So basically, the guy has a list of critiques, and your reply is, "but that's the way it's always been!" Do you not see the flaw here?
The FLAW here is that they guy's list of critiques demonstrated out of whack expectations.
Suppose you read a game review of the new FIFA game, and the reviewer starting saying ridiculous things like "I was really disappointed with the game. I couldn't small the grass."
Its ok to critique a game like this if its understood that you are critiqueing the entire genre, or even videogames in general... but to single out a title and say -THIS- game disappointed me because there were no smells just demonstrates how out of touch your expectations were.
shoot a furry animal and the system does not let me, then make the arrow pass straight through it
Ok, let me get this straight... a message telling you the bunny isn't a valid target is unacceptable, and show lack of polish. While having arrows sail right through it, (which looks like a BUG) is ok? Seems pretty arbitrary to me. Personally I'd rather be told why my arrows are continuously missing.
You should be able to attack NPC but be aware that there are consequences. The system should handle situations like that gracefully. For example if an important merchant NPC in a city gets attacked, let the city guards show up to arrest the character. And if the merchant dies anyway, let it re-spawn. Make the stupid action that the character want to do available but make it not worthwhile.
"worthwhile" is an useless word. If people *can* do something, people will do something, even if its not 'worthwhile'. In EQ for example, for a long time you could kill the merchants and other NPCs. Its pretty annoying if you head to the bank or baker or quest giver and find he's not there because someones killing him / killed him.
Consequences? Let the city gaurds show up? Well, then we'll just kill them TOO. If we can raid a dragon-god-lava-monster with legendary artifact weapons I'm pretty sure a few gaurds who haven't stepped out of their village shouldn't be an obstacle.
EQ1 had a social aggro system... if you attacked an NPC nearby gaurds would attempt to kill you in response. So players just banded together and killed the gaurds too. The merchants didn't drop anything, gave practically no experience. Bored players killed them. Jerks who wanted to interfere with other players killed them. Eventually players complained because they couldn't finish quests and what not, and a lot of npcs couldn't be attacked, and even some entire areas became combat-free.
That would be my expectations and I think that they are both reasonable and realistic since even Ultima 6 had smart solutions for situations like that (I think it was released 1990 - that's 17 years ago).
ultima 6 was single player. quite frankly, yes, a lot of things had to take a gaint step BACKWARDS in order to accomodate keeping a few thousand players in any sort of reasonable sync.
I can't tell if your just being sarcastic or not. People aren't modding you funny though, so I'm not the only one who thinks you at least *might* be serious.
The combat system sucks - it actually has a window that says things like "You hit the wolf for two points of damage". It felt like going back in time to the 80's.
"Tynsil's Mark of Nobility heals Doobers for 43 hit points." "Udaho's Ghastly Shroud regenerates 133 points of absorption."...
Personally I don't think it is "polished gameplay" if you try, for instance, trying to do something like shoot a sheep with your crossbow only to receive an error message - yes, really! an error message saying something like "disallowed action".
So you aren't allowed to shoot the sheep, big deal. They aren't 'opponents' or 'killable creatures', they're just animated background, like a torch, or tree.
And calling that an "error message"? What is it supposed to say when you perform a disallowed action? Did you also complain when you tried to lockpick a goblin?
And although the world is big, you can't really explore it - you can't open doors unless they are part of the plot, you can't smash crates or barrels or whatever to see what is inside them, you even can't fight the NPCs or animals unless it is part of the plot.
Go play everquest one. It lets you really explore. Of course, the moment you step into the side room the YOU-hating level 65 shadowknight leader was sitting in he executes you on the spot. Or when you get sent to see so-and-so, you can spend 3 hours checking nearly every room in the city, only to find out after much frustration that so-and-so only comes out at night, and he walks around too, and if you don't catch up to him in time his path takes him right to the level 65 shadowknight -- who kills him. (And you too if you happen to be nearby.)
Modern MMORPGs got rid of all that stuff because a lot of players complained bitterly about how it wasn't fair. All that open 'Exploration' was wasting time when looking for things, perpetually getting them lost, and often getting them killed. They wanted maps, and waypoints so they couldn't get lost. They wanted higher level aggressive mobs to be well marked, and far away. They didn't want to open doors and find BIG THINGS that could and would kill them.
I've gotten refunds at the movie theatre several times... but maybe that's just in my area.
Its like anything else, people are much more willing to refund if you return the product largely un-comsumed.
If you stay for the full 2 hour movie, your pretty much consumed what you paid for, and even if you didn't like it, they delivered what you paid for. If you decide its not worth watching after 20 minutes, I find people are pretty amenable to issuing a refund, or letting you watch one of the other shows.
the article clearly indicated that they were NOT skipping the ads.
I have a DVR, I skip a lot of the ads, but not all of them. Sometimes I *want* a break. Sometimes the commercials are entertaining.
I'm sure some people almost always skip the commercials. I'm sure some people almost never skip the commercials.
But the bottom line is if you start looking at people with viewers, at least SOME of them will be watching the commercials. That's much 'better' than just assuming none of them ever do.
I argue that if we don't want our society being like him, then he is a danger to society.
I don't want our society to piss all over the floor in public restrooms. If 1 million people did it, the entire restroom would be just be a 2 foot deep pool of piss, forming a yellow river out into the Mall...
So the jackasses who piss on the floor in public restrooms should be incarcerated for life, because they represent a danger to society?
I mean, if you're dealing with a corrupt court where you're guilty until proven innocent, you don't even have to be using encryption to get screwed this way.
If by Kangaroo court, you mean the DA already thinks he has enough on you between circumstantial evidence and a snitch.
The DA might just as well accuse you of using steganography to hide illegal photos in random files spread all across your hard drive, which is equally impossible to disprove.
