approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (X) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (X) it is defenseless against brute force attacks (X) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) users of email will not put up with it ( ) microsoft will not put up with it ( ) the police will not put up with it ( ) requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers (X) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) open relays in foreign countries ( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) asshats ( ) jurisdictional problems ( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) huge existing software investment in smtp ( ) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack ( ) willingness of users to install os patches received by email (X) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes (X) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) extreme profitability of spam ( ) joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) technically illiterate politicians ( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) blacklists suck ( ) whitelists suck ( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored ( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) sending email should be free ( ) why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem (X) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) i don't want the government reading my email ( ) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
(X) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work. (X) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Trust me, in areas where irreligious people outnumber the religious, it goes the other way just as much. It happens in schoolyards before kids know what religion is. You're talking about the general malicious nature of stupid people gathered around a social cause, not anything that has to do with religion in particular. These same ways of thinking can be applied to brand name shoes, social class, or even what privileges your parents give you in high school just as well as religion.
It's very social indeed.. I don't see your point there as that is what makes it so bad when people take it too seriously.
As I pointed out, this is taking it socially, not seriously. These attitudes aren't a part of actual Christian writings. They're part of the same mentality that drives schoolyard trends and bullies in grade school. It has nothing to do with religion. Atheists are capable and willing to treat religious people with the same contempt.
The fallacy in your point is equivalent to saying Nike is an inferior brand of shoe because people take owning it to mean more than the shoe's value. This has absolutely no bearing on the objective quality of the shoe relative to other shoes, only the social value of it.
We are just lucky in the U.S. that there are laws protecting us from religious prejudice. Like I said, it's not that way everywhere.
It goes both ways. Both religion and lack of it can be used as excuses for attitudes which degrade and devalue the lives of others. To take the behavior of a certain portion of a religion and generalize it is the essence of prejudice. It's what Hitler used to justify Jewish genocide, it's what the Catholic Church used as head of state to justify Crusade genocide against Muslims, and it's what is used by both theists and atheists today to belittle each other. With statements such as "religious shouldn't be taken seriously" there can be no respect for religion - or lack thereof - since it assumes choice of belief to be a criteria for judging someone's character negatively before discussion. That's all I'm trying to get at. To assert that religion shouldn't be taken seriously is just as blind and presumptuous as an assertion that one book contains the world's truths and all who don't listen to it are worth despising. They come from the same psychology of wanting to dismiss specifics and individual judgments in exchange for a convenient sweeping generalization.
Labeled?! Man that's harsh. It's a good thing our children don't learn that brand of social interaction by participating in public schools that foster social systems based on stereotypes, labels, and jealousy.
For an easy example, anyone who takes Christianity seriously wouldn't deliberately hurt or persecute another person, because it's against one of the most fundamental commandments (love thy neighbor as thyself). You're confusing "taking religion seriously" with "taking religion socially."
Arguable. Psychological needs are very real, and there's every reason to think that religion is a way of meeting a certain psychological need. Look at even secular society, where Al Gore has set up his own little religion where people sin by making carbon emissions and atone for it with "offsets" which do nothing more than pad pockets by helping his investments. Humans in general have a subconscious need for certain things such as guilt, the pursuit of self-righteousness, etc. that religion provides.
And that's just from a secular standpoint. If you actually believe the tenets of any religions, then you absolutely need religion to live healthily - maybe even more than the things you mention. In Christianity you need it to live eternally. In Buddhism you need it to reach Nirvana and break reincarnation. In Islam you need to avoid being smitten by Allah's wrath. While assuming that a scientific epistemic is sufficient to explain the reality of human needs is convenient, to say that only direct observation can provide that truth (or if you're agnostic, the best approximation of it) is logically just a self-contradictory assertion as a philosophy.
That's completely relative to your worldview. Religion is a subset of worldviews. To start on the premise of your non-religious worldview and claim that religion is unimportant is completely redundant.
The same could be said of technology, politics, or pretty much any other matter which is of actual importance. Just because you don't think it's worth taking seriously doesn't mean in the bigger picture it's not worth taking seriously. This isn't insightful at all, what kind of crap modding is this?
