I'd just like to add that they gave those of us who worked as employees about 3 weeks notice that we were all out of a job. I know that the store I was the morning/closing manager for in downtown Cleveland was pulling in an extremely hefty profit per month as I was responsible for cleaning up the books at the end of each week. And nothing has gone in to replace us. Cleveland is lucky to have a few local shops, but they are all extremely cramped/overcrowded and generally not the greatest places to hang out.
Just to add one more NOTE to your point. Nintendo has been pretty consistent about charging more in Japan for their consoles than in the United States, for the initial release price at least.
Yes, but I probably wouldn't be happy if the man running my bank's security was convicted of robbing banks.
Not sure if you read the link I posted, but in summary, the guy who was THE HEAD of DHS task force for finding pedophiles was convicted of being a pedophile.
I'm not damning all of DHS. There are hundreds of thousands of hard working people who work under that general banner. My point is that the leadership is unfortunatly appointed by moronic political leaders who would rather give jobs to a friend of a friend then find the right man for the job. That is the point of the original article for this discussion. This criminally inept leadership cripples the work of those who are trying to make a difference as their work is undercut or ignored.
Had to look twice at that second reference. Gator!? The guys who practically invented mainstream data-mining? I've seen some of the inside of Homeland Security and I was depressed at its prospects. But between this and the fact that they regularly hire sexual predators to defend us,
Some days you just have to sit back and dream because reality is far too confusing. Conservatives actually espousing their correct value set concerning government regulation? Democrats (Hillary and cohorts) trying to "save the children" with mindless studies that egrediously waste tax payer money that could go to something like education?
Some days you just wish for a party that would be the proponents of a moderate and fiscally responsible social safety net and completely disregard this moral safety net idiocy. A long shot, I know. But since when did the government have the right or even the ability to make subjective judgements about morality? Religious people should be up in arms that the government is interfering with their baliwack (instead of just muddying up religion with politics). Church groups should be pounding the street protesting the latest GTA, not trying to get politicians to deal with it. I can ignore street protests...laws are a little harder.
Other than the "we are going to copy x-box live, except that we are doing it with SOE so it will be MMORPGtastic is some way", the only thing I found of value in those announcements concerning the PS3 was about the harddrive. Although they did not talk about "units" or "sku's" or show anything in real terms out there, the topics they went over leaned heavily on downloaded content. I was personally afraid that they were going the way the 360 did with the 2 product debacle. If I preorder a PS3, I want the damn system. I do not want some crimpled gimp that requires future upgrades to act as the actual product I bought. It was about 5 months before the 360's release that they started talking about having a "core/premium" setup. Hopefully Sony avoids this misstep. If they want my money, they better not try and thrust a memory card on me again...
I playhed through both parts of the demo that came with Dragon Quest 8 and although I am skeptical, it will still be fun and that is what matters. I am one of those that enjoyed the menu'ed battle system and lament its loss, but the new system isnt terrible. There are a few holes that I think made it alittle too easy. I found myself "kiting" all the enemies with the ranged class character, (kiting being the process of casting a spell to slow a monsters movement/attack and then running it around as it gets beat down) which made everything but the boss fights very easy. Hopefully they have some nice ranged attack monsters and have removed some the ridiculous effectiveness of Time Magic.
In summation, the only thing new this time around is the battle system and I find it a fresh experience, although the jury is still out on whether it is "better".
Less than a month ago I read a few articles concerning the fact that there are already ridiculously large subsidies to telecom companies to "offset" the costs of laying down cable for broadband internet. Essentially, this subsidy was supposed to create a market where several companies were competing to offer access on par with what the Japanese provide. So far all I've seen are companies lining their pockets, forming monopolies (I'm looking at you AT&T), not competing except in extremely dense ubran markets, and offering up a service that is only 1/10 the power we were promised and pitiful when compared to any other first world coutnry of comparable technical capacity. The only thing I believe the Dems could do on this front is pass a law that tells the Big Telecos to piss of when a local municipality tries to form citywide wireless or broadband. When Philidelphia gave it a shot they were taken to the State Supreme Court for trying to provide their citizens a service! Despite what it sounds like, I'm not an anti-business kind of person, I just can't stomach the kind of greed and corruption that exists at the highest wealth bracket in our country. If you don't agree, just think about this, ever notice how basic employee benefits like healthcare and pension are the first thing to go and any wage cut for the top 10% of executives are the last?
