Aside from being laughably pretentious, that's ignoring the fact that there are clear guidelines for making the parts that don't look like encyclopedia entries, into the same.
You're shirking your responsibility as an editor to actually edit pages, in favor of lazily deleting out of hand. That, right there, is what's wrong with the Wikipedia.
Yeah. While I reflexively rankle at the idea of blocking a whole swathe of domains like that, it's unfortunately clear that services like dyndns and mine.nu are going to be overrun with phishers and scammers because they're just as convenient to them as they are to non-malicious Internet users.
Think more 'Dark Ages of Camelot' v2.0 than WoW, given that it's Mythic. From my experience in the beta, the PVE game exists only to teach you how to fight, and to lead you around to collect loot and XPs. The public quests in particular are very much 'Repeat these until you max your local faction out, collect a few greens, and hop in the local RvR queue.'
First off, not all of us are on unlimited, high-speed broadband. Second, in my experience the official P2P client is abysmal. There are vast numbers of users who never seed at all, making even small patches take an inordinately long time to download.
The price of pressing and packaging discs is negligible, especially with the economy of scale that they're operating on. They're guaranteed sales to retail chains by the hundreds of thousands; a massive, lump sale like that looks a lot better on the spreadsheets than a steady trickle of downloads, and moves the strain of demand off their servers and network.
According to an e-mail I got through a job-search site, the market for domestic WoW gold and EVE ISK farming is wide open and ready for you to plunder it. Just load up Glider or find a mining bot, and watch the money roll in.
Or, if you don't want to get banned for violating EULAs and pissing players off, play the auction house or stock market. Even keeping track of trends, it shouldn't take you more than an hour a day, and you can certainly run the average MMO client from a decent laptop.
Of course, you may have to buy gold to start making it...
She gave him permission to put the site up on the Web. RDR books waved a wad of cash under his nose, and he went for it. Rowling put her foot down. RDR, still sensing the potential for scads of money, decided to claw at it and failed miserably.
This is not a fight between a Big Author and a Little Guy, this is a Scummy Company getting Bitchslapped.
Sure, but at that point we'll be worrying about AI breaking the planet down to make matrioshka brains, and not favoring the players that it cybers between GM events.
Run-once quests, as the only available quests, don't work in the context of a multiplayer game. Period. The players will tear through the content faster than you can create it, and will attempt to monopolize your time and effort from that point forward.
The closest thing that I've seen to real 'quests' in games are one-time, large-scale events like the Hopeslayer running rampant in Asheron's Call, or opening the gates of An'Quiraj in WoW. An argument could be made for large-group events like raids, wherein everyone is basically acting to a script against the AI's own script, with success culminating in a reenactment of the developer's plan for the encounter.
It's Worse than That
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The best description that I've found is that Spore is a collection of loosely connected mini games.
The cell stage plays very much like Flow, with the addition of the stripped-down creature creator (which basically takes the place of traditional 'powerups').
The creature stage... oh god, fuck me running, it plays like a bad MMO. If you go off exploring, you're fucked-- the complexity, toughness and aggressiveness of creatures increases with the distance you head out from your first nest, and moving to the next nest is thematically identical to the process of binding yourself to a respawn point. Combat and interaction depend on pressing the same four buttons over and over again, waiting for cooldowns, just like you might in WoW or any of its antecedents. Even making friends requires you to literally level your creature up, earning DNA points so that you can add bits that boost your charm rating so you can make tougher friends. Despite all of that customization, there are basically only two tracks you can move down: a fighting carnivore (because meat doesn't grow on trees) or a social herbivore (because buying both charm bits and combat bits is prohibitively expensive).
I haven't made it past the Creature stage because, like your average MMO, draw distances are terrible and your rate of movement is worse. Even the people that I know who enjoy the game describe the later sections as stripped-down RTS and 4X games, more proof-of-concept demos than anything else.
Wright's come out and said that Spore will be getting expansion packs, like the Sims, but 'different'. I suspect that we'll be asked to fork over another thirty bucks every few months for some actual depth of gameplay, rather than the biological equivalent to Sims fashions and furniture.
Re:No Mention of Creature Creator
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Those zany, wacky creatures you made in the months before Spore was released? You're not going to be using them until after you've finished evolving. You can start over with those old races once you have reached that point, but getting there involves popping into and out of the creator to add new bits that you find on the bloody ground and very occasionally wrest from other species. In the context of Spore as a game, the Creature Creator is more of an Editor.
