If you really wanted to look at a map, there was always the built in terrain editor with the game. I've never bought a strat guide since becoming a member of the information age : printed material becomes dated, and subsequently useless; hot "strategies" are later deemed exploits and nerfed or their use banned in multiplay, etc.
Okay - admittedly I haven't purchased GTA 1, 2, 3, VC, SA, or, well, anything, from Rockstar. It's not so much a boycott, this run around shooting people just wasn't enough to make such games more than a 2 night rental for me.
Now the graphics do look nice, taking advantage of all that that is the 360 - but I just can't see this being a fun game. I mean, do you really want to take the time to learn how to maneuver a table paddle with your joypad? Personally this is one of those things that if I was going to spend time on, I think I'd play real table tennis. Unlike racing cars, shooting guns, and blowing stuff up, the costs and risks of doing the real thing are so minimal - why make a game to simulate it?
The other side of this, is that if a publicly funded research project leads to discoveries, they are available to all. If a private company through stem cell research finds a cure for cancer, guess what?
How much are you willing to pay for a cure for cancer, sir? 100,000? 200,000? 7 million?
If such a thing were possible, do you think we could just rollback to before episode I?
I want you guys with tech degrees and movie editing props to try something tonight. Take Star Wars Episodes 1, 2, and 3 - and cut out EVERYTHING except the lightsaber fights. Paste all that together, and tell me Lucas wouldn't have been much better off just publishing this.
That's a great concept to employ in Eve, but Eve is much more pvp oriented than WoW is, in the sense that you can take materials from other players, and destroying their ship has real consequences. Killing someone in WoW is a 2 minute setback, and the gains (honor) are diminishing. It's not like you can spank them and take the krol blade they just got. And changing the easy pace game design that got them to the 5 million mark for a hardcore systemt that barely gained 100k subscribers? Probably not the best business solution.
What makes me laugh is the people that I know that complain about the gold farmers, are all the same people that have, get this, bought gold from them. I think their complaint is coming from the fact that the amount of real world money they would have to spend for certain rare items rises. People that learn how to play ecomonies, buy low, sell high, and farm marketable items, will prevail in any inflating market. People that rely on outside help will be victims to the market squeeze. That simple.
I know a guy with a 360, but his computer is terrible for playing WoW on because it's dated. The 360 represents incredible graphics power for a very economical price, about 400 dollars instead of 1500 for a decent PC.
That said, I'm sure analysts that make more money in a month than I do in a year determined the market share isn't there for the return on investment. As a WoW player, it benefits me more to see them developing more content, rather than expanding their player base. Especially with the queues the way they currently are.
I've read, and partly agree that exposure to violence can lead to desensitization. But, so what?
Let's face it, we live in a violent world. The US is essentially a nation at war (we have 100,000 + troops deployed, and basically wartime civic policies in effect).
To me, desensitization doesn't make you more likely to commit violent crimes, but rather removes the likelihood that you'll be paralyzed in fear in the face of it. In other words, it helps protect you from violence, because you'll be more able to respond to a situation, instead of reacting to it.
I've read reviews of this MMO, and the once promising hype seems to fail to deliver. What makes or breaks any D&D game is the ability for extraordinary things to happen. And unfortunately, this really can't be managed without a real life GM. Planescape Torment came close, but that's single player, but a great example of what this game should have been. NPCs with real, meaningful backgrounds that are not only enticing, but explain certain unique characteristics about them. Name another game where the first NPC you encounter is a floating, talking, no chatterbox, of a skull. And a main character with a real story and motive. Unfortunately, the MMO just doesn't create opportunities to be a hero, because there are 1000s of people out trying to save the world at the same time.
I think I'll just stick to my World of Warcrack for now.
"One of the activists, Jim March, said he was the person who actually turned over the allegedly stolen documents to the Oakland Tribune and the state attorney general's and secretary of state's offices."
Now that I've not only RTFA, but QTFA, you can STFU.
http://www.bitoffun.com/stupid_laws_Virginia.htm
I'm not going to say it's all gravy to go around breaking every law, but when someone reports a serious crime is not the time to nail them on a traffic violation, or similarly stupid crime. For your information, his violation was that after someone rear ended his car, the lights on his license plate didn't work, and part of the frame was considered too low. Hardcore criminal there.