I'd assume from what they're saying that the way a Blu-Ray player works (IANAE), the hardware itself is hard-wired to throw an interrupt that loads this executable program from the disc and runs it, effectively giving the disc power over the entire system to check itself. Even if a system were compromised in software, if the hardware immediately loaded in the disc's application then it could detect that and abort from within that application (hence storing an image to check against). This would mean the only way to crack it would be a pretty tricky hardware mod, but as he says, this would only compromise that particular piece of hardware.
That's a small box you're living in. Standards complience, as with all software development, is just a topic that new learners latch onto; the professionals have already adapted to the quirks and would definitely rather have new toys to play with than the same old toys painted a different color for prettiness.
In the spirit of putting developpers first, Microsoft should make Visual Studio an open source project first. Then we can all benefit from it's awesome new list of additions:
- 100% increase in startup times
- 250% increase in IntelliSense lag
- Newly added: Features that bring up a "TODO" box or crash the program when used in random contexts
- The CD would include binaries instead of actual executables, and you would benefit from the productive experience of building it yourself
- MSDN Library would be replaced with five pages: Home, Download, Contributing, Links, and Help; the latter would lead to a set of poorly formatted discussion forums rather than the obviously overinflated and uselessly wordy MSDN help files
- The compiler would be raved about for conforming to standards but still break quite often in addition to using the most horrendously unuseful RTTI in the world
I eagerly await MS's move to OSS since it would be so great for developpers!
...would be smart enough to see Rockstar's game here, and the reason for the political response. Kneejerk reactions against "politicians" and "family values" or "free speech" have nothing to do with what's going on here. Rockstar's means of getting sales have been based very, very heavily on causing controversy.
The original GTA being headlined as the "cause" of illegal activity nationwide, and sales skyrocket; coincidence? A little-known title called Manhunt is blamed for a murder, and sales skyrocket (in fact, this trashy game goes from bargain bin to hit); coincidence? A new title is found to contain material once again violating general social and moral standards, and Rockstar is once again painted as exciting, defiant free speech advotate, and sales skyrocket. Coincidence?
Consider, why would any professional studio leave this kind of material in their game? One would have to call people incompetent and ignorant idiots all the way up and down their staff to establish this case as an "accident" of any sort. They're not; these are some of the brightest and most capable people in the industry. What this was was Rockstar playing its card to get media coverage once again, and to once again rake in profits by violating social standards.
People don't like their social standards being violated. People especially don't like when people gain money for this. Enter the governing body representing the people to cut out the profit in violating social standards. This is only about "protecting kids" to the shallow laymen. The main thing this is about is trying to give people a sense of security in their ratings system which they have a right to have.
What needs to also be done? The whole Mature rating needs to be cut out or at least CLEARLY CUT AWAY FROM THE AO RATING, because it is completely worthless (read the descriptions of both and you'll see why). The ESRB system is finally being pushed, and it has shown that its rating system has not been genuine in-and-of itself. The people who point out that this sex scene shouldn't have made the difference are correct; instead, the ESRB should be obligated to follow its own standards and rate these sorts of games AO, regardless of the financial consequences this has on the developpers.
The main thing the ESRB is scared of is that no game thus far historically has been rated AO because of violence alone. They need to set a precident. All of Rockstar's recent games were inappropriately rated under their descriptions (since they all contain "prolonged" graphic violence) and the ESRB now feels hand-tied to rate future games with these ridiculous levels of graphic violence as AO. They need to do so.
Enter the whining Slashdotters. They want Doom 3 at Walmart to buy it. They want GTA there for convenience. The ESRB realizes that if they rate these games AO, they will piss of these consumers. They are inconsistant because they have been appeasing the very people who are now turning around and blaming them for being inconsistant. I dare all the people complaining about inconsistancy here to go to the ESRB's web site, go to the feedback hotline, and ask them to use the AO rating on games involving excessive violence and gore in order to be consistant. Otherwise, quit whining since this problem has only existed for your conveience.
It does use seperate servers, but the are seamless; that is, it divides every area into automatically partitioned "districts" which can be ported between instantly. So all you have to say is "Meet in Lion's Arch dist 1" and anyone in America can meet you there. There are also international districts which players from different continents can meet on.
Good point, in the first part of the game you don't even get ANY penalty for dying, and you resurrect in the same area with all the enemies you killed dead.