You'd have a fairly strong defense against that accusation if your hard drive contains no steganography tools. That's sort of the the issue with truecrypt - it doesn't prove you have child porn, or even a hidden volume, but its not unreasonable to suppose you might, if you have truecrypt, there is other circumstantial evidence, and a 'snitch' whose just reliable enough of a witness to sway a jury.
The benchmarks were all measuring the delays from extremely common, simple tasks. Booting, app launching, opening, typing, scrolling, and saving are the fundamental tasks for word processing.
Yes, and Notepad is blazing fast on my PC. And it does all of those common fundamental things admirably.
Hmmm... I wonder why I don't use Notepad instead of Word (actually in my case OOo Writer). Perhaps because writer is much more, what's the word? "Productive"?, despite taking 5-10 seconds to initially launch.
There wouldn't have been any point in writing an article about how much more computers can do these days.
So instead they wrote an article about productivity and left out all the stuff computers can now do for you.
I guess calculators haven't come along much either. I mean they're about the same responsiveness, both turn on pretty quickly, digits come up almost instantaneously; this was all true 25 years ago. No real progress has been made.
Lets just conveniently ignore the fact that the new one can work with numbers more than 8 digits long, can solve systems of linear equations, converts to hexadecimal, computes compounding interest, and can even plot a sin wave... I mean that hasn't increased my productivity one iota.
If I 'purchased a license' then where is it? I don't have a drawer full of licenses. I have a hard drive full of songs.
And that license, is it really mine, after all I don't own the copyright on the license any more than I own the copyright on the song. So what exactly are you claiming they *sold* me?
And if its really 'my license' that I purchased, why can't I transfer it to a friend when I'm done with it? I mean, sure the license says I can't make copies of the song, but why can't I transfer the *license*.
Really depends what you mean by "headscarf". Some would. Some wouldn't.
Searching google images shows the diversity of things called 'headscarf'. The word covers garments ranging from little more than a headband to the complete head covering a women in Taliban controlled afghanistan would wear.
But let me go back for a second...you say that the company needs to go after both the buyer and the seller. Really, this is unrealistic. It is hard to actually prove that someone bought the gold. Sure, you can see who a seller is by how much gold is coming from them and how it is distributed. But say a gold seller just gives a person gold for fun...that person would be banned.
The strategy is make 'giving people piles of gold for fun' an urealistic and unlikely scenario, then preventing it via the mechanics, so it can't happen by accident. Then people who jump through hoops to do it stick out like sore thumbs.
They have no proof that the person actually bought gold, they just know that they got gold from a certain character.
Which is why you make 'unrealistic gifts' the target. This all applies to designing new games. When dealing with it in an existing game, then yes, you made your bed and now you have to sleep in it.
It is better to go after the seller because it is easier to track a large volume of transaction to a single account.
Yes, in an existing game, where do you don't have the freedom to (re)define the ruleset/mechanics. Although even that is ineffective, a profitable seller operation can afford a stable of accounts to 'launder', and even 'throw away accounts' to be discarded when they get 'hot'.
Ok, to go back to the difference between WoW and FFXI. The services these gold selling companies have change the complexion of the game. In FFXI, it made the game unenjoyable to me. In WoW, other than the spam messages, you really don't even notice.
Which is why Blizzard is only chasing the spammers. But there are plenty of people who are disgusted with the peons4hire activity going on, even if it isn't causing the complete economic collapse.
There is a bit of inflation...but generally you benefit from that as much as anyone else. Blizzard did it right with their Raiding system. You just can't buy the best stuff. The only mistake they made was making epic flying mounts so expensive. Other than that, you need to actually play the game to get the top tier stuff.
No. Because that ONLY affects top tier players. Non-top tier players in raiding guilds will never get that stuff anyway... so for them the top tier stuff they could ever acheive IS for for sale. For new players/ mid level players the stuff they can buy is better than anything they could 'earn' at any given point along the progression curve.
As far as capping progress per hour...that is just dumb. Some people enjoy to level as fast as they can. There is nothing wrong with that.
Which is why there can be more than one game, more than one server for that game, and special rulesets for different servers.
You just have to learn that in an MMORPG you will not be the best player on there unless you give up your life.
In current mmorpgs that is the case, yes.
Really, what would you cap it at...your rate? These are games designed to be played by many people, not just you.
Different strokes for different folks. I'd happily join a server where your play time was capped at 15 hours a week. It would be an attractive server for people like me. I don't suggest that it be the ONLY server. But its like anything else... people LIKE to play with people of similiar rank and skill, and of similiar involvement in the game.
I don't WANT to play with people who log 150 hours a week in the game, and honestly they don't really WANT to play with me either. Sure I can form groups within the game of like minded people, but the game world itself is dominated by the hard core players, and that affects our game. I don't want to buy their shit. I don't want them doing everything on the server first. I don't want their incessant whining about raid game content, and issues like the balance of uber-lord seven when tanked by paladins vs warriors to dominate all the developers time instead of the broken quest for 40th level players.
They specifically said it uses the visible curvature of the bone as the primary recognition factor. Thinks like scars, glasses, will have a limited effect to disguise.
As for puberty, sure the curvature will change while the skull is still forming, but even by early teens things are mostly set.
Really thick facial hair that totally obscures the outline of your head plus oversize glasses that obscure your eye sockets and brow ridges would defeat it, but that hairy bastard with glam-rock shades is going to stick out in a crowd like a sore thumb anyway.:)
I did the math. That would handle 3.4x10^38 Bytes, or 340 trillion YottaBytes (1 YottaByte = 1 billion PetaBytes, 1 PetaByte = 1 million GigaBytes). That's a very large number of Bytes, but I still wouldn't use the word never.
