It's like a big game of texas hold em. Their own interest in Take Two drove the price up some 30%, now they have to feign disinterest to drive it back down. But, at 30% off it'll probably look ripe for acquisition again.
Gotta love free markets.
Oh, and spore is awesome up until the tribal stage. It's pretty obvious Will Wright ran outta creative genius right there. As fun as it is to blame EA, I don't think they had much to do with it.
Creepy customizable pacman/flow game -> Innovative genre shattering animorphic AI -> RTS with all the depth of a cheap flash game
I'd really prefer they leave it as it is. I can use my preferences to assign ACs an automatic -6, I can't do that so well if they constantly log in under throw away accounts.
I remember when their creature creator demo came out, I downloaded and installed it, and faced this EA download manager.
As best I can tell, the thing attempts to connect out to its update and authentication server via some kind of IE backbone. It couldn't make it through my system, which was running no firewall, no antivirus, no router blockage - the only possible blockout is the fact that I keep my internet explorer settings for activex/flash/java/javascript completely off for non-trusted sites. And the thing wasn't going to tell me what site it was trying to visit so I could trust it.
I determine right there I wasn't buying this game - it won't operate on my system when installed legitamitely.
This is a great idea, and one I hope to see them port to other MMOs as well. Even WOW with 11 million subscribers suffers that sometimes, some places you just cannot find a person online that wants to run a particular dungeon playing a particular role/class that you need. The fact that this can prevent you from advancing in the game is one of the most frustrating aspects of an MMORPG.
It's important to realise that the article stated the computer had a 9 stone handicap. That'd be kind of like saying a chess computer beat Kasparov, but the computer started with an extra rook. (A chess computer did beat Kasparov fairly, but that's for another day).
Go is interesting to me because the "moves" are simple enough that the game should almost certainly be solvable from move one - yet the game is broad enough that computers (and their programmers) have not yet solved it.
I dunno - when I first started playing WOW, I was impressed by the rapid interaction of different skills, thinking to myself this was good, as it should significantly reduce the inclination to bot or multibox.
Here we are 3.5 years later, and the gameplay is so simple that we find top rated arena teams consisting of nothing more than 5 elemental shamans bound to perform the same command from one keyboard, and bots that can automatically farm gold/materials that remain useful in the endgame.
Perhaps we should not hate the bot itself, but the over-simplified game mechanics. Perhaps if an activity is so ridiculously simple that it can be automated, or a strategy so simple it involves spamming the same skill, it should not be that rewarding/effective.
I'd love it if Blizzard would staff more GMs to simply preserve watch over the lands of Azeroth, and when they would find a botting player simply unleash a dozen raptors on him, or upgrade one of the mobs he's farming considerably. A player at the keyboard will adapt to the situation, a bot will simply continue to stumble into the unpredicted new environment it is in.
I think I would have modded the parent flamebait over insightful, given the need to bold words in every sentence and make broad hyperboles, but whatever. Apparently someone agrees with you, they certainly don't know insight though.
Look at the statistics. Gun ownership in an area increases self defensibility, which ultimately lowers crime.
The part your missing is that the extremists regularly kill off those that would lead protests against their dogma and actions. They make an example of one, and a hundred shy back into their homes in fear. It's been that way for years.
If we really wanted Iraq to be a free country, all we need to do is go door to door and give every man and woman a gun. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, a nice 12 gauge shotgun would do nicely.
There will be a civil war, followed by democracy. And amazingly, no US troop involvement necessary.
People may cry "WTF ur gonna get lotsa people killed?!" - but seriously the jihadist types aren't going to surrender. Better to give the people the best protection against them we can (self defense) than to play this charade of security and watch hundreds of Iraqies be murdered every day for their beliefs.
I agree. If the telecoms have immunity, then they have no reason to maintain their records proving that our government mandated their cooperation - they can simply sit back and wave the immunity flag and sit smug.
For some reason I just can't see giving companies like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc immunity to prosecution for failure to take proper care of my privacy with information they collect. Maybe it's the completely dishonest PR I've seen out of Comcast recently with relation to P2P trafficing. Maybe it's the anti-competitive buyouts of AT&T. Maybe it's just a general mistrust of anyone worth over a million dollars.
So yea - if there are breaches of my privacy, someone should be held accountable. If it's the government mandating it unjustly, they need publicly defamed and removed from office. If there's no public official - then let the suing of large private information collecting giants like the telecom industries serve as a lesson that maybe, just maybe, they should stop tracking everytime I sneeze.
