Unlike the average MMO, where all assets virtual and physical belong to the company and not the end user, stuff that players create within Second Life is their own intellectual property. It's not a matter of SL being a game or not at all, but rather a function of licence agreements and design philosophy.
They've existed for years, actually. The thing is, smaller sites that deal openly with 'virtual artifacts' are a lot easier for the game owners to strongarm, and they don't carry the same weight and name recognition as eBay does.
I know that the six-to-eight hour figure is supposed to be spread out over the whole household, and not represent an average single user, but that figure is still jarring to me for some reason.
I'm not familiar with the physics or the schematics involved, but is it possible that that kind of heavy-duty usage is cooking the bulbs?
I think it's less that he realized that he was using the wrong tool, and more that he was surprised that people called him on it. Anshe Chung Co/LLC/KFC/KMFDM/WTF is too used to working within the confines of Second Life, where the admins are more than willing to keep them happy. The outside world... much less so.
I don't really sympathise with him at all, on any level. Anshe Chung is not his wife. Anshe Chung does not resemble his wife in the slightest. The 'phlying phalanx of phalluses' attack was roughly the equivalent of an eight year old drawing a pointy-hatted stick-figure, labeling it 'Teechur' and adding lightning bolts flying toward it-- only in this case, it's Mrs. Graef drawing the caricature herself. His overreaction was on par with that same teacher seeking the young critic's expulsion because the drawing noted previously was a 'death threat'.
The attack was juvenile, certainly, but flying off the handle and trying to smother it was the worst thing that he could have possibly done.
Expansion packs have been a part of MMOs virtually since the beginning. I'm not sure if Meridian 59 had any, but I know that Ultima Online and the original Everquest did. The thing is, MMO expansions tend to be both fucking big, and the sort of thing that doesn't really lend itself to gradual release-- Burning Crusade came on four CDs, two new races (with a couple of armloads of new quests related to each) and a continent's worth of new endgame content.
It's utterly infeasible to release that much data as a download, between the eight million accounts, the limitations of the bittorrent-like patch client, and the number of users that either block ports to prevent sharing the load or simply can't share because of bandwith caps.
Plus there are the costs of development. Testers might come cheap, but designers and coders that would otherwise be busy doing other things don't. A good hunk of the monthly fee goes right back into systems upkeep and keeping the staff in food, and the rest goes on up the pipe to the parent companies. Like it or not, they have an obligation to turn a profit for the shareholders; turning to them and saying, "Oh, by the way, we're going to take the year's earnings and dump it into developing something that will make the players happy, but you won't see any direct benefit from" is only good for getting your expansion project canned. Even in the case of something as phenomenally huge as World of Warcraft, the parent companies and the shareholders demand a constant increase in profits; an expansion pack, which is naturally intended to dovetail with an already vetted main game and appeal to extant players, is the safest and most cost-effective means of boosting those profits once the player base's population has stabilized.
Umm... I can understand having exclusive relationships with, say, Pepsi or Coca Cola. However, it seems refusing to donate to one charity because you have an exclusive relationship with another charity almost implies that there is some financial benefit for you to donate money to one charity over another. Not to point fingers, but it's a bit of a gray area there...
It helps if you think of the United Way as being roughly as charitable as Coke of Pepsi. They've paid little more than lip-service to the idea of charity for a number of years now.
Uncle Warren makes a few interesting comments about SLers lack of coping mechanisms. Basically, people like "Anshe Chung" are used to being able to shriek bloody murder, or send an IM to a Linden staffer, and have the target of their rage erased on the flimsiest of pretexts. She's a big fish in a small pond, and the more that the real world intrudes, the more obvious her ineffectiveness on the larger scale becomes.
That's what they said about Star Wars Galaxies, too. Word from NDA-dodgers is that it runs like a pig even on high-end systems, and is missing little things like end-game content. Given that they're going public beta in less than a month, with plans for release shortly thereafter, we have a problem.
And before anyone tries to counter with something like 'They can patch it in!' or 'It'll be ready before anyone gets that high!', bear in mind how fast "uberguilds" and concerted efforts by shut-ins and power-gamers have hit maximum level in other titles. Also recall McQuaid's last big project, Everquest: the poster child for intentionally broken and incomplete content that somehow nonetheless was always "Working as intended."
We've got three CFLs in the kitchen light fixture, and they put out a decent amount of light. Unfortunately, a single one in the light fixture I have in my study puts out eighty watts worth of luminosity. It's not a matter of colour, they're simply dimmer-- they actually print the comparative power consumption and light output values on the packaging for the ones we've got in the cupboard.