If you start running out of space just up the block size.;)
On the other hand if they ever make a 512 bit filesystem, I think we'll finally be covered. You'll use up all the atoms in the universe making the disk, and still have media for less than 1% of the addressable space, even if your block size is 1 byte.
I am not the person you responded to, but that's a good question.
I can't vouch for "illegal" (IANAL) but can I ask why you don't think it's wrong?
The answer is simply, because I 'bought it' and its 'mine'. I don't need anyone's 'by your leave' if I lend or give my other possessions to my friends, why should a song be any different!?
If I buy a song, it should be unequivocably ok to transfer ownership of it to someone else when I'm done with it, or to lend it to them however I see fit to. Are we agreed?
Ok... so what makes a song different from my hedge clippers? Well.. if my friend has them I don't.
Ok... so how about I make a hedge clipper server, so that when my friend isn't using my clippers he puts them back in my clipper server, and he can take them back whenever he needs them. So as long as my friend and I aren't clipping at the same time we effectively both have access to the clippers, almost whenever we want them. If I did that, it would be perfectly legal right... nobody would accuse me of stealing the clippers.
Why not allow that for songs? The song server is easy to setup, since we already have this internet, and I don't have to figure out a way of teleporting objects around like I do for clippers.
But since the songs can be trivially copied, why not just make a duplicate instead of setting up a song server. Sure you and your friend might accidently listen to it at the same time, but in reality 99% of the time nobody will be using it...so the 2 minutes of overlapping use on Friday march 22nd 2007 shouldn't really be a deal breaker should it?
Now, sure I could extend that song server idea to a million people, and it starts breaking down. In the clipper example for example, it would still be legal, but the clipper collisions would occur at a frightful rate, and most people wouldn't get the clippers when they wanted them. Additionally, with the constant use the clippers would break pretty fast.
In the case of songs, faces a similiar problems - the collision rate would be too high. But at least the digital copy is effectively indestructible... but another issue arises out of copyright law:
Copyright law covers far more than just merely copying. In fact 'making copies' on its own is pretty benign all things concerned. If all people did was fill their own hard drives with copies, the industry really wouldn't give 2 shits about it. Its only when you start encroaching on the other elements of copyright that real problems occur -- things like public distribution, broadcasting, etc. Making something available to a few friends doesn't amount to 'public distribution' or 'public broadcasting'... p2p sharing DOES.
Why should you have to prove anything? The fact that your name is on the file proves nothing about what you did. Given how many examples people have given demonstrating that fact, how easy it is to spoof, how easy it that it could have been ANYBODY, no judge/jury would ever convict anybody based on having their name on a file.
Or perhaps you think I can successfully sue "Brandie Matthews" and "Araceli Cruz" and "Darwin Ellison" for sending me spam in the last 5 minutes? (Assuming they are even real people...)
Even if they did exist the fact that their name return address is on my spam means squat. They could be infected, they could have had their information harvested off some web forum, they could have been spoofed by an 'arch enemy', the could be the victim of a random name generator that just happens to have found a result that coincides with a real person...
Unless the files are ACTUALLY watermarked and don't just have some obvious bit of metadata this is completely irrelevant. (And even if the files ARE watermarked, that would be a completely independant finding, as this metadata would not be even a peripheral part of any halfway competent watermarking scheme.)
As I understood it, the vulnerability in WPA-PSK is simply a brute force attack. One cannot 'sniff out' the key like WEP simply by observing a chunk of traffic.
A good 'WPA2 PSK' key, like $%AG$T$Yhga3yhwrs34G343a34%$j654# will hold out against brute force admirably. And far far longer than WEP will.
If you have a cite to the contrary, that if you are using WPA2-PSK you might as well be using WEP I'd be very interested in taking a look.
after two or three years the Wii is going to be seriously outdated (graphically)
5 years from now people are going to look at Halo3 and say, it looks pretty good for the time, but its dated now. They couldn't get the physics quite right, and see here how the shadows aren't perfect. And the face still looks plastic... but it was the best they could do.
Super Paper Mario on the other hand, like 'the Simpsons' TV show looks exactly the way the authors wanted it too.
The Wii isn't going to be able to keep up with the photo-realism of the xbox/ps, but really, it doesn't HAVE to in order to be successful with great games.
The "problem" with Devs playing the game isn't going to be that big an issue in one of the many games where PvE is the main reason for playing, as I doubt any sensible person would care that a Dev was an uber-wizard with with 300 pet dragons who could kill orcs by looking at them, as long as they played sensibly and didn't get in other players' ways.
Actually it IS a big issue in PvE games. In some games the top end guilds contained devs. Not a big deal on its own if the dev is a passive player, but if they take an active leadership role, or even an active advisory role to player leadership the guild will start to have advantages over other guilds.
PvE games aren't 'competitive' the way EVE is, but they ARE still competitive. And nothing reeks as a bad as getting assistance from the devs -- faster responses to petitions, insider information, etc, even minor incidental perks lke this reek of corruption.
But yeah, in a game like EVE where the overall fortunes of the player alliances are being impacted by the devs participation... thats a whole new brand of stench.
If the devs worked on it in the form of new content, or ageing content, you could get away with a perpetual world. Have enemy mobs in communities that grow and expand, the occasional random enemy hero popping up that requires more effort to beat. Have set improvements in world technology and travel that unlocks previously accessable areas.
This is how the games already work. Occasionally older areas are occasionally revamped, new areas are added by expansion. In order for the new areas to be worth visiting, they must be better than the old ones. Because all your characters levelled up in the old ones, the new ones have to be predominantly high level. Most of the game goes unused. Take a look at Everquest, if you want to see a game that has 'aged'. (And for an example of just how absurd it gets.)
