they chose their current political leaders, no totalitarian dictators here.
Communism != totalitarianism.
The 'communist' label has been appropriated by many dictators, as has the 'socialist' label (see: 1930s Europe), and the 'democratic' label (see: post-colonial Africa).
I'm not familiar enough with the area in question to know whether or not the communist party there is truly communist or not, but please don't equate communism with totalitarianism.
What I like about it was that it really discouraged players from treating combat as the sole method of meeting challenges. Yes, a combat between two PCs and 3 NPCs might take 8 hours to resolve... but that one marathon rolL-playing session would have been preceded by 6 rolE-playing sessions, maybe with some stealth, etc, thrown in.
As compared to AD&D and WH, which seemingly resolved around combat after combat after combat.
Yes, part of it depended on the GM, and YMMV, but I felt the system really guided players towards making more realistic decisions.
In my experience, IT workers are much more likely to steal toner. Why? Because they have the access. At my company, we lock down the toner. EVERY empty cartridge, box, etc must be accounted for. Usage is tracked -- when I turn in an empty to get a full one, it gets noted in the usage file... any anomalies are investigated. Sucks to be me if someone decides to steal my toner, or swap out their used home cartridge with my new one after-hours.
I tried pointing out that the tracking was more expensive than the occasional lost cartridge... for my troubles I got to compare the cost savings on toner post-tracking system.
Turns out, a company of 90 full-time employees was losing over $3000 per year on 'missing' toner. Who knew?
Nah, he's referring to what would happen if William S. Burroughs had actually written everything written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Except he left out the drugs.
Sure, gameplay is what most of us want. I tend to mix up my gameplay between strategy and casual games, and I'll tell you that a fast processor is very necessary for good one-player strategy games -- most good AI is very processor intensive. Even turn-based games are subject to this, as I cannot stand waiting 5 minutes for the AI competition to complete their turns.
Rolemaster used this system (yeah, yeah, Pen & Paper), I personally believe they perfected. The problem was that the game was way, way too complicated for a tabletop game (so many charts, gah, I dreamed of crit charts). This is not a problem with PC games, however, I'd be very curious to see some development team implement the rolemaster system into a MMO.
The only problem with thatm though, is that weapons in RM are deadly. One lucky crit by some lvl 1 goon and you're out for the count, or at least severely impaired. Impairment is another thing I'd like to see in an MMO. Get injured in the leg? Run slow. Get injured in the head? Uh-oh. This is the sort of thing that should be added into a true PvP game.
Maybe I misunderstood the OP, but s/he seemed to feel that all combinations of skill sets need to be viable. Maybe they meant that the bar needs to be lowered (thereby nerfing the 'best' combos) in order to make sure weak combos aren't overpowered, but there's no reason to ensure that a fisher-basketweaver is as viable in PvP as an archer-mage.
When you give the players such an open system like a skill-based system, the developers have exponentially more work on their hands. They have to make sure all the combinations are viable gaming options.
Poppycock. There is no reason why a certain skill set needs to be viable. It's OK if no one plays that combo. What they need to do is to make certan that certain combinations aren't overpowered.
If they think all gamers have overpriced Alienware monsters, they're in for a big shock. I'm on Mac and I only plan on buying a Wii, that means no "Crysis" for me either.
Well, first, you're on a Mac. To many publishers, that means you're part of a small demographic that isn't cost-effective to reach until your game is a blockbuster, or the revenue is higher per user... with your WoW example, they're getting the subscription fees off you as well as the game purchase.
Second, did you forget that Vista is coming out next year? There are probably many, many people who will be upgrading their PCs in the next couple years to something a little (a lot) more powerful... myself included. For all it gets slagged on Slashdot (and I'm no MS fanboy), I'm quite confident that Vista will have high market penetration as the replacement cycle shambles on, which will help drive the market for higher-performance PCs.
Plenty of streaming radio networks do this. A couple minutes of ads to listen to an hour or so of music. Of course, if you pay to subscribe, the ads disappear...
