get your feel for the game, and then run into a crippling problem that prevents you from really advancing. Then you have to download a patch, which will re-install the copy protection the zero-day pirates removed.
Those same zero-day pirates are usually a few days behind on the first patch, which means anyone who downloaded it is stuck, and either has to wait or buy a legitimate copy.
Really, you think these massive bugs really make it through Q/A without being noticed? You think they are able to correct such bugs in about 24-48hrs, and a lot is taken care of?
NWN2 left in a crippling water effect when you got to the main city, which they had to patch out. Really, they never saw that even high end machines came to a lag infested halt trying to walk around?
Besides, how many times do you see a game released on both PC and XBox 360/PS3, and the console versions don't have the same bugs, but the PC version is a mess?
So, all those gaming mags and their companion websites, as well as other sites, will start taking it on the chin.
"Here at (blahgamers!) we consider (newgameX) to be absolutely killer! The graphics were uber, the gameplay awesome, and the chicks had almost nothing on!*"
*The above review was compensated for by (producers of newgameX) with a free lifetime subscription to (newgameX), a cool $5K, and dates with each of the kiosk girls we used at the last game convention. Condoms not included.
Re:A few comments from a guy from this field...
on
IT and Health Care
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· Score: 1
I agree with you whole heartedly.
There are so many things that you have to consider.
I work for a software vendor that makes many different applications for prescription filling and related pharmacy stuff. It seems like the problems never stop coming, even though we have some great coders and spec writers.
Consider this. There are 50 states plus D.C., and the federal government, that each have rules and regulations on how presciptions can be filled, how things have to be labelled, etc. One seemingly minor change to a law can been hundreds of lines of code changing, with testing needed to make sure we don't break something that previously worked. I used to joke that if we fix one thing, we always break at least 2 other things.
As far as NCPDP goes, the currently used standard (5.1) is a pain in the ass, and D.0 (the next HIPAA compliant standard) is going to be worse. Every single insurance company and healthcare provider is trying to work some little niche rule exception into place, and NCPDP is a bunch of spineless bastards when it comes to enforcing the regulations they publish. Plus, they are slower to respond to the industry than an old man wearing a hat driving a land yacht on his way to church. But, they are no longer the complete dinosaur you portrayed them as. Almost nobody uses the 3.2 stanard anymore, and spaces and variable lengths are non-issues with the current standards.
Electronic prescription transmission is even worse. SureScripts is another relatively spinless orginzation that fails to police the prescriber vendors, but gets all over the pharmacies like flies on shit for any little problem that crops up. Pass the buck and freak out later is their motto.
Let's not forget other pertinant aspects of healthcare software. Drug Utilization Review (DUR) is a major component, provided only by a very few vendors, and the number of editorial errors are higher than you'd like. Often it takes up to a month for new drugs to get into the review systems, and can take longer for the new DUR hits to show up due to it taking time for it to be recognized that there is a problem.
I would think that some older and more established MMOs would have quite a bit more lines of code than WoW. EQ comes to mind, with 14 expansions released, probably has more code. EQ2 may have more, since there has been more expansions released for it. Lineage II has been around for a long time and has had quite a few expansions. And there are plenty of Asian style MMOs out there that have had numerous expansions. And Vanguard, for all its crappiness, is a huge game.
I don't have the latest EQ2 expansion installed on my PC, since I stopped playing before it came out, and it takes up 9.5GB on my HD. WoW is sitting at 15.9GB right now, but well over 2GB of that is old patch files that don't seem to delete themselves after being applied, and there may be more that I haven't deleted manually elsewhere. By c ontrast, my Vanguard install (that hasn't been patched in more than a year now) that never had a box expansion, is at 18.7GB.
You have to remember that WoW is designed to run on a fairly low end machine. The graphics are pretty tame, not being much advanced over EQ's graphics these days, and they certainly don't require a powerful graphics card. It's one of the reasons the game is so popular. People don't have to upgrade their PCs to play it. Just about any stock PC will play WoW fine.
Don't assume that because the most people play the game, it has the most code. It just appeals to the most people.
Probably EQ2. It sounds funny, but in many ways, it is more casual player friendly than WoW. It really grew up from its not-so-great launch.