Ever notice how every 4 years there seem to be a lot more political commercials on TV?
Or the fact there are more action movies in the summer and more serious Oscar contender's and fantasy epics in the winter?
Now, have you noticed about how this "Industry" referenced above (the software industry), always goes into a psychological/monetary depression ever 3-4 years in the beginning of a new hardware cycle? We have already seen a ton of articles that sum up to, "Consumer's unwilling to spend great % of their income on gaming and will therefore buy less software to afford hardware". The software industry hasn't changed how they handle the cycle, like starting to release ALL new titles at reduced cost, so why do they expect any different? If they did have this 8-12 months of reduced game costs I bet they would still see the same numbers of units sold as before. Demand does decrease to a certain degree, but its not that much as long as they are making halfway decent games(insert flame about bad sequels etc.). Its just that people can't suddenly dip into the couch and find more disposable income. This kind of year has always been followed by a year of record breaking sales, as people want the new and interesting games for their new systems and developers hit their stride with coding on the new machines. If the stuffed suits over on Wallstreet can figure this out, why can't the software people?
My server was relatively new when I started on it and now it has the usual primetime que of well over 500+. Compared to other servers this could be rather minor but the fact that it is still causing me headaches shows how severe the problem is.
My example is probably one that many have experienced. My raid guild was doing its usual round of Onyxia followed by MC and right in the middle of MC, I disconnect. Usually not that big of an issue, as I just do a restart and log back in....to find a que of 780 and a wait time of about an hour. I'm one of the primary healers, so its alot harder to take on bosses without me and getting another guildmate in takes time. Add to that the fact that I wont get any of the loot I might have been able to have a chance at and the issue of my reputation with the guild. Even if I'm a good player, if there is a higher chance I'll disconnect and be gone for over an hour because of the QUE (curse its name!) I'm less likely to be brought on raids. So it hurts me and everyone I'm playing with.
I especially don't know how casual players deal with it. If they want to log on and spend a free hour questing or something, in which case they can't prearrange that time and prepare, they wont play a minute as they just sit the que.
Over the last decade China has done as much as possible to stimulate growth while keeping everything internal. By doing this, they have burned through tons of cash in the form of loans that are not supposed to be paid back, incredibly risky investments that rarely succeed, and attempting to provide services to the massively burgeoning urban population that move to these new cities they construct. The only thing that has made this sustainable was the insatiable demand of world consumers (don't just pin the US, we are only the biggest piece of the pie, not the whole thing) for their cheap products. Yet, things like this internet move undermine the entire system by seperating themselves from the very lifelines they need to fund their system. If they create this backbone, they either are going to have to have matching root systems stay in place for companies to interact with the rest of the world, (who aren't picking up Mandarin chinese characters as a second internet language, no thanks) or risk losing all of the business in the country that demands contact with those outside who wish to communicate. I'm not saying that their internal system prevents all collaboration, it just adds difficulty to something that doesn't need it. Either case will be ridiculously expensive to both put it place and maintain and serve no purpose other than to the satisfy their own paranoid fantasies. The Chinses boom is based on consumerism and their ability to identify and meet the demands of the market, and this only hinders that and hastens the tipping both of their unsustainable growth.
I never really considered this idea of "work enviroment" related training and how MMO's can foster develope of these skills. Imagine how many times in school your teachers gave you a ridiculous group project simply because they wanted to teach kids how to function in a results-based enviroment as a group. There are alot of skills you learn in an MMO group: leadership, listening, adapting to change based on observation of other's actions, conflict resolution, etc. that are nice to have when you step into that deep, cold, void of the real world. Obviously they are not saying that everyone learns these skills, but I can definatly see that the challenges set before players do foster such ideas.
For those of you WoWer's who never went through the Everquest days let me give you some situations where a "harder" game may have consequences:
Imagine having to spend 10+ hours of grinding to get level 29.
Imagine doing a 5+ endgame raid where you finally get the boss and you lose the roll on the loot. And so you leave your computer having lost almost a complete level of experience with wipes and not much to show for it. (And you though get groups together was hard)
Now imagine trying to keep a guild together or just general group tension down when wiping with any party can cost you the exp equivalent of 3-4 hours of mob grinding. Plus a ton of extra time and money in regents from having to summon all your corpses from under the feet of "Baron VonAssbeater".
I had alot of fun with EQ and a pretty successful guild. But I was also a teenager and this was the best that was available at the time. There is No Way in Hell I would put up with that stuff now.
