Almog's rebuttal has a lot of claims with no actual evidence. Nothing is measured; everything he says is based on how he thinks things should in theory work. But the "sufficiently smart GC" is as big a joke as the "sufficiently smart compiler", and he even says "while some of these allocation patterns were discussed by teams when I was at Sun I don't know if these were actually implemented".
Also:
(in fact game programmers NEVER allocate during game level execution)....This isn't really hard, you just make sure that while you are performing an animation or within a game level you don't make any allocations.
I'm a professional game programmer, and I'm laughing at this. If you're making Space Invaders, and there's a fixed board and a fixed number of invaders, that statement is true. If you're making a game for this decade, with meaningful AI, an open world that's continuously streamed in and out of memory, and dynamic, emergent, or player-driven events, that's just silly. For Mr. Almog to even say that shows how much he doesn't know about the subject.
It's *users* who want it, not developers. Getting a potential customer to download and install a thick client is a big hurdle compared to just providing the experience directly from the web page. It's not just the extra work required from the user in the first place, although the number of clicks required to become a customer is a huge factor in conversions. It's also, from the user's perspective, all the potential problems adware, malware, bundled toolbars, DLL conflicts, and applications that don't uninstall correctly or permanently make themselves a part of your taskbar consuming resources.
I believe the rights to the IP belonged to Sierra, which like Blizzard was a division of Vivendi Universal, and thus is now a part of the Activision-Blizzard empire. I could be wrong, my guess is Arcanum 2 isn't a priority for Bobby Kotick.:-)
I know, Bloodlines technically was developed by Troika. Still, mostly the same crew.
Not really. A few people from Troika went to Obsidian initially, but not many stayed long. At this point the biggest concentration is probably at Carbine Studios under Tim Cain, followed by Turtle Rock where experience with the Source Engine paid off in the making of Left 4 Dead. If you take a look at a recent L4D blog post you can definitely see how much the early screen shots looked like Vampire -- not surprising considering some of the same lighting/level/texture people did them.
(I was lead programmer on Vampire. You can ultimately blame most of the bugs on one very bad decision, by me, very early in the project. I chose an architecture for the scripting system that gave us more flexibility than we needed at the price of easy testing and validation. That's another story, though.)
Epic's down in the research triangle of North Carolina, pretty far away. Firaxis (Sid Meier's company) is up around Baltimore, along with Day1 Studios. That's kinda-sorta within a contiguous metro area, but not something you'd ever want as your daily commute. Baltimore's also home to Zenimax Online, an MMO studio spun off from the same parent company as Bethesda. EA-Mythic is in Fairfax, VA, but I'm not sure how many people are still there or what their future is.
There's an oversupply of people who want to work in the game industry, but certainly not an oversupply of talent. Building a big-budget game has all the complexities of a large-scale development (my last project had over a million lines of code and 300+ GB of assets), with all the limitations of small-scale low-level embedded systems development (got to fit that all into your console). People who can handle that are rare. I've been involved in hiring at my last few jobs, and we'd routinely turn away piles of applicants who thought programming was just about shuffling information back and forth between a data store and a front end, while crying that we were behind schedule because of unfilled positions.
There are long hours, but it's often self-inflicted. For a lot of us, we want to make something awesome, and working on a cool game and bringing a vision to life is what we enjoy doing for 10+ hours of our day. I've done it at my own startup and I've done it at EA. It's not for most people, but neither are most specialties.
There's no real protection, because ultimately references just come down to syntactic sugar. In a large enough project, where foo(), bar(), and baz() below are implemented in different files by different teams, it's entirely possible to end up with something like this:
Why surprised? Once a program says "draw this polygon" it's up to the graphics chip to render it. The graphics chip doesn't know or care whether the command came from managed or unmanaged or anything else. On the other hand, managed code is probably capable of saying "draw this polygon" a lot fewer times per second...leaving the graphics chip a lot more time per polygon to spend on those extra pixels.
Speaking ONLY as a guy who reads graphics papers, the paper you linked proposes and requires hardware features that aren't presently available to consumers. Barring a surprise announcement from ATI or Nvidia, I personally don't expect that to change by the game's launch window.
Does anyone else think a combination of baseball, MMOs, comics, and sci-fi/fantasy sounds exactly like the formula for every major publisher's current product lineup? That's not to say they might not make some very good games in these genres, but they're probably going to make games in roughly the same mold as, well, games.
