Wikipedia does have history pages, and you can view snapshots. Right now it mostly is used to track edit wars and to watch articles go from nothing to something... but if it persists, it -will- be possible to look back and browse "Wikipedia 2010" in 2060.
You mean it works like real life? If I want to change the oil in my car, I have to do a little work. If I don't I have to pay? I guess that makes sense.
Do you know a lot of people who want to play a racing game where they'd have to manually decide between spending 20 minutes simulating changing their oil, or paying real money to skip doing it manually before they could go on the next race?
Making something "Work like real life" isn't exactly the key to making good games.
The racing game would be pretty crappy if the guy in front of you loses control and turns your car into a flaming wreck. Then instead of racing the game is just years of simulated physical therapy. And you aren't allowed to stop playing unless you kill yourself... for real.
golf is more about beating your own score than someone elses for most people.
And it has a whole handicap system in place so that when you do play against others if everyone plays there best they will end up even, regardless of how far apart their "best" actually is.
. If paying money gives you an better experience then it is worth the price.
And that's fine until you get into a competive game, where an equal footing off the line is sort of the entire point.
Pole position is a nice perk in racing... we can give it to the team that posted the best times in the qualifiers and previous runs... or just auction it off to the highest bidder...
Just because a team is willing to pay for pole position doesn't mean we should let them, does it? Some things need to be earned, letting people buy them takes their merit away from everyone.
By the time you watch an episode of simpsons... even if you skip the commercials... we could be at war.
But don't let that worry you, my Alien Invasion Conspiracy doomday clock which tracks the chances that an alien fleet is behind the moon right now and is coordinating with the CIA and FBI to prepare a combination harvest & extinction of the human race has been very accurately set at only 20 minutes to midnight.
Insurance: Drunk drivers kill a lot of people every year. In addition to it being a tragedy, for the insurance co.s, it's a business matter. How do YOU propose that they tell the difference between a person who drives drunk (or tipsy) but have been lucky so far, and people who might die, kill, create enormous medical bills, or wreck expensive property tomorrow?
You mean there is no way to measure actual impairment? You aren't willing to even try?
Fines: These are laws about public safety. You're complaining about paying money because you were caught endangering others. I'm not sure I trust you behind the wheel in any event, knowing that. Let alone that you consulted a lawyer about how to act if (when eventually?) you get caught doing something that could kill people, and took the advice to heart.
You are assuming that he's driving impaired. What if he's not impaired? What if with 0.08 in his system he isn't endangering the public at all?
People with a cold, sniffles, and coughing are perhaps more impaired than he is at 0.08. Should we fine everyone who gets into a car with allergies, or who drives home from work tired with a headache from the cheap lighting?
Those people are more impaired.
Me, I got a ticket last week for holding a phone. Not using it. Holding it; it had fallen out of my jacket pocket, and I'd picked it up to put in the cup holder.
If it had been my wallet instead of my phone, I'd still have my $180 bucks. I wasn't impaired, i wasn't driving distracted, the cop saw me holding an electronic device, and ticketed me.
So consulting ones lawyer in advance is probably a good idea. The system isn't looking for impaired drivers... its looking for an excuse to punish people whether they are impaired or not.
As a consumer, I want a standard guaranteeing that whatever payment option I use is applicable to all apps in the market place.
Im with you. Except calling it a "payment option" in the last sentence is a mistake.
Its still a payment REQUIREMENT to the customer. But if I'm going to be subjected to a payment requirement to use a marketplace, then its definitely good that it at least be applied consistently to the whole market place.
, you can still have a complete, fulfilling experience... by paying not to have to play the game! Hurrah!
leaving some of the drudgery time wasters behind. I means you can do more of the fun stuff with the time you spend.
You mean the game has "drudery timewasters" literaly DESIGNED to be drudgery time wasters -- and then it offers you way to pay your way to leaving them behind?
You just came right out illustrated one of my points for me.
I mean seriously... how is this not offensive?