Oh yeah, lets remove China's MFN Status. By the way, we here in the US started calling it Normal Trade Relations or NTR in 1998, since about 147 countries had MFN status with us. And the only point of NTR is the fact that we can't put tariffs on import/export goods. The end. And would people really want the extreme rampant inflation that the institution of these tariffs would bring? Because although we talk about just Walmart goods going up in price, with the amount we import from China the increase in price in the multitude of imported goods that China sends us would shockwave into every part of our daily life. Removing NTR from China is just something anti-China hawks like to harp about, since 99.9% of America are against the consequences it would bring.
What really needs to happen, is that we need to lean like hell on China to remove the international capital restrictions they have on their people. They simply do not allow people in China to invest much in foreign countries and therefore they aren't really playing fair. Because, for all the "Rising China" stuff, it would be far more likely that their business elite would invest in the safe/good returns of Western Companies as opposed to the incredibly risky Chinese start-ups, or the amazingly inefficient government run industries.
After reading Tharkban's comment I reread my own and realized I seemed like a cheerleader. My knowledge of this stuff is based off of research I've done on disarmament treaties and I really think that its all a tremendous waste of scientific knowhow and resources. Some useful stuff has come from it, like radar, but its overall a crazy waste. Its part of the reason for the USSR collapse. Putin's "my missile's penis is better than yours" statements are futile and only serve as a distraction to Russia's organizational failures. Its exactly like same rhetoric Kruschev used to toss out all the time to placate the hardliners of his day.
I personally would be far more blown away by a technology that got pizza to my house faster.
A missile that zig-zags eh?
I really wonder what this will do to the accuracy rating of that missile. Russian standards are pretty low as Russian radar and targeting systems are dreadfully behind current US military tech, and with the additional variation in trajectory who the hell knows where that thing will fall?
If you look at the history of the development of ballistic missiles, the Russians focused on huge missiles with tons of warheads so that it could go ridiculously off course and still damage the target. The US went for things like the cruise missile, that had a small number of warheads but was very accurate. Thats why we have "Aegis" class radar.
Oh, and Putin's bragging about the fact that his missiles can change trajectory in flight? *gasp!* Obviously thats thousands of times better than our amazingly advances unmanned drones which can be equiped with small missiles or used for laser guided targeting.
All sarcasm aside, I wonder if the Russians are still using the very dangerous and unmanagable liquid fuel in their missiles?
Blizzard really only has three options in this situation:
1. Freedom of Expression,
If you say that these people have the freedom to collect together and openly espouse the values/personal choices/lifestyle similarities, than you must open this standard to all "virtual citizens" in WoW. The verbal harassment system becomes moot because Blizzard has given a basic set of freedoms to all its players. This is the, "If Jewish pride groups can march near city hall then so can the Neo-Nazi's" because freedom can fully be offensive," example.
2.Allocate generous resources to monitoring harassment issues and make thousands of daily decisions in a timely manner,
This is the only way Blizzard could decide which groups can come together and advertise and which can't. Leaving behind how in the world they could develope a fair and far-reaching policy standard, the workload for this "Quality of Experience" issue would be enourmous and vastly overload the current less-than-pervasive GM staff. They would set a standard that the Executives agree with and enforce it around the clock. Unless they had the intellect of Solomon, I'm guessing that they would still take a ton of crap.
3. Cut of the problem with a "blanket" ban of things that might incite harassment,
This is the cheapest and least time consuming of the three, as they can just say, "Nope, we don't want this and its ours game so you can't do it." It is fully within their rights. We can always yell and scream about the fairness of our virtual social experience, but they are the one's in control. If you want to punish them, stop giving them money. That's what they are after in the first place. I personally am not all that up in arms about this decision. If you really wanted to do a Guild that espoused a certain value-set or lifestyle, its easy to do so in a way that is on a "person-to-person" level. And you'll probably end up with better guildmates that way anyway.