I'll admit I've downloaded a few ROMs for free - and they're the same games that I already purchased once upon a time, for use on a game system that was flawed in design and could no longer support the cartiges upon which the original games were written. Somehow, I don't feel like I should have to pay for a second license to the software to port the game over to a playable platform.
I wish Congress would take a break from banning porn to pass a law the basically says if you stop supporting your software it becomes free after so many years, because unlike the books upon which the copyright laws originated, software dies if not constantly updated and copied on to new media.
Another fine example that police are a bunch of pricks, who will stab you in the back for giving them useful information/leads. Submit useful information anonymously so that the powers that be cannot smite you for disrupting their political agenda.
Here's a fine and recent example : My ex-neighbor once called the police to report the disturbance of a young girl screaming, concerned that there could possibly be some kind of rape attempt. The police showed up, checked into the disturbance, then ran a background on my neighbor. Apparently he had some traffic violations on the books, so they took his license while they were there.
Yes, the guy in the article broke the law. But there's an older law about biting the hand that feeds you.
I work for a software company that I'm not going to name here, but we basically did the same thing : releasing a "no frills" version of the software. The customers we got into this package were essentially those that make their decisions purely on price, but not one has been impressed by the interface that was supposedly designed to meet their needs - they are all in said offering simply because it's cheaper, and most complain about how the software is "gimped". People may act stupid sometimes, but they aren't blind : they're going to see this exactly as it is - Microsoft is attempting to nickel and dime for their new OS.
If they would just sell the added features as separate softwares, like other competitors have to, they wouldn't have to worry about selling what's going to come off as a poorly written OS. What's going to motivate someone to switch from Windows XP into some kinda of Basic feature stripped Vista?
And that's ignoring Microsoft's long standing tradition of releasing its OS full of security holes and show stopping fatal errors.
This patent basically says they own the rights to creating a particular type of camera view? How the hell is this NOT public domain? For f's sake, that's like saying someone could patent the right to throw a ball through the air.
They should have taken this to court. They didn't need a high expense lawyer, just a judge that couldn't be bought, to show a clip of supposedly copyrighted material, and let the judge throw these criminal patent jumping asses in the slammer for fraud.
The spherical panning of a camera is just mathematics. You can't patent that. You can copyright a particular version of it, but if someone else incidentally develops the same system, and can prove it's based on a mathematical equation and not the copyrighted work, this should be an open and shut case.
That, and there is a theme in each one about the world coming to an end. Now you may say that whoopdeedoo - that's what every RPG is about - but not really. Some are about an evil dictator wanting to rule everything, or a single character acheiving revenge (loved SEGA shadowrun!) - or just wanting to collect a whole bunch of pets - but to record, every FF game has involved world cataclysm.
(I've never played FF11, the MMO, so if I'm wrong there, I'll blame the MMO tycoons for corrupting it.)
Seems like a bit of a straw man setup to me. Of course games are not drugs, the association is entirely due to the likelyhood of becoming addicted. But how long are we going to blame the capitalist for finding a good market, and creating a good offering, instead of holding an individual responsible for his own behavior?
A prime example, from world of warcrack, is the pvp honor grind. The game holds 14 ranks in pvp, each week one's standing in overall honor point gain is used to determine if they gain or lose progress in these ranks. Rank 14, the coveted grand marshall/high warlord, can only be held at any one time by less than 1% of the server.
The result? Fierce competition. People spending 16 hours a day farming for pvp honor. People ignoring jobs, school, families, for a chance to succeed in reaching rank 14. And after months (yes, months) of this behavior, they look up and realise their real lives have been affected. Some revolt quit the game outright, some return to normalcy, a good number run to Blizzard forums or other means of public communication - to denounce Blizzard for creating the system. But the fact is, and more and more realise this, that it is the people making crazy insane attempts to overcome one another that created the problem, not Blizzard.
We expect game creating companies to make really good games - the same way we expect the ride designers in an amusement park to make exciting roller coasters, or film directors to make awesome movies, or a restaurant to serve great food. But it is our own responsibility as consumers to make healthy choices about how much food and entertainment we can afford, it is not on companies to cut us off at the tap.
Very insightful, wish I had some mod points for you:P
I would say it's still capitalism, but it defies the principles of a free market for sure. Capitalism defines how capital is distributed, free market defines the economy/practices by which we exchange stuff.