When Henry Kissinger and Rikki Lake team up with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to make video games, we'll talk "industry-changing".
I worked as the lead programmer on a game that used Python for scripting, at a company where another team was also using Python for scripting. From a bugcount and quality-assurance perspective, Python worked out very badly for both games.
The dynamic nature of the language bit us in the ass over and over and over. Suppose early in the game, based on what someone does, there's a script that states: globalFlags.killedRedDragon = true;
On a quest much later in the game, there's a script that goes something like (loosely paraphrasing Python syntax): if (player.characterClass == paladin):
if (NPC.BobTheBlacksmith.GetDisposition() == friendly):
if (globalFlags.killedRedDagron):
# do some special thing where Bob offers to make
# you a special paladin-only helmet from the
# bones of the red dragon
You'll note there's a syntax error on that third line. It happens, and it happens especially often with scripters, who are generally among the least experienced coders at a company. You have to build that expectation into your entire development process, and languages with the dynamic flexibility of Python just don't do that.
The problem is that we won't know about the error until that line is actually executed during gameplay. If the scripter himself is doing it, that's going to take several hours. If not, depending on QA, that might not happen for several months. Or if the hourly grunt whose task was to play through the game as a paladin who likes blacksmiths decided to blow off killing the dragon even though it was in his test script, it might not happen at all and you ship with a few hundred outstanding bugs.
Sure, better processes and better people could have used Python to great success. But given limited time for processes and limited budgets for recruiting talent, we would have done much better with something that A) doesn't give people enough flexibility to get most things wrong, and B) gives the team the opportunity to catch what's wrong much earlier in the cycle.
Mine too, and she's all about the DPS (and the more dramatic the mob's death animation is, the happier she is). I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown on what classes men and women are drawn too. My theory is that a lot of girls who game are using virtual worlds as an outlet for aggressive tendencies they can't or won't express in their real-world societal roles.
Why do/. mods even bother to post anything SOE related? Regardless of content, all that happens is that the flamethrowers come out. Oh they ruined SWG! Oh SOE is collapsing!
But it's entertaining to watch what's going on with SWG from a safe and comfortable distance.
Why do you think people go to stock car races? Hint: it's not to see cars turn left.
The author's right that the majority of indie games aren't innovative...just like the majority of garage bands, student films, and livejournal poetry is crap. But the there's a LOT of it, and even if only one in a hundred indie games are innovative, that's still more indie games that are innovative than there are big-budget games that are published at all.
One aspect in particular - He clearly doesn't realise just how much of a loss cancelling a game is for a developer. I don't know why he thinks a relationship with a developer is worth more than the combined cost of development losses so far and paying a development team while the company pitches for a new deal.
And that's one of the main problems with the developer/publisher/milestone model. Some years ago, I was a programmer on a certain title at a certain underfunded studio, both of which shall remain nameless. A few months into the project, the gameplay just plain wasn't coming together and we had a meeting internally about what to do. My response to our (internal) project lead: this project should be cancelled. We all knew it, but with very little discussion we proceeded to patch up the enemy AI in a completely unmaintainable way that just happened to work in a carefully-constructed test level. Our external producer was pleased, and we got operating capital to make our next couple of payrolls.
Ultimately, the game shipped with all the problems and cost overruns that we foresaw internally at that time. If we'd been honest with our producer to try and "build the relationship", there wouldn't have been any relationship at all. There wouldn't have been a studio for the publisher to have a relationship with. We'd have been out on the street looking for new jobs.
Developers who write code that takes advantage of GPUs in modern gaming PCs are already familliar with this style programming,
But you can probably count on your fingers the number of developers who are using GPUs for anything other than rendering pixels, or at most some simple vectorizable simulations like water or cloth.
Taking an arbitrary program and turning it into something that would run well on a GPU (or a Cell SPU) usually requires a significant redesign of the algorithms and data structures as compared to what you would naively and straightforwardly do in C...or it won't get anywhere near peak performance and may even run slower. It's certainly possible to do, but you won't be re-using any of that originally written code, and it's a different way of thinking from what 95% of programmers are used to. I'm speaking from experience as someone who earns his living by being in the remaining 5%.:)
As the original poster said: you hand optimize (and design) your program for the cell.