I picked up Gamepro from the very first issue it ever printed and have been a subscriber ever since. Nowadays it is simply more out of habit and my family wanting to continue the tradition my grandmother started than my strong desire to read it. The problem with that magazine in particular was that the very strong minds in the writing and editorial staff were promoted or poached away to places that offered higher salaries/position. I can understand the lure of more money and escaping more of the "hectic deadline" kind of life, but it really hurt the magazine. The combination of newer people and an increased level of "make money with adds" rather than "provide substance to readers" culture brought the quality of the magazine down. They seemed much more interested in competing with other rags that wanted to play off the pop culture fads of the day,(I really REALLY don't care what games the tards in Linkin Park or from some sports team play), than providing me with a source of new info on the games/developments I was interested in. It is so bad today that any source of real news, like a new GTA or the Revolution controller, get full layouts as if it was written by that company's marketing dept, and maybe it is. Much of the genuine critiquing has gone by the wayside. Something has to be a HUGE pile of shit to get negative press.
I want to note one exception very quickly. The Buyers Beware section was an enourmously wonderful addition and incredibly inciteful into gaming bugs. it even does follow up for patches/fixes!
I am not saying that the kind of magazine I used to read does not exist. I am only stating that the general trend towards serving the industry instead of the consumer has plagued many of the major ones.
It seems like nothing is going Mr.Boll's way. It took Bloodrayne a terribly long time to find a production company that was willing to carry this film and put it in theatres and now that he finally has, a far better movie starring a violent female vampire, Underworld:Evolution, is coming out this friday. Now I know many did not like the first one and will probably not like this one as well, but I believe we can all agree that it will seem like Shakespeare when compared to the visual abortion that is Bloodrayne. Those who appreciate this genre of movie enough to see such films will, hopefully, adopt the better of the two.
With any newly released format drive, the cost will be astronomical. Remember when DVD drives were released, and then DVD-writables? Until the technology is cheap and plentiful, these drives are going to cost a lot on both the producer and consumer end. Does anyone think that MS is going to bite the cost and sell it on the red? Do they really think they are going to make money this way? I understand that Sony is also including their technology in the PS3, but they don't contract out for their production so costs can be reigned in and margins met.
That being said, I can imagine that if the peripheral for the 360 is significantly cheaper than the stand alone PC or home player drives, that this will push the MS agenda of creating a huge market draw for the 360 longterm while also promoting the HD-DVD format. And MS has always shown that they believe in the "spend money to make money" philosophy, so who knows?
All I'm saying is that if you just shelled out $500 for a system and maybe a few "eh" games (still waiting on Oblivion), is a $200-$300 or greater purchase in your plans for 2006? Or maybe you're gonna get some more games.
I wasn't stating that I was against the program. In fact, I am incredibly energized by the concept. What I was arguing was that what many of the people involved are working on is finding a way to keep it in the hands of the intended recipient. And to those "flood the market" people out there, good luck. One of the most important portions of this project was making this a cost effective scenario, and making 10 gajillion of them isn't likely to happen. Especially with the host countries footing some of the bill for them.
I have one word for you, Somalia. Negroponte and the rest need to find a way to make it so these laptops have great educational value and probably little else. Warlords in places like that tend to capture anything that development aid provides and use it as a kind of control over their region. I'm not saying that their plan is going to work and that these people won't steal them anyway, but its better to try and make them less valuable to those who want to put them under armed guard in a warehouse than to do nothing at all and almost gaurentee that that is where they are going. We could always have a U.S. solider come free with every laptop so they can guard the child while they have it.
When the old people from the Family Values Coalition and other such organizations talk to the old people in Congress, amazingly they don't understand things like video games. Shocking.
These people are always striving to make it seem like they are personally "doing something" and if this comes across the table, its rather uncontroversial to 95% of Congress. Very few districts/states have large video game makers as part of their constituency, and so there are few votes against such efforts. Only ACLU type people as well as the small interested lobbyest groups would put up any sort of fight.
Luckily, as the next generation comes into power, I see this become far more of a "non-issue" and legislation moving in the direction of what service video games can play in advancing society. Roles such as education and psychological therapy.
So they took a cancer on society and made it more personal. I bet if there was Pokemon in my body, I would feel the same way about it as I do about Pokemon here in the "outside" world. I call that proper name choice.
Just to clear the air, I did work at a Wizards of the Coast retail store during the Pokemon card craze. And yes, the word Pikachu or whatever now does induce vomiting.
They created a remapped control scheme to just use the mouse in under 5 days...interesting. I wonder how buggy it is and whether it still even makes the game viable? As neither I nor anyone I know plays this game there is no way to tell. If anyone catches wind of a follow-up story I would love to read it.