Apparently, developing nuclear weapons with the capability to destroy the planet wasn't enough. Somehow the nations of the world have not yet asploded themselves. But perhaps with a loose black hole, we'll finally self destruct as a species, and maybe even take the sun with us.
I have to wonder - if every species that ever formed across the galaxy runs into that delimma at some point - that their science of destruction outranges their science of defense and mobility, and one crazy guy blows the whole thing to bits. I mean as it is we've developed the capability to pretty much destroy the only place in the universe we know we can survive - but we seem to be a long ways off from developing the technology in planetary terraforming or off-world survival to expand beyond the earth. In fact, our present means of transportation are pretty sad too. One loose cannon...
What if every black hole was actually once a scientifically advanced species that blew itself up making black holes?
I disgree entirely. I care about needing the original disk. Moving towards a steam-like system of DRM where you don't need an easily malable sub-gigabyte coaster to unlock usage of your software license is a step long overdue.
MMOs caught on to this secret early on - when the value your game offers is mostly or completely through online play, you don't need a disk, you can do a much much better job checking accounts as they authenticate with your server.
And consoles are being released with built in HDs rivaling those in gaming PCs now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to be less than ten years away from never needing the gaming disk there, either.
Kudos to Blizzard, though as was stated above, a few years too late.
"What's the right age for a kid to start playing games?"
Hell, kids start playing games from the second they can use their little hands to cover their eyes. Peek-a-boo, which later evolves into hide-and-seek and treasure hunt, which are the heart of several games and an element of many others. So I guess the counter-question is, what kinds of games? If you design games to cater to the mental capability of the age group, and a user interface that they can work with, the hardware is the only limit (my two year old's hands can't quite operate a mouse yet). The rest is a matter of designing something that is challenging but not overwhelming. I think a young child can play an MMO like WOW with no problem, because they don't typically approach the world with an "I have to conquer everything" approach, but rather an explorative "Hey, what's this do?" approach. And in my experience, the six year old eventually finds a lot of repetition, gets bored, and stops playing LONG before the grown adult should have done the same;)
I have to agree. Although it's too bad really, I'd love to own a patent on the flavor of statistics where you pull a number out of your @$$ and claim it as a percentage of the population that believes/does X. I'd make a killing on at least 90% of the forums out there.
If everyone on slashdot accessed RIAA.org at the same time every morning, we could just permajam their website. DOS, but kinda legal, since you can't sue an individual for loading your website once a day.
Sigh - then again, the formula "if everyone did X" results in a lot of miracles that will never actually happen.
Ehhhhhh, kinda. On the one hand, companies could certainly always be more forthcoming about what they are selling to kids, the action packed in your face commercialism that surrounds ever more creative ways to sell a wad of corn syrup needs to be reigned in. But that's not the real issue, the one driving that kind of commercialism.
The real issue is a underdeveloped sense of pro active thinking in young minds. Less and less are kids encouraged to think critically, more and more are they spoon fed. I trust that marketing minds are doing whatever it is that generates them the most profits and sales, and their weapon of choice is the action packed, emotionally charged, factless message (works for politics too). It's an issue of education, but I don't think it's because kids don't know sugar without exercise makes you fat. It's because they don't care. They don't really think about life when they're 40. They don't build the habits that reward not through instant gratification, but long term success and health. And we say, well they're just kids, they'll learn that later. But look around, and tell me they learned it later.
If the world went on a heatlh kick, and people consistently acted in their own best interest in terms of diet, McDonalds would go out of business, or undergo a very significant menu change. Oh yes, they've introduced the premier "salad" to their menu, sure. Is there a salad happy meal? Batter coated fried chicken paste wins the taste buds of the youngest generation, not the health conscious choice.
I am far more worried that a select few people can manipulate the "results" of a political election than I am over a rich guy buying out what half the US doesn't even use. There was a slashdot article up not too long ago asking what college students would sell their right to vote for, and many would have agreed to a total under a thousand dollars. Why? Because you can achieve a lot more change with a thousand dollars than you can with a single vote. And it scales. If half the United States (150 million? We'll round) votes Democrat to promote universal health care coverage, there's still a big debate in the Congress, they still need 3/5ths to pass anything contravertial in the Senate, and a whopping 2/3rds to sneak anything by our war-mongerring President.
On the other hand, with 1000x150million dollars, you could just fund the damn thing.
If you've dropped crack because you've developed the drive to live with and experience your emotions and environment untethered by the influence of drugs, and the willpower to commit to it, that is a moment truly worthy of rejoice.