The motivation for game design is all wrong. Hey look at this boss, this level has a hidden area here and when you kill this boss you get a hint about it, and when you follow the hint, you get this item.
Boss... thats a nice item. Ok, make it so it only drops one time in 100 from the boss. And 7 out of 10 times, the room is just empty.
So on average a player will need to do it several hundred times to get the item.
But Boss that's drudgery and a waste of time.
Yeah, but we'll put the item in the market for $2 for anyone who is lazy.
Scratch that, make it drop 1 in 1000, and we can make it $5.00...
Granted TF2 doesn't necessarily follow this slippery slope down to the conclusion, but lots of freemium games certainly do.
But at the end of the day, I want to play games to escape from the real world, not be reminded in them that if I spent just a $1.50 more I could be having even more fun than I am right.
Because I don't know about you, because if the game is literally blackmailing me with drudgery and time wasters to try and lure another buck fifty out of me, that's not a game I want to play.
If you are lazy, you can pay. If you don't want to pay, you can work a little for it. Sounds good to me!
Calling people who buy items "lazy" is all well and good.. but:
Its hard for someone smart not to be sitting there waiting for that rare to random spawn to calculate the number of hours they are spending trying to get X divided over the cost of X in some marketplace... at which point you realize that if you wandered around the city collecting cans you'd have had that item 3 months ago.
As soon as a game presents me with a choice like this it becomes very difficult for me to want to play the game at all.
When I work out that I can legitimately (ie not via cheating, or using some sort of hack/crack/bot/whatever... but using an officially supported and apporved method to) earn the in game "rewards" orders of magnitudes faster by NOT PLAYING the game -- i find that thoroughly disillusioning.
Now if getting item X is actually fun enough to motivate me to play even if I wasn't going to get item X that might be different. But few games are. The vast majority of games reward "grinding" -- the worst kind of least fun repetition to maximize ones odds of getting items you want. Whether you are stuck playing the same particular level/dungeon/map/scenario endlessly...
Or perhaps its just truly random, and then nothing you do affects whether you get it or not, and then finally receiving the "reward" is utterly pointless -- the guy next you got his the first guy he killed... the guy next to him will die of old age before fate favors him... talk about sucking the point out of it.
The paid content doesn't give you a huge advantage over the free content.
So it gives you a minor advantage over the free content?
Is that actually "good" or just "better than worst case"?
My problem with freemium even when done "right" or whatever you want to call it is still is unacceptable to me at a fundamental level:
I -do- not want to be confronted with real life purchasing decisions every few minutes while playing games. Period. I don't want to be dropped into a "store" everytime I die. I don't want to be prompted to buy something everytime I start up, and every time I quit, and every time a new level loads.
I don't want to asked to evaluate whether or not some two dozen different micro-items is worth $X to me.
I don't want any of it. I don't want to subject my kids to it either.
That saod, I don't mind expansion packs. 20 new tracks and 5 new cars for $10 bucks or whatever is perfectly fine. But don't advertise it in the game so that I have to explicitly decline buying it every time I play... and don't break it up into micro-transactions... $1 per track, 1$ per car... I don't want to excert the mental process of deciding is this car worth a buck, is this car worth a buck, is this car worth a buck to me... I just don't.
And don't have me competing with people in the expansion pack cars if they are anything more than just skins.
Remember even "Situationally better" is still better if you get any control over the situation, which of course, unless you are an idiot... you always do.
Most of us can no more imagine it now than some guy playing Pacman could have foreseen Half-Life 2. But it's coming.
The guy playing pacman (released in 1980) only had to move a couple cabinets over to play Battlezone (also released in 1980) to foresee Half Life 2 and FPS's in general.
The key point is that you seem to have missed is that the terrorists cannot turn the security line at (your favorite airport) into a giant guided missile and fly it into (your favorite important structure).
And it will never happen again anyway. locked reinforced doors to the pilots cabin and a passenger compartment full of people who will never forget 9/11 will ensure it.