But this also gets to a larger concept, how great of a PR point would it be if a company presented the fact that it always goes out of its way to consider the disabled when creating their entertainment software. That is just a darn decent thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd just like to add that they gave those of us who worked as employees about 3 weeks notice that we were all out of a job. I know that the store I was the morning/closing manager for in downtown Cleveland was pulling in an extremely hefty profit per month as I was responsible for cleaning up the books at the end of each week. And nothing has gone in to replace us. Cleveland is lucky to have a few local shops, but they are all extremely cramped/overcrowded and generally not the greatest places to hang out.
Just to add one more NOTE to your point. Nintendo has been pretty consistent about charging more in Japan for their consoles than in the United States, for the initial release price at least.
Yes, but I probably wouldn't be happy if the man running my bank's security was convicted of robbing banks.
Not sure if you read the link I posted, but in summary, the guy who was THE HEAD of DHS task force for finding pedophiles was convicted of being a pedophile.
I'm not damning all of DHS. There are hundreds of thousands of hard working people who work under that general banner. My point is that the leadership is unfortunatly appointed by moronic political leaders who would rather give jobs to a friend of a friend then find the right man for the job. That is the point of the original article for this discussion. This criminally inept leadership cripples the work of those who are trying to make a difference as their work is undercut or ignored.
Had to look twice at that second reference. Gator!? The guys who practically invented mainstream data-mining? I've seen some of the inside of Homeland Security and I was depressed at its prospects. But between this and the fact that they regularly hire sexual predators to defend us,
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000294.php
this is getting to ALMOST be so scary its funny.
Some days you just have to sit back and dream because reality is far too confusing. Conservatives actually espousing their correct value set concerning government regulation? Democrats (Hillary and cohorts) trying to "save the children" with mindless studies that egrediously waste tax payer money that could go to something like education?
Some days you just wish for a party that would be the proponents of a moderate and fiscally responsible social safety net and completely disregard this moral safety net idiocy. A long shot, I know. But since when did the government have the right or even the ability to make subjective judgements about morality? Religious people should be up in arms that the government is interfering with their baliwack (instead of just muddying up religion with politics). Church groups should be pounding the street protesting the latest GTA, not trying to get politicians to deal with it. I can ignore street protests...laws are a little harder.
Other than the "we are going to copy x-box live, except that we are doing it with SOE so it will be MMORPGtastic is some way", the only thing I found of value in those announcements concerning the PS3 was about the harddrive. Although they did not talk about "units" or "sku's" or show anything in real terms out there, the topics they went over leaned heavily on downloaded content. I was personally afraid that they were going the way the 360 did with the 2 product debacle. If I preorder a PS3, I want the damn system. I do not want some crimpled gimp that requires future upgrades to act as the actual product I bought. It was about 5 months before the 360's release that they started talking about having a "core/premium" setup. Hopefully Sony avoids this misstep. If they want my money, they better not try and thrust a memory card on me again...
I playhed through both parts of the demo that came with Dragon Quest 8 and although I am skeptical, it will still be fun and that is what matters. I am one of those that enjoyed the menu'ed battle system and lament its loss, but the new system isnt terrible. There are a few holes that I think made it alittle too easy. I found myself "kiting" all the enemies with the ranged class character, (kiting being the process of casting a spell to slow a monsters movement/attack and then running it around as it gets beat down) which made everything but the boss fights very easy. Hopefully they have some nice ranged attack monsters and have removed some the ridiculous effectiveness of Time Magic.
In summation, the only thing new this time around is the battle system and I find it a fresh experience, although the jury is still out on whether it is "better".
Less than a month ago I read a few articles concerning the fact that there are already ridiculously large subsidies to telecom companies to "offset" the costs of laying down cable for broadband internet. Essentially, this subsidy was supposed to create a market where several companies were competing to offer access on par with what the Japanese provide. So far all I've seen are companies lining their pockets, forming monopolies (I'm looking at you AT&T), not competing except in extremely dense ubran markets, and offering up a service that is only 1/10 the power we were promised and pitiful when compared to any other first world coutnry of comparable technical capacity. The only thing I believe the Dems could do on this front is pass a law that tells the Big Telecos to piss of when a local municipality tries to form citywide wireless or broadband. When Philidelphia gave it a shot they were taken to the State Supreme Court for trying to provide their citizens a service! Despite what it sounds like, I'm not an anti-business kind of person, I just can't stomach the kind of greed and corruption that exists at the highest wealth bracket in our country. If you don't agree, just think about this, ever notice how basic employee benefits like healthcare and pension are the first thing to go and any wage cut for the top 10% of executives are the last?