If you've dropped crack because it doesn't get you high anymore, and haven't grown mentally/emotionally from the addiction centered mentality, you'll very likely continue to burden your family and friends through your self destructive habits.
There is a silver bullet for addiction, and it's not in a vaccine. It comes from defining your own principles, and commiting to live by them, rather than center your life around someone or something else. From this you build good habits, and in doing so eliminate bad ones. It's not just about changing the stimilus - because the truth is we can't always control what that stimilus will be. But we can learn to choose our responses.
I do wish the best to your brother and family. Sorry if I sound a little preachy, I just worry when I see things like "this is exactly what they need". It's not. It may be helpful short term, but it's not the cure.
That might work great, if it weren't possible to just let your best friend shoot you, waking up 10 seconds later in the same system, and split the bounty.
There's a fundamental change in the value of life when you only get one.
This isn't like a mugger stealing a purse. It's kind of like an email scammer convincing you to send money to Nigeria - but not really.
It's more like betting 100 bucks on a chess game, and then falling for it when your opponent recommends a move for you that leads ultimately to you losing your bet. I don't feel sorry for that guy.
It's true that the newbs suffer this, because they don't understand the market. However, it's not suffocating the market at all. As was posted above and warrents repeating, for the market to stay this high, someone has to be buying up all the items supplied at lower pricing. That means I can create a new character on a new server with no rich friends, get up to level 6 or so and pick up mining/herbalism, put together a few stacks of copper/peacebloom/linen (low grade level 1-10 stuff) and make BANK on the auction house, enough to easily buy myself a few decent bags and finance my training costs for the first 20 levels or so. The only issue is that the market fails to sort properly, so sometimes people have to sort through several pages of stuff (maybe they fixed this by now?)
In other words, someone trying to manipulate the market like this is actually a boon to anyone with a bit of knowledge about the game that's running through low levels anyways.
Lol, that whole site needs javascript in order to work. And you can bet your ass if a troll is spamming it anonymously, it's not a website I'm interested in allowing to run any sort of javascript/activex/etc.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like a big game of texas hold em. Their own interest in Take Two drove the price up some 30%, now they have to feign disinterest to drive it back down. But, at 30% off it'll probably look ripe for acquisition again.
Gotta love free markets.
Oh, and spore is awesome up until the tribal stage. It's pretty obvious Will Wright ran outta creative genius right there. As fun as it is to blame EA, I don't think they had much to do with it.
Creepy customizable pacman/flow game -> Innovative genre shattering animorphic AI -> RTS with all the depth of a cheap flash game
I'd really prefer they leave it as it is. I can use my preferences to assign ACs an automatic -6, I can't do that so well if they constantly log in under throw away accounts.
I remember when their creature creator demo came out, I downloaded and installed it, and faced this EA download manager.
As best I can tell, the thing attempts to connect out to its update and authentication server via some kind of IE backbone. It couldn't make it through my system, which was running no firewall, no antivirus, no router blockage - the only possible blockout is the fact that I keep my internet explorer settings for activex/flash/java/javascript completely off for non-trusted sites. And the thing wasn't going to tell me what site it was trying to visit so I could trust it.
I determine right there I wasn't buying this game - it won't operate on my system when installed legitamitely.
This is a great idea, and one I hope to see them port to other MMOs as well. Even WOW with 11 million subscribers suffers that sometimes, some places you just cannot find a person online that wants to run a particular dungeon playing a particular role/class that you need. The fact that this can prevent you from advancing in the game is one of the most frustrating aspects of an MMORPG.
It's important to realise that the article stated the computer had a 9 stone handicap. That'd be kind of like saying a chess computer beat Kasparov, but the computer started with an extra rook. (A chess computer did beat Kasparov fairly, but that's for another day).
Go is interesting to me because the "moves" are simple enough that the game should almost certainly be solvable from move one - yet the game is broad enough that computers (and their programmers) have not yet solved it.
I dunno - when I first started playing WOW, I was impressed by the rapid interaction of different skills, thinking to myself this was good, as it should significantly reduce the inclination to bot or multibox.
Here we are 3.5 years later, and the gameplay is so simple that we find top rated arena teams consisting of nothing more than 5 elemental shamans bound to perform the same command from one keyboard, and bots that can automatically farm gold/materials that remain useful in the endgame.
Perhaps we should not hate the bot itself, but the over-simplified game mechanics. Perhaps if an activity is so ridiculously simple that it can be automated, or a strategy so simple it involves spamming the same skill, it should not be that rewarding/effective.