IANAGD, so I wouldn't really have any idea how much work this would take. I'll assume far too much.
I dunno, its what they already do.
I just don't like the idea of a forced server reset when players might be getting attached to their current character.
How do you cope with beating single player RPGs? The game just ends. Game Over. Even if you were really enjoying it.
If it was age induced, then they could retire them whenever they felt they had to, and would feel a sense of pride for what they've achieved.
Maybe. I think its an anti-climax, and watching your favorite character gradually deteriorate would be more depressing than anything else. It forces you stop playing with him, and ultimately forces you to play the *same game* with another character. I think it would be viewed negatively by most players.
You could even throw in a Heroes hall or something where all the top level retirees go and get drunk every night, talking about all the things they'd done before and how kids these days have it easy compared to their day...
You could, but 'Taverns' are notoriously empty in games. Few players actually want to sit in a virtual room drinking virtual beer. They can just as easily have the conversations 'out of character' while playing.
A server reset shouldn't be viewed as 'starting over and losing your character', but taking the essence of your character and advancing it to the next level in a 'refreshed' world.
The issue I see with only 'aging' the players it that it resets the players but not the world. I think if you simply age the characters and retire them and then they play the next generation up in the 'same world' it will get old fast.
Especially if they always get to the same point and then just start deteriorating. Nothing could be more 'anti-climatic'.
Of course, there is nothing stopping them from aging the entire playerbase together, and having the current generation pass the torch to the next as part of the server reset.
But the game after the reset needs to be 'fresh', there has to be new things to do, real new content. New maps/zones/instances/dungeons added, new mobs, new tricks for old mobs, new equipment rotated in, new quests, and above all a new story arc to run through.
Only as much as playing CIV again is a sequel to your last game.
You have the same identity, equipment/attributes or whatever but in a brand new story right?
Some stuff is carried over, most isn't.
Sure, you could have server resets but knowing the MMO mobs like most do, I can never imagine a world where players would be OK starting over again from scratch (ie the farm boy with nothing turned to RPG hero).
I disagree. How many of us have replayed a single player RPG with a different character/group. Or even a mmorpg with a different race/class. The idea I'm formulating is to better encourage that and reward it.
Furthermore, how do you end this story arc? When the super guild destroys the super villain? How do you appease players in the "massive" multiplayer environment? I can see how this works in smaller MUD environments but we're talking specifically about MMOs here. How are hundreds if not thousands of players supposed to coordinate their play to achieve a story arc?
Don't make it so that its over when the super guild destroys the super villain. That's just lame, and the timing of the end is unpredictable. Make it so that a significant chunk of the player base has to complete some level appropriate objective to do 'their part'. Superguilds have to take their turn holding back the super villain, lesser guilds have lesser accomplishments that they have to achieve, etc. And when the doomsday comes, and the server resets the starting world is based on what the overall server accomplished. And your personal start is based somewhat on what you personally accomplished. (not the difference between starting naked or uber, but a non-trivial set of perks.) In a multifaction game - whether its good vs evil, or albion vs hibernia vs whatever give the factions different objectives, and the post-reset world reflects the balances the players acheived. Or give the players a choice of objectives, and let them choose what to strive for.
What you're suggesting is great, I'm just not sure how plausible it is. One thing I do know is that it doesn't yet exist
Some games have touched on the fringe a little bit. Everquest for example launched special rules servers that were effectively 'time limited competitions'. Scads of people re-rolled on them, just to try and rack up their 'score' before it was over.
Games like Shadowbane and DAoC which had heavy PvP components were designed to maintain a perpetual 'balance'. But they could have been (should have been?) designed as episodic -- allowing for one group to 'take over the world' and win the game, or to capture the most territory before the game ends.
DiabloII had monthly offical ladder characters, that competed for top standings, and gave the game a lot of replay value to the expert players. Anyone could be 90th level. But who could get there first, if you held an official race starting today... (it wouldn't let you join games with non-ladder characters, so you couldn't twink gear etc from your other characters).
Now, not all players want this, and maybe their should be perpetual never ending servers for people who just want to wander around, and who take 6 years to go from 0 to 70. But I don't think anybody who plays these games a LOT, really likes zipping to 70 and then endlessly grinding the same few areas while they wait for the next expansion.
Yet, they can't be bothered to go anywhere else because once you level to uber there is no point to the early,mid,high,very-high, and just-short-of-uber game. So you spend all your time either right at the end, or damned close to it, while the devs make progressing that last little bit excruciatingly hard to buy some time to write another expansion.
I suspect they'd embrace a game, where they zip through the levels, accomplish myriad goals along the way, win. And then get to start over (with 'perks') taking a different path. Perhaps even 'unlocking' their former uber-character(s) or equipme
The one thing the RPG can do that a MMO can never do is have an ending.
Why not? Why can't the game be won or lost? Why can't you, after winning or losing, play it again? A lot of these games claim to have over-arching story arcs -- why can't the story end?
And when they do, ease players into the next arc, do a server reset, and start the world anew, and let players take it down a different road. When you do the reset don't completely wipe the characters, let them pass a selection of equipment or attributes to the 'next generation', so they don't 'lose everything'.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Actually, I find pausing vs just letting a commercial break run are quite different.
So basically, the guy has a list of critiques, and your reply is, "but that's the way it's always been!" Do you not see the flaw here?
The FLAW here is that they guy's list of critiques demonstrated out of whack expectations.
Suppose you read a game review of the new FIFA game, and the reviewer starting saying ridiculous things like "I was really disappointed with the game. I couldn't small the grass."