I personally boycott things that I know are intentionally deceptive. I don't have cable. I refuse credit cards as every one comes with 20 odd paragraphs taking away every right they legally can from you. I use a fake email address applying for anything that isn't government related (begrudgingly the DMV actually earns a real email address) because half these companies will go behind your back and sell you out.
When we all purchased our internet connections, we purchased speeds "up to xMB/sec", or some such formula. Do we ever actually hit the up to cap? My ISP doesn't. It doesn't today. It didn't 5 years ago. What's new?
As long as internet service providers can get away with not having a service level agreement to a minimum traffic speed, talk about more or less bandwidth is just an excuse not to purchase more hardware. Basically it's the ISPs market right now, and the end user suffers.
Though I can say, verizon has been very reliable for me. The speed isn't always top notch, but it rarely if ever goes down in my area. And that's important when the queues for stormrage grow a half hour deep:P
On the other hand, I think more and more we're reaching the goals of what gamers want their games to look like, and falling short on games playing how gamers want them to play. Instant action, game balance, getting enough game for your dollar, ease of use, originality - a lot of these concepts are simple but get lost in the wayside of "but it draw 4.2 trillion pixels per second! Look how detailed his nose is!"
The games industry in general isn't in trouble, but designers that want to stay competitive would do well to sit down and play pong for a week, then go back and look at what's really important in making a game. There are so many disappointments to be found on the 50 dollar rack these days it's not at all funny.
More like M$ will buy time, and then package it into M$ Office with their calendar. Now some will probably sue over the anti-trust issues with packaging time together with software that tracks it, but given their track record, I'm pretty sure M$ can get away with it.
Ok, I stopped reading this article at 4. : when the author admitted had only made two points even though he felt the need to start 4 sections. This is a poor way to construct the arguement, and the points he has made thus far really don't support that WoW is teaching bad things.
Yes, RPGs are not first person shooters. You acquire in game attributes, spells, divine favors, equipment, reputation, etc., which make your character stronger. "Skill" still exists in an RPG, the cunning to adapt to tactics, the social skill of building and maintaining a successful balanced cooperative group or guild, the dexterity to select skills at a split second. The game encourages you to build all of these, Streetfighter was all about hand-eye coordination and what he called yomi, which really is tactical adaptation. In other words, what WoW teaches less the social skills.
Yes, MMORPGs have their roots in RPGs, which, contrary to the first CRPGs which were all single player, are inherently group activities. Find me a DMG (Dungeon Master's guide) that doesn't somewhere mention encouraging the players to work together and leverage their differences to create a strong party. While a few solo minded peeps who only know single player RPGs will take offense to this and whine, I find the majority actually like working in groups. Personally I would group even if it wasn't necessary, because it's a hell of a lot more fun to kill 100 beetles if you have someone to talk with while you do it.
And I've seen what a "challenging" single player quest looks like - take the hunter's quest for his epic bow, where he essentially has to kite a demon for a few minutes and hit his snare abilities with precision timing. Wow. Use the same 3 skills over and over for 3 minutes, run back and forward, and hope you don't lag out. Compare that to the Vaelastraz fight, where random people get destroyed by a debuff, and your group has to adapt to the gap.
I'll go back and read the rest of this now, and if the author manages to wring a good point somewhere later in contrast to the beginning, I'll come back and comment on that.
So for the first 30 levels, you don't gain squat for levelling? Somehow I don't think that's going to appeal to many American gamers, although I might be proven wrong.
I've only really played World of Warcraft, (by that I mean I've tried the trials of, and rejected, just about every other available MMO), but I prefer what appears to be the traditional gain a level, get new skills formula. It allows a large variety of gameplay options without overwhelming you when you first learn to play a class. 30 levels is just too long a period to introduce something new to the game.
Still, an informative article, and I'm glad to have read it. WoW has a lot of gaps, and I like to keep an eye on what the competition is doing.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really wanted to look at a map, there was always the built in terrain editor with the game. I've never bought a strat guide since becoming a member of the information age : printed material becomes dated, and subsequently useless; hot "strategies" are later deemed exploits and nerfed or their use banned in multiplay, etc.