The only thing one has to think about then is: which is going to play longer? (and keep paying subscription fees?) I'm sorry to say, it is the hardcore gamer.
But which are there more of?
All else being equal, keeping ten casual players for two months pays better than keeping one hardcore gamer for a year. Except it's not equal, because the hardcore players are online for more hours and thus bring higher server costs (and lower profits).
Anything a casual gamer could do in a month, a hardcore gamer will do in a week (or less).
And so you need a larger team of developers pumping out more content faster, to keep up with the hardcore.
If you want a game for casual gamers, it has to appeal to casual gamers and no one else. That sounds great, but it doesn't make Blizzard as much money.
I'm pretty sure Blizzard's finances are doing just fine.
Then again it could be that Quicktime is not as optimized for Intel just yet.
From an architectural standpoint, Altivec is miles ahead of SSE3. Given carefully tuned code for each processor and a task like video encoding that can make heavy use of their respective vector units, GHz for GHz the PowerPC should come out well ahead.
On the other had, is Quicktime even 100% x86 code yet? Including all the codecs?
There's so much more to benchmarking than bar charts, and normally Ars Technica is better than this.
Clearly the memory disparity was a factor in many of the tests.
Why?
Seriously, what makes it so clear to you that this was a major factor? If all the tests run could fit in 512 MB without swapping, going to 1 GB wouldn't gain anything, right? Is there something about current Mac platforms that I don't know?
There were many differences between the machines. I'd be more inclined to point out that a significant minority of the benchmarks tested the graphics chips more than the CPU.
Most likely, they had the funding they THOUGHT they needed, but through a lack of development experience they underestimated what it would take to actually get their game out the door and ran out of money. Companies with no track record tend to not be aware of all the pitfalls and problems along the way. You'll notice that most would-be MMO developers are either very, very experienced teams (Origin, Sony, Blizzard) or have never done anything big before. They either know enough to pull it off, or they don't even know what they don't know. Middle-tier teams stay away: they know enough to know they don't have the resources. Occasionally someone comes out of nowhere and gets it right, but they're the rare exception.
This project was probably doomed from the start for another reason, too. I've worked on a Source Engine project (Vampire) and at an MMO company (Mythic). Source does have some really really great tech for rendering expressive characters, but its architecture was definitely not targeted at a massive, continuous, persistent world with thousands of simultaneous players and 24/7 uptime. It's a great engine for building a single-player or 50-player game with discretely contained environments, but... right tool for the wrong job, and the fact that they picked it points back into the "not fully understanding the problem" issue.
On another note, is the price tag worth it? Theres a lot of geforce 6800 Ultra/Radeon x800XT/850 users who arent going to see nothing more than a 10fps increase in Doom3 at 1600x1200 4xFSAA.
If you already own one of those cards, prossibly not, but not everyone has bought a new video card in the last six months. To someone with, say, a Radeon 9800 XT, perhaps the jump in performance has now gone from "not worth it" for a 6800 Ultra to "hey, that's a big step up". Similarly, the X800 was a worthwhile upgrade to someone with a Radeon 8500, but possibly not to someone with a Radeon 9800 XT. People buy when there's enough of a performance difference to make it worthwhile to them, and with tech always advancing sooner or later your day will come.
5. Instead of improving classes, Blizzard has shown that they would rather swing the nerf bat. This is the wrong way to go about balancing a MMO.
Um...no.
First and most obviously, if power levels are only ever adjusted upward, balancing becomes an arms race that, carried to its logical conclusion, will end up with level one characters blasting the landscape with nuclear fireballs.
Secondly, say you have twenty classes. One of them is obviously overpowered. If you want to make things more balanced without nerfing that class, you have to raise the abilities of NINETEEN other classes up to be competitive rather than just lowering one. What are the odds of the balance of those other classes relative to each other coming out of that intact? And if that balance is broken, and your only option for fixing it is giving even more powers, then you're back in the arms race situation.
You can hate on developers all you want for making your Uber Bow of Instant Slaying that you spent weeks questing for a little less uber, but that won't make downward adjustment (as well as upward) an unnecessary tool from the other side of the fence.
Slashdot Mirror
Crawford brought in lots of data on real-world performance. (e.g. http://sealedabstract.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Screen-Shot-2013-05-14-at-10.15.29-PM.png)
Almog's rebuttal has a lot of claims with no actual evidence. Nothing is measured; everything he says is based on how he thinks things should in theory work. But the "sufficiently smart GC" is as big a joke as the "sufficiently smart compiler", and he even says "while some of these allocation patterns were discussed by teams when I was at Sun I don't know if these were actually implemented".
