No, WoW did not destroy your marriage. It didn't show up and sleep with your wife. You and your wife's inability to deal with problems in your marriage destroyed it. It's not nefarious, it's a game that millions (literally) play without it messing up their lives.
Perhaps the real point here is, "people who have problems with addiction shouldn't engage in behaviors that can, *for some people*, be addicting"?
I mean, comeon, I like a self-reinforcing, carrot-stick game well enough, but lately I can't get around to playing it. The game (or any game) on its own isn't nefarious. But, I suppose we have to villianize it *somehow*, right?
Depends. Like when I set up my Web Comics Nation account back a while ago, I found I was able to set whether the "Subscribe to Comic" button would supply the whole comic page or just the comic. I imagine that other services and RSS feeds have similar options.
Yeah, this comment isn't going to start a flamewar. You read like the guy who proclaims that no one uses COBOL or FORTRAN anymore, either, nor should they be.
"new ibooks going bad after a year" and the article coming out today implied to me that this was a relatively recent issue, so that was kind of confusing, since I wondered who had been buying new g4 ibooks as recently as a year ago
the other reply to my ponderance was much more useful
you, on the other hand, should have saved the bits it required to do your post
I seem to recall something like this happening in the early 90's that caused a big regional outage. I was a young geek at the time and didn't really know how the thing I was MUDding on worked, but I seem to recall it had something to do with a homeless guy, a trashcan fire, and some fiberoptic cables running under a bridge in Minneapolis. Anyone remember this?
I gotta agree. Fark used to be pretty fun and its content used to be worthwhile. Now it seems to be more and more the forum equivalent of nationally syndicated comic strips. That is, increasingly bland and sanitized for its increasingly common audience.
All the side effects you mention are the result of over-imbibing, though. While driving still isn't probably a good idea (especially since the law currently trends towards overreacting when speaking of DUI things), it's perfectly doable to drink great alchohol and have a great, fun time without the various ill effects you mentioned.
Hey now, I like my UID. It often results in a string of very amusing "wow, that's a low uid" posts, which then are followed by people who were even more geekier than me in those days, and have an even lower UID. My ICQ # is also 7 digits, which isn't as interesting, but apparently they're up to 10 or something odd like that.
So, I think I'd say the UID is "mostly meaningless";)
Er, kinda sorta, depending on how you get Windows installed (often depending on when it was installed). And what.Net version you need. So, really, effectively, "no, it isn't". Your helpdesk might install it for you, or the vendor might install it on the image they use for their retail machines, but that's not much different than if they'd done it with some version of JRE.
Well, there's definitely persistent cookies from Google when you log into gmail, it'll still log you in next session if you do the little checkmark thing and not explicitly log off. I've not noticed the behavior you mention, but I have FF set to clear all that stuff on exit.
Setting aside the "reading into the wording" of "clicking on a few ads", it's entirely possible to click on your own ads and not get canned. You don't register your IP address / hostname with google in any way that would, that I can recall, make them able to automatically detect that you've clicked on one of your own ads. I'd be more inclined to think that google just didn't want to pay out that money, so canned him instead. It's an anecdote like with PayPal, the big company decides their terms of service means whatever they want it to mean, and the program participant has no recourse. Pretty lame if you ask me.
You seem to be under the mistake impression that I think all the exploits in an MMO can ever be closed. They can't, that's reality.
And do you really think there's tens of thousands of bots/farmers in Lineage? I find that a dubious assertion at best. In any even, even if there were 250,000 of them, that still puts them at 1,000,000 active subscribers, well above any of the competition.
I'm not sure why not having "American" as an essential part of your self-identity is a requirement. What's the point of liking your country, anyway? Your government is a necessary evil, and your countrymen are not your family. A country should not be like a social club or an extended family, it is a structure of convenience and utilitarian necessity. Taking so much pride in mostly arbitrary national borders gets you all sorts of great things... like for example, world wars!