Plus, you buy the latest expansion, and you have the complete game, all previous expansions included. It makes it much cheaper than most established games.
Throw in the nostalgia a good portion of WoW players have for seeing the various lands of EQ again, and it's a fairly logical choice.
They got away from the 40-man raids and got down to 25-man raids, but now they are upping the time it takes to complete places. I feel like I'm back in EQ in some cases, where you would pick an instance to tackle, and spend all day Saturday trying to beat it.
Sure, you can log out and come back in and the zone won't have reset (though trash mobs may be back). But instead of making 1 instance so big, I'd have preferred to have wings that were treated as seperate instances. Each wing of Naxx takes a long time to get through unless you are in an uber guild with a really tight-knit group of raiders.
I'm at the point where all my gear upgrades are either through Arena (hack-ptui!) or 25 man instances. And my guild doesn't even have 25 active players. I do a few PUGs, but I haven't seen a single piece drop that my class can use on any of them. And PUGs on stuff like 25-Naxx don't look for the same folks the next day. They just grab whomever and keep going.
This is at the core of why I get frustrated with WoW so much.
Blizzard has decided to blur the lines between classes, and keeps changing rolls with each expansion.
I'm on my second stint in WoW. I played for the first 9 months after release, and quit when I hit 60 and got bored with the gear grind. I went and played EQ2 for 3 years, and stopped playing after my kids were born. Recently the wife and I decided to give WoW another try.
After hitting 80 with my solo main, I can say that the game is definitely weak on class roles. The talent trees are cool and all, but I hate not knowing if a shaman is a healer or a dps class, and what kind of dps they are. I hate not knowing if a druid is going to boomkin, heal, or tank/melee. I could go on, but people that play the game get it.
When I join a pug for instance/raid runs, I'd like to not have to ask who is doing what. I like knowing that the druid is primarily going to heal, and maybe toss a few DoTs in.
I've grown to prefer EQ2's way of having 24 classes, and many of those classes are simple variations of a theme. I greatly preferred having someone ask my necro "you have lifeburn specced?" than asking my shaman "you enhancement, elemental, or resto?"
The dual specs are a nice touch, but I think WoW is hurting by its lack of timely expansions, and its problems nerfing PvE when it tries to fix PvP issues.
Now I'm going to go play some "I Win" mode, and get my DK on.
I have Steam, and I have FIOS, with the Actiontec router, and I never had problems in the past. Granted, I don't use Steam a ton, but it connected, and I was able to list and enter TF2 games when I tried it out.
The Actiontec is not a great router, and it's a pain to open ports at times, but you can eventually work your way around things.
Re:Free the Digital Distribution Revolution! No St
on
The Age of Steam
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· Score: 1
There will always be the concern that a company/platform with the vast majority of users/subscribers will cause problems, but sometimes, it helps.
Not everyone loves iTunes, but let's be realistic about it. Apple has created a consumer's place, more than the paradise the RIAA would prefer. Apple has done more to champion music at a reasonable cost than the RIAA companies would like. And iTunes has become so powerful, it keeps all the rest of the companies in line. The RIAA would love to break iTunes' stranglehold on the market, as would several other people like Wal-Mart. Frankly, I hope they don't, because Apple seems to have its head on straight about this.
So, it depends on the company running the show. Apple and Valve have both shown themselves to be responsible towards the consumer. Others would surely ratched up the greed factor.
Ok, we have a winner! Please come forward and collect your prize. Today you have your choice between fake Viagra, a penis pump, or a date with the she-male of your dreams!
Wait, so you are just now figuring out that DRM is a hassle, after all these years? What rock were you under?
I remember the days of the Apple II/II+/IIe when the copy protections were often more evil. Remember the code wheels with "Align the 3 symbols and then enter the word into this box" protections? Remember the "Look on page 26, paragraph 3, 8th word, and enter it here" protections? I remember the speed copy protections that games like Wizardry used that got so annoying that I eventually had a hole drilled into the side of my 5 1/4" drives so I could get the speed closer before using the keys for fine adjustments. And yes, you had to have the game in the drive to play...funny how that seems like such a hardship these days!
