I can think of one very good reason why they're doing this: planned obsolescence. They're under no obligation to provide matchmaking support in perpetuity, and the presence of mods and custom maps unnaturally extends the lifespan of something they'd much prefer you replace after a year.
They made a Sims MMO, actually. It tanked hard, mainly because instead of sending your Sim to work off-screen, you had to perform insipid mini-games for money. Entire neighborhoods were set up as virtual sweatshops, with people manning four-player pizza making machines (the most effective device for making money) for hours to pay for their dream houses.
Because it would be an excuse to move 'undesirables' out of the city in large numbers, make a spike in capital spending and construction, and then cause the city and its environs to implode when the Olympic venues turn out to be unrentable and the tourists vanish again?
Hosting the Olympics might be an honour on the national level, but locally... you've got to figure out which city you can afford to disrupt over the long term.
I just wasted a couple of hours on this. It begins interestingly enough, but once you discover that you can kill the enemies and that the level design is amateurish at best, the appeal evaporates like smoke.
Being 'deep' and 'thought provoking' isn't enough. This is a mistake that a lot of amateur writers make. The end result needs to be accessible as well, or the audience discovers nothing.
Both of you have totally missed my point. This isn't an FPS, and it isn't a TV show where gunfire is a means of pushing the plot along.
If you're expecting immersion to trump playability and fun in an MMO, you're either totally ignorant of the genre or looking for a reason to complain. Phasers are a staple of the setting, but one-shot kills are neither interesting nor fun for the players. MMO combat is not a scenario where you get killed, respawn at your conveniently located base, and run back into the fight within thirty seconds. Even if it was, that would again defeat the purpose of phasers being deadly weapons.
Jesus, 'immersion'. You do realize that even if things played the way you wanted them to, each and every server would have dozens of variations on Captains Kirk and Picard, spamming their demands for hot tea and hot green women, don't you?
God forbid they skip some of Star Trek's 'realism' in order to make the game more playable. Jesus, it's not like SWG's light sabers cut people in half with one swing, or the assortment of blasters one-shotted storm troopers either.
Phasers one-shot targets for one reason, and one reason only: plot. The only times that combat was a going plot concern in any Star Trek series, the phasers were plotted out of existence or plenty of cover and bad marksmanship was provided.
I don't think this game is going to be any better than the array of godawful Interplay releases, but complaining that a weapon in an MMO doesn't kill people outright is ridiculous.
Bullshit. It's an MMO, not some rinky-dink peer-to-peer setup like original flavour Diablo. If there's something important enough that you don't want it hacked, you don't let the client handle it.
Not that it's a particularly good game (because it's not), but that pile of crap Gameguard is the reason I dropped out of that beta a week in. Stupid thing turned my uninterruptible power supply service off every time the game started, and I can only guess at what else it was doing behind the scenes... rather than preventing hacks, which it apparently wasn't worth shit at.
Anyone else remember the bullshit schemes for advertising Shadow Man on tombstones, or paying everyone's speeding tickets to celebrate the release of Cartoon Physics Racer XX-3?
Anyone else remember how that company bit the dust in '04?
Hype is only useful in the long run, if there's something worthwhile following it. People have a tendency to get jaded with it rather quickly, too. This is probably going to end up as a lot of money wasted when it comes down to accounting.
Seriously, if they did go ahead and somehow force IE6 to stop working, or refuse to provide support for it, this thread would be filled with people screaming about MS screwing the end user, and waiting impatiently for the DOJ to come swooping in.
Has anyone else actually tried this search? I have, just now. 'Why are Macs So Expensive' shows up in BOTH Bing and GOOGLE searches. Not at the top of the rankings, but both on the first page.
This is the result of an algorithmic cockup that people are blowing entirely out of proportion, not a ridiculous conspiracy.
Five million users, whether they just be one-time registrants or not, is pretty impressive. The thing is, Smed is implying a connection between those users and the cash shop, which just isn't necessarily there. The game is free-to-play. You don't need to subscribe, or to buy gear in the cash shop. I doubt many really have, beyond using the free 100 Store Cash they got from the first or second million milestone celebration.
Cash store games work, but claiming 'five million people spend money at ours!' is disingenuous.
An indie game titled 'Roboblitz' uses procedural generation to 'unpack' game textures the first time the game is run. It makes the installer smaller, but the unpacking process is still time- and processor-intensive. It saves transmission bandwidth, but doesn't do the end user any other favours.
Have you actually played the latest expansion? You get to Northrend at level 70. You can't fly there without "Cold Weather Flight Training" or somesuch, which you can't even get until level 77-- which is most of the way through the Northrend content, and costs a serious chunk of change to boot.
The Howling Fjords starting zone is built heavily around sheer drops, switchbacks, irregular terrain and slow lifts. Its very existence is a poke in the eye for people who thought that the nether drake mounts they spent weeks grinding faction for made them the kings of shit mountain.
"Enjoyment" is highly subjective. I enjoy the weight of a book. I enjoy opening a textbook to a random page and reading a quarter of a chapter. I enjoy the way a book smells. I enjoy being able to jot a note in the margin, or stick a receipt in to mark my place. I enjoy opening an old, cherished book to the front and reading a sentimental, handwritten dedication. I enjoy not having to spend several hundred dollars on an e-book reader in order to read a book wherever and whenever.