Ever notice how every 4 years there seem to be a lot more political commercials on TV?
Or the fact there are more action movies in the summer and more serious Oscar contender's and fantasy epics in the winter?
Now, have you noticed about how this "Industry" referenced above (the software industry), always goes into a psychological/monetary depression ever 3-4 years in the beginning of a new hardware cycle? We have already seen a ton of articles that sum up to, "Consumer's unwilling to spend great % of their income on gaming and will therefore buy less software to afford hardware". The software industry hasn't changed how they handle the cycle, like starting to release ALL new titles at reduced cost, so why do they expect any different? If they did have this 8-12 months of reduced game costs I bet they would still see the same numbers of units sold as before. Demand does decrease to a certain degree, but its not that much as long as they are making halfway decent games(insert flame about bad sequels etc.). Its just that people can't suddenly dip into the couch and find more disposable income. This kind of year has always been followed by a year of record breaking sales, as people want the new and interesting games for their new systems and developers hit their stride with coding on the new machines. If the stuffed suits over on Wallstreet can figure this out, why can't the software people?
My server was relatively new when I started on it and now it has the usual primetime que of well over 500+. Compared to other servers this could be rather minor but the fact that it is still causing me headaches shows how severe the problem is.
My example is probably one that many have experienced. My raid guild was doing its usual round of Onyxia followed by MC and right in the middle of MC, I disconnect. Usually not that big of an issue, as I just do a restart and log back in....to find a que of 780 and a wait time of about an hour. I'm one of the primary healers, so its alot harder to take on bosses without me and getting another guildmate in takes time. Add to that the fact that I wont get any of the loot I might have been able to have a chance at and the issue of my reputation with the guild. Even if I'm a good player, if there is a higher chance I'll disconnect and be gone for over an hour because of the QUE (curse its name!) I'm less likely to be brought on raids. So it hurts me and everyone I'm playing with.
I especially don't know how casual players deal with it. If they want to log on and spend a free hour questing or something, in which case they can't prearrange that time and prepare, they wont play a minute as they just sit the que.
Over the last decade China has done as much as possible to stimulate growth while keeping everything internal. By doing this, they have burned through tons of cash in the form of loans that are not supposed to be paid back, incredibly risky investments that rarely succeed, and attempting to provide services to the massively burgeoning urban population that move to these new cities they construct. The only thing that has made this sustainable was the insatiable demand of world consumers (don't just pin the US, we are only the biggest piece of the pie, not the whole thing) for their cheap products. Yet, things like this internet move undermine the entire system by seperating themselves from the very lifelines they need to fund their system. If they create this backbone, they either are going to have to have matching root systems stay in place for companies to interact with the rest of the world, (who aren't picking up Mandarin chinese characters as a second internet language, no thanks) or risk losing all of the business in the country that demands contact with those outside who wish to communicate. I'm not saying that their internal system prevents all collaboration, it just adds difficulty to something that doesn't need it. Either case will be ridiculously expensive to both put it place and maintain and serve no purpose other than to the satisfy their own paranoid fantasies. The Chinses boom is based on consumerism and their ability to identify and meet the demands of the market, and this only hinders that and hastens the tipping both of their unsustainable growth.
I never really considered this idea of "work enviroment" related training and how MMO's can foster develope of these skills. Imagine how many times in school your teachers gave you a ridiculous group project simply because they wanted to teach kids how to function in a results-based enviroment as a group. There are alot of skills you learn in an MMO group: leadership, listening, adapting to change based on observation of other's actions, conflict resolution, etc. that are nice to have when you step into that deep, cold, void of the real world. Obviously they are not saying that everyone learns these skills, but I can definatly see that the challenges set before players do foster such ideas.
For those of you WoWer's who never went through the Everquest days let me give you some situations where a "harder" game may have consequences:
Imagine having to spend 10+ hours of grinding to get level 29.
Imagine doing a 5+ endgame raid where you finally get the boss and you lose the roll on the loot. And so you leave your computer having lost almost a complete level of experience with wipes and not much to show for it. (And you though get groups together was hard)
Now imagine trying to keep a guild together or just general group tension down when wiping with any party can cost you the exp equivalent of 3-4 hours of mob grinding. Plus a ton of extra time and money in regents from having to summon all your corpses from under the feet of "Baron VonAssbeater".
I had alot of fun with EQ and a pretty successful guild. But I was also a teenager and this was the best that was available at the time. There is No Way in Hell I would put up with that stuff now.