Game makers have been putting protection onto games since back the early 80's and probably even in the late 70's. Many of them make today's DRM seem easy, and made curbing the 2nd hand market a little easier. Losing the code wheel meant nobody else played that game unless you cut out the protection. A task a lot harder back then than today's simple "oh, I just use Daemon Tools" type workarounds.
As for the price argument, I remember paying I believe 39.99 for Wizardry back in 1982. More than 25yrs later, games generally release at 49.99 on the PC, or about a 50% increase. A paperback book back then cost around 3-4 bucks. Now they cost 7-9 bucks, or about a 125% increase. I don't see folks screaming about paperbacks, and they still sell, even with a nice 2nd hand market that is probably better than for games.
I fully understand that buying games only to find out they suck is a problem. I've downloaded games before, and tried them out. If they are any good, I almost always buy them, especially since they are usually so buggy that gameplay sucks on the pirated version. This, I am convinced, is on purpose. Game developers want people to pay for the full product, so they leave easy to spot bugs in game so that pirates famous "0-day" releases are crap. Notice how fast those patches come out???? But if a game sucks in its basic gameplay, I won't buy it.
I use pirated software as a demo, since demos are generally the absolute flawless section of the game, and often some of the best play. It's a highly polished lure, but I'm tired of being a fish.
Justify it any way you want, but the bottom line is you don't want to pay for your games. Why not be honest about it, instead of building up these straw houses?
Back in the 1950's the first 1hr broadcast of a television show started, with the Milton Berle Show. And there was only 1 commercial break, at the half-hour point. And funny things happened.
In his autobiography, Berle said that in the city of Detroit, he was so popular that the city had no water pressure from 9PM to 9:05PM, due to all the toilets being flushed at the same time.
Well, this led to a little innovation by those that make commercials, and it still happens to this day: Commercials are much louder than the regular broadcast. So folks could hear in the bathroom, and over the toilet's flushing.
Just give me a chip in my TV that regulates the sound to a maximum decibel level when I change the volume, so the commercials are no louder than the program.
Ah, someone that truly understands the utter lameness of UO!
You basically summed up my experience with UO. I played it while it was the only game in town, and after a few months, gave up in complete disgust. Some time later, just after the Kunark expansion had been released, I picked up EQ. Ended up playing that for over 5 years, and the wife started to play some 6 months after I started.
I'm constantly amazed at how many people think UO was such a brilliant game. Yes, it fit the bill for a niche audience, but for the vast majority of potential players, it just couldn't gain traction. The constant PK aspect of the game, the botting, the fact that you could train a toon to 6 100 skills in 3 days via a bot, and the fact that large groups would target any non-PK type(s) made for a very anti-social game. The term "griefer" was made famous in UO.
MMOs are largely about their player base. They are social games more than a FPS type game ends up being. UO made being anti-social too easy, with minimal penalties. Ohhh, you can't go into town or the guards will kill you! That's not very harsh when you just create another toon that can deposit stuff in your house for you, or have your PK buddy help you transfer items around with one of their alts meeting you just outside of town.
I think it was the player housing that made everyone so rabid, with folks getting their first piece of online real estate. That was the one thing most EQ players whined about. Yet those damn houses made the countryside a disaster.
UO had one of the greatest potential "name recogniztion" of any MMO ever, after SWG. The Ultima series of games were legendary, especially for those of us lucky enough to play the early ones on the Apple II series of computers. (I-III were brilliant.) If the game had such great mechanics and gameplay, it would have been king for a long time. But with crappy top down fixed graphics and the well documented problems the above poster listed, it was bound to fail.
I'll forever be glad that I got to experience the early Ultimas, and I thank Lord British for those games. But the man got too big for his britches, and too many people still believe his name will garauntee success.
UO didn't initially thrive because of the unrestricted player-player interaction. It intially survived because it was the only game out there that most people had heard of.
The reasons you state are the reasons it died. People went to play EQ, which had a lot longer character growth curve, required grouping for most stuff, and was basically devoid of PvP.
Sorry, but a game where you can max a toon out in 3 days won't survive for long. Add in rampant botting, and it was doomed to fail.
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo! at least has some brand name left, while AOL is just a farce at this point. If they were going to do a merger, it should be the other way around.