Yes and no. Mostly I think you haven't thought about it much. There are a couple of problems I can see there right away:
1. Rampant cheating. Think WoW Glider on steroids. If you have the source code, you can write a client which looks to the server 100% like a player at the keyboard on the official client. Write a client which drives a whole group of player characters on a farming or ganking spree from a single machine. Which _will_ screw up the game, and drive people away. (Especially in a game where _all_ there is to do is farm and PvP.) That's money lost.
I'd argue that if this was possible, the game code is already broken. In any event, there's any number of minor changes that could be made before release that can alleviate if not eliminate the problem. I don't see how any of it would require a huge investment in time.
Or you could delay the game and invest in changing the whole protocol, so the old code doesn't even work with the server any more.
Or change the protocol just enough that it doesn't work.
Which again is money lost. Both extra development time, and time in which you're not collecting the monthly fees. A single month delay, if you had, say, 1 million players, is 10 to 15 million dollars lost in fees alone.
Paper shuffling. No different than if a bug was found and the release was delayed.
But even if you do, someone saw all your weak points. Yes, most games do rely on security through obscurity, because noone has the funds, computing power and bandwidth, to do everything on the server securely. There's invariably a lot of functionality in the client, and you basically keep your fingers crossed. Maybe you code some "tripwires" on the server to detect if someone did something awfully wrong, but (A) it's still keeping your fingers crossed that noone will do something that you haven't checked, and (B) more importantly, whoever saw the code now also knows exactly what to avoid.
Basically, it's pretty much _the_ cheating nightmare scenario.
I don't agree, frankly. The very fact that one knows the source has been copied makes you able to do something about it because you know what they stole. The nightmare is that someone writes something that exploits a flaw in your release code that you can't detect, which can happen with or without the source code being copied away. No casual (or even devoted) gamer is gonna spend the time to shift through the code, but the farmers might, if they can get their hands on the source. But, farmers will farm, no matter the game.
2. Whoever has that code will have a trivial job of making some "emulated" servers and stealing your subscribers that way. It's one thing to have a shabby half-way there alternative server available after a year, it's entirely another thing to maybe have a 100% perfect alternative right at the start.
Yeah, no way there'd be lawsuits there. Besides, people play MMOs for coherent content and (supposedly) the community/social aspects. If all your friends are on Lineage II, they're gonna move to Lineage III, not some half-assed quasi-Lineagethat no one has heard of. I also think you're intentionally ignoring the infrastructure costs of running an MMO that would even start to compare with the player population of Lineage. Not to mention that the content would have to completely re-written in order to even start attracting players without attracting Lineage-Lawyers.
And yes, that _is_ money lost, and not just profits lost. Most MMOs have far more content than a single-player RPG. (Even Oblivion is a spit in the bucket compared to the sheer size of WoW.) For most, basically the boxed copy is subsidized, and they're betting you'll stay there for more than 2-3 months to break even and start making a profit. That already doesn't leave you with that much pure profit, since the average player stays about 6 months on a MMO. If half your
You make some interesting points, though I don't know if they would have to make "significant code changes" in order to avoid losing customers. If the code is exploitable, those changes should be made anyway, and if they don't know what could be exploited, then how would they know they had to fix it?
The code was copied, not stolen. Talk about alarmist press. Even if one of their direct competitors got the code, what good is it going to do them? Players of lineage will continue to play lineage (cuz lineage people are obsessed, I think). It's not like someone's gonna be able to plop the code on some server farm in a couple weeks and make a competing mmo.
Agreed. The whole 'Homeland' thing is really unnerving. From my viewpoint, the last thing this country needs is more nationalistic fervor. We already have too much of it being relabeled as "patriotism" (though that's been going on for a couple of centuries, but still).
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No, WoW did not destroy your marriage. It didn't show up and sleep with your wife. You and your wife's inability to deal with problems in your marriage destroyed it. It's not nefarious, it's a game that millions (literally) play without it messing up their lives.
In short, "save it for Livejournal".