A guildie of mine who won the Hall of Heroes (global tourney) several dozen times with pickup groups has no more than about 5 hours in his RP character (which he used no skills from). In GvG our guild frequently uses a member with a prebuild healer, and we've beaten guilds above rank 100 with that member in the build. The prebuild characters in PvP are without question playable and competetive and thus the argument that it takes "hours and hours" to get a competetive character is just not true.
Also, losing in an overworld zone won't port you back to town. In fact you can keep ressing for free infinitely, you will just have a high DP and need to work it off. This is especially easy in the early zones. The only zones that do port you back for dying are missions, which port you back to the beginning of the zone, not "several zones away."
And there simply isn't a grind; you'll be to L20 long before you get to the endgame and completing quests/missions (e.g. proceeding through content, not repeating it) is significantly faster to get experience than any farming would do you. I've been through the PvE with three characters and I've never stopped to "level up" or "grind."
About freaking time someone mentioned it. I play that and I have no server downtime, no seperate servers, seamless gameplay going even further cutting out the fat than WoW (I got tired of "corpse running" in WoW when I did play it if I didn't want to spend tons of gold to play again quickly), no network lag on the server end, game-controlled economics so that farming isn't an issue, item balance so that you don't have to work for hundreds of hours to get "maxed equipment" statistially, updates with both bug fixes and significant content additions every week, and I have no monthly fee.
Even a week before launch (in the beta), GW was looking cleaner and more player-friendly than WoW by leaps and bounds, and it still does, now more than ever. With the big summer content patch coming out in a week or two having followed a series of other large gameplay additions (Faction being the most significant), GW is looking to lack none of the "content additions" that WoW has been getting, and in fact it seems to roll them out a lot faster.
You would have to be implying catastrophic failures and incompetence on multiple levels of the development team to end up with a situation like that in the first place (especially on a console title; console titles are tested to death and thus you wouldn't get that feedback "at the last minute" unless your testing team was made up of idiots), failures which shouldn't happen at a company hiring people of the caliber that they do to produce the quality of games they do. What's more, unless their whole content system was a frail hack (no chance in a large game like GTA), the actual art and models used there could have and should have been completely removed from the gold; at worst case it should have frozen when someone tried to run that section of the game or showed filler box-models.
There are only a few options I can think of:
- The Rockstar team are idiots from design down to testing (no way)
- The Rockstar team was originally developping GTA as an AO game
- The Rockstar team intentionally left it in to start controversy as their former titles are infamous for, and were dipping their toes in the water for having "unlockable" adult content in future M games
The ratings below M are actually used, with actual games, and actually a majority of games, thus your question is silly. "Controversial" games represent a small minority of the number of game titles published (and the development houses that produce them also a minority) and simply get a large amount of media attention for the FUD that both sides argue ("our children are being corrupted and people are dying" versus "our rights to free speech are going to be abolished"). While games like GTA get good sales and better media, their elimination from the mainstream market would only be a gap filled by something else and would be of more benefit to the industry's name than it would detriment to their finances. The adult entertainment market is already a multi-billion dollar industry; Rockstar would just have to setup shop there. After all, their target audience is essentially adult anyhow, right? The one-year slide is just a financial appeasement; it should not exist in a sensible rating system and needs to go before the ESRB can become more than a joke at rating graphic games.
It makes sense that culturally, a game that emphasizes illegal activity, killing of realistic people in realistic settings, and contains sexual situations not suitable for a minor shouldn't be marketted to anyone under 18, regardless of the commercial consequences. The problem isn't that GTA would get pulled; the problem is that it was there in the first place, which was due to playing political games instead of just using moral sense.
It usually is looked over if it takes a hack to get to since the content isn't really "pornographic" in nature (in the sense of intending to add sexual content). In stark contrast, the GTA scenes are obviously pornographic in nature and intent (with not only art but gameplay elements) and not just an "art issue."
The line is simple. #6, #5, #4 are all developper-end content issues where content that was explicitly sexual was put in the game deliberately by the developper. #3, #2, and #1 are user-end introductions of new content (just using the existant rendering system). #3 is the only blurry one since it would be ridiculous if the models were too "detailed" under the clothes (which would be content made by the developper).
The standard has always been "who introduced the content that breaks the rating?" In this case the user is introducing nothing but a jump within the code's existant code; no new content is introduced. When it comes to reskinning, that's introducing new content in the form of a skin.