Interesting side note: For the first time in over a year, I saw a commercial on TV that actually said "AOL Keyword". I haven't heard that phrase in a long time, which just shows how far off the map AOL has fallen.
SOE botched the whole SWG:NGE thing in an epic way. And they've admitted as much. The problem was, SWG was dying. The game was pretty lousy, and was losing players at a rate that was going to spell the end of the game. Which would have been a huge black eye. How could a Star Wars game fail? Movies were coming out, and the name was as popular as ever. So, SOE tried to do something to revive a dying game, and in the process of trying to attract new players with a better game experience, pissed off every single one or their subscribers that liked the game as is. Instead of one black eye, they had 2, plus a broken nose and broken jaw, and all their teeth knocked out. With that one move, SOE made potential players of all their games worry about what might happen in the future. SOE probably listens to its player base at least as well as Blizzard does, if not better. But the facial injuries endure.
I seriously believe that if it wasn't for the Station Pass, SOE would have pulled the plug on SWG a while ago. And when the new Star Wars MMO comes out, SWG will go out with a whimper.
I hate to tell you this, but SE is no different from just about every other MMO maker out there when it comes to player feedback during the closed beta. Yes, they do read what you send them. Most of the time, they fail to do what the players suggest.
Blizzard added the Paladin's talent trees in a final version less than 2 weeks from WoW's launch. So, they got no feedback that they could really use to make changes to the tree, because nobody had enough time to test everything, give feedback, and give Blizzard time to make changes. The player base was fairly vocal about not releasing it until the testing was done on the new tree. Blizzard released anyways, and the Paladin was a poor class at launch.
NCSoftt was told by the CoH closed beta player base that the instances for questing were just too repititious for long-term play during the closed beta. They released the game as it was, and after a few months, players left in droves for either EQ2 or WoW. When CoV came out, they CONTIUNED the same mistake. They knew better.
Look at SOE's famous SWG NGE fiasco. 'Nuff said. The only credit I give SOE is that they admit they made a horrible mistake. And they have listened to the player base of EQ2 a whole lot, and the game continues to improve. (Though my necro still needs a little more love, damnit! hehehe)
Most companies making a MMO are like that DM in D&D that came up with what he thought was this incredible scenario/dungeon he wanted players to go through. He spent all these hours making it challenging, interesting, and what he thought was fun. Then, the players try to wander in a different direction, and the DM is furious because he didn't PLAN for that. Why would anyone want to go THERE when he spent all this time creating this wonderful setting right HERE! That, in a nutshell, is the creative director behind just about every single MMO made. Little despots with bad cases of game-designer megalomania. THEY KNOW BETTER! The players just need time to adjust to their brilliant ideas.
We've seen it with Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. We saw it with that Richard Garriott futuristic shooter MMO. We're seeing it with FFXIV. We saw it with APB, which just went belly-up. We saw it with Hellgate: London. And we'll see it with several upcoming games.
Blizzard didn't invent the wheel with WoW. They refined a lot of existing things, made a game with a very low hardware requirement, and removed a good portion of the "Evercamp" factor. That's why they are the 11+ million player goliath they are.
This whole subject has little to do with software companies rushing out software in most cases. It has a whole lot more to do with breaking the zero-day pirating scene.
If they leave in certain bugs that are certain to break the game about 2-4hrs in, then the zero-day piracy crowd (which relies on the cracked game being available before or on the day of release) have a game that won't work for them. They either have to worry about cracking the patch, or buying the game.
What you buy when you get the game box is a very expensive demo copy. Get your feel for the game, and then run into a crippling problem that prevents you from really advancing. Then you have to download a patch, which will re-install the copy protection the zero-day pirates removed.
Those same zero-day pirates are usually a few days behind on the first patch, which means anyone who downloaded it is stuck, and either has to wait or buy a legitimate copy.
Really, you think these massive bugs really make it through Q/A without being noticed? You think they are able to correct such bugs in about 24-48hrs, and a lot is taken care of?
NWN2 left in a crippling water effect when you got to the main city, which they had to patch out. Really, they never saw that even high end machines came to a lag infested halt trying to walk around?