I'd love to use fluorescents, but unfortunately I get serious eyestrain in light that low, and have neither the electrical outlets or the space for another fixture in here, so a hundred watt incandescent it is.
I'm familiar with their other works, but don't think that they have the name recognition that Dragonlance does. I choked the first couple of Death Gate novels down, but never got past the fact that they felt they had to include Fizban the Fabulous in it. Sure they changed a few letters of his name around, but he made references to Dragonlance himself. The Darksword RPG system was out-and-out terrible, and the series never really grabbed me either.
Designing a system from the ground up for Serenity was probably a bad move in itself, especially given its lack of success-- a talent for writing young adult fiction and a history of gaming doesn't necessarily parley into a talent for developing rulesets. Reusing it for yet another TV tie-in RPG is bull-headed, at best, and suggests that Mags is trying to force success by attaching it to already extant fanbases, rather than doing the hard work of setting (and further rules) development. And... actually, if this does fail, it could make Universal seriously consider canceling the license, which would prevent them from pursuing a D20 version.
I'm leery too. As far as I'm concerned, Weis' only claim to fame is the interminable Dragonlance series; just because she can co-author middle-school book-report fodder, and has ostensibly played tabletop RPGs, doesn't mean that she has any skill or talent in designing the damn things.
Besides that, as much of a geek and fanboy as I am, I've never encountered a particularly good TV-licensed RPG. From FASA's Star Trek to Babylon 5, they typically suffer from two major flaws: First, a relative lack of usable, canonical information. Sure, there's a lot of raw data from a show like Doctor Who or Star Trek, but by and large it's cruft, filled with silly minutiae or one-shot enemies and technologies. Second, the systems are usually abysmally designed: The B5 RPG (printed in glossy colour) made heavy use of colour coding in its character sheets years before colour photocopiers were widely available, for example.
I wonder how much play testing games like this get?
I suspect very little, maybe some in-house testing and whatever they can inflict on local cons and geeky friends. A lot of this stuff seems to develop from house rules or desperate attempts to ape-while-defying D&D, and tends to miss the point when it comes to actual playability vs. internal gimmickry. What really gets me though, is why the Hell didn't they just license this under D20? I guarantee that when most geeks think Weis, they think Dragonlance (or crap), and when they think Dragonlance, they think D&D (or... yeah). Given the overlap between gamers and sci-fi geeks, Weis' previous association with D&D, and the fact that D20 is the thousand pound gorilla in a market that is always difficult to succeed in, that should have been a no-brainer.
No, almost certainly not. It's really easy to rile people up over something, like hula hoops or the environment, but long-term exposure wears resistance and levels of concern down to malleable levels. Just look at the UK's increasingly Panopticon society, or the shrugs the average guy on the street gives at the mention of rising sea levels or identity theft. If it doesn't directly and conspicuously harm them (and even then), then it quickly drops down the rungs of their hierarchy of concerns.
I just love that they claim that Prey enjoyed 'overwhelming success'. Given that it was almost as late, little more than silly gameplay gimmicks, and far, far shorter than the designers swore, I'd call it 'middling' at best.
The 1984 comparison made me immediately think of this:
"Smith!" screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. "6079 Smith W! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me."
This whole situation with CCTV cameras in Britain makes me think more of Bentham than Orwell... not that it makes me feel any better.
The Unreal engine is licensed, for one thing. It's also a great deal simpler, both from a client and a server perspective.
I'd guess that it might cause a minor flood of 'me too' titles, but nothing spectacular. Software development is a huge expense that would be largely obviated, yes, but not so the similar expense of art asset development and, of course, servers.
Any real effect that it might have on the MMOG market would probably be felt overseas, and by Blizzard itself-- the Korean market's apparently used the Serious Sam engine at least once or twice, so parceling out or recycling huge parts of the WoW engine would be a given for other development houses. At the same time, there's going to be a huge influx of hackers working for WoW gold farming concerns, trying to parley quirks in the code into new, exploitable glitches.
For me, it's simple rubbernecking. How the fuck can a successful, published author squeeze out a turd of metaphor that would get a freshman english student hit repeatedly with a rolled up newspaper?
