1) You give me a product, I give you money. That's the deal, don't abuse it. 2) All software should stay in their 'sandbox'. i.e., unless I explicitely allow the program to do so all software should shut down in its entirety when I click close. That goes double for games. Remember playing games is not the only thing I do on my computer. 3) I don't give a shit about ingame advertising. 4)Never install secondary programs that run outside of the game environment. Be it for anti-piracy, or any other reason. 5) Never monitor my browsing 6) Never send my data anywhere without my explicit consent each and every time. 8) Ever
I run a similar style company called Dial-A-Geek (Shut up, when I made the name I thought I was being original...) based in British Columbia Canada. We provide in home and on site computer support.
What do my techs do? Exactly the same sort of stuff the normal/.er does in the course of their day. I'm not hired by/.'ers I hire them, assuming they can check their ego at the door.
Honestly, as was already pointed out, basic troubleshooting is necessary for a large segment of the population. Could most people do the reinstalls, upgrades, repairs, virus scans and other tasks that we perform? Sure, but they'd prefer to have a professional do it we have the experience and the tools to ensure backups are performed can find things like drivers quickly. It's not rocket science, but experience makes it quicker and less painful. Just like (oh god incoming car analogy) I could spend my Saturday changing the fluids in my car I'd rather let a mechanic do it.
The reality is that a lot of people are still not very computer savvy and (here's the important point) not interested in becoming savvy. They find our job boring and would rather never think about computer repair and maintenance. They'd rather do the things they enjoy in life. I'm overhearing the conversations of a couple of our frontline people right now. Want to know what they're saying?
"Yes ma'am a reinstall is like resetting your computer back to the day you bought it. Well we save your data, but applications would have to be reinstalled. Like Office. Like Word. Like that blue W you press when you want to type. No it doesn't come with Windows. Yes I'm sure, unless there was a restore CD. A disk that came with your computer, or it would've ask you to burn one when you bought it. You don't remember? Not a problem our technician can look for it when he arrives."
and on and on.
The world might be virtual, but the friendships can be real. People invest emotionally in a ton of things that other people find silly. Sitting on a high horse and judging what other people find meaningful just makes you look like an ass.
This one I know...
It dates back to the initial beat testing of EQ. In it the chat window had an ugly bug where it would delete the last character in your text. So if you said 'hello' they'd see 'hell'. End result of that was a few new conventions in MUD speak including 'ok' being truncated to 'k' then to 'kk' to ensure that you group would see the first 'k'.
Stuck around ever since.
/shrug
You can spend a lot of time analyzing the motivations of companies, but I see little value in it. If they do the 'right thing' because of bad press or because of noble intentions matters little to me. The important point is that they changed.
SOE and SWG is in the doghouse right now, that means that every single decision is cast through the worst possible light. They don't change something then they're not listening to the player base. They do change something and they're wasting critical time that they could spending doing other projects. They can't win. Don't get me wronhg I think the latest changes to SWG are terrible and, well, insane, but that has nothing to do with this particular issue.
Now I don't have any idea how long it took them to code this change, maybe a couple hours, maybe a couple days. Heck maybe someone who works at SOE read Slashdot and decided to do it on his own time.
But the important point to me is this:
There was a legitimate complaint from a minority of their players. SOE saw that and took action to rectify the problem. For that they deserve some congratulations.
Good for them,
Whatever you may think about their products or SOE in general this is a positive response to a legitimate complaints of a small subset of the SWG universe.
They could've ignored it, but they didn't and for that I think they deserve a congratulations.
I run a small development firm that survives primarily on contract work. Depending on the nature and scope of what you want done, we might be able to hash something out.
Is doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different response.
Hey John,
Former SWG and EQ player here, but you know WoW...
Bluntly my question is this:
Why should I have any faith in the SWG team making something good given their track record so far. SWG has gone through multiple radical changes througout its lifspan. Each one has promised to make it the game we were originally promised. Each time the suck factor has remained undimished. So what's different this time?
As an additional question was there any talk of simply creating a SWG2 that was more in line with what people wanted instead cobbling these changes onto SWG?
Lastly, has lucasarts made any rumblings about pulling the plug given the general shoddiness of the game.