Its ok to critique a game like this if its understood that you are critiqueing the entire genre, or even videogames in general... but to single out a title and say -THIS- game disappointed me because there were no smells just demonstrates how out of touch your expectations were.
shoot a furry animal and the system does not let me, then make the arrow pass straight through it
Ok, let me get this straight... a message telling you the bunny isn't a valid target is unacceptable, and show lack of polish. While having arrows sail right through it, (which looks like a BUG) is ok? Seems pretty arbitrary to me. Personally I'd rather be told why my arrows are continuously missing.
You should be able to attack NPC but be aware that there are consequences. The system should handle situations like that gracefully. For example if an important merchant NPC in a city gets attacked, let the city guards show up to arrest the character. And if the merchant dies anyway, let it re-spawn. Make the stupid action that the character want to do available but make it not worthwhile.
"worthwhile" is an useless word. If people *can* do something, people will do something, even if its not 'worthwhile'. In EQ for example, for a long time you could kill the merchants and other NPCs. Its pretty annoying if you head to the bank or baker or quest giver and find he's not there because someones killing him / killed him.
Consequences? Let the city gaurds show up? Well, then we'll just kill them TOO. If we can raid a dragon-god-lava-monster with legendary artifact weapons I'm pretty sure a few gaurds who haven't stepped out of their village shouldn't be an obstacle.
EQ1 had a social aggro system... if you attacked an NPC nearby gaurds would attempt to kill you in response. So players just banded together and killed the gaurds too. The merchants didn't drop anything, gave practically no experience. Bored players killed them. Jerks who wanted to interfere with other players killed them. Eventually players complained because they couldn't finish quests and what not, and a lot of npcs couldn't be attacked, and even some entire areas became combat-free.
That would be my expectations and I think that they are both reasonable and realistic since even Ultima 6 had smart solutions for situations like that (I think it was released 1990 - that's 17 years ago).
ultima 6 was single player. quite frankly, yes, a lot of things had to take a gaint step BACKWARDS in order to accomodate keeping a few thousand players in any sort of reasonable sync.
But he also didn't believe that an imbalance of power leads anywhere but wrong.
I guess the US ban on private citizens owning nuclear submarines would be an imbalance of power?
Or perhaps the idea of preventing Iraq from possessing WMDs (like the US already DOES) would be an imbalance of power?
Sorry, the US is JUST as out of touch with reality as Britain is.
Have you played a mmorpg before?
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I can't tell if your just being sarcastic or not. People aren't modding you funny though, so I'm not the only one who thinks you at least *might* be serious.
The combat system sucks - it actually has a window that says things like "You hit the wolf for two points of damage". It felt like going back in time to the 80's.
Par for the course:
World of Warcraft:
http://www.rpgfan.com/reviews/wow/wow3.jpg
"Your Shoot Bow hits Onyxia for 92."
"Onyxia suffers 99 Nature damage from Bryna's Serpent Sting."
EQ2
http://www.jeffmaloneshirtlesspvp.com/images/EQ2_
"Tynsil's Mark of Nobility heals Doobers for 43 hit points."
"Udaho's Ghastly Shroud regenerates 133 points of absorption."
Personally I don't think it is "polished gameplay" if you try, for instance, trying to do something like shoot a sheep with your crossbow only to receive an error message - yes, really! an error message saying something like "disallowed action".
So you aren't allowed to shoot the sheep, big deal. They aren't 'opponents' or 'killable creatures', they're just animated background, like a torch, or tree.
And calling that an "error message"? What is it supposed to say when you perform a disallowed action?
Did you also complain when you tried to lockpick a goblin?
And although the world is big, you can't really explore it - you can't open doors unless they are part of the plot, you can't smash crates or barrels or whatever to see what is inside them, you even can't fight the NPCs or animals unless it is part of the plot.
Go play everquest one. It lets you really explore. Of course, the moment you step into the side room the YOU-hating level 65 shadowknight leader was sitting in he executes you on the spot. Or when you get sent to see so-and-so, you can spend 3 hours checking nearly every room in the city, only to find out after much frustration that so-and-so only comes out at night, and he walks around too, and if you don't catch up to him in time his path takes him right to the level 65 shadowknight -- who kills him. (And you too if you happen to be nearby.)
Modern MMORPGs got rid of all that stuff because a lot of players complained bitterly about how it wasn't fair. All that open 'Exploration' was wasting time when looking for things, perpetually getting them lost, and often getting them killed. They wanted maps, and waypoints so they couldn't get lost. They wanted higher level aggressive mobs to be well marked, and far away. They didn't want to open doors and find BIG THINGS that could and would kill them.
So they got what they wanted.
Its sad really.
I've gotten refunds at the movie theatre several times... but maybe that's just in my area.
Its like anything else, people are much more willing to refund if you return the product largely un-comsumed.
If you stay for the full 2 hour movie, your pretty much consumed what you paid for, and even if you didn't like it, they delivered what you paid for. If you decide its not worth watching after 20 minutes, I find people are pretty amenable to issuing a refund, or letting you watch one of the other shows.
the article clearly indicated that they were NOT skipping the ads.
I have a DVR, I skip a lot of the ads, but not all of them. Sometimes I *want* a break. Sometimes the commercials are entertaining.
I'm sure some people almost always skip the commercials.
I'm sure some people almost never skip the commercials.
But the bottom line is if you start looking at people with viewers, at least SOME of them will be watching the commercials. That's much 'better' than just assuming none of them ever do.
I argue that if we don't want our society being like him, then he is a danger to society.
I don't want our society to piss all over the floor in public restrooms. If 1 million people did it, the entire restroom would be just be a 2 foot deep pool of piss, forming a yellow river out into the Mall...
So the jackasses who piss on the floor in public restrooms should be incarcerated for life, because they represent a danger to society?
Give me a break.