Oh yeah, lets remove China's MFN Status. By the way, we here in the US started calling it Normal Trade Relations or NTR in 1998, since about 147 countries had MFN status with us. And the only point of NTR is the fact that we can't put tariffs on import/export goods. The end. And would people really want the extreme rampant inflation that the institution of these tariffs would bring? Because although we talk about just Walmart goods going up in price, with the amount we import from China the increase in price in the multitude of imported goods that China sends us would shockwave into every part of our daily life. Removing NTR from China is just something anti-China hawks like to harp about, since 99.9% of America are against the consequences it would bring. What really needs to happen, is that we need to lean like hell on China to remove the international capital restrictions they have on their people. They simply do not allow people in China to invest much in foreign countries and therefore they aren't really playing fair. Because, for all the "Rising China" stuff, it would be far more likely that their business elite would invest in the safe/good returns of Western Companies as opposed to the incredibly risky Chinese start-ups, or the amazingly inefficient government run industries.
After reading Tharkban's comment I reread my own and realized I seemed like a cheerleader. My knowledge of this stuff is based off of research I've done on disarmament treaties and I really think that its all a tremendous waste of scientific knowhow and resources. Some useful stuff has come from it, like radar, but its overall a crazy waste. Its part of the reason for the USSR collapse. Putin's "my missile's penis is better than yours" statements are futile and only serve as a distraction to Russia's organizational failures. Its exactly like same rhetoric Kruschev used to toss out all the time to placate the hardliners of his day.
I personally would be far more blown away by a technology that got pizza to my house faster.
A missile that zig-zags eh?
I really wonder what this will do to the accuracy rating of that missile. Russian standards are pretty low as Russian radar and targeting systems are dreadfully behind current US military tech, and with the additional variation in trajectory who the hell knows where that thing will fall?
If you look at the history of the development of ballistic missiles, the Russians focused on huge missiles with tons of warheads so that it could go ridiculously off course and still damage the target. The US went for things like the cruise missile, that had a small number of warheads but was very accurate. Thats why we have "Aegis" class radar.
Oh, and Putin's bragging about the fact that his missiles can change trajectory in flight? *gasp!* Obviously thats thousands of times better than our amazingly advances unmanned drones which can be equiped with small missiles or used for laser guided targeting.
All sarcasm aside, I wonder if the Russians are still using the very dangerous and unmanagable liquid fuel in their missiles?
Blizzard really only has three options in this situation:
1. Freedom of Expression,
If you say that these people have the freedom to collect together and openly espouse the values/personal choices/lifestyle similarities, than you must open this standard to all "virtual citizens" in WoW. The verbal harassment system becomes moot because Blizzard has given a basic set of freedoms to all its players. This is the, "If Jewish pride groups can march near city hall then so can the Neo-Nazi's" because freedom can fully be offensive," example.
2.Allocate generous resources to monitoring harassment issues and make thousands of daily decisions in a timely manner,
This is the only way Blizzard could decide which groups can come together and advertise and which can't. Leaving behind how in the world they could develope a fair and far-reaching policy standard, the workload for this "Quality of Experience" issue would be enourmous and vastly overload the current less-than-pervasive GM staff. They would set a standard that the Executives agree with and enforce it around the clock. Unless they had the intellect of Solomon, I'm guessing that they would still take a ton of crap.
3. Cut of the problem with a "blanket" ban of things that might incite harassment,
This is the cheapest and least time consuming of the three, as they can just say, "Nope, we don't want this and its ours game so you can't do it." It is fully within their rights. We can always yell and scream about the fairness of our virtual social experience, but they are the one's in control. If you want to punish them, stop giving them money. That's what they are after in the first place. I personally am not all that up in arms about this decision. If you really wanted to do a Guild that espoused a certain value-set or lifestyle, its easy to do so in a way that is on a "person-to-person" level. And you'll probably end up with better guildmates that way anyway.