I have to ask the question. Ok, so they've spent boku $$ and they want to recoup some of the loss, but releasing a DOA device is just going to harm their company not help it.
Think of the Ngage (stop laughing I have a point)imagine if Nokia had actually LISTENED to the feedback prior to releasing it. Gone back, made the next gen version (like they did with the QD) and released that as the Ngage.
All the complaints would've disappeared, they would've had a solid product that may have been able to carve out a bit of a niche between the PSP and the GBA.
But no they had to release a POS and now every product they release is tainted by that initial one.
Plus the implicit message that Nokia doesn't understand gamers and their desires.
To Tiger I can only say:
Suck it up. Go back to the drawing board. Fix the problems, or this will be your last forray into the world of handheld gaming.
Plus having to pay 200+ extra just to get a unit that doesn't play ads? WTF??
There seems to be a misconception that this project has something do with OS wars. It doesn't. There is a perfectly good Windows option provided on page 3 of the article. Of course any Windows option requires the requisite licensing, but that dooes not preclude someone from using a Windows LiveCD.
Don't turn our relief efforts into a pissing match. It's not appropriate and completely irrelevant.
It could be argued that RPG's attract more weepy gamers, but is there any evidence? Anything besides the authors preexisting biases to lead him such a conclusion?
Nope thought not./PS still pissed that Hobbes betrayed me.
It's interesting that virtually all the things he picked for the ultimate RPG's come from the bottom of the barrel.
He had love for: SWG, Neocron, Shadowbane.
He had no love for: WoW, EQ 1/2, CoH.
Strange that the subscription numbers for the games he has no love for are far superior to those that he does like.
Ok, so a bad game can have good elements, but come on, doesn't WoW do at least one thing right (2 mill. subscribers would tend to say yes)?
honestly I think all of his ideas are, at best, perks. And the problem with perks is the more perks the developers are working on the less core elements are being perfected.
WoW perfects the core elements(combat quests environments)and eschews the perks (char customization, housing). End result? WoW rocks and SWG sucks.
We might see someone trancend the classic do quest - level up model, but until then WoW wins.
I'll preface by explaining who I am. I am thrity years old. Happily married five years. I am the CEO of a successful IT company. I have power, respect, and friends.
But this comment stripped away fifteen years from me. Again I feel like the undersized freshman entering into a very different world.
I get it. I was it. I am it.
At my school I was met with a combination of revile and contempt. This emanated from both the population of the school and some of the teachers.
Why? Because I had commited the cardinal sins.
I wore black I listened to Bauhaus I played DnD Hell I even joined the drama club at one point.
All of these were the equilvalent of my scarlet letter.
Freak-Geek-Loser I've been them all.
And now I am doubly damned because I play Video Games.
(I even played EQ)
To many people I am sure that I must be an abberation. Someone who was able to expose himself to all these negative influences yet somehow dresses himself. Goes to work. Pay way too much taxes (no seriously, damn my bill was crazy this year). Provide for my family and do all the other things I shouldn't be able to. Yet I do. I even thrive at it.
In fact I would go so far to say that it has been my 'freakish' elements that have allowed to be a success. My passion for computers, video games, and all things good and holy to the/. crowd are what I have used to make myself a success.
So why am I saying this?
To give hope to those who stuck on year two of a five year tenure in hell.
People joke about how those who were beaten up in HS go on to be the bullies boss in Post Grad. There's a lot of truth to that. It's not a god given right, but as soon as you leave HS it becomes rapidly apparent how pointless and trivial it was. How small that world is. The game is reset and the rules change.
And general sticking peoples heads in a toilet is a less valuable skill than knowing computers.
Your 5-10-15 year reunions can rapidly become a testament of how far ahead you have pulled against those were the kings of HS. Not all, but some.
All of the cliches are true to a point:
Success is the greatest revenge. Trust me. Don't let the bastards get you down. Don't drink the water they put something in it
(well maybe not the last one)
To my fellow brethen of geekdom I say this:
Do what you love and tell those that would defy you to fuck off. They'll never understand until your company goes public.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are the rules:
1) You give me a product, I give you money. That's the deal, don't abuse it.