Okay - admittedly I haven't purchased GTA 1, 2, 3, VC, SA, or, well, anything, from Rockstar. It's not so much a boycott, this run around shooting people just wasn't enough to make such games more than a 2 night rental for me.
Now the graphics do look nice, taking advantage of all that that is the 360 - but I just can't see this being a fun game. I mean, do you really want to take the time to learn how to maneuver a table paddle with your joypad? Personally this is one of those things that if I was going to spend time on, I think I'd play real table tennis. Unlike racing cars, shooting guns, and blowing stuff up, the costs and risks of doing the real thing are so minimal - why make a game to simulate it?
Good point, I didn't think of that.
Buying monopoly money is more complicated than I thought!
Author spent 60 dollars on 500 gold.
The ad banner just beneath his article :
1000 gold for $34.99
nuff said
The other side of this, is that if a publicly funded research project leads to discoveries, they are available to all. If a private company through stem cell research finds a cure for cancer, guess what?
How much are you willing to pay for a cure for cancer, sir? 100,000? 200,000? 7 million?
No thanks, lets make this a public venue.
If such a thing were possible, do you think we could just rollback to before episode I?
I want you guys with tech degrees and movie editing props to try something tonight. Take Star Wars Episodes 1, 2, and 3 - and cut out EVERYTHING except the lightsaber fights. Paste all that together, and tell me Lucas wouldn't have been much better off just publishing this.
That's a great concept to employ in Eve, but Eve is much more pvp oriented than WoW is, in the sense that you can take materials from other players, and destroying their ship has real consequences. Killing someone in WoW is a 2 minute setback, and the gains (honor) are diminishing. It's not like you can spank them and take the krol blade they just got. And changing the easy pace game design that got them to the 5 million mark for a hardcore systemt that barely gained 100k subscribers? Probably not the best business solution.
What makes me laugh is the people that I know that complain about the gold farmers, are all the same people that have, get this, bought gold from them. I think their complaint is coming from the fact that the amount of real world money they would have to spend for certain rare items rises. People that learn how to play ecomonies, buy low, sell high, and farm marketable items, will prevail in any inflating market. People that rely on outside help will be victims to the market squeeze. That simple.
Of course it is.
If you put in a cheat code in starcraft to give yourself extra money, that's cheating. You know it is.
If you put in your credit card number to give yourself extra money in World of Warcraft - that's cheating too.
You're essentially rewarding the character with resourses that he did not earn.
End of File
I know a guy with a 360, but his computer is terrible for playing WoW on because it's dated. The 360 represents incredible graphics power for a very economical price, about 400 dollars instead of 1500 for a decent PC.
That said, I'm sure analysts that make more money in a month than I do in a year determined the market share isn't there for the return on investment. As a WoW player, it benefits me more to see them developing more content, rather than expanding their player base. Especially with the queues the way they currently are.
I've read, and partly agree that exposure to violence can lead to desensitization. But, so what?
Let's face it, we live in a violent world. The US is essentially a nation at war (we have 100,000 + troops deployed, and basically wartime civic policies in effect).
To me, desensitization doesn't make you more likely to commit violent crimes, but rather removes the likelihood that you'll be paralyzed in fear in the face of it. In other words, it helps protect you from violence, because you'll be more able to respond to a situation, instead of reacting to it.
I've read reviews of this MMO, and the once promising hype seems to fail to deliver. What makes or breaks any D&D game is the ability for extraordinary things to happen. And unfortunately, this really can't be managed without a real life GM. Planescape Torment came close, but that's single player, but a great example of what this game should have been. NPCs with real, meaningful backgrounds that are not only enticing, but explain certain unique characteristics about them. Name another game where the first NPC you encounter is a floating, talking, no chatterbox, of a skull. And a main character with a real story and motive. Unfortunately, the MMO just doesn't create opportunities to be a hero, because there are 1000s of people out trying to save the world at the same time.
I think I'll just stick to my World of Warcrack for now.
"One of the activists, Jim March, said he was the person who actually turned over the allegedly stolen documents to the Oakland Tribune and the state attorney general's and secretary of state's offices."