You're going to be waiting a long, long time. EA's got their own direct-download service, which they're trying their best to monetize by charging five or ten bucks for a service that Steam provides for free-- namely, keeping track of your purchase over the long run. If you don't fork over what amounts to the price of shipping and handling, EA deletes the record of your purchase six months after you made it.
I've taken a hard stance that I like to talk about: I have sworn to myself that I won't fall for fearmongering any more. I now vote only for the party that I actually want to be in power, consequences be damned. I've convinced myself that our form of democracy just doesn't work if you don't vote for who you actually support.
Precisely. That's why we have the concepts of majority, minority and coalition governments. I prefer minority governments for exactly the outcome we have here-- Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition actually has the chance to keep shit like this from steamrolling through, when the ruling party doesn't have enough seats to overwhelm the opposing vote.
Um, more like boldly going where angels fear to tread. At best you're going to create a shitty little flash game that acts as a teaser for the full-fledged client, and then discover that there is virtually no reusable code between the two. Nobody's done this before because it's a bad idea on its face-- at best, you're wasting precious coding resources on hype, which is what your PR department is for.
Quantic promises a whole lot with the titles that they hype, and ends up giving very little beyond what they shine up for demo releases. They did it with Omikron, they did it with Fahrenheit (though anyone familiar with 'indigo children' might have suspected the clusterfuck that the story would turn into), and they've done it with their other adventure titles.
But what about those of us who don't have one or more of those devices? I have a PC and I have a cell phone, but no console. My phone can't handle anything more sophisticated than a bad Bejeweled port or SMS-- both of which my cell provider likes to charge through the nose for.
Sure, Nintendo did something much like this with Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, necessitating the use of a Gameboy Advance for each player, and both Sega and Sony had their Video Memory Units and Pocketstations-- but an MMO developer does not typically have that kind of control over hardware, and for each layer of hardware requirement you add, you whittle away that many more players.
MMOs work on consoles, and arguments that you can't use a keyboard on modern ones are easily defeated. Heck, a keyboard-equipped console could be considered the ideal platform for an MMO, simply because it is that much easier to track a user by their hardware signature, and ban him beyond a spoofed MAC address and a new copy of Lord of the War-Crafting Anarchists. Cell phones? They're an even bigger development headache than PCs, between the number of architectures, limits (both hardware and provider-assigned firmware) and the stupidly vast array of service plans that may or may not include data or SMS. A lot of people already balk at the idea of a recurring fee for MMOs. Incurring usage fees on their phone bills would drive even more away.
Slashdot Mirror
You're shirking your responsibility as an editor to actually edit pages, in favor of lazily deleting out of hand. That, right there, is what's wrong with the Wikipedia.
Yeah. While I reflexively rankle at the idea of blocking a whole swathe of domains like that, it's unfortunately clear that services like dyndns and mine.nu are going to be overrun with phishers and scammers because they're just as convenient to them as they are to non-malicious Internet users.
Oh god, not a poll tax. Has no-one learned anything from the Thatcher government?
Think more 'Dark Ages of Camelot' v2.0 than WoW, given that it's Mythic. From my experience in the beta, the PVE game exists only to teach you how to fight, and to lead you around to collect loot and XPs. The public quests in particular are very much 'Repeat these until you max your local faction out, collect a few greens, and hop in the local RvR queue.'
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't a Stateside judge just quash something like this a few weeks ago?
The price of pressing and packaging discs is negligible, especially with the economy of scale that they're operating on. They're guaranteed sales to retail chains by the hundreds of thousands; a massive, lump sale like that looks a lot better on the spreadsheets than a steady trickle of downloads, and moves the strain of demand off their servers and network.
She wouldn't be the first one.
Or, if you don't want to get banned for violating EULAs and pissing players off, play the auction house or stock market. Even keeping track of trends, it shouldn't take you more than an hour a day, and you can certainly run the average MMO client from a decent laptop.
Of course, you may have to buy gold to start making it...
This is not a fight between a Big Author and a Little Guy, this is a Scummy Company getting Bitchslapped.
Sure, but at that point we'll be worrying about AI breaking the planet down to make matrioshka brains, and not favoring the players that it cybers between GM events.