I'd love it if Blizzard would staff more GMs to simply preserve watch over the lands of Azeroth, and when they would find a botting player simply unleash a dozen raptors on him, or upgrade one of the mobs he's farming considerably. A player at the keyboard will adapt to the situation, a bot will simply continue to stumble into the unpredicted new environment it is in.
I think I would have modded the parent flamebait over insightful, given the need to bold words in every sentence and make broad hyperboles, but whatever. Apparently someone agrees with you, they certainly don't know insight though.
Look at the statistics. Gun ownership in an area increases self defensibility, which ultimately lowers crime.
The part your missing is that the extremists regularly kill off those that would lead protests against their dogma and actions. They make an example of one, and a hundred shy back into their homes in fear. It's been that way for years.
If we really wanted Iraq to be a free country, all we need to do is go door to door and give every man and woman a gun. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, a nice 12 gauge shotgun would do nicely.
There will be a civil war, followed by democracy. And amazingly, no US troop involvement necessary.
People may cry "WTF ur gonna get lotsa people killed?!" - but seriously the jihadist types aren't going to surrender. Better to give the people the best protection against them we can (self defense) than to play this charade of security and watch hundreds of Iraqies be murdered every day for their beliefs.
Because when you say 100% in scientific terms, what you really imply is >99.5%. Which to bacteria is about a half a day setback.
Of course, given that we probably couldn't completely 100.00000000000% sterilize what we sent there, the next question is:
Is there life on Mars now? (that we've been there)
Sooner or later, we're gonna find our own bacteria on Mars if we keep sending stuff there.
I agree. If the telecoms have immunity, then they have no reason to maintain their records proving that our government mandated their cooperation - they can simply sit back and wave the immunity flag and sit smug.
For some reason I just can't see giving companies like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc immunity to prosecution for failure to take proper care of my privacy with information they collect. Maybe it's the completely dishonest PR I've seen out of Comcast recently with relation to P2P trafficing. Maybe it's the anti-competitive buyouts of AT&T. Maybe it's just a general mistrust of anyone worth over a million dollars.
So yea - if there are breaches of my privacy, someone should be held accountable. If it's the government mandating it unjustly, they need publicly defamed and removed from office. If there's no public official - then let the suing of large private information collecting giants like the telecom industries serve as a lesson that maybe, just maybe, they should stop tracking everytime I sneeze.
Apparently, developing nuclear weapons with the capability to destroy the planet wasn't enough. Somehow the nations of the world have not yet asploded themselves. But perhaps with a loose black hole, we'll finally self destruct as a species, and maybe even take the sun with us.
I have to wonder - if every species that ever formed across the galaxy runs into that delimma at some point - that their science of destruction outranges their science of defense and mobility, and one crazy guy blows the whole thing to bits. I mean as it is we've developed the capability to pretty much destroy the only place in the universe we know we can survive - but we seem to be a long ways off from developing the technology in planetary terraforming or off-world survival to expand beyond the earth. In fact, our present means of transportation are pretty sad too. One loose cannon...
What if every black hole was actually once a scientifically advanced species that blew itself up making black holes?
Honestly I don't care if it was offtopic, that made my day:)
I disgree entirely. I care about needing the original disk. Moving towards a steam-like system of DRM where you don't need an easily malable sub-gigabyte coaster to unlock usage of your software license is a step long overdue.
MMOs caught on to this secret early on - when the value your game offers is mostly or completely through online play, you don't need a disk, you can do a much much better job checking accounts as they authenticate with your server.
And consoles are being released with built in HDs rivaling those in gaming PCs now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to be less than ten years away from never needing the gaming disk there, either.
Kudos to Blizzard, though as was stated above, a few years too late.
The jury deliberations could take days... maybe weeks.
"What's the right age for a kid to start playing games?"
;)
Hell, kids start playing games from the second they can use their little hands to cover their eyes. Peek-a-boo, which later evolves into hide-and-seek and treasure hunt, which are the heart of several games and an element of many others. So I guess the counter-question is, what kinds of games? If you design games to cater to the mental capability of the age group, and a user interface that they can work with, the hardware is the only limit (my two year old's hands can't quite operate a mouse yet). The rest is a matter of designing something that is challenging but not overwhelming. I think a young child can play an MMO like WOW with no problem, because they don't typically approach the world with an "I have to conquer everything" approach, but rather an explorative "Hey, what's this do?" approach. And in my experience, the six year old eventually finds a lot of repetition, gets bored, and stops playing LONG before the grown adult should have done the same
I have to agree. Although it's too bad really, I'd love to own a patent on the flavor of statistics where you pull a number out of your @$$ and claim it as a percentage of the population that believes/does X. I'd make a killing on at least 90% of the forums out there.