This 'news' cropped up at about the time Interplay went into bankruptcy, there's nothing new about it. It's nothing more than a desperate attempt to get re-listed on the stock market and to squeeze that seventy-five million out of gullible stockholders-- at the moment, they're little more than one of the penny stocks that clog inboxes these days.
At best, Interplay has four or five guys in an unheated room, doing this out of the goodness of their hearts and the vacuity of their heads. When there are employees absconding with computer hardware because Payroll can't make ends meet, there's no bloody way that they can afford a project of this magnitude.
Many of the products in that article would have been plausible, but incredibly half-assed in terms of practical functionality, given the state of technology at the time.
I rather wish that the article's author realized that, because the sense of naivete that came off of it was palpable. The design of the WALT in particular is clearly awful: a 'portable' phone big enough to have a touch-screen and a lot of unused space around it, that could send and receive faxes, but didn't have any apparent keyboard interface for writing outgoing faxes.
I'm definitely in for the lore and exploration in these games; if there's a way that I can avoid whacking the monsters, I'll take it. What had me hooked on CoX for over a straight year was that just about everything moving had a bit of back-story. If it's a quest-giver, you can click and see their background. If it's a monster, you can click a couple of times to see a textual description. Lots of mission objectives give you little clues that you can bring up in a window, and when you finish a story arc you're left with a souvenir synopsis of the whole escapade. Some of the stories are one-shots, but others reveal the methods and drives of signature villains and their minions.
Warcraft does things similarly, in that their quest givers usually have some degree of personality, but the rewards that they grant are ultimately disposable and there is nothing like a traditional CRPG quest log. It seems to rely more on outside knowledge of the Warcraft canon, like from the tie-in novels or the earlier RTS games, which limited my appreciation of the storylines.
Games like Ryzom rarely have a real story, and when it is there it's usually poorly translated. Instead they go for the Pokemon grind: level up killing green crabs, then move on to red crabs, and then try your hand at killing slugs.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike the average MMO, where all assets virtual and physical belong to the company and not the end user, stuff that players create within Second Life is their own intellectual property. It's not a matter of SL being a game or not at all, but rather a function of licence agreements and design philosophy.
They've existed for years, actually. The thing is, smaller sites that deal openly with 'virtual artifacts' are a lot easier for the game owners to strongarm, and they don't carry the same weight and name recognition as eBay does.
I'm not familiar with the physics or the schematics involved, but is it possible that that kind of heavy-duty usage is cooking the bulbs?
I don't really sympathise with him at all, on any level. Anshe Chung is not his wife. Anshe Chung does not resemble his wife in the slightest. The 'phlying phalanx of phalluses' attack was roughly the equivalent of an eight year old drawing a pointy-hatted stick-figure, labeling it 'Teechur' and adding lightning bolts flying toward it-- only in this case, it's Mrs. Graef drawing the caricature herself. His overreaction was on par with that same teacher seeking the young critic's expulsion because the drawing noted previously was a 'death threat'.
The attack was juvenile, certainly, but flying off the handle and trying to smother it was the worst thing that he could have possibly done.
I'm voting for flop, because this kind of scenario has 'hacks and trainers' written all over it.
It's utterly infeasible to release that much data as a download, between the eight million accounts, the limitations of the bittorrent-like patch client, and the number of users that either block ports to prevent sharing the load or simply can't share because of bandwith caps.
Plus there are the costs of development. Testers might come cheap, but designers and coders that would otherwise be busy doing other things don't. A good hunk of the monthly fee goes right back into systems upkeep and keeping the staff in food, and the rest goes on up the pipe to the parent companies. Like it or not, they have an obligation to turn a profit for the shareholders; turning to them and saying, "Oh, by the way, we're going to take the year's earnings and dump it into developing something that will make the players happy, but you won't see any direct benefit from" is only good for getting your expansion project canned. Even in the case of something as phenomenally huge as World of Warcraft, the parent companies and the shareholders demand a constant increase in profits; an expansion pack, which is naturally intended to dovetail with an already vetted main game and appeal to extant players, is the safest and most cost-effective means of boosting those profits once the player base's population has stabilized.
The context isn't perfectly clear, but I think the article suggests that the bidder mentioned was the one who had the item stolen, not the thief.
Uncle Warren makes a few interesting comments about SLers lack of coping mechanisms. Basically, people like "Anshe Chung" are used to being able to shriek bloody murder, or send an IM to a Linden staffer, and have the target of their rage erased on the flimsiest of pretexts. She's a big fish in a small pond, and the more that the real world intrudes, the more obvious her ineffectiveness on the larger scale becomes.