I mean, if you're dealing with a corrupt court where you're guilty until proven innocent, you don't even have to be using encryption to get screwed this way.
If by Kangaroo court, you mean the DA already thinks he has enough on you between circumstantial evidence and a snitch.
The DA might just as well accuse you of using steganography to hide illegal photos in random files spread all across your hard drive, which is equally impossible to disprove.
You'd have a fairly strong defense against that accusation if your hard drive contains no steganography tools. That's sort of the the issue with truecrypt - it doesn't prove you have child porn, or even a hidden volume, but its not unreasonable to suppose you might, if you have truecrypt, there is other circumstantial evidence, and a 'snitch' whose just reliable enough of a witness to sway a jury.
The benchmarks were all measuring the delays from extremely common, simple tasks. Booting, app launching, opening, typing, scrolling, and saving are the fundamental tasks for word processing.
Yes, and Notepad is blazing fast on my PC. And it does all of those common fundamental things admirably.
Hmmm... I wonder why I don't use Notepad instead of Word (actually in my case OOo Writer). Perhaps because writer is much more, what's the word? "Productive"?, despite taking 5-10 seconds to initially launch.
There wouldn't have been any point in writing an article about how much more computers can do these days.
So instead they wrote an article about productivity and left out all the stuff computers can now do for you.
I guess calculators haven't come along much either. I mean they're about the same responsiveness, both turn on pretty quickly, digits come up almost instantaneously; this was all true 25 years ago. No real progress has been made.
Lets just conveniently ignore the fact that the new one can work with numbers more than 8 digits long, can solve systems of linear equations, converts to hexadecimal, computes compounding interest, and can even plot a sin wave... I mean that hasn't increased my productivity one iota.
8p
Its a little silly don't you think.
If I 'purchased a license' then where is it? I don't have a drawer full of licenses. I have a hard drive full of songs.
And that license, is it really mine, after all I don't own the copyright on the license any more than I own the copyright on the song. So what exactly are you claiming they *sold* me?
And if its really 'my license' that I purchased, why can't I transfer it to a friend when I'm done with it? I mean, sure the license says I can't make copies of the song, but why can't I transfer the *license*.
Really depends what you mean by "headscarf". Some would. Some wouldn't.
Searching google images shows the diversity of things called 'headscarf'. The word covers garments ranging from little more than a headband to the complete head covering a women in Taliban controlled afghanistan would wear.
But let me go back for a second...you say that the company needs to go after both the buyer and the seller. Really, this is unrealistic. It is hard to actually prove that someone bought the gold. Sure, you can see who a seller is by how much gold is coming from them and how it is distributed. But say a gold seller just gives a person gold for fun...that person would be banned.
The strategy is make 'giving people piles of gold for fun' an urealistic and unlikely scenario, then preventing it via the mechanics, so it can't happen by accident. Then people who jump through hoops to do it stick out like sore thumbs.
They have no proof that the person actually bought gold, they just know that they got gold from a certain character.
Which is why you make 'unrealistic gifts' the target. This all applies to designing new games. When dealing with it in an existing game, then yes, you made your bed and now you have to sleep in it.
It is better to go after the seller because it is easier to track a large volume of transaction to a single account.
Yes, in an existing game, where do you don't have the freedom to (re)define the ruleset/mechanics. Although even that is ineffective, a profitable seller operation can afford a stable of accounts to 'launder', and even 'throw away accounts' to be discarded when they get 'hot'.
Ok, to go back to the difference between WoW and FFXI. The services these gold selling companies have change the complexion of the game. In FFXI, it made the game unenjoyable to me. In WoW, other than the spam messages, you really don't even notice.
Which is why Blizzard is only chasing the spammers. But there are plenty of people who are disgusted with the peons4hire activity going on, even if it isn't causing the complete economic collapse.
There is a bit of inflation...but generally you benefit from that as much as anyone else. Blizzard did it right with their Raiding system. You just can't buy the best stuff. The only mistake they made was making epic flying mounts so expensive. Other than that, you need to actually play the game to get the top tier stuff.
No. Because that ONLY affects top tier players. Non-top tier players in raiding guilds will never get that stuff anyway... so for them the top tier stuff they could ever acheive IS for for sale. For new players/ mid level players the stuff they can buy is better than anything they could 'earn' at any given point along the progression curve.
As far as capping progress per hour...that is just dumb. Some people enjoy to level as fast as they can. There is nothing wrong with that.
Which is why there can be more than one game, more than one server for that game, and special rulesets for different servers.
You just have to learn that in an MMORPG you will not be the best player on there unless you give up your life.
In current mmorpgs that is the case, yes.
Really, what would you cap it at...your rate? These are games designed to be played by many people, not just you.
Different strokes for different folks. I'd happily join a server where your play time was capped at 15 hours a week. It would be an attractive server for people like me. I don't suggest that it be the ONLY server. But its like anything else... people LIKE to play with people of similiar rank and skill, and of similiar involvement in the game.
I don't WANT to play with people who log 150 hours a week in the game, and honestly they don't really WANT to play with me either. Sure I can form groups within the game of like minded people, but the game world itself is dominated by the hard core players, and that affects our game. I don't want to buy their shit. I don't want them doing everything on the server first. I don't want their incessant whining about raid game content, and issues like the balance of uber-lord seven when tanked by paladins vs warriors to dominate all the developers time instead of the broken quest for 40th level players.
They specifically said it uses the visible curvature of the bone as the primary recognition factor. Thinks like scars, glasses, will have a limited effect to disguise.
:)
As for puberty, sure the curvature will change while the skull is still forming, but even by early teens things are mostly set.