Most strategy guides are misnamed. They should call them "Spoiler Books" or something.
You don't learn strategy from strategy guides, you learn how to follow a walk-through. Where's the satisfaction in that?
Maybe I'm old-school, but I've never used a strategy guide for any game. If I can't beat the game without one, either I'm not as skilled/smart as I'd like to be, or there is a design flaw in the game. Both have been true with different games, and it's only the second possibility that really bothers me... especially when I lay out cash for a game.
There is a lot to be gained for them in city areas where there is a lot of GPRS/GSM congestion as instead of needing to put up more towers in expensive areas with expensive fees, they can give vastly increased bandwidth through wifi points in key locations.
But at the same time, the lose some of the revenue. Sure, putting up more towers is expensive -- but it's proportional to call volume, as is their revenue. As soon as you can use wifi for your cell phone, they lose a HUGE amount of money in call charges, more than the cost of providing the bandwidth via cell tower -- otherwise they'd never put up additional towers.
That's what the moderation system and comment filtering is for.
Re: your obvious contribution to the crap, you've posted it here (your OP in this thread) so I feel quite justified in assuming that you post worthless crap elsewhere also.
If you want breaking stories, go somewhere else. If you want good discussion (yes, with all its foibles) read Slashdot. The two are pretty much mutually exclusive at this point.
So, quit your whining and realize that you pick the appropriate tool for the job.
No, it's because the ARE forward-thinking. Why would they do anything on purpose to cut into their revenue stream? All that can happen is that they lose money, short-term and long-term... the long term is a lot easier to forecast and deal with when you have the force of law guaranteeing that the status quo will be maintained for a very long time to come.
Decisions are made by those who vote - when only about a third of the population choose to spend the brief time necessary to vote, however, you get what they vote for.
Sure, we vote for candidates -- who are typically selected to run by a very few people. And those people who are elected then get to vote on legislation written by industry lobbyists, when they are dependent on those industries for their campaign funds.
The media (who are big corporations, by the way) have a lot of control of how the public views the candidates.
At the local level, we're in better shape, but national politics are controlled by the moneyed corporate interests.
I've recently been approached by several different people (most recently, the concierge at my office building) about why their internet is so slow recently. Stupid me, I forgot to ask if they used a portal... I gave them a sheet with instructions for cleaning out malware, and it didn't seem to help them. Then one of them informed me she uses AOL. Turns out, they all did. I told them all to uninstall AOL, cancel their account (good luck with that!) and use Firefox instead of IE.
My protocol for handling 'computer slowness' requests from acquaintances now begins with "Do you use AOL?".
The Welsh longbow and the crossbow started the process in Europe. Gunpowder finished it off. The rapier was a ceremonial weapon used for ritualized individual warfare (dueling), which is quite different from the 'in the wild' evolution of weapons. It evolved not in response to heavy armor, but instead in response to the advantages of a long reach and damaging ability of a thrusting attack that can directly damage the vitals against an unarmored foe.
The OP does, however (unintentionally, I believe), bring up an important concept that is germaine to the DRM debate. At periods in history, there have been technological advances in weaponry and/or armor that have cause a wholesale change in how war is fought. These include mounted troops, gunpowder units (as you mention), steel, the stirrup, the machine gun, I could go on and on. When these advances were brought into play, the nature of war changed -- just as digital distribution of music is changing the nature of the business of entertainment media.
Looking at the history of popular music, we've only seen widespread distribution of media to the home for less than a century. It's been a good run for the media distributors, but their time is going the way of the cavalry charge -- shot down by thousands of bullets that we call 'downloads'.
Unless of course they develop new business models.
They have, they are called buy-legislation-that-enforces-the-old-model and extort-from-people-who-lack-the-resources-to-defen d-themselves-in-a-court-of-law.