I picked up Gamepro from the very first issue it ever printed and have been a subscriber ever since. Nowadays it is simply more out of habit and my family wanting to continue the tradition my grandmother started than my strong desire to read it. The problem with that magazine in particular was that the very strong minds in the writing and editorial staff were promoted or poached away to places that offered higher salaries/position. I can understand the lure of more money and escaping more of the "hectic deadline" kind of life, but it really hurt the magazine. The combination of newer people and an increased level of "make money with adds" rather than "provide substance to readers" culture brought the quality of the magazine down. They seemed much more interested in competing with other rags that wanted to play off the pop culture fads of the day,(I really REALLY don't care what games the tards in Linkin Park or from some sports team play), than providing me with a source of new info on the games/developments I was interested in. It is so bad today that any source of real news, like a new GTA or the Revolution controller, get full layouts as if it was written by that company's marketing dept, and maybe it is. Much of the genuine critiquing has gone by the wayside. Something has to be a HUGE pile of shit to get negative press.
I want to note one exception very quickly. The Buyers Beware section was an enourmously wonderful addition and incredibly inciteful into gaming bugs. it even does follow up for patches/fixes!
I am not saying that the kind of magazine I used to read does not exist. I am only stating that the general trend towards serving the industry instead of the consumer has plagued many of the major ones.
It seems like nothing is going Mr.Boll's way. It took Bloodrayne a terribly long time to find a production company that was willing to carry this film and put it in theatres and now that he finally has, a far better movie starring a violent female vampire, Underworld:Evolution, is coming out this friday. Now I know many did not like the first one and will probably not like this one as well, but I believe we can all agree that it will seem like Shakespeare when compared to the visual abortion that is Bloodrayne. Those who appreciate this genre of movie enough to see such films will, hopefully, adopt the better of the two.
With any newly released format drive, the cost will be astronomical. Remember when DVD drives were released, and then DVD-writables? Until the technology is cheap and plentiful, these drives are going to cost a lot on both the producer and consumer end. Does anyone think that MS is going to bite the cost and sell it on the red? Do they really think they are going to make money this way? I understand that Sony is also including their technology in the PS3, but they don't contract out for their production so costs can be reigned in and margins met.
That being said, I can imagine that if the peripheral for the 360 is significantly cheaper than the stand alone PC or home player drives, that this will push the MS agenda of creating a huge market draw for the 360 longterm while also promoting the HD-DVD format. And MS has always shown that they believe in the "spend money to make money" philosophy, so who knows?
All I'm saying is that if you just shelled out $500 for a system and maybe a few "eh" games (still waiting on Oblivion), is a $200-$300 or greater purchase in your plans for 2006? Or maybe you're gonna get some more games.
I wasn't stating that I was against the program. In fact, I am incredibly energized by the concept. What I was arguing was that what many of the people involved are working on is finding a way to keep it in the hands of the intended recipient. And to those "flood the market" people out there, good luck. One of the most important portions of this project was making this a cost effective scenario, and making 10 gajillion of them isn't likely to happen. Especially with the host countries footing some of the bill for them.
I have one word for you, Somalia. Negroponte and the rest need to find a way to make it so these laptops have great educational value and probably little else. Warlords in places like that tend to capture anything that development aid provides and use it as a kind of control over their region. I'm not saying that their plan is going to work and that these people won't steal them anyway, but its better to try and make them less valuable to those who want to put them under armed guard in a warehouse than to do nothing at all and almost gaurentee that that is where they are going. We could always have a U.S. solider come free with every laptop so they can guard the child while they have it.
When the old people from the Family Values Coalition and other such organizations talk to the old people in Congress, amazingly they don't understand things like video games. Shocking.
These people are always striving to make it seem like they are personally "doing something" and if this comes across the table, its rather uncontroversial to 95% of Congress. Very few districts/states have large video game makers as part of their constituency, and so there are few votes against such efforts. Only ACLU type people as well as the small interested lobbyest groups would put up any sort of fight.
Luckily, as the next generation comes into power, I see this become far more of a "non-issue" and legislation moving in the direction of what service video games can play in advancing society. Roles such as education and psychological therapy.
So they took a cancer on society and made it more personal. I bet if there was Pokemon in my body, I would feel the same way about it as I do about Pokemon here in the "outside" world. I call that proper name choice.
Just to clear the air, I did work at a Wizards of the Coast retail store during the Pokemon card craze. And yes, the word Pikachu or whatever now does induce vomiting.
They created a remapped control scheme to just use the mouse in under 5 days...interesting. I wonder how buggy it is and whether it still even makes the game viable? As neither I nor anyone I know plays this game there is no way to tell. If anyone catches wind of a follow-up story I would love to read it.
But this also gets to a larger concept, how great of a PR point would it be if a company presented the fact that it always goes out of its way to consider the disabled when creating their entertainment software. That is just a darn decent thing to do.