The closest thing that I've seen to real 'quests' in games are one-time, large-scale events like the Hopeslayer running rampant in Asheron's Call, or opening the gates of An'Quiraj in WoW. An argument could be made for large-group events like raids, wherein everyone is basically acting to a script against the AI's own script, with success culminating in a reenactment of the developer's plan for the encounter.
The cell stage plays very much like Flow, with the addition of the stripped-down creature creator (which basically takes the place of traditional 'powerups').
The creature stage... oh god, fuck me running, it plays like a bad MMO. If you go off exploring, you're fucked-- the complexity, toughness and aggressiveness of creatures increases with the distance you head out from your first nest, and moving to the next nest is thematically identical to the process of binding yourself to a respawn point. Combat and interaction depend on pressing the same four buttons over and over again, waiting for cooldowns, just like you might in WoW or any of its antecedents. Even making friends requires you to literally level your creature up, earning DNA points so that you can add bits that boost your charm rating so you can make tougher friends. Despite all of that customization, there are basically only two tracks you can move down: a fighting carnivore (because meat doesn't grow on trees) or a social herbivore (because buying both charm bits and combat bits is prohibitively expensive).
I haven't made it past the Creature stage because, like your average MMO, draw distances are terrible and your rate of movement is worse. Even the people that I know who enjoy the game describe the later sections as stripped-down RTS and 4X games, more proof-of-concept demos than anything else.
Wright's come out and said that Spore will be getting expansion packs, like the Sims, but 'different'. I suspect that we'll be asked to fork over another thirty bucks every few months for some actual depth of gameplay, rather than the biological equivalent to Sims fashions and furniture.
Those zany, wacky creatures you made in the months before Spore was released? You're not going to be using them until after you've finished evolving. You can start over with those old races once you have reached that point, but getting there involves popping into and out of the creator to add new bits that you find on the bloody ground and very occasionally wrest from other species. In the context of Spore as a game, the Creature Creator is more of an Editor.
You're going to be waiting a long, long time. EA's got their own direct-download service, which they're trying their best to monetize by charging five or ten bucks for a service that Steam provides for free-- namely, keeping track of your purchase over the long run. If you don't fork over what amounts to the price of shipping and handling, EA deletes the record of your purchase six months after you made it.
Precisely. That's why we have the concepts of majority, minority and coalition governments. I prefer minority governments for exactly the outcome we have here-- Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition actually has the chance to keep shit like this from steamrolling through, when the ruling party doesn't have enough seats to overwhelm the opposing vote.
Can I order hot pockets over the Internet?
Since when has Facebook been about anything but data mining and user tracking?
Actually, the Academy is too busy preventing linguistic drift to actually simplify the language.
Um, more like boldly going where angels fear to tread. At best you're going to create a shitty little flash game that acts as a teaser for the full-fledged client, and then discover that there is virtually no reusable code between the two. Nobody's done this before because it's a bad idea on its face-- at best, you're wasting precious coding resources on hype, which is what your PR department is for.
Quantic promises a whole lot with the titles that they hype, and ends up giving very little beyond what they shine up for demo releases. They did it with Omikron, they did it with Fahrenheit (though anyone familiar with 'indigo children' might have suspected the clusterfuck that the story would turn into), and they've done it with their other adventure titles.
Afarensis, or Robustus?
One step forward, two steps back! Cha cha cha! Thanks guys, but some of us do, you know, LAN?
Australia has more horrifying, poisonous creatures per square meter, than any other place on Earth. If anyone is going to understand Spore, it's them.
Sure, Nintendo did something much like this with Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, necessitating the use of a Gameboy Advance for each player, and both Sega and Sony had their Video Memory Units and Pocketstations-- but an MMO developer does not typically have that kind of control over hardware, and for each layer of hardware requirement you add, you whittle away that many more players.
MMOs work on consoles, and arguments that you can't use a keyboard on modern ones are easily defeated. Heck, a keyboard-equipped console could be considered the ideal platform for an MMO, simply because it is that much easier to track a user by their hardware signature, and ban him beyond a spoofed MAC address and a new copy of Lord of the War-Crafting Anarchists. Cell phones? They're an even bigger development headache than PCs, between the number of architectures, limits (both hardware and provider-assigned firmware) and the stupidly vast array of service plans that may or may not include data or SMS. A lot of people already balk at the idea of a recurring fee for MMOs. Incurring usage fees on their phone bills would drive even more away.
Busting Security Through Obscurity!