I agree with you 100%. If we're purchasing a license to the media, it should include that media in any form. However, this breaks the model for the media companies, so it's a hard sell.
Many of us live in democracies -- by the people, for the people, right?
Not anymore. The US stopped being anything close to a democracy sometime last century. It's a neo-fascist state run by corporations.
That said, there is some room for popular sentiment to sway politicians, it's just hard for the people to compete with moeyed interests regarding pet issues.
Extra! Extra! Slashdot travels back in time to retrieve everybody else's headlines from last friday! Read all about it!
Good for Slashdot. I'd rather read some well-thought out comments and great links to other material on the topic than see the inanity that passes for comments at other places -- which you've obviously been a part of creating.
the term cat and mouse game implies that there is a chance for the big media companies to win.
Nah, it just means they are being constantly played with by crackers. Like a cat letting a mouse 'escape' just so it can pounce on it again. It's inevitable that the cat wins in the end (assuming the mouse doesn't find a hole in the wall to run through, like the DMCA in the US).
Slashdot Mirror
Communism != totalitarianism.
The 'communist' label has been appropriated by many dictators, as has the 'socialist' label (see: 1930s Europe), and the 'democratic' label (see: post-colonial Africa).
I'm not familiar enough with the area in question to know whether or not the communist party there is truly communist or not, but please don't equate communism with totalitarianism.
What I like about it was that it really discouraged players from treating combat as the sole method of meeting challenges. Yes, a combat between two PCs and 3 NPCs might take 8 hours to resolve... but that one marathon rolL-playing session would have been preceded by 6 rolE-playing sessions, maybe with some stealth, etc, thrown in.
As compared to AD&D and WH, which seemingly resolved around combat after combat after combat.
Yes, part of it depended on the GM, and YMMV, but I felt the system really guided players towards making more realistic decisions.
In my experience, IT workers are much more likely to steal toner. Why? Because they have the access. At my company, we lock down the toner. EVERY empty cartridge, box, etc must be accounted for. Usage is tracked -- when I turn in an empty to get a full one, it gets noted in the usage file... any anomalies are investigated. Sucks to be me if someone decides to steal my toner, or swap out their used home cartridge with my new one after-hours.
I tried pointing out that the tracking was more expensive than the occasional lost cartridge... for my troubles I got to compare the cost savings on toner post-tracking system.
Turns out, a company of 90 full-time employees was losing over $3000 per year on 'missing' toner. Who knew?
Nah, he's referring to what would happen if William S. Burroughs had actually written everything written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Except he left out the drugs.
Sure, gameplay is what most of us want. I tend to mix up my gameplay between strategy and casual games, and I'll tell you that a fast processor is very necessary for good one-player strategy games -- most good AI is very processor intensive. Even turn-based games are subject to this, as I cannot stand waiting 5 minutes for the AI competition to complete their turns.
Rolemaster used this system (yeah, yeah, Pen & Paper), I personally believe they perfected. The problem was that the game was way, way too complicated for a tabletop game (so many charts, gah, I dreamed of crit charts). This is not a problem with PC games, however, I'd be very curious to see some development team implement the rolemaster system into a MMO.
The only problem with thatm though, is that weapons in RM are deadly. One lucky crit by some lvl 1 goon and you're out for the count, or at least severely impaired. Impairment is another thing I'd like to see in an MMO. Get injured in the leg? Run slow. Get injured in the head? Uh-oh. This is the sort of thing that should be added into a true PvP game.
Thanks for restating my post :)
Maybe I misunderstood the OP, but s/he seemed to feel that all combinations of skill sets need to be viable. Maybe they meant that the bar needs to be lowered (thereby nerfing the 'best' combos) in order to make sure weak combos aren't overpowered, but there's no reason to ensure that a fisher-basketweaver is as viable in PvP as an archer-mage.