Besides, how many times do you see a game released on both PC and XBox 360/PS3, and the console versions don't have the same bugs, but the PC version is a mess?
http://www.avert.org/age-of-consent.htm
So, all those gaming mags and their companion websites, as well as other sites, will start taking it on the chin.
"Here at (blahgamers!) we consider (newgameX) to be absolutely killer! The graphics were uber, the gameplay awesome, and the chicks had almost nothing on!*"
*The above review was compensated for by (producers of newgameX) with a free lifetime subscription to (newgameX), a cool $5K, and dates with each of the kiosk girls we used at the last game convention. Condoms not included.
I agree with you whole heartedly.
There are so many things that you have to consider.
I work for a software vendor that makes many different applications for prescription filling and related pharmacy stuff. It seems like the problems never stop coming, even though we have some great coders and spec writers.
Consider this. There are 50 states plus D.C., and the federal government, that each have rules and regulations on how presciptions can be filled, how things have to be labelled, etc. One seemingly minor change to a law can been hundreds of lines of code changing, with testing needed to make sure we don't break something that previously worked. I used to joke that if we fix one thing, we always break at least 2 other things.
As far as NCPDP goes, the currently used standard (5.1) is a pain in the ass, and D.0 (the next HIPAA compliant standard) is going to be worse. Every single insurance company and healthcare provider is trying to work some little niche rule exception into place, and NCPDP is a bunch of spineless bastards when it comes to enforcing the regulations they publish. Plus, they are slower to respond to the industry than an old man wearing a hat driving a land yacht on his way to church. But, they are no longer the complete dinosaur you portrayed them as. Almost nobody uses the 3.2 stanard anymore, and spaces and variable lengths are non-issues with the current standards.
Electronic prescription transmission is even worse. SureScripts is another relatively spinless orginzation that fails to police the prescriber vendors, but gets all over the pharmacies like flies on shit for any little problem that crops up. Pass the buck and freak out later is their motto.
Let's not forget other pertinant aspects of healthcare software. Drug Utilization Review (DUR) is a major component, provided only by a very few vendors, and the number of editorial errors are higher than you'd like. Often it takes up to a month for new drugs to get into the review systems, and can take longer for the new DUR hits to show up due to it taking time for it to be recognized that there is a problem.
I would think that some older and more established MMOs would have quite a bit more lines of code than WoW. EQ comes to mind, with 14 expansions released, probably has more code. EQ2 may have more, since there has been more expansions released for it. Lineage II has been around for a long time and has had quite a few expansions. And there are plenty of Asian style MMOs out there that have had numerous expansions. And Vanguard, for all its crappiness, is a huge game.
I don't have the latest EQ2 expansion installed on my PC, since I stopped playing before it came out, and it takes up 9.5GB on my HD. WoW is sitting at 15.9GB right now, but well over 2GB of that is old patch files that don't seem to delete themselves after being applied, and there may be more that I haven't deleted manually elsewhere. By c ontrast, my Vanguard install (that hasn't been patched in more than a year now) that never had a box expansion, is at 18.7GB.
You have to remember that WoW is designed to run on a fairly low end machine. The graphics are pretty tame, not being much advanced over EQ's graphics these days, and they certainly don't require a powerful graphics card. It's one of the reasons the game is so popular. People don't have to upgrade their PCs to play it. Just about any stock PC will play WoW fine.
Don't assume that because the most people play the game, it has the most code. It just appeals to the most people.
More like this: http://www.booble.com/
Probably EQ2. It sounds funny, but in many ways, it is more casual player friendly than WoW. It really grew up from its not-so-great launch.
Plus, you buy the latest expansion, and you have the complete game, all previous expansions included. It makes it much cheaper than most established games.
Throw in the nostalgia a good portion of WoW players have for seeing the various lands of EQ again, and it's a fairly logical choice.
I think a lot of rogues not playing on PvP servers would contend that a lot has changed in how the game plays and feels.
DKs have radically changed the landscape of the game.
They got away from the 40-man raids and got down to 25-man raids, but now they are upping the time it takes to complete places. I feel like I'm back in EQ in some cases, where you would pick an instance to tackle, and spend all day Saturday trying to beat it.