Have people who are still claiming this is a case of "inserted content" even read the article? The content was already in there. That means, that within Rockstar, the following people have to have not only seen it, but spent time developping it:
- Programmers
- Content Managers (and minions)
- Artists and Animators
- Game Designers/Script Writers
- Script Programmers
This means probably at least a dozen people within Rockstar worked on this content, in the state you see it now. They knew it existed, and they did not remove it. Rockstar flatly lied about the content not being in the game originally. This ruling in no way says that added content can change a game's rating; it does say content on the product disk can, which makes full sense.
As for people criticizing the rating change, it's actually good that the ESRB has the balls to start enforcing its ratings now. What they need to do though is cut the crap with "17+" and "18+" ratings and just bump Mature games to AO. Since obviously pornography is not going to be sold to anyone under 18 and that's not negociable, do the people complaining about "inconsistancy" really want violent games (Doom 3, HL2, RE4, etc.) to all be rated 18+ as well? I wouldn't mind that (and I say this as a game developper by profession), but wouldn't you?
If you are going to complain about something, at least grace the reader with your proposed solution and its consequences and why it is better than how things are.
But we're not playing a blame game, we're trying to find a solution. Who's to blame doesn't matter. What we can do about it does.
You blame "parents" as if the "parents" complaining now are the same "parents" who neglect their children. The people looking for the solution are the reasonable parents who have done all they can to protect their own children, not the neglectful parents who don't care.
They realize that if a child becomes violent from a game and shoots another child, it won't be that child that pays the largest price; it will be theirs or some other, one that didn't even play the game. Therefore making tougher laws to keep these games out of the hands of children (by whatever means necessary, even if it has consequences on the ease of use of these games for adults) seems the only reasonable solution to them. Do you have a better idea?
Besides, if you don't think GTA is marketed for teens under 17, you probably also don't believe smoking causes lung cancer.
Slashdot Mirror
your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) users of email will not put up with it
( ) microsoft will not put up with it
( ) the police will not put up with it
( ) requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(X) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) asshats
( ) jurisdictional problems
( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) huge existing software investment in smtp
( ) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
( ) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
(X) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
(X) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) extreme profitability of spam
( ) joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
( ) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) sending email should be free
( ) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(X) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) i don't want the government reading my email
( ) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
(X) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
(X) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Trust me, in areas where irreligious people outnumber the religious, it goes the other way just as much. It happens in schoolyards before kids know what religion is. You're talking about the general malicious nature of stupid people gathered around a social cause, not anything that has to do with religion in particular. These same ways of thinking can be applied to brand name shoes, social class, or even what privileges your parents give you in high school just as well as religion.
As I pointed out, this is taking it socially, not seriously. These attitudes aren't a part of actual Christian writings. They're part of the same mentality that drives schoolyard trends and bullies in grade school. It has nothing to do with religion. Atheists are capable and willing to treat religious people with the same contempt.
The fallacy in your point is equivalent to saying Nike is an inferior brand of shoe because people take owning it to mean more than the shoe's value. This has absolutely no bearing on the objective quality of the shoe relative to other shoes, only the social value of it.
We are just lucky in the U.S. that there are laws protecting us from religious prejudice. Like I said, it's not that way everywhere.
It goes both ways. Both religion and lack of it can be used as excuses for attitudes which degrade and devalue the lives of others. To take the behavior of a certain portion of a religion and generalize it is the essence of prejudice. It's what Hitler used to justify Jewish genocide, it's what the Catholic Church used as head of state to justify Crusade genocide against Muslims, and it's what is used by both theists and atheists today to belittle each other. With statements such as "religious shouldn't be taken seriously" there can be no respect for religion - or lack thereof - since it assumes choice of belief to be a criteria for judging someone's character negatively before discussion. That's all I'm trying to get at. To assert that religion shouldn't be taken seriously is just as blind and presumptuous as an assertion that one book contains the world's truths and all who don't listen to it are worth despising. They come from the same psychology of wanting to dismiss specifics and individual judgments in exchange for a convenient sweeping generalization.
For an easy example, anyone who takes Christianity seriously wouldn't deliberately hurt or persecute another person, because it's against one of the most fundamental commandments (love thy neighbor as thyself). You're confusing "taking religion seriously" with "taking religion socially."