Now that I've not only RTFA, but QTFA, you can STFU.
http://www.bitoffun.com/stupid_laws_Virginia.htm
I'm not going to say it's all gravy to go around breaking every law, but when someone reports a serious crime is not the time to nail them on a traffic violation, or similarly stupid crime. For your information, his violation was that after someone rear ended his car, the lights on his license plate didn't work, and part of the frame was considered too low. Hardcore criminal there.
I'll admit I've downloaded a few ROMs for free - and they're the same games that I already purchased once upon a time, for use on a game system that was flawed in design and could no longer support the cartiges upon which the original games were written. Somehow, I don't feel like I should have to pay for a second license to the software to port the game over to a playable platform.
I wish Congress would take a break from banning porn to pass a law the basically says if you stop supporting your software it becomes free after so many years, because unlike the books upon which the copyright laws originated, software dies if not constantly updated and copied on to new media.
Another fine example that police are a bunch of pricks, who will stab you in the back for giving them useful information/leads. Submit useful information anonymously so that the powers that be cannot smite you for disrupting their political agenda.
Here's a fine and recent example : My ex-neighbor once called the police to report the disturbance of a young girl screaming, concerned that there could possibly be some kind of rape attempt. The police showed up, checked into the disturbance, then ran a background on my neighbor. Apparently he had some traffic violations on the books, so they took his license while they were there.
Yes, the guy in the article broke the law. But there's an older law about biting the hand that feeds you.
I work for a software company that I'm not going to name here, but we basically did the same thing : releasing a "no frills" version of the software. The customers we got into this package were essentially those that make their decisions purely on price, but not one has been impressed by the interface that was supposedly designed to meet their needs - they are all in said offering simply because it's cheaper, and most complain about how the software is "gimped". People may act stupid sometimes, but they aren't blind : they're going to see this exactly as it is - Microsoft is attempting to nickel and dime for their new OS.
If they would just sell the added features as separate softwares, like other competitors have to, they wouldn't have to worry about selling what's going to come off as a poorly written OS. What's going to motivate someone to switch from Windows XP into some kinda of Basic feature stripped Vista?
And that's ignoring Microsoft's long standing tradition of releasing its OS full of security holes and show stopping fatal errors.
This patent basically says they own the rights to creating a particular type of camera view? How the hell is this NOT public domain? For f's sake, that's like saying someone could patent the right to throw a ball through the air.
They should have taken this to court. They didn't need a high expense lawyer, just a judge that couldn't be bought, to show a clip of supposedly copyrighted material, and let the judge throw these criminal patent jumping asses in the slammer for fraud.
The spherical panning of a camera is just mathematics. You can't patent that. You can copyright a particular version of it, but if someone else incidentally develops the same system, and can prove it's based on a mathematical equation and not the copyrighted work, this should be an open and shut case.
That, and there is a theme in each one about the world coming to an end. Now you may say that whoopdeedoo - that's what every RPG is about - but not really. Some are about an evil dictator wanting to rule everything, or a single character acheiving revenge (loved SEGA shadowrun!) - or just wanting to collect a whole bunch of pets - but to record, every FF game has involved world cataclysm.
(I've never played FF11, the MMO, so if I'm wrong there, I'll blame the MMO tycoons for corrupting it.)
Seems like a bit of a straw man setup to me. Of course games are not drugs, the association is entirely due to the likelyhood of becoming addicted. But how long are we going to blame the capitalist for finding a good market, and creating a good offering, instead of holding an individual responsible for his own behavior?
A prime example, from world of warcrack, is the pvp honor grind. The game holds 14 ranks in pvp, each week one's standing in overall honor point gain is used to determine if they gain or lose progress in these ranks. Rank 14, the coveted grand marshall/high warlord, can only be held at any one time by less than 1% of the server.
The result? Fierce competition. People spending 16 hours a day farming for pvp honor. People ignoring jobs, school, families, for a chance to succeed in reaching rank 14. And after months (yes, months) of this behavior, they look up and realise their real lives have been affected. Some revolt quit the game outright, some return to normalcy, a good number run to Blizzard forums or other means of public communication - to denounce Blizzard for creating the system. But the fact is, and more and more realise this, that it is the people making crazy insane attempts to overcome one another that created the problem, not Blizzard.
We expect game creating companies to make really good games - the same way we expect the ride designers in an amusement park to make exciting roller coasters, or film directors to make awesome movies, or a restaurant to serve great food. But it is our own responsibility as consumers to make healthy choices about how much food and entertainment we can afford, it is not on companies to cut us off at the tap.