Also:
I'm a professional game programmer, and I'm laughing at this. If you're making Space Invaders, and there's a fixed board and a fixed number of invaders, that statement is true. If you're making a game for this decade, with meaningful AI, an open world that's continuously streamed in and out of memory, and dynamic, emergent, or player-driven events, that's just silly. For Mr. Almog to even say that shows how much he doesn't know about the subject.
It's *users* who want it, not developers. Getting a potential customer to download and install a thick client is a big hurdle compared to just providing the experience directly from the web page. It's not just the extra work required from the user in the first place, although the number of clicks required to become a customer is a huge factor in conversions. It's also, from the user's perspective, all the potential problems adware, malware, bundled toolbars, DLL conflicts, and applications that don't uninstall correctly or permanently make themselves a part of your taskbar consuming resources.
I believe the rights to the IP belonged to Sierra, which like Blizzard was a division of Vivendi Universal, and thus is now a part of the Activision-Blizzard empire. I could be wrong, my guess is Arcanum 2 isn't a priority for Bobby Kotick. :-)
Not really. A few people from Troika went to Obsidian initially, but not many stayed long. At this point the biggest concentration is probably at Carbine Studios under Tim Cain, followed by Turtle Rock where experience with the Source Engine paid off in the making of Left 4 Dead. If you take a look at a recent L4D blog post you can definitely see how much the early screen shots looked like Vampire -- not surprising considering some of the same lighting/level/texture people did them. (I was lead programmer on Vampire. You can ultimately blame most of the bugs on one very bad decision, by me, very early in the project. I chose an architecture for the scripting system that gave us more flexibility than we needed at the price of easy testing and validation. That's another story, though.)
Epic's down in the research triangle of North Carolina, pretty far away. Firaxis (Sid Meier's company) is up around Baltimore, along with Day1 Studios. That's kinda-sorta within a contiguous metro area, but not something you'd ever want as your daily commute. Baltimore's also home to Zenimax Online, an MMO studio spun off from the same parent company as Bethesda. EA-Mythic is in Fairfax, VA, but I'm not sure how many people are still there or what their future is.
There's an oversupply of people who want to work in the game industry, but certainly not an oversupply of talent. Building a big-budget game has all the complexities of a large-scale development (my last project had over a million lines of code and 300+ GB of assets), with all the limitations of small-scale low-level embedded systems development (got to fit that all into your console). People who can handle that are rare. I've been involved in hiring at my last few jobs, and we'd routinely turn away piles of applicants who thought programming was just about shuffling information back and forth between a data store and a front end, while crying that we were behind schedule because of unfilled positions.
There are long hours, but it's often self-inflicted. For a lot of us, we want to make something awesome, and working on a cool game and bringing a vision to life is what we enjoy doing for 10+ hours of our day. I've done it at my own startup and I've done it at EA. It's not for most people, but neither are most specialties.
There's no real protection, because ultimately references just come down to syntactic sugar. In a large enough project, where foo(), bar(), and baz() below are implemented in different files by different teams, it's entirely possible to end up with something like this:
struct A { int value; };
void foo( A & ref ) { ref.value = 17; }
void bar( A * ptr ) { foo( *ptr ); }
void baz() { bar( NULL ); }
Why surprised? Once a program says "draw this polygon" it's up to the graphics chip to render it. The graphics chip doesn't know or care whether the command came from managed or unmanaged or anything else. On the other hand, managed code is probably capable of saying "draw this polygon" a lot fewer times per second...leaving the graphics chip a lot more time per polygon to spend on those extra pixels.
Speaking ONLY as a guy who reads graphics papers, the paper you linked proposes and requires hardware features that aren't presently available to consumers. Barring a surprise announcement from ATI or Nvidia, I personally don't expect that to change by the game's launch window.
Does anyone else think a combination of baseball, MMOs, comics, and sci-fi/fantasy sounds exactly like the formula for every major publisher's current product lineup? That's not to say they might not make some very good games in these genres, but they're probably going to make games in roughly the same mold as, well, games.
When Henry Kissinger and Rikki Lake team up with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to make video games, we'll talk "industry-changing".