And that's just from a secular standpoint. If you actually believe the tenets of any religions, then you absolutely need religion to live healthily - maybe even more than the things you mention. In Christianity you need it to live eternally. In Buddhism you need it to reach Nirvana and break reincarnation. In Islam you need to avoid being smitten by Allah's wrath. While assuming that a scientific epistemic is sufficient to explain the reality of human needs is convenient, to say that only direct observation can provide that truth (or if you're agnostic, the best approximation of it) is logically just a self-contradictory assertion as a philosophy.
That's completely relative to your worldview. Religion is a subset of worldviews. To start on the premise of your non-religious worldview and claim that religion is unimportant is completely redundant.
Politics not being taken seriously is why our government is a joke, yet ironically here people are complaining about it.
The same could be said of technology, politics, or pretty much any other matter which is of actual importance. Just because you don't think it's worth taking seriously doesn't mean in the bigger picture it's not worth taking seriously. This isn't insightful at all, what kind of crap modding is this?
I say we start with sharpies and work from there.
That's a small box you're living in. Standards complience, as with all software development, is just a topic that new learners latch onto; the professionals have already adapted to the quirks and would definitely rather have new toys to play with than the same old toys painted a different color for prettiness.
- 100% increase in startup times
- 250% increase in IntelliSense lag
- Newly added: Features that bring up a "TODO" box or crash the program when used in random contexts
- The CD would include binaries instead of actual executables, and you would benefit from the productive experience of building it yourself
- MSDN Library would be replaced with five pages: Home, Download, Contributing, Links, and Help; the latter would lead to a set of poorly formatted discussion forums rather than the obviously overinflated and uselessly wordy MSDN help files
- The compiler would be raved about for conforming to standards but still break quite often in addition to using the most horrendously unuseful RTTI in the world
I eagerly await MS's move to OSS since it would be so great for developpers!
The original GTA being headlined as the "cause" of illegal activity nationwide, and sales skyrocket; coincidence? A little-known title called Manhunt is blamed for a murder, and sales skyrocket (in fact, this trashy game goes from bargain bin to hit); coincidence? A new title is found to contain material once again violating general social and moral standards, and Rockstar is once again painted as exciting, defiant free speech advotate, and sales skyrocket. Coincidence?
Consider, why would any professional studio leave this kind of material in their game? One would have to call people incompetent and ignorant idiots all the way up and down their staff to establish this case as an "accident" of any sort. They're not; these are some of the brightest and most capable people in the industry. What this was was Rockstar playing its card to get media coverage once again, and to once again rake in profits by violating social standards.
People don't like their social standards being violated. People especially don't like when people gain money for this. Enter the governing body representing the people to cut out the profit in violating social standards. This is only about "protecting kids" to the shallow laymen. The main thing this is about is trying to give people a sense of security in their ratings system which they have a right to have.
What needs to also be done? The whole Mature rating needs to be cut out or at least CLEARLY CUT AWAY FROM THE AO RATING, because it is completely worthless (read the descriptions of both and you'll see why). The ESRB system is finally being pushed, and it has shown that its rating system has not been genuine in-and-of itself. The people who point out that this sex scene shouldn't have made the difference are correct; instead, the ESRB should be obligated to follow its own standards and rate these sorts of games AO, regardless of the financial consequences this has on the developpers.
The main thing the ESRB is scared of is that no game thus far historically has been rated AO because of violence alone. They need to set a precident. All of Rockstar's recent games were inappropriately rated under their descriptions (since they all contain "prolonged" graphic violence) and the ESRB now feels hand-tied to rate future games with these ridiculous levels of graphic violence as AO. They need to do so.
Enter the whining Slashdotters. They want Doom 3 at Walmart to buy it. They want GTA there for convenience. The ESRB realizes that if they rate these games AO, they will piss of these consumers. They are inconsistant because they have been appeasing the very people who are now turning around and blaming them for being inconsistant. I dare all the people complaining about inconsistancy here to go to the ESRB's web site, go to the feedback hotline, and ask them to use the AO rating on games involving excessive violence and gore in order to be consistant. Otherwise, quit whining since this problem has only existed for your conveience.
It does use seperate servers, but the are seamless; that is, it divides every area into automatically partitioned "districts" which can be ported between instantly. So all you have to say is "Meet in Lion's Arch dist 1" and anyone in America can meet you there. There are also international districts which players from different continents can meet on.