Really thick facial hair that totally obscures the outline of your head plus oversize glasses that obscure your eye sockets and brow ridges would defeat it, but that hairy bastard with glam-rock shades is going to stick out in a crowd like a sore thumb anyway.
I did the math. That would handle 3.4x10^38 Bytes, or 340 trillion YottaBytes (1 YottaByte = 1 billion PetaBytes, 1 PetaByte = 1 million GigaBytes). That's a very large number of Bytes, but I still wouldn't use the word never.
;)
If you start running out of space just up the block size.
On the other hand if they ever make a 512 bit filesystem, I think we'll finally be covered. You'll use up all the atoms in the universe making the disk, and still have media for less than 1% of the addressable space, even if your block size is 1 byte.
I am not the person you responded to, but that's a good question.
I can't vouch for "illegal" (IANAL) but can I ask why you don't think it's wrong?
The answer is simply, because I 'bought it' and its 'mine'. I don't need anyone's 'by your leave' if I lend or give my other possessions to my friends, why should a song be any different!?
If I buy a song, it should be unequivocably ok to transfer ownership of it to someone else when I'm done with it, or to lend it to them however I see fit to. Are we agreed?
Ok... so what makes a song different from my hedge clippers? Well.. if my friend has them I don't.
Ok... so how about I make a hedge clipper server, so that when my friend isn't using my clippers he puts them back in my clipper server, and he can take them back whenever he needs them. So as long as my friend and I aren't clipping at the same time we effectively both have access to the clippers, almost whenever we want them. If I did that, it would be perfectly legal right... nobody would accuse me of stealing the clippers.
Why not allow that for songs? The song server is easy to setup, since we already have this internet, and I don't have to figure out a way of teleporting objects around like I do for clippers.
But since the songs can be trivially copied, why not just make a duplicate instead of setting up a song server. Sure you and your friend might accidently listen to it at the same time, but in reality 99% of the time nobody will be using it...so the 2 minutes of overlapping use on Friday march 22nd 2007 shouldn't really be a deal breaker should it?
Now, sure I could extend that song server idea to a million people, and it starts breaking down. In the clipper example for example, it would still be legal, but the clipper collisions would occur at a frightful rate, and most people wouldn't get the clippers when they wanted them. Additionally, with the constant use the clippers would break pretty fast.
In the case of songs, faces a similiar problems - the collision rate would be too high. But at least the digital copy is effectively indestructible... but another issue arises out of copyright law:
Copyright law covers far more than just merely copying. In fact 'making copies' on its own is pretty benign all things concerned. If all people did was fill their own hard drives with copies, the industry really wouldn't give 2 shits about it. Its only when you start encroaching on the other elements of copyright that real problems occur -- things like public distribution, broadcasting, etc. Making something available to a few friends doesn't amount to 'public distribution' or 'public broadcasting'... p2p sharing DOES.
So it really is a completely different ballgame.
Why should you have to prove anything? The fact that your name is on the file proves nothing about what you did. Given how many examples people have given demonstrating that fact, how easy it is to spoof, how easy it that it could have been ANYBODY, no judge/jury would ever convict anybody based on having their name on a file.
Or perhaps you think I can successfully sue "Brandie Matthews" and "Araceli Cruz" and "Darwin Ellison" for sending me spam in the last 5 minutes? (Assuming they are even real people...)
Even if they did exist the fact that their name return address is on my spam means squat. They could be infected, they could have had their information harvested off some web forum, they could have been spoofed by an 'arch enemy', the could be the victim of a random name generator that just happens to have found a result that coincides with a real person...
Unless the files are ACTUALLY watermarked and don't just have some obvious bit of metadata this is completely irrelevant. (And even if the files ARE watermarked, that would be a completely independant finding, as this metadata would not be even a peripheral part of any halfway competent watermarking scheme.)
As I understood it, the vulnerability in WPA-PSK is simply a brute force attack. One cannot 'sniff out' the key like WEP simply by observing a chunk of traffic.
A good 'WPA2 PSK' key, like $%AG$T$Yhga3yhwrs34G343a34%$j654# will hold out against brute force admirably. And far far longer than WEP will.
If you have a cite to the contrary, that if you are using WPA2-PSK you might as well be using WEP I'd be very interested in taking a look.
after two or three years the Wii is going to be seriously outdated (graphically)
5 years from now people are going to look at Halo3 and say, it looks pretty good for the time, but its dated now. They couldn't get the physics quite right, and see here how the shadows aren't perfect. And the face still looks plastic... but it was the best they could do.
Super Paper Mario on the other hand, like 'the Simpsons' TV show looks exactly the way the authors wanted it too.
The Wii isn't going to be able to keep up with the photo-realism of the xbox/ps, but really, it doesn't HAVE to in order to be successful with great games.
Really? wireless B and WEP is the step down from AES+RADIUS?
Mine works fine with WPA2 and wireless G.
The "problem" with Devs playing the game isn't going to be that big an issue in one of the many games where PvE is the main reason for playing, as I doubt any sensible person would care that a Dev was an uber-wizard with with 300 pet dragons who could kill orcs by looking at them, as long as they played sensibly and didn't get in other players' ways.
Actually it IS a big issue in PvE games. In some games the top end guilds contained devs. Not a big deal on its own if the dev is a passive player, but if they take an active leadership role, or even an active advisory role to player leadership the guild will start to have advantages over other guilds.
PvE games aren't 'competitive' the way EVE is, but they ARE still competitive. And nothing reeks as a bad as getting assistance from the devs -- faster responses to petitions, insider information, etc, even minor incidental perks lke this reek of corruption.
But yeah, in a game like EVE where the overall fortunes of the player alliances are being impacted by the devs participation... thats a whole new brand of stench.