Python for Scripting (Or Ruby; Or Lua)
I worked as the lead programmer on a game that used Python for scripting, at a company where another team was also using Python for scripting. From a bugcount and quality-assurance perspective, Python worked out very badly for both games.
The dynamic nature of the language bit us in the ass over and over and over. Suppose early in the game, based on what someone does, there's a script that states:
globalFlags.killedRedDragon = true;
On a quest much later in the game, there's a script that goes something like (loosely paraphrasing Python syntax):
if (player.characterClass == paladin):
if (NPC.BobTheBlacksmith.GetDisposition() == friendly):
if (globalFlags. killedRedDagron ):
# do some special thing where Bob offers to make
# you a special paladin-only helmet from the
# bones of the red dragon
You'll note there's a syntax error on that third line. It happens, and it happens especially often with scripters, who are generally among the least experienced coders at a company. You have to build that expectation into your entire development process, and languages with the dynamic flexibility of Python just don't do that.
The problem is that we won't know about the error until that line is actually executed during gameplay. If the scripter himself is doing it, that's going to take several hours. If not, depending on QA, that might not happen for several months. Or if the hourly grunt whose task was to play through the game as a paladin who likes blacksmiths decided to blow off killing the dragon even though it was in his test script, it might not happen at all and you ship with a few hundred outstanding bugs.
Sure, better processes and better people could have used Python to great success. But given limited time for processes and limited budgets for recruiting talent, we would have done much better with something that A) doesn't give people enough flexibility to get most things wrong, and B) gives the team the opportunity to catch what's wrong much earlier in the cycle.
My girlfriend is a fire mage...
Mine too, and she's all about the DPS (and the more dramatic the mob's death animation is, the happier she is). I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown on what classes men and women are drawn too. My theory is that a lot of girls who game are using virtual worlds as an outlet for aggressive tendencies they can't or won't express in their real-world societal roles.
Why do /. mods even bother to post anything SOE related? Regardless of content, all that happens is that the flamethrowers come out. Oh they ruined SWG! Oh SOE is collapsing!
But it's entertaining to watch what's going on with SWG from a safe and comfortable distance.
Why do you think people go to stock car races? Hint: it's not to see cars turn left.
That's productive.
Nope, that's slashdot.
The author's right that the majority of indie games aren't innovative...just like the majority of garage bands, student films, and livejournal poetry is crap. But the there's a LOT of it, and even if only one in a hundred indie games are innovative, that's still more indie games that are innovative than there are big-budget games that are published at all.
One aspect in particular - He clearly doesn't realise just how much of a loss cancelling a game is for a developer. I don't know why he thinks a relationship with a developer is worth more than the combined cost of development losses so far and paying a development team while the company pitches for a new deal.
And that's one of the main problems with the developer/publisher/milestone model. Some years ago, I was a programmer on a certain title at a certain underfunded studio, both of which shall remain nameless. A few months into the project, the gameplay just plain wasn't coming together and we had a meeting internally about what to do. My response to our (internal) project lead: this project should be cancelled. We all knew it, but with very little discussion we proceeded to patch up the enemy AI in a completely unmaintainable way that just happened to work in a carefully-constructed test level. Our external producer was pleased, and we got operating capital to make our next couple of payrolls.
Ultimately, the game shipped with all the problems and cost overruns that we foresaw internally at that time. If we'd been honest with our producer to try and "build the relationship", there wouldn't have been any relationship at all. There wouldn't have been a studio for the publisher to have a relationship with. We'd have been out on the street looking for new jobs.
Developers who write code that takes advantage of GPUs in modern gaming PCs are already familliar with this style programming,
:)
But you can probably count on your fingers the number of developers who are using GPUs for anything other than rendering pixels, or at most some simple vectorizable simulations like water or cloth.
Taking an arbitrary program and turning it into something that would run well on a GPU (or a Cell SPU) usually requires a significant redesign of the algorithms and data structures as compared to what you would naively and straightforwardly do in C...or it won't get anywhere near peak performance and may even run slower. It's certainly possible to do, but you won't be re-using any of that originally written code, and it's a different way of thinking from what 95% of programmers are used to. I'm speaking from experience as someone who earns his living by being in the remaining 5%.
As the original poster said: you hand optimize (and design) your program for the cell.