Good point, in the first part of the game you don't even get ANY penalty for dying, and you resurrect in the same area with all the enemies you killed dead.
Also, losing in an overworld zone won't port you back to town. In fact you can keep ressing for free infinitely, you will just have a high DP and need to work it off. This is especially easy in the early zones. The only zones that do port you back for dying are missions, which port you back to the beginning of the zone, not "several zones away."
And there simply isn't a grind; you'll be to L20 long before you get to the endgame and completing quests/missions (e.g. proceeding through content, not repeating it) is significantly faster to get experience than any farming would do you. I've been through the PvE with three characters and I've never stopped to "level up" or "grind."
About freaking time someone mentioned it. I play that and I have no server downtime, no seperate servers, seamless gameplay going even further cutting out the fat than WoW (I got tired of "corpse running" in WoW when I did play it if I didn't want to spend tons of gold to play again quickly), no network lag on the server end, game-controlled economics so that farming isn't an issue, item balance so that you don't have to work for hundreds of hours to get "maxed equipment" statistially, updates with both bug fixes and significant content additions every week, and I have no monthly fee. Even a week before launch (in the beta), GW was looking cleaner and more player-friendly than WoW by leaps and bounds, and it still does, now more than ever. With the big summer content patch coming out in a week or two having followed a series of other large gameplay additions (Faction being the most significant), GW is looking to lack none of the "content additions" that WoW has been getting, and in fact it seems to roll them out a lot faster.
There are only a few options I can think of:
- The Rockstar team are idiots from design down to testing (no way)
- The Rockstar team was originally developping GTA as an AO game
- The Rockstar team intentionally left it in to start controversy as their former titles are infamous for, and were dipping their toes in the water for having "unlockable" adult content in future M games
The last seems the most likely.
It makes sense that culturally, a game that emphasizes illegal activity, killing of realistic people in realistic settings, and contains sexual situations not suitable for a minor shouldn't be marketted to anyone under 18, regardless of the commercial consequences. The problem isn't that GTA would get pulled; the problem is that it was there in the first place, which was due to playing political games instead of just using moral sense.
It usually is looked over if it takes a hack to get to since the content isn't really "pornographic" in nature (in the sense of intending to add sexual content). In stark contrast, the GTA scenes are obviously pornographic in nature and intent (with not only art but gameplay elements) and not just an "art issue."
The standard has always been "who introduced the content that breaks the rating?" In this case the user is introducing nothing but a jump within the code's existant code; no new content is introduced. When it comes to reskinning, that's introducing new content in the form of a skin.
- Programmers
- Content Managers (and minions)
- Artists and Animators
- Game Designers/Script Writers
- Script Programmers
This means probably at least a dozen people within Rockstar worked on this content, in the state you see it now. They knew it existed, and they did not remove it. Rockstar flatly lied about the content not being in the game originally. This ruling in no way says that added content can change a game's rating; it does say content on the product disk can, which makes full sense.
As for people criticizing the rating change, it's actually good that the ESRB has the balls to start enforcing its ratings now. What they need to do though is cut the crap with "17+" and "18+" ratings and just bump Mature games to AO. Since obviously pornography is not going to be sold to anyone under 18 and that's not negociable, do the people complaining about "inconsistancy" really want violent games (Doom 3, HL2, RE4, etc.) to all be rated 18+ as well? I wouldn't mind that (and I say this as a game developper by profession), but wouldn't you?
If you are going to complain about something, at least grace the reader with your proposed solution and its consequences and why it is better than how things are.
But we're not playing a blame game, we're trying to find a solution. Who's to blame doesn't matter. What we can do about it does. You blame "parents" as if the "parents" complaining now are the same "parents" who neglect their children. The people looking for the solution are the reasonable parents who have done all they can to protect their own children, not the neglectful parents who don't care. They realize that if a child becomes violent from a game and shoots another child, it won't be that child that pays the largest price; it will be theirs or some other, one that didn't even play the game. Therefore making tougher laws to keep these games out of the hands of children (by whatever means necessary, even if it has consequences on the ease of use of these games for adults) seems the only reasonable solution to them. Do you have a better idea? Besides, if you don't think GTA is marketed for teens under 17, you probably also don't believe smoking causes lung cancer.