...
Wait, can't we just do that anyways?
If everyone on slashdot accessed RIAA.org at the same time every morning, we could just permajam their website. DOS, but kinda legal, since you can't sue an individual for loading your website once a day.
Sigh - then again, the formula "if everyone did X" results in a lot of miracles that will never actually happen.
Ehhhhhh, kinda. On the one hand, companies could certainly always be more forthcoming about what they are selling to kids, the action packed in your face commercialism that surrounds ever more creative ways to sell a wad of corn syrup needs to be reigned in. But that's not the real issue, the one driving that kind of commercialism.
The real issue is a underdeveloped sense of pro active thinking in young minds. Less and less are kids encouraged to think critically, more and more are they spoon fed. I trust that marketing minds are doing whatever it is that generates them the most profits and sales, and their weapon of choice is the action packed, emotionally charged, factless message (works for politics too). It's an issue of education, but I don't think it's because kids don't know sugar without exercise makes you fat. It's because they don't care. They don't really think about life when they're 40. They don't build the habits that reward not through instant gratification, but long term success and health. And we say, well they're just kids, they'll learn that later. But look around, and tell me they learned it later.
If the world went on a heatlh kick, and people consistently acted in their own best interest in terms of diet, McDonalds would go out of business, or undergo a very significant menu change. Oh yes, they've introduced the premier "salad" to their menu, sure. Is there a salad happy meal? Batter coated fried chicken paste wins the taste buds of the youngest generation, not the health conscious choice.
I am far more worried that a select few people can manipulate the "results" of a political election than I am over a rich guy buying out what half the US doesn't even use. There was a slashdot article up not too long ago asking what college students would sell their right to vote for, and many would have agreed to a total under a thousand dollars. Why? Because you can achieve a lot more change with a thousand dollars than you can with a single vote. And it scales. If half the United States (150 million? We'll round) votes Democrat to promote universal health care coverage, there's still a big debate in the Congress, they still need 3/5ths to pass anything contravertial in the Senate, and a whopping 2/3rds to sneak anything by our war-mongerring President.
On the other hand, with 1000x150million dollars, you could just fund the damn thing.
If you've dropped crack because you've developed the drive to live with and experience your emotions and environment untethered by the influence of drugs, and the willpower to commit to it, that is a moment truly worthy of rejoice.
If you've dropped crack because it doesn't get you high anymore, and haven't grown mentally/emotionally from the addiction centered mentality, you'll very likely continue to burden your family and friends through your self destructive habits.
There is a silver bullet for addiction, and it's not in a vaccine. It comes from defining your own principles, and commiting to live by them, rather than center your life around someone or something else. From this you build good habits, and in doing so eliminate bad ones. It's not just about changing the stimilus - because the truth is we can't always control what that stimilus will be. But we can learn to choose our responses.
I do wish the best to your brother and family. Sorry if I sound a little preachy, I just worry when I see things like "this is exactly what they need". It's not. It may be helpful short term, but it's not the cure.
That might work great, if it weren't possible to just let your best friend shoot you, waking up 10 seconds later in the same system, and split the bounty.
There's a fundamental change in the value of life when you only get one.
This isn't like a mugger stealing a purse.
It's kind of like an email scammer convincing you to send money to Nigeria - but not really.
It's more like betting 100 bucks on a chess game, and then falling for it when your opponent recommends a move for you that leads ultimately to you losing your bet. I don't feel sorry for that guy.
It's true that the newbs suffer this, because they don't understand the market. However, it's not suffocating the market at all. As was posted above and warrents repeating, for the market to stay this high, someone has to be buying up all the items supplied at lower pricing. That means I can create a new character on a new server with no rich friends, get up to level 6 or so and pick up mining/herbalism, put together a few stacks of copper/peacebloom/linen (low grade level 1-10 stuff) and make BANK on the auction house, enough to easily buy myself a few decent bags and finance my training costs for the first 20 levels or so. The only issue is that the market fails to sort properly, so sometimes people have to sort through several pages of stuff (maybe they fixed this by now?)
In other words, someone trying to manipulate the market like this is actually a boon to anyone with a bit of knowledge about the game that's running through low levels anyways.
Lol, that whole site needs javascript in order to work. And you can bet your ass if a troll is spamming it anonymously, it's not a website I'm interested in allowing to run any sort of javascript/activex/etc.