And before anyone tries to counter with something like 'They can patch it in!' or 'It'll be ready before anyone gets that high!', bear in mind how fast "uberguilds" and concerted efforts by shut-ins and power-gamers have hit maximum level in other titles. Also recall McQuaid's last big project, Everquest: the poster child for intentionally broken and incomplete content that somehow nonetheless was always "Working as intended."
The new SR game will be great! Er, that is... if you've never heard of something called 'Counter-Strike'...
I'd love to use fluorescents, but unfortunately I get serious eyestrain in light that low, and have neither the electrical outlets or the space for another fixture in here, so a hundred watt incandescent it is.
I wouldn't say that; between zombie computers and reams of first posts, there's plenty of evidence for mindlessness on the net.
Designing a system from the ground up for Serenity was probably a bad move in itself, especially given its lack of success-- a talent for writing young adult fiction and a history of gaming doesn't necessarily parley into a talent for developing rulesets. Reusing it for yet another TV tie-in RPG is bull-headed, at best, and suggests that Mags is trying to force success by attaching it to already extant fanbases, rather than doing the hard work of setting (and further rules) development. And... actually, if this does fail, it could make Universal seriously consider canceling the license, which would prevent them from pursuing a D20 version.
Besides that, as much of a geek and fanboy as I am, I've never encountered a particularly good TV-licensed RPG. From FASA's Star Trek to Babylon 5, they typically suffer from two major flaws: First, a relative lack of usable, canonical information. Sure, there's a lot of raw data from a show like Doctor Who or Star Trek, but by and large it's cruft, filled with silly minutiae or one-shot enemies and technologies. Second, the systems are usually abysmally designed: The B5 RPG (printed in glossy colour) made heavy use of colour coding in its character sheets years before colour photocopiers were widely available, for example.
I suspect very little, maybe some in-house testing and whatever they can inflict on local cons and geeky friends. A lot of this stuff seems to develop from house rules or desperate attempts to ape-while-defying D&D, and tends to miss the point when it comes to actual playability vs. internal gimmickry. What really gets me though, is why the Hell didn't they just license this under D20? I guarantee that when most geeks think Weis, they think Dragonlance (or crap), and when they think Dragonlance, they think D&D (or... yeah). Given the overlap between gamers and sci-fi geeks, Weis' previous association with D&D, and the fact that D20 is the thousand pound gorilla in a market that is always difficult to succeed in, that should have been a no-brainer.I just love that they claim that Prey enjoyed 'overwhelming success'. Given that it was almost as late, little more than silly gameplay gimmicks, and far, far shorter than the designers swore, I'd call it 'middling' at best.
"Smith!" screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. "6079 Smith W! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me."
This whole situation with CCTV cameras in Britain makes me think more of Bentham than Orwell... not that it makes me feel any better.
I'd guess that it might cause a minor flood of 'me too' titles, but nothing spectacular. Software development is a huge expense that would be largely obviated, yes, but not so the similar expense of art asset development and, of course, servers.
Any real effect that it might have on the MMOG market would probably be felt overseas, and by Blizzard itself-- the Korean market's apparently used the Serious Sam engine at least once or twice, so parceling out or recycling huge parts of the WoW engine would be a given for other development houses. At the same time, there's going to be a huge influx of hackers working for WoW gold farming concerns, trying to parley quirks in the code into new, exploitable glitches.
...But it's still a potentially broadened user base. Besides, haven't there been administrator tweaking kits for earlier versions of IE, too?
For me, it's simple rubbernecking. How the fuck can a successful, published author squeeze out a turd of metaphor that would get a freshman english student hit repeatedly with a rolled up newspaper?
At best, Interplay has four or five guys in an unheated room, doing this out of the goodness of their hearts and the vacuity of their heads. When there are employees absconding with computer hardware because Payroll can't make ends meet, there's no bloody way that they can afford a project of this magnitude.
Could it be... terror?
Warcraft does things similarly, in that their quest givers usually have some degree of personality, but the rewards that they grant are ultimately disposable and there is nothing like a traditional CRPG quest log. It seems to rely more on outside knowledge of the Warcraft canon, like from the tie-in novels or the earlier RTS games, which limited my appreciation of the storylines.
Games like Ryzom rarely have a real story, and when it is there it's usually poorly translated. Instead they go for the Pokemon grind: level up killing green crabs, then move on to red crabs, and then try your hand at killing slugs.