Richard Garriott was making these kinds of elaborate games a decade ago.
n e
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/ultima-onli
The only thing one has to think about then is: which is going to play longer? (and keep paying subscription fees?) I'm sorry to say, it is the hardcore gamer.
But which are there more of?
All else being equal, keeping ten casual players for two months pays better than keeping one hardcore gamer for a year. Except it's not equal, because the hardcore players are online for more hours and thus bring higher server costs (and lower profits).
Anything a casual gamer could do in a month, a hardcore gamer will do in a week (or less).
And so you need a larger team of developers pumping out more content faster, to keep up with the hardcore.
If you want a game for casual gamers, it has to appeal to casual gamers and no one else. That sounds great, but it doesn't make Blizzard as much money.
I'm pretty sure Blizzard's finances are doing just fine.
Then again it could be that Quicktime is not as optimized for Intel just yet.
From an architectural standpoint, Altivec is miles ahead of SSE3. Given carefully tuned code for each processor and a task like video encoding that can make heavy use of their respective vector units, GHz for GHz the PowerPC should come out well ahead.
On the other had, is Quicktime even 100% x86 code yet? Including all the codecs?
There's so much more to benchmarking than bar charts, and normally Ars Technica is better than this.
Clearly the memory disparity was a factor in many of the tests.
Why?
Seriously, what makes it so clear to you that this was a major factor? If all the tests run could fit in 512 MB without swapping, going to 1 GB wouldn't gain anything, right? Is there something about current Mac platforms that I don't know?
There were many differences between the machines. I'd be more inclined to point out that a significant minority of the benchmarks tested the graphics chips more than the CPU.
Most likely, they had the funding they THOUGHT they needed, but through a lack of development experience they underestimated what it would take to actually get their game out the door and ran out of money. Companies with no track record tend to not be aware of all the pitfalls and problems along the way. You'll notice that most would-be MMO developers are either very, very experienced teams (Origin, Sony, Blizzard) or have never done anything big before. They either know enough to pull it off, or they don't even know what they don't know. Middle-tier teams stay away: they know enough to know they don't have the resources. Occasionally someone comes out of nowhere and gets it right, but they're the rare exception.
This project was probably doomed from the start for another reason, too. I've worked on a Source Engine project (Vampire) and at an MMO company (Mythic). Source does have some really really great tech for rendering expressive characters, but its architecture was definitely not targeted at a massive, continuous, persistent world with thousands of simultaneous players and 24/7 uptime. It's a great engine for building a single-player or 50-player game with discretely contained environments, but... right tool for the wrong job, and the fact that they picked it points back into the "not fully understanding the problem" issue.
On another note, is the price tag worth it? Theres a lot of geforce 6800 Ultra/Radeon x800XT/850 users who arent going to see nothing more than a 10fps increase in Doom3 at 1600x1200 4xFSAA.
If you already own one of those cards, prossibly not, but not everyone has bought a new video card in the last six months. To someone with, say, a Radeon 9800 XT, perhaps the jump in performance has now gone from "not worth it" for a 6800 Ultra to "hey, that's a big step up". Similarly, the X800 was a worthwhile upgrade to someone with a Radeon 8500, but possibly not to someone with a Radeon 9800 XT. People buy when there's enough of a performance difference to make it worthwhile to them, and with tech always advancing sooner or later your day will come.
Um...no.
First and most obviously, if power levels are only ever adjusted upward, balancing becomes an arms race that, carried to its logical conclusion, will end up with level one characters blasting the landscape with nuclear fireballs.
Secondly, say you have twenty classes. One of them is obviously overpowered. If you want to make things more balanced without nerfing that class, you have to raise the abilities of NINETEEN other classes up to be competitive rather than just lowering one. What are the odds of the balance of those other classes relative to each other coming out of that intact? And if that balance is broken, and your only option for fixing it is giving even more powers, then you're back in the arms race situation.
You can hate on developers all you want for making your Uber Bow of Instant Slaying that you spent weeks questing for a little less uber, but that won't make downward adjustment (as well as upward) an unnecessary tool from the other side of the fence.
I wish Mythic would do less time complaining and spend more time making a new game.
You're referring to Imperator, perhaps?
You don't have to prove it. You only have to convince twelve people dull enough to end up on a jury that it's true.
I'd give pretty good odds that anyone who owns a copy of Halo or GTA would be stricken from that pool.