Sure, you can log out and come back in and the zone won't have reset (though trash mobs may be back). But instead of making 1 instance so big, I'd have preferred to have wings that were treated as seperate instances. Each wing of Naxx takes a long time to get through unless you are in an uber guild with a really tight-knit group of raiders.
I'm at the point where all my gear upgrades are either through Arena (hack-ptui!) or 25 man instances. And my guild doesn't even have 25 active players. I do a few PUGs, but I haven't seen a single piece drop that my class can use on any of them. And PUGs on stuff like 25-Naxx don't look for the same folks the next day. They just grab whomever and keep going.
This is at the core of why I get frustrated with WoW so much.
Blizzard has decided to blur the lines between classes, and keeps changing rolls with each expansion.
I'm on my second stint in WoW. I played for the first 9 months after release, and quit when I hit 60 and got bored with the gear grind. I went and played EQ2 for 3 years, and stopped playing after my kids were born. Recently the wife and I decided to give WoW another try.
After hitting 80 with my solo main, I can say that the game is definitely weak on class roles. The talent trees are cool and all, but I hate not knowing if a shaman is a healer or a dps class, and what kind of dps they are. I hate not knowing if a druid is going to boomkin, heal, or tank/melee. I could go on, but people that play the game get it.
When I join a pug for instance/raid runs, I'd like to not have to ask who is doing what. I like knowing that the druid is primarily going to heal, and maybe toss a few DoTs in.
I've grown to prefer EQ2's way of having 24 classes, and many of those classes are simple variations of a theme. I greatly preferred having someone ask my necro "you have lifeburn specced?" than asking my shaman "you enhancement, elemental, or resto?"
The dual specs are a nice touch, but I think WoW is hurting by its lack of timely expansions, and its problems nerfing PvE when it tries to fix PvP issues.
Now I'm going to go play some "I Win" mode, and get my DK on.
Why the heck not? We need more of them, right? Right?
Considering that the serial code thing has been around for decades, I'd hardly consider it major DRM.
Just make it so that you can't download patch updates without connecting to the company's servers and having a valid serial #.
Sure, the patch will get cracked eventually, but you just made the pirating process a little less hassle free.
I have Steam, and I have FIOS, with the Actiontec router, and I never had problems in the past. Granted, I don't use Steam a ton, but it connected, and I was able to list and enter TF2 games when I tried it out.
The Actiontec is not a great router, and it's a pain to open ports at times, but you can eventually work your way around things.
There will always be the concern that a company/platform with the vast majority of users/subscribers will cause problems, but sometimes, it helps.
Not everyone loves iTunes, but let's be realistic about it. Apple has created a consumer's place, more than the paradise the RIAA would prefer. Apple has done more to champion music at a reasonable cost than the RIAA companies would like. And iTunes has become so powerful, it keeps all the rest of the companies in line. The RIAA would love to break iTunes' stranglehold on the market, as would several other people like Wal-Mart. Frankly, I hope they don't, because Apple seems to have its head on straight about this.
So, it depends on the company running the show. Apple and Valve have both shown themselves to be responsible towards the consumer. Others would surely ratched up the greed factor.
Ok, we have a winner! Please come forward and collect your prize. Today you have your choice between fake Viagra, a penis pump, or a date with the she-male of your dreams!
Did you miss the simple beauty of his sarcasm, that you had to reply with a serious post about the ramifications?
Better check your scalp for fungus. This one just ran all over your head, so you could have Athlete's Scalp.
Wait, so you are just now figuring out that DRM is a hassle, after all these years? What rock were you under?
I remember the days of the Apple II/II+/IIe when the copy protections were often more evil. Remember the code wheels with "Align the 3 symbols and then enter the word into this box" protections? Remember the "Look on page 26, paragraph 3, 8th word, and enter it here" protections? I remember the speed copy protections that games like Wizardry used that got so annoying that I eventually had a hole drilled into the side of my 5 1/4" drives so I could get the speed closer before using the keys for fine adjustments. And yes, you had to have the game in the drive to play...funny how that seems like such a hardship these days!
Game makers have been putting protection onto games since back the early 80's and probably even in the late 70's. Many of them make today's DRM seem easy, and made curbing the 2nd hand market a little easier. Losing the code wheel meant nobody else played that game unless you cut out the protection. A task a lot harder back then than today's simple "oh, I just use Daemon Tools" type workarounds.