Very insightful, wish I had some mod points for you:P
I would say it's still capitalism, but it defies the principles of a free market for sure. Capitalism defines how capital is distributed, free market defines the economy/practices by which we exchange stuff.
I personally boycott things that I know are intentionally deceptive. I don't have cable. I refuse credit cards as every one comes with 20 odd paragraphs taking away every right they legally can from you. I use a fake email address applying for anything that isn't government related (begrudgingly the DMV actually earns a real email address) because half these companies will go behind your back and sell you out.
It's not paranoia if you're right.
When we all purchased our internet connections, we purchased speeds "up to xMB/sec", or some such formula. Do we ever actually hit the up to cap? My ISP doesn't. It doesn't today. It didn't 5 years ago. What's new?
:P
As long as internet service providers can get away with not having a service level agreement to a minimum traffic speed, talk about more or less bandwidth is just an excuse not to purchase more hardware. Basically it's the ISPs market right now, and the end user suffers.
Though I can say, verizon has been very reliable for me. The speed isn't always top notch, but it rarely if ever goes down in my area. And that's important when the queues for stormrage grow a half hour deep
This is hardly news.
On the other hand, I think more and more we're reaching the goals of what gamers want their games to look like, and falling short on games playing how gamers want them to play. Instant action, game balance, getting enough game for your dollar, ease of use, originality - a lot of these concepts are simple but get lost in the wayside of "but it draw 4.2 trillion pixels per second! Look how detailed his nose is!"
The games industry in general isn't in trouble, but designers that want to stay competitive would do well to sit down and play pong for a week, then go back and look at what's really important in making a game. There are so many disappointments to be found on the 50 dollar rack these days it's not at all funny.
More like M$ will buy time, and then package it into M$ Office with their calendar. Now some will probably sue over the anti-trust issues with packaging time together with software that tracks it, but given their track record, I'm pretty sure M$ can get away with it.
Ok, I stopped reading this article at 4. : when the author admitted had only made two points even though he felt the need to start 4 sections. This is a poor way to construct the arguement, and the points he has made thus far really don't support that WoW is teaching bad things.
Yes, RPGs are not first person shooters. You acquire in game attributes, spells, divine favors, equipment, reputation, etc., which make your character stronger. "Skill" still exists in an RPG, the cunning to adapt to tactics, the social skill of building and maintaining a successful balanced cooperative group or guild, the dexterity to select skills at a split second. The game encourages you to build all of these, Streetfighter was all about hand-eye coordination and what he called yomi, which really is tactical adaptation. In other words, what WoW teaches less the social skills.
Yes, MMORPGs have their roots in RPGs, which, contrary to the first CRPGs which were all single player, are inherently group activities. Find me a DMG (Dungeon Master's guide) that doesn't somewhere mention encouraging the players to work together and leverage their differences to create a strong party. While a few solo minded peeps who only know single player RPGs will take offense to this and whine, I find the majority actually like working in groups. Personally I would group even if it wasn't necessary, because it's a hell of a lot more fun to kill 100 beetles if you have someone to talk with while you do it.
And I've seen what a "challenging" single player quest looks like - take the hunter's quest for his epic bow, where he essentially has to kite a demon for a few minutes and hit his snare abilities with precision timing. Wow. Use the same 3 skills over and over for 3 minutes, run back and forward, and hope you don't lag out. Compare that to the Vaelastraz fight, where random people get destroyed by a debuff, and your group has to adapt to the gap.
I'll go back and read the rest of this now, and if the author manages to wring a good point somewhere later in contrast to the beginning, I'll come back and comment on that.
You could throw spears...
So for the first 30 levels, you don't gain squat for levelling? Somehow I don't think that's going to appeal to many American gamers, although I might be proven wrong.
I've only really played World of Warcraft, (by that I mean I've tried the trials of, and rejected, just about every other available MMO), but I prefer what appears to be the traditional gain a level, get new skills formula. It allows a large variety of gameplay options without overwhelming you when you first learn to play a class. 30 levels is just too long a period to introduce something new to the game.
Still, an informative article, and I'm glad to have read it. WoW has a lot of gaps, and I like to keep an eye on what the competition is doing.