We could easily solve this by privatizing all roads and making them toll roads and letting businesses decide if they require these safety features to allow you on their roadways.
How would that solve anything? Whose to say that the privately owned roads will not require the safety feature he objects to?
If there is no route from A to B that uses the safety feature set he agrees with then large tracts of the country will be inaccessible to him.
That doesn't sound like a "solution" to me.
Nevermind that he's held nearly hostage by whoever owns the road to his house. Either he buckles down to their safety requirements, or his car doesn't get out of the garage.
. beardo's point was simply that you can be healthy as a vegan, not that you can not be healthy without being vegan.
I'm not sure that your reading of it is correct. You seem to argue that he's saying that he's healthy DESPITE being vegan.
I guess you can interpret his post like that.
His argument, as I read it, was that he is vegan, healthy, and that being vegan is in part a foundation of that health.
Seeing as HIS own follow up response didn't accuse me of straw men or other gross mischaracterizations of his argument, I'm not sure your reading is correct.
maybe you're making the point that diet doesn't affect health?
You do realize I explicitly wrote that "a healthy diet is important." in the post you are accusing me of making the point that diet doesn't affect health right? I'm pretty sure your going to have a tough time reconciling that without some pretty irrational leaps of logic.
Do you see WoW "nerds" getting special protection from bullying, the way homosexuals do?
Do you see WoW nerds getting disowned by their family's kicked out of their churches, ostracized by their own friends, and fired from their jobs... for being WoW nerds?
No? Didn't think so.
The crime might be the same "bullying group X" but the consequences of the crime aren't really in the same league.
If you dare question the special legal treatment of homosexuals, you are a homophobe
Not at all. I even agree putting poorly crafted laws on the books to protect homosexuals is wrong. The stigma of being gay is an epheral cultural anomoly that will likely eventually sort itself out... and once it does... the laws will still be around... ripe for abuse.
But that doesn't mean we should shove our heads up our asses and pretend that being outed as gay is no different than being outed as a WoW nerd within the world today.
, it was deprecated in favor of something else when Apple changed APIs to favor Cocoa instead of Carbon
It was discontinued when apple decided to use opengl instead of their own 3d api. That is a lot like Microsoft killing silverlight to focus on html 5.
And silverlight -- if you can count quickdraw3d as being evolved from lisagraf than silverlight didn't pop out in 2007 its roots are in dotNet. And even if silverlight dies, a lot that's in it will live on.
Apple cancelled a product line that wasn't successful
Like the Zune. Financial trouble or not, the Zune hasn't been a rousing success, and the standalone mp3 market itself is collapsing as smartphones and handheld consoles eat away at the market.
. I lead a very active lifestyle -- I bike to work, scuba dive, teach spin classes, and work out regularly. (I'm known as one of the tougher spin instructors.) I go to the doctor about once a year to get a checkup.
And this is why you are healthy.
I eat a vegan diet
Not this.
Granted your diet likely involves not loading up on potato chips, and twinkies every day... so a "healty diet" is important. But it doesn't need to be "vegan" to be "healthy".
like SIlverlight and WinFS and Windows Live and so on.
WinFS meet OpenDoc Zune meet Xserve...
Apple's list might not be as long... but any tech companies past is littered with projects that got dropped after failing to gain enough momentum or after hitting technical or other obstacles...
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia does have history pages, and you can view snapshots. Right now it mostly is used to track edit wars and to watch articles go from nothing to something... but if it persists, it -will- be possible to look back and browse "Wikipedia 2010" in 2060.
You mean it works like real life? If I want to change the oil in my car, I have to do a little work. If I don't I have to pay? I guess that makes sense.
Do you know a lot of people who want to play a racing game where they'd have to manually decide between spending 20 minutes simulating changing their oil, or paying real money to skip doing it manually before they could go on the next race?
Making something "Work like real life" isn't exactly the key to making good games.