As for the price argument, I remember paying I believe 39.99 for Wizardry back in 1982. More than 25yrs later, games generally release at 49.99 on the PC, or about a 50% increase. A paperback book back then cost around 3-4 bucks. Now they cost 7-9 bucks, or about a 125% increase. I don't see folks screaming about paperbacks, and they still sell, even with a nice 2nd hand market that is probably better than for games.
I fully understand that buying games only to find out they suck is a problem. I've downloaded games before, and tried them out. If they are any good, I almost always buy them, especially since they are usually so buggy that gameplay sucks on the pirated version. This, I am convinced, is on purpose. Game developers want people to pay for the full product, so they leave easy to spot bugs in game so that pirates famous "0-day" releases are crap. Notice how fast those patches come out???? But if a game sucks in its basic gameplay, I won't buy it.
I use pirated software as a demo, since demos are generally the absolute flawless section of the game, and often some of the best play. It's a highly polished lure, but I'm tired of being a fish.
Justify it any way you want, but the bottom line is you don't want to pay for your games. Why not be honest about it, instead of building up these straw houses?
Why is this surprising to anyone?
Back in the 1950's the first 1hr broadcast of a television show started, with the Milton Berle Show. And there was only 1 commercial break, at the half-hour point. And funny things happened.
In his autobiography, Berle said that in the city of Detroit, he was so popular that the city had no water pressure from 9PM to 9:05PM, due to all the toilets being flushed at the same time.
Well, this led to a little innovation by those that make commercials, and it still happens to this day: Commercials are much louder than the regular broadcast. So folks could hear in the bathroom, and over the toilet's flushing.
Just give me a chip in my TV that regulates the sound to a maximum decibel level when I change the volume, so the commercials are no louder than the program.
Here is a website that lists all known ages of consent. It's easier to look up here.
http://www.avert.org/aofconsent.htm
Ah, someone that truly understands the utter lameness of UO!
You basically summed up my experience with UO. I played it while it was the only game in town, and after a few months, gave up in complete disgust. Some time later, just after the Kunark expansion had been released, I picked up EQ. Ended up playing that for over 5 years, and the wife started to play some 6 months after I started.
I'm constantly amazed at how many people think UO was such a brilliant game. Yes, it fit the bill for a niche audience, but for the vast majority of potential players, it just couldn't gain traction. The constant PK aspect of the game, the botting, the fact that you could train a toon to 6 100 skills in 3 days via a bot, and the fact that large groups would target any non-PK type(s) made for a very anti-social game. The term "griefer" was made famous in UO.
MMOs are largely about their player base. They are social games more than a FPS type game ends up being. UO made being anti-social too easy, with minimal penalties. Ohhh, you can't go into town or the guards will kill you! That's not very harsh when you just create another toon that can deposit stuff in your house for you, or have your PK buddy help you transfer items around with one of their alts meeting you just outside of town.
I think it was the player housing that made everyone so rabid, with folks getting their first piece of online real estate. That was the one thing most EQ players whined about. Yet those damn houses made the countryside a disaster.
UO had one of the greatest potential "name recogniztion" of any MMO ever, after SWG. The Ultima series of games were legendary, especially for those of us lucky enough to play the early ones on the Apple II series of computers. (I-III were brilliant.) If the game had such great mechanics and gameplay, it would have been king for a long time. But with crappy top down fixed graphics and the well documented problems the above poster listed, it was bound to fail.
I'll forever be glad that I got to experience the early Ultimas, and I thank Lord British for those games. But the man got too big for his britches, and too many people still believe his name will garauntee success.
Oh, I dunno about that. I'm sure the judge would have come up with a figure without too much effort! Lots of zeroes at the end of the number, too!
UO didn't initially thrive because of the unrestricted player-player interaction. It intially survived because it was the only game out there that most people had heard of.
The reasons you state are the reasons it died. People went to play EQ, which had a lot longer character growth curve, required grouping for most stuff, and was basically devoid of PvP.
Sorry, but a game where you can max a toon out in 3 days won't survive for long. Add in rampant botting, and it was doomed to fail.