Perhaps the real point here is, "people who have problems with addiction shouldn't engage in behaviors that can, *for some people*, be addicting"?
I mean, comeon, I like a self-reinforcing, carrot-stick game well enough, but lately I can't get around to playing it. The game (or any game) on its own isn't nefarious. But, I suppose we have to villianize it *somehow*, right?
Depends. Like when I set up my Web Comics Nation account back a while ago, I found I was able to set whether the "Subscribe to Comic" button would supply the whole comic page or just the comic. I imagine that other services and RSS feeds have similar options.
Yeah, this comment isn't going to start a flamewar. You read like the guy who proclaims that no one uses COBOL or FORTRAN anymore, either, nor should they be.
wasn't really my question, ac
"new ibooks going bad after a year" and the article coming out today implied to me that this was a relatively recent issue, so that was kind of confusing, since I wondered who had been buying new g4 ibooks as recently as a year ago
the other reply to my ponderance was much more useful
you, on the other hand, should have saved the bits it required to do your post
ah
I seem to recall something like this happening in the early 90's that caused a big regional outage. I was a young geek at the time and didn't really know how the thing I was MUDding on worked, but I seem to recall it had something to do with a homeless guy, a trashcan fire, and some fiberoptic cables running under a bridge in Minneapolis. Anyone remember this?
I guess my first reaction to this was "iBooks? Who has only had a new iBook for a year? Is that even possible?", but admittedly I dunno...
I gotta agree. Fark used to be pretty fun and its content used to be worthwhile. Now it seems to be more and more the forum equivalent of nationally syndicated comic strips. That is, increasingly bland and sanitized for its increasingly common audience.
All the side effects you mention are the result of over-imbibing, though. While driving still isn't probably a good idea (especially since the law currently trends towards overreacting when speaking of DUI things), it's perfectly doable to drink great alchohol and have a great, fun time without the various ill effects you mentioned.
Yes, but is it possible to prevent the clueless, annoying ones from coming back?
Hey now, I like my UID. It often results in a string of very amusing "wow, that's a low uid" posts, which then are followed by people who were even more geekier than me in those days, and have an even lower UID. My ICQ # is also 7 digits, which isn't as interesting, but apparently they're up to 10 or something odd like that.
So, I think I'd say the UID is "mostly meaningless" ;)
Er, kinda sorta, depending on how you get Windows installed (often depending on when it was installed). And what .Net version you need. So, really, effectively, "no, it isn't". Your helpdesk might install it for you, or the vendor might install it on the image they use for their retail machines, but that's not much different than if they'd done it with some version of JRE.
Well, there's definitely persistent cookies from Google when you log into gmail, it'll still log you in next session if you do the little checkmark thing and not explicitly log off. I've not noticed the behavior you mention, but I have FF set to clear all that stuff on exit.
Setting aside the "reading into the wording" of "clicking on a few ads", it's entirely possible to click on your own ads and not get canned. You don't register your IP address / hostname with google in any way that would, that I can recall, make them able to automatically detect that you've clicked on one of your own ads. I'd be more inclined to think that google just didn't want to pay out that money, so canned him instead. It's an anecdote like with PayPal, the big company decides their terms of service means whatever they want it to mean, and the program participant has no recourse. Pretty lame if you ask me.
Name me the last time direct usage of American patriotism stopped a war.
You seem to be under the mistake impression that I think all the exploits in an MMO can ever be closed. They can't, that's reality.
And do you really think there's tens of thousands of bots/farmers in Lineage? I find that a dubious assertion at best. In any even, even if there were 250,000 of them, that still puts them at 1,000,000 active subscribers, well above any of the competition.
I'm not sure why not having "American" as an essential part of your self-identity is a requirement. What's the point of liking your country, anyway? Your government is a necessary evil, and your countrymen are not your family. A country should not be like a social club or an extended family, it is a structure of convenience and utilitarian necessity. Taking so much pride in mostly arbitrary national borders gets you all sorts of great things... like for example, world wars!