The racing game would be pretty crappy if the guy in front of you loses control and turns your car into a flaming wreck. Then instead of racing the game is just years of simulated physical therapy. And you aren't allowed to stop playing unless you kill yourself ... for real.
You know... just like real life.
Because -that- sounds like a good game design??
Why not just give you the items, without making you do something obviously stupid and a complete waste of time?
golf is more about beating your own score than someone elses for most people.
And it has a whole handicap system in place so that when you do play against others if everyone plays there best they will end up even, regardless of how far apart their "best" actually is.
. If paying money gives you an better experience then it is worth the price.
And that's fine until you get into a competive game, where an equal footing off the line is sort of the entire point.
Pole position is a nice perk in racing... we can give it to the team that posted the best times in the qualifiers and previous runs... or just auction it off to the highest bidder...
Just because a team is willing to pay for pole position doesn't mean we should let them, does it? Some things need to be earned, letting people buy them takes their merit away from everyone.
Right, come see my Canada doomsday clock...
Its only 18 minutes to midnight.
By the time you watch an episode of simpsons... even if you skip the commercials... we could be at war.
But don't let that worry you, my Alien Invasion Conspiracy doomday clock which tracks the chances that an alien fleet is behind the moon right now and is coordinating with the CIA and FBI to prepare a combination harvest & extinction of the human race has been very accurately set at only 20 minutes to midnight.
What a retarded metric.
Insurance: Drunk drivers kill a lot of people every year. In addition to it being a tragedy, for the insurance co.s, it's a business matter. How do YOU propose that they tell the difference between a person who drives drunk (or tipsy) but have been lucky so far, and people who might die, kill, create enormous medical bills, or wreck expensive property tomorrow?
You mean there is no way to measure actual impairment? You aren't willing to even try?
Fines: These are laws about public safety. You're complaining about paying money because you were caught endangering others. I'm not sure I trust you behind the wheel in any event, knowing that. Let alone that you consulted a lawyer about how to act if (when eventually?) you get caught doing something that could kill people, and took the advice to heart.
You are assuming that he's driving impaired. What if he's not impaired? What if with 0.08 in his system he isn't endangering the public at all?
People with a cold, sniffles, and coughing are perhaps more impaired than he is at 0.08. Should we fine everyone who gets into a car with allergies, or who drives home from work tired with a headache from the cheap lighting?
Those people are more impaired.
Me, I got a ticket last week for holding a phone. Not using it. Holding it; it had fallen out of my jacket pocket, and I'd picked it up to put in the cup holder.
If it had been my wallet instead of my phone, I'd still have my $180 bucks. I wasn't impaired, i wasn't driving distracted, the cop saw me holding an electronic device, and ticketed me.
So consulting ones lawyer in advance is probably a good idea. The system isn't looking for impaired drivers... its looking for an excuse to punish people whether they are impaired or not.
As a consumer, I want a standard guaranteeing that whatever payment option I use is applicable to all apps in the market place.
Im with you. Except calling it a "payment option" in the last sentence is a mistake.
Its still a payment REQUIREMENT to the customer. But if I'm going to be subjected to a payment requirement to use a marketplace, then its definitely good that it at least be applied consistently to the whole market place.
A$$le looks like it should be pronounced Asshole.
So yeah, that works for me.
She sounds dreadfully boring. You'd probably hate her within a few months.
, you can still have a complete, fulfilling experience ... by paying not to have to play the game! Hurrah!
leaving some of the drudgery time wasters behind. I means you can do more of the fun stuff with the time you spend.
You mean the game has "drudery timewasters" literaly DESIGNED to be drudgery time wasters -- and then it offers you way to pay your way to leaving them behind?
You just came right out illustrated one of my points for me.
I mean seriously... how is this not offensive?
The motivation for game design is all wrong. Hey look at this boss, this level has a hidden area here and when you kill this boss you get a hint about it, and when you follow the hint, you get this item.
Boss... thats a nice item. Ok, make it so it only drops one time in 100 from the boss. And 7 out of 10 times, the room is just empty.