2) All software should stay in their 'sandbox'. i.e., unless I explicitely allow the program to do so all software should shut down in its entirety when I click close. That goes double for games. Remember playing games is not the only thing I do on my computer.
3) I don't give a shit about ingame advertising.
4)Never install secondary programs that run outside of the game environment. Be it for anti-piracy, or any other reason.
5) Never monitor my browsing
6) Never send my data anywhere without my explicit consent each and every time.
8) Ever
I run a similar style company called Dial-A-Geek (Shut up, when I made the name I thought I was being original...) based in British Columbia Canada. We provide in home and on site computer support. What do my techs do? Exactly the same sort of stuff the normal /.er does in the course of their day. I'm not hired by /.'ers I hire them, assuming they can check their ego at the door.
Honestly, as was already pointed out, basic troubleshooting is necessary for a large segment of the population. Could most people do the reinstalls, upgrades, repairs, virus scans and other tasks that we perform? Sure, but they'd prefer to have a professional do it we have the experience and the tools to ensure backups are performed can find things like drivers quickly. It's not rocket science, but experience makes it quicker and less painful. Just like (oh god incoming car analogy) I could spend my Saturday changing the fluids in my car I'd rather let a mechanic do it.
The reality is that a lot of people are still not very computer savvy and (here's the important point) not interested in becoming savvy. They find our job boring and would rather never think about computer repair and maintenance. They'd rather do the things they enjoy in life. I'm overhearing the conversations of a couple of our frontline people right now. Want to know what they're saying?
"Yes ma'am a reinstall is like resetting your computer back to the day you bought it. Well we save your data, but applications would have to be reinstalled. Like Office. Like Word. Like that blue W you press when you want to type. No it doesn't come with Windows. Yes I'm sure, unless there was a restore CD. A disk that came with your computer, or it would've ask you to burn one when you bought it. You don't remember? Not a problem our technician can look for it when he arrives."
and on and on.
The world might be virtual, but the friendships can be real. People invest emotionally in a ton of things that other people find silly. Sitting on a high horse and judging what other people find meaningful just makes you look like an ass.
This one I know... It dates back to the initial beat testing of EQ. In it the chat window had an ugly bug where it would delete the last character in your text. So if you said 'hello' they'd see 'hell'. End result of that was a few new conventions in MUD speak including 'ok' being truncated to 'k' then to 'kk' to ensure that you group would see the first 'k'. Stuck around ever since.
/shrug You can spend a lot of time analyzing the motivations of companies, but I see little value in it. If they do the 'right thing' because of bad press or because of noble intentions matters little to me. The important point is that they changed. SOE and SWG is in the doghouse right now, that means that every single decision is cast through the worst possible light. They don't change something then they're not listening to the player base. They do change something and they're wasting critical time that they could spending doing other projects. They can't win. Don't get me wronhg I think the latest changes to SWG are terrible and, well, insane, but that has nothing to do with this particular issue. Now I don't have any idea how long it took them to code this change, maybe a couple hours, maybe a couple days. Heck maybe someone who works at SOE read Slashdot and decided to do it on his own time. But the important point to me is this: There was a legitimate complaint from a minority of their players. SOE saw that and took action to rectify the problem. For that they deserve some congratulations.
Good for them, Whatever you may think about their products or SOE in general this is a positive response to a legitimate complaints of a small subset of the SWG universe. They could've ignored it, but they didn't and for that I think they deserve a congratulations.
I run a small development firm that survives primarily on contract work. Depending on the nature and scope of what you want done, we might be able to hash something out.
Is doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different response.
Hey John,
Former SWG and EQ player here, but you know WoW...
Bluntly my question is this:
Why should I have any faith in the SWG team making something good given their track record so far. SWG has gone through multiple radical changes througout its lifspan. Each one has promised to make it the game we were originally promised. Each time the suck factor has remained undimished. So what's different this time?
As an additional question was there any talk of simply creating a SWG2 that was more in line with what people wanted instead cobbling these changes onto SWG?
Lastly, has lucasarts made any rumblings about pulling the plug given the general shoddiness of the game.