Mr. Bradbury's 'obsession' may have something to do with growing up during the Depression. He doesn't give a shit about the Internet-- there is no 'concern' evident anywhere in the article. His formative years were spent in the wake of the evaporation of a whole ton of ephemeral monetary value, which left people with little more than (wait for it) their material possessions. There may just be the slightest correlation there.
Above and beyond all that though, Bradbury is one of the most reactionary people on the face of the Earth. He's old and he's set in his ways.
You can read text on the Internet, but it has none of the tactile assets of physical books. I've read classics on paper, and I've read them in plaintext on Project Gutenberg (being a student can be stupidly expensive), and I will always vastly prefer the hard copy.
Books are a bit easier to use when the power's out, or a router's down, as well. They also serve as better kindling than the Kindle, if it comes down to that, too. I think Mr. Bradbury wrote a story that touched on that, actually.
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I can think of one very good reason why they're doing this: planned obsolescence. They're under no obligation to provide matchmaking support in perpetuity, and the presence of mods and custom maps unnaturally extends the lifespan of something they'd much prefer you replace after a year.
Seriously. Developing an MMO to pay for a new RTS engine is like building a city so you can get your Starbucks fix.
They made a Sims MMO, actually. It tanked hard, mainly because instead of sending your Sim to work off-screen, you had to perform insipid mini-games for money. Entire neighborhoods were set up as virtual sweatshops, with people manning four-player pizza making machines (the most effective device for making money) for hours to pay for their dream houses.
So that says a lot about your culture and sense of self-worth?
Hosting the Olympics might be an honour on the national level, but locally... you've got to figure out which city you can afford to disrupt over the long term.
Being 'deep' and 'thought provoking' isn't enough. This is a mistake that a lot of amateur writers make. The end result needs to be accessible as well, or the audience discovers nothing.
If you're expecting immersion to trump playability and fun in an MMO, you're either totally ignorant of the genre or looking for a reason to complain. Phasers are a staple of the setting, but one-shot kills are neither interesting nor fun for the players. MMO combat is not a scenario where you get killed, respawn at your conveniently located base, and run back into the fight within thirty seconds. Even if it was, that would again defeat the purpose of phasers being deadly weapons.
Jesus, 'immersion'. You do realize that even if things played the way you wanted them to, each and every server would have dozens of variations on Captains Kirk and Picard, spamming their demands for hot tea and hot green women, don't you?
Phasers one-shot targets for one reason, and one reason only: plot. The only times that combat was a going plot concern in any Star Trek series, the phasers were plotted out of existence or plenty of cover and bad marksmanship was provided.
I don't think this game is going to be any better than the array of godawful Interplay releases, but complaining that a weapon in an MMO doesn't kill people outright is ridiculous.
Bullshit. It's an MMO, not some rinky-dink peer-to-peer setup like original flavour Diablo. If there's something important enough that you don't want it hacked, you don't let the client handle it.
Not that it's a particularly good game (because it's not), but that pile of crap Gameguard is the reason I dropped out of that beta a week in. Stupid thing turned my uninterruptible power supply service off every time the game started, and I can only guess at what else it was doing behind the scenes... rather than preventing hacks, which it apparently wasn't worth shit at.
Sellers can't leave feedback any more, actually.
eBay has been doing that for years.
Anyone else remember how that company bit the dust in '04?
Hype is only useful in the long run, if there's something worthwhile following it. People have a tendency to get jaded with it rather quickly, too. This is probably going to end up as a lot of money wasted when it comes down to accounting.
The Cartoon Network's FusionFall MMO is more accurately browser-based, since it uses a Flash-like rich-media plugin.
Seriously, if they did go ahead and somehow force IE6 to stop working, or refuse to provide support for it, this thread would be filled with people screaming about MS screwing the end user, and waiting impatiently for the DOJ to come swooping in.
This is the result of an algorithmic cockup that people are blowing entirely out of proportion, not a ridiculous conspiracy.
127.0.0.1 block.opendns.com
127.0.0.1 guide.opendns.com
Cash store games work, but claiming 'five million people spend money at ours!' is disingenuous.
An indie game titled 'Roboblitz' uses procedural generation to 'unpack' game textures the first time the game is run. It makes the installer smaller, but the unpacking process is still time- and processor-intensive. It saves transmission bandwidth, but doesn't do the end user any other favours.
My god. The parallels between him and Elvis just keep cropping up.
The Howling Fjords starting zone is built heavily around sheer drops, switchbacks, irregular terrain and slow lifts. Its very existence is a poke in the eye for people who thought that the nether drake mounts they spent weeks grinding faction for made them the kings of shit mountain.
What, like this one?
Mr. Bradbury's 'obsession' may have something to do with growing up during the Depression. He doesn't give a shit about the Internet-- there is no 'concern' evident anywhere in the article. His formative years were spent in the wake of the evaporation of a whole ton of ephemeral monetary value, which left people with little more than (wait for it) their material possessions. There may just be the slightest correlation there.
Above and beyond all that though, Bradbury is one of the most reactionary people on the face of the Earth. He's old and he's set in his ways.
Books are a bit easier to use when the power's out, or a router's down, as well. They also serve as better kindling than the Kindle, if it comes down to that, too. I think Mr. Bradbury wrote a story that touched on that, actually.
Not just a hype overdose, but a hyper overdose!