So on average a player will need to do it several hundred times to get the item.
But Boss that's drudgery and a waste of time.
Yeah, but we'll put the item in the market for $2 for anyone who is lazy.
Scratch that, make it drop 1 in 1000, and we can make it $5.00...
Granted TF2 doesn't necessarily follow this slippery slope down to the conclusion, but lots of freemium games certainly do.
But at the end of the day, I want to play games to escape from the real world, not be reminded in them that if I spent just a $1.50 more I could be having even more fun than I am right.
Because I don't know about you, because if the game is literally blackmailing me with drudgery and time wasters to try and lure another buck fifty out of me, that's not a game I want to play.
If you are lazy, you can pay. If you don't want to pay, you can work a little for it. Sounds good to me!
Calling people who buy items "lazy" is all well and good.. but:
Its hard for someone smart not to be sitting there waiting for that rare to random spawn to calculate the number of hours they are spending trying to get X divided over the cost of X in some marketplace... at which point you realize that if you wandered around the city collecting cans you'd have had that item 3 months ago.
As soon as a game presents me with a choice like this it becomes very difficult for me to want to play the game at all.
When I work out that I can legitimately (ie not via cheating, or using some sort of hack/crack/bot/whatever... but using an officially supported and apporved method to) earn the in game "rewards" orders of magnitudes faster by NOT PLAYING the game -- i find that thoroughly disillusioning.
Now if getting item X is actually fun enough to motivate me to play even if I wasn't going to get item X that might be different. But few games are. The vast majority of games reward "grinding" -- the worst kind of least fun repetition to maximize ones odds of getting items you want. Whether you are stuck playing the same particular level/dungeon/map/scenario endlessly...
Or perhaps its just truly random, and then nothing you do affects whether you get it or not, and then finally receiving the "reward" is utterly pointless -- the guy next you got his the first guy he killed... the guy next to him will die of old age before fate favors him... talk about sucking the point out of it.
The paid content doesn't give you a huge advantage over the free content.
So it gives you a minor advantage over the free content?
Is that actually "good" or just "better than worst case"?
My problem with freemium even when done "right" or whatever you want to call it is still is unacceptable to me at a fundamental level:
I -do- not want to be confronted with real life purchasing decisions every few minutes while playing games. Period. I don't want to be dropped into a "store" everytime I die. I don't want to be prompted to buy something everytime I start up, and every time I quit, and every time a new level loads.
I don't want to asked to evaluate whether or not some two dozen different micro-items is worth $X to me.
I don't want any of it. I don't want to subject my kids to it either.
That saod, I don't mind expansion packs. 20 new tracks and 5 new cars for $10 bucks or whatever is perfectly fine. But don't advertise it in the game so that I have to explicitly decline buying it every time I play... and don't break it up into micro-transactions... $1 per track, 1$ per car... I don't want to excert the mental process of deciding is this car worth a buck, is this car worth a buck, is this car worth a buck to me... I just don't.
And don't have me competing with people in the expansion pack cars if they are anything more than just skins.
Remember even "Situationally better" is still better if you get any control over the situation, which of course, unless you are an idiot... you always do.
Most of us can no more imagine it now than some guy playing Pacman could have foreseen Half-Life 2. But it's coming.
The guy playing pacman (released in 1980) only had to move a couple cabinets over to play Battlezone (also released in 1980) to foresee Half Life 2 and FPS's in general.
The key point is that you seem to have missed is that the terrorists cannot turn the security line at (your favorite airport) into a giant guided missile and fly it into (your favorite important structure).
And it will never happen again anyway. locked reinforced doors to the pilots cabin and a passenger compartment full of people who will never forget 9/11 will ensure it.
Having them scan grandmas privates won't.
MPAA: I FORCE CHOKE YOU! [extends hand]
Its pretty much obligatory to post this here i think:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmQB1n68KFQ
We could easily solve this by privatizing all roads and making them toll roads and letting businesses decide if they require these safety features to allow you on their roadways.