If the devs worked on it in the form of new content, or ageing content, you could get away with a perpetual world. Have enemy mobs in communities that grow and expand, the occasional random enemy hero popping up that requires more effort to beat. Have set improvements in world technology and travel that unlocks previously accessable areas.
This is how the games already work. Occasionally older areas are occasionally revamped, new areas are added by expansion. In order for the new areas to be worth visiting, they must be better than the old ones. Because all your characters levelled up in the old ones, the new ones have to be predominantly high level. Most of the game goes unused. Take a look at Everquest, if you want to see a game that has 'aged'. (And for an example of just how absurd it gets.)
IANAGD, so I wouldn't really have any idea how much work this would take. I'll assume far too much.
I dunno, its what they already do.
I just don't like the idea of a forced server reset when players might be getting attached to their current character.
How do you cope with beating single player RPGs? The game just ends. Game Over. Even if you were really enjoying it.
If it was age induced, then they could retire them whenever they felt they had to, and would feel a sense of pride for what they've achieved.
Maybe. I think its an anti-climax, and watching your favorite character gradually deteriorate would be more depressing than anything else. It forces you stop playing with him, and ultimately forces you to play the *same game* with another character. I think it would be viewed negatively by most players.
You could even throw in a Heroes hall or something where all the top level retirees go and get drunk every night, talking about all the things they'd done before and how kids these days have it easy compared to their day...
You could, but 'Taverns' are notoriously empty in games. Few players actually want to sit in a virtual room drinking virtual beer. They can just as easily have the conversations 'out of character' while playing.
A server reset shouldn't be viewed as 'starting over and losing your character', but taking the essence of your character and advancing it to the next level in a 'refreshed' world.
The issue I see with only 'aging' the players it that it resets the players but not the world. I think if you simply age the characters and retire them and then they play the next generation up in the 'same world' it will get old fast.
Especially if they always get to the same point and then just start deteriorating. Nothing could be more 'anti-climatic'.
Of course, there is nothing stopping them from aging the entire playerbase together, and having the current generation pass the torch to the next as part of the server reset.
But the game after the reset needs to be 'fresh', there has to be new things to do, real new content. New maps/zones/instances/dungeons added, new mobs, new tricks for old mobs, new equipment rotated in, new quests, and above all a new story arc to run through.
Sounds like a sequel to me.
Only as much as playing CIV again is a sequel to your last game.
You have the same identity, equipment/attributes or whatever but in a brand new story right?
Some stuff is carried over, most isn't.
Sure, you could have server resets but knowing the MMO mobs like most do, I can never imagine a world where players would be OK starting over again from scratch (ie the farm boy with nothing turned to RPG hero).
I disagree. How many of us have replayed a single player RPG with a different character/group. Or even a mmorpg with a different race/class. The idea I'm formulating is to better encourage that and reward it.
Furthermore, how do you end this story arc? When the super guild destroys the super villain? How do you appease players in the "massive" multiplayer environment? I can see how this works in smaller MUD environments but we're talking specifically about MMOs here. How are hundreds if not thousands of players supposed to coordinate their play to achieve a story arc?
Don't make it so that its over when the super guild destroys the super villain. That's just lame, and the timing of the end is unpredictable. Make it so that a significant chunk of the player base has to complete some level appropriate objective to do 'their part'. Superguilds have to take their turn holding back the super villain, lesser guilds have lesser accomplishments that they have to achieve, etc. And when the doomsday comes, and the server resets the starting world is based on what the overall server accomplished. And your personal start is based somewhat on what you personally accomplished. (not the difference between starting naked or uber, but a non-trivial set of perks.) In a multifaction game - whether its good vs evil, or albion vs hibernia vs whatever give the factions different objectives, and the post-reset world reflects the balances the players acheived. Or give the players a choice of objectives, and let them choose what to strive for.
What you're suggesting is great, I'm just not sure how plausible it is. One thing I do know is that it doesn't yet exist
Some games have touched on the fringe a little bit. Everquest for example launched special rules servers that were effectively 'time limited competitions'. Scads of people re-rolled on them, just to try and rack up their 'score' before it was over.
Games like Shadowbane and DAoC which had heavy PvP components were designed to maintain a perpetual 'balance'. But they could have been (should have been?) designed as episodic -- allowing for one group to 'take over the world' and win the game, or to capture the most territory before the game ends.
DiabloII had monthly offical ladder characters, that competed for top standings, and gave the game a lot of replay value to the expert players. Anyone could be 90th level. But who could get there first, if you held an official race starting today... (it wouldn't let you join games with non-ladder characters, so you couldn't twink gear etc from your other characters).
Now, not all players want this, and maybe their should be perpetual never ending servers for people who just want to wander around, and who take 6 years to go from 0 to 70. But I don't think anybody who plays these games a LOT, really likes zipping to 70 and then endlessly grinding the same few areas while they wait for the next expansion.
Yet, they can't be bothered to go anywhere else because once you level to uber there is no point to the early,mid,high,very-high, and just-short-of-uber game. So you spend all your time either right at the end, or damned close to it, while the devs make progressing that last little bit excruciatingly hard to buy some time to write another expansion.
I suspect they'd embrace a game, where they zip through the levels, accomplish myriad goals along the way, win. And then get to start over (with 'perks') taking a different path. Perhaps even 'unlocking' their former uber-character(s) or equipme
The one thing the RPG can do that a MMO can never do is have an ending.
Why not? Why can't the game be won or lost? Why can't you, after winning or losing, play it again? A lot of these games claim to have over-arching story arcs -- why can't the story end?
And when they do, ease players into the next arc, do a server reset, and start the world anew, and let players take it down a different road. When you do the reset don't completely wipe the characters, let them pass a selection of equipment or attributes to the 'next generation', so they don't 'lose everything'.