I have to ask the question. Ok, so they've spent boku $$ and they want to recoup some of the loss, but releasing a DOA device is just going to harm their company not help it.
Think of the Ngage (stop laughing I have a point)imagine if Nokia had actually LISTENED to the feedback prior to releasing it. Gone back, made the next gen version (like they did with the QD) and released that as the Ngage.
All the complaints would've disappeared, they would've had a solid product that may have been able to carve out a bit of a niche between the PSP and the GBA.
But no they had to release a POS and now every product they release is tainted by that initial one.
Plus the implicit message that Nokia doesn't understand gamers and their desires.
To Tiger I can only say:
Suck it up. Go back to the drawing board. Fix the problems, or this will be your last forray into the world of handheld gaming.
Plus having to pay 200+ extra just to get a unit that doesn't play ads? WTF??
Actually I am interested. send me an e-mail at cNOSPAMgillen@shaw.ca .
There seems to be a misconception that this project has something do with OS wars. It doesn't. There is a perfectly good Windows option provided on page 3 of the article. Of course any Windows option requires the requisite licensing, but that dooes not preclude someone from using a Windows LiveCD. Don't turn our relief efforts into a pissing match. It's not appropriate and completely irrelevant.
No, which is why a Windows LiveCD option is included.
It could be argued that RPG's attract more weepy gamers, but is there any evidence? Anything besides the authors preexisting biases to lead him such a conclusion?
/PS still pissed that Hobbes betrayed me.
Nope thought not.
It's interesting that virtually all the things he picked for the ultimate RPG's come from the bottom of the barrel.
He had love for: SWG, Neocron, Shadowbane.
He had no love for: WoW, EQ 1/2, CoH.
Strange that the subscription numbers for the games he has no love for are far superior to those that he does like.
Ok, so a bad game can have good elements, but come on, doesn't WoW do at least one thing right (2 mill. subscribers would tend to say yes)?
honestly I think all of his ideas are, at best, perks. And the problem with perks is the more perks the developers are working on the less core elements are being perfected.
WoW perfects the core elements(combat quests environments)and eschews the perks (char customization, housing). End result? WoW rocks and SWG sucks.
We might see someone trancend the classic do quest - level up model, but until then WoW wins.
I'll preface by explaining who I am. I am thrity years old. Happily married five years. I am the CEO of a successful IT company. I have power, respect, and friends.
/. crowd are what I have used to make myself a success.
But this comment stripped away fifteen years from me. Again I feel like the undersized freshman entering into a very different world.
I get it. I was it. I am it.
At my school I was met with a combination of revile and contempt. This emanated from both the population of the school and some of the teachers.
Why? Because I had commited the cardinal sins.
I wore black
I listened to Bauhaus
I played DnD
Hell I even joined the drama club at one point.
All of these were the equilvalent of my scarlet letter.
Freak-Geek-Loser I've been them all.
And now I am doubly damned because I play Video Games.
(I even played EQ)
To many people I am sure that I must be an abberation. Someone who was able to expose himself to all these negative influences yet somehow dresses himself. Goes to work. Pay way too much taxes (no seriously, damn my bill was crazy this year). Provide for my family and do all the other things I shouldn't be able to. Yet I do. I even thrive at it.
In fact I would go so far to say that it has been my 'freakish' elements that have allowed to be a success. My passion for computers, video games, and all things good and holy to the
So why am I saying this?
To give hope to those who stuck on year two of a five year tenure in hell.
People joke about how those who were beaten up in HS go on to be the bullies boss in Post Grad. There's a lot of truth to that. It's not a god given right, but as soon as you leave HS it becomes rapidly apparent how pointless and trivial it was. How small that world is. The game is reset and the rules change.
And general sticking peoples heads in a toilet is a less valuable skill than knowing computers.
Your 5-10-15 year reunions can rapidly become a testament of how far ahead you have pulled against those were the kings of HS. Not all, but some.
All of the cliches are true to a point:
Success is the greatest revenge. Trust me.
Don't let the bastards get you down.
Don't drink the water they put something in it
(well maybe not the last one)
To my fellow brethen of geekdom I say this:
Do what you love and tell those that would defy you to fuck off. They'll never understand until your company goes public.