How would that solve anything? Whose to say that the privately owned roads will not require the safety feature he objects to?
If there is no route from A to B that uses the safety feature set he agrees with then large tracts of the country will be inaccessible to him.
That doesn't sound like a "solution" to me.
Nevermind that he's held nearly hostage by whoever owns the road to his house. Either he buckles down to their safety requirements, or his car doesn't get out of the garage.
. beardo's point was simply that you can be healthy as a vegan, not that you can not be healthy without being vegan.
I'm not sure that your reading of it is correct. You seem to argue that he's saying that he's healthy DESPITE being vegan.
I guess you can interpret his post like that.
His argument, as I read it, was that he is vegan, healthy, and that being vegan is in part a foundation of that health.
Seeing as HIS own follow up response didn't accuse me of straw men or other gross mischaracterizations of his argument, I'm not sure your reading is correct.
maybe you're making the point that diet doesn't affect health?
You do realize I explicitly wrote that "a healthy diet is important." in the post you are accusing me of making the point that diet doesn't affect health right? I'm pretty sure your going to have a tough time reconciling that without some pretty irrational leaps of logic.
Do you see WoW "nerds" getting special protection from bullying, the way homosexuals do?
Do you see WoW nerds getting disowned by their family's kicked out of their churches, ostracized by their own friends, and fired from their jobs... for being WoW nerds?
No? Didn't think so.
The crime might be the same "bullying group X" but the consequences of the crime aren't really in the same league.
If you dare question the special legal treatment of homosexuals, you are a homophobe
Not at all. I even agree putting poorly crafted laws on the books to protect homosexuals is wrong. The stigma of being gay is an epheral cultural anomoly that will likely eventually sort itself out... and once it does... the laws will still be around... ripe for abuse.
But that doesn't mean we should shove our heads up our asses and pretend that being outed as gay is no different than being outed as a WoW nerd within the world today.
, it was deprecated in favor of something else when Apple changed APIs to favor Cocoa instead of Carbon
It was discontinued when apple decided to use opengl instead of their own 3d api. That is a lot like Microsoft killing silverlight to focus on html 5.
And silverlight -- if you can count quickdraw3d as being evolved from lisagraf than silverlight didn't pop out in 2007 its roots are in dotNet. And even if silverlight dies, a lot that's in it will live on.
Apple cancelled a product line that wasn't successful
Like the Zune. Financial trouble or not, the Zune hasn't been a rousing success, and the standalone mp3 market itself is collapsing as smartphones and handheld consoles eat away at the market.
Bullshit.
Quickdraw3d and opendoc are both parallel examples to silverlight... especially quickdraw3d
The newton parallels the Zune .mac/icloud/whatever parallels hotmail/windowslive/whatever
OpenDoc ...
Xserve
Newton
Final Cut Studio
Shake
QuickDraw3D
. I lead a very active lifestyle -- I bike to work, scuba dive, teach spin classes, and work out regularly. (I'm known as one of the tougher spin instructors.) I go to the doctor about once a year to get a checkup.
And this is why you are healthy.
I eat a vegan diet
Not this.
Granted your diet likely involves not loading up on potato chips, and twinkies every day... so a "healty diet" is important. But it doesn't need to be "vegan" to be "healthy".
like SIlverlight and WinFS and Windows Live and so on.
WinFS meet OpenDoc ...
Zune meet Xserve
Apple's list might not be as long... but any tech companies past is littered with projects that got dropped after failing to gain enough momentum or after hitting technical or other obstacles...
You have shown the same example multiple times. That is not the same as many different examples.
I thought the complaint was that microsoft was constantly changing direction and dropping brandnames and reworking services into something else.
iTools -> .Mac -> MobileMe -> iCloud
is one example of Apple doing the same thing with one of their services (and not just once, but regularly)
If it had been as successful as zune market or whatever, I expect they would have.