Yes and no. Mostly I think you haven't thought about it much. There are a couple of problems I can see there right away:
1. Rampant cheating. Think WoW Glider on steroids. If you have the source code, you can write a client which looks to the server 100% like a player at the keyboard on the official client. Write a client which drives a whole group of player characters on a farming or ganking spree from a single machine. Which _will_ screw up the game, and drive people away. (Especially in a game where _all_ there is to do is farm and PvP.) That's money lost.
I'd argue that if this was possible, the game code is already broken. In any event, there's any number of minor changes that could be made before release that can alleviate if not eliminate the problem. I don't see how any of it would require a huge investment in time.
Or you could delay the game and invest in changing the whole protocol, so the old code doesn't even work with the server any more.
Or change the protocol just enough that it doesn't work.
Which again is money lost. Both extra development time, and time in which you're not collecting the monthly fees. A single month delay, if you had, say, 1 million players, is 10 to 15 million dollars lost in fees alone.
Paper shuffling. No different than if a bug was found and the release was delayed.
But even if you do, someone saw all your weak points. Yes, most games do rely on security through obscurity, because noone has the funds, computing power and bandwidth, to do everything on the server securely. There's invariably a lot of functionality in the client, and you basically keep your fingers crossed. Maybe you code some "tripwires" on the server to detect if someone did something awfully wrong, but (A) it's still keeping your fingers crossed that noone will do something that you haven't checked, and (B) more importantly, whoever saw the code now also knows exactly what to avoid.
Basically, it's pretty much _the_ cheating nightmare scenario.
I don't agree, frankly. The very fact that one knows the source has been copied makes you able to do something about it because you know what they stole. The nightmare is that someone writes something that exploits a flaw in your release code that you can't detect, which can happen with or without the source code being copied away. No casual (or even devoted) gamer is gonna spend the time to shift through the code, but the farmers might, if they can get their hands on the source. But, farmers will farm, no matter the game.
2. Whoever has that code will have a trivial job of making some "emulated" servers and stealing your subscribers that way. It's one thing to have a shabby half-way there alternative server available after a year, it's entirely another thing to maybe have a 100% perfect alternative right at the start.
Yeah, no way there'd be lawsuits there. Besides, people play MMOs for coherent content and (supposedly) the community/social aspects. If all your friends are on Lineage II, they're gonna move to Lineage III, not some half-assed quasi-Lineagethat no one has heard of. I also think you're intentionally ignoring the infrastructure costs of running an MMO that would even start to compare with the player population of Lineage. Not to mention that the content would have to completely re-written in order to even start attracting players without attracting Lineage-Lawyers.
And yes, that _is_ money lost, and not just profits lost. Most MMOs have far more content than a single-player RPG. (Even Oblivion is a spit in the bucket compared to the sheer size of WoW.) For most, basically the boxed copy is subsidized, and they're betting you'll stay there for more than 2-3 months to break even and start making a profit. That already doesn't leave you with that much pure profit, since the average player stays about 6 months on a MMO. If half your
You make some interesting points, though I don't know if they would have to make "significant code changes" in order to avoid losing customers. If the code is exploitable, those changes should be made anyway, and if they don't know what could be exploited, then how would they know they had to fix it?
Your demarcation boundary for considering what is "interactive" seems arbitrary, AC.
The code was copied, not stolen. Talk about alarmist press. Even if one of their direct competitors got the code, what good is it going to do them? Players of lineage will continue to play lineage (cuz lineage people are obsessed, I think). It's not like someone's gonna be able to plop the code on some server farm in a couple weeks and make a competing mmo.
Agreed. The whole 'Homeland' thing is really unnerving. From my viewpoint, the last thing this country needs is more nationalistic fervor. We already have too much of it being relabeled as "patriotism" (though that's been going on for a couple of centuries, but still).
Er, so web 2.0 started in like, 1995 when you could submit forms?
It's not possible that Cisco, et al have non-software patents?