Second, did you forget that Vista is coming out next year? There are probably many, many people who will be upgrading their PCs in the next couple years to something a little (a lot) more powerful... myself included. For all it gets slagged on Slashdot (and I'm no MS fanboy), I'm quite confident that Vista will have high market penetration as the replacement cycle shambles on, which will help drive the market for higher-performance PCs.
Plenty of streaming radio networks do this. A couple minutes of ads to listen to an hour or so of music. Of course, if you pay to subscribe, the ads disappear...
What, "P.S.3. phone home?"
We all know about the published foibles, but now we have to worry about spyware pre-installed on the damn thing?
Well, at any rate, I'll be looking forward to the Reese's Pieces shipped with the console.
Most strategy guides are misnamed. They should call them "Spoiler Books" or something.
You don't learn strategy from strategy guides, you learn how to follow a walk-through. Where's the satisfaction in that?
Maybe I'm old-school, but I've never used a strategy guide for any game. If I can't beat the game without one, either I'm not as skilled/smart as I'd like to be, or there is a design flaw in the game. Both have been true with different games, and it's only the second possibility that really bothers me... especially when I lay out cash for a game.
That's what the moderation system and comment filtering is for.
Re: your obvious contribution to the crap, you've posted it here (your OP in this thread) so I feel quite justified in assuming that you post worthless crap elsewhere also.
If you want breaking stories, go somewhere else. If you want good discussion (yes, with all its foibles) read Slashdot. The two are pretty much mutually exclusive at this point.
So, quit your whining and realize that you pick the appropriate tool for the job.
Bill Karpovich, bringing vague managerial-speak to OSS since August 2005.
Future ventures to include:
Paradigmoss
Leveragoss
Top-downoss
Empoweros
Bleedingedgeoss
Really, I could go on and on... But for the sake of my own sanity, I'll stop there. Besides, companies have been named far worse.
The media (who are big corporations, by the way) have a lot of control of how the public views the candidates.
At the local level, we're in better shape, but national politics are controlled by the moneyed corporate interests.
I've recently been approached by several different people (most recently, the concierge at my office building) about why their internet is so slow recently. Stupid me, I forgot to ask if they used a portal... I gave them a sheet with instructions for cleaning out malware, and it didn't seem to help them. Then one of them informed me she uses AOL. Turns out, they all did. I told them all to uninstall AOL, cancel their account (good luck with that!) and use Firefox instead of IE.
My protocol for handling 'computer slowness' requests from acquaintances now begins with "Do you use AOL?".
I say we just pull out all the stops and call it 'evilware'.
At any rate, from now on, I'm only going to install goodware. Unfortunately, it appears such products are still "coming soon" and might be vaporware.
The Welsh longbow and the crossbow started the process in Europe. Gunpowder finished it off. The rapier was a ceremonial weapon used for ritualized individual warfare (dueling), which is quite different from the 'in the wild' evolution of weapons. It evolved not in response to heavy armor, but instead in response to the advantages of a long reach and damaging ability of a thrusting attack that can directly damage the vitals against an unarmored foe.
The OP does, however (unintentionally, I believe), bring up an important concept that is germaine to the DRM debate. At periods in history, there have been technological advances in weaponry and/or armor that have cause a wholesale change in how war is fought. These include mounted troops, gunpowder units (as you mention), steel, the stirrup, the machine gun, I could go on and on. When these advances were brought into play, the nature of war changed -- just as digital distribution of music is changing the nature of the business of entertainment media.
Looking at the history of popular music, we've only seen widespread distribution of media to the home for less than a century. It's been a good run for the media distributors, but their time is going the way of the cavalry charge -- shot down by thousands of bullets that we call 'downloads'.
Not anymore. The US stopped being anything close to a democracy sometime last century. It's a neo-fascist state run by corporations.
That said, there is some room for popular sentiment to sway politicians, it's just hard for the people to compete with moeyed interests regarding pet issues.
Good for Slashdot. I'd rather read some well-thought out comments and great links to other material on the topic than see the inanity that passes for comments at other places -- which you've obviously been a part of creating.