There's nothing wrong with technology for the sake of technology - hell, this is/. and I'm guessing a significant number of people here love technology for the sake of technology - however that doesn't mean we have to hail something like Avatar as the pinnacle of human achievement, or even human cinematic achievement, when in fact it's a tired old story with some pretty graphics. I can appreciate the technology for its own sake even if I realise the people using it are failing to explore the medium in any meaningful way (and of course, nor should they when their aim is to just churn cash, but let's just call a spade a spade).
What I dislike about the current crop of 3D is that they still don't give you a feel of depth, because the perspective is generally forced on whatever the director wants you to be looking at. Quite often during Avatar I'd want to ignore the main action and look at what was happening around the periphery, the result was really quite jarring and quickly made me feel sick. The whole point of 3D should be that I can fully appreciate the world on the screen, but most of the time it feels like I'm seeing less of that world, like I'm looking at it through a very narrow lens. Also, having lots of scenes where someone points or throws something directly at the camera is just incredibly cheap (and looks ridiculous when you're watching in 2D) and yet every movie so far seems to have employed this gimmick at least a couple of times - it's like the studios insist on a minimum number of "oh my god it's coming right at us" moments per X minutes of movie. I'd like to see a movie where the director treated the technology with a little more respect and not like a kid with a new toy.
Agreed - I sat through Avatar* and it just felt like a 3 hour tech demo to me, like one of those pointless videos graphics card manufacturers frequently put out that people probably stopped watching in 1997. I can imagine if you're unused to seeing such demos the movie would feel like something special, to me it was just Fern Gully with pretty graphics and it definitely fell foul of the same traps as all 3D movies (scenes where things obviously come towards the screen just to play to the technology without adding anything to the movie, or the fact that I can't focus on the pretty backgrounds because the forced 3D perspective means if I try to my brains will melt out through my ears). Unlike the creative use of colour and sound when those technologies became available, we've yet to see a movie which defines the 3D genre as anything other than a fun little gimmick.
That's not to say I don't ever think 3D could make a film better, but we need the current generation of film makers to cut their teeth on the technology and then hopefully someone will emerge to show how it should be done and set the standard. So far every 3D movie I've seen would have worked just as well in 2D, and considering I have to pay more to see it I don't think it's unfair to expect a 3D movie to deliver a better experience.
* Well, most of it, I'm slightly embarassed to say it's the first ever time I fell asleep in front of a movie, but it speaks volumes for what I thought of the movie that a chronic insomniac in a crowded, noisy cinema, cramped into an uncomfortable cinema seat, wearing uncomfortable 3D glasses and bombarded with noise and light from the movie still managed to fall asleep for five minutes during what I suspect was meant to be a big "wow" scene - the one where they fly for the first time...
I always wondered if the fact that Hobbits were used to eating 'shrooms and smoking their special tobacco is what made them slightly more resilient to the promises of the ring, and therefore the ideal ring-bearers, but the movie pretty much strips out all of that without really explaining why Hobbits are better suited to carry the ring than, say, the giant eagle (who presumably could have dropped off the ring in a couple of hours and been back in time for tea).
It would be nice to think they were only incompetent, but you don't hear stories of people frequently receiving credit errors, or portions of their bill inexplicably removed. Either this happens a lot and people keep it quiet, or the system is set up in such a way that, if there are errors, they always go in the company's favour, or that said errors never flag internally for investigation and removal, so the customer has to do all the legwork.
More than a million people turned up in London to protest the war in Iraq, I'm pretty sure it was the biggest single protest the country has ever seen, so I think you're being a little quick to toss out the sheeple cliché (albeit the government just ignored their wishes anyway, which is the really sickening part - they complain about voter apathy but when a significant portion of the country turns up to make their views heard on a subject and are ignored, why should voters be anything but).
Maybe they're thinking of the long game. Considering jpeg is still the norm and that's almost 20 years old, and the only two other common web image formats we use both added something useful above and beyond jpeg (transparency/animation and alpha transparency) which probably helped with their adoption, I think it's safe to say that things are pretty glacial in this field. Maybe Google are introducing this now with a view to it only being available across the board in a decade's time.
Given the proliferation of 10-20MP cameras on the mass consumer market (even though you can often get much better quality results with a 5MP camera with a better lense, particularly if it's only going to be used for standard photo sized prints or web usage) that's actually a really good idea, although we'd probably need the ability to throw away the larger chunks if they're not needed (I'm thinking an image intensive site that never needs to show the images at more than 550x550 and probably doesn't want to host a 16MP version of every image it has for storage reasons). We'd probably also need a method of preventing image crawlers like Google's own hitting up the 16MP version of images and nuking a site's entire bandwidth allowance in one mad download session. If we could solve those issues, this could be a really useful addition to the web.
I'm assuming the WebP images were compressed to a similar quality level to the JPEGs but merely resulted in smaller file sizes, otherwise the tests are pretty meaningless (in other words, sure you could compress the JPEG by 86% and still have an acceptable image, but if you could also compress the WebP image by 86% and have an acceptable image of the same quality but even smaller, then WebP would still win). Ultimately we need to be able to get our hands on a quality image editing tool that supports both formats to definitively answer which is best, but my point is just because you can make massive gains by optimising JPEGs, doesn't preclude even greater gains from optimising WebP.
That's probably just the justification to end users who don't currently care about bandwidth and don't understand how images eating bandwidth ultimately results in a slower, more costly web for everyone. Ultimately, though, even if images account for a small hit in web page load times compared to huge flash or slow ad banners, it's still a net gain if the images are smaller (of course, that itself depends on the people uploading them compressing them properly, which generally doesn't happen enough).
I often use my phone to browse the web, and since a lot of the imagery online aids in understanding the context or navigation of the website, it would be a horribly crippled experience to browse with images turned off. Incidentally, photos (on flickr, etc) look fantastic and rich on my Desire's big AMOLED screen, of course YMMV but I don't see that as a valid reason to never even try viewing images on a phone.
Or maybe Google isn't a single entity but rather a company with many diverse departments and many more diverse individuals working in said departments.
I don't really see the problem - isn't this one of the much touted advantages of Android, that if you don't like their store you can set up your own? If a provider locks the phone to a specific store, I'll not buy that phone from that provider, it's not like Android isn't on a huge variety of new handsets, if I wanted to be locked in, there's an App provider for that. I'm sure Amazon's aim will be, as usual, to try and stamp out the competition and become the sole gatekeeper - good look doing that when the competition is Google and they control the OS, but if it means a little competition to improve the usability of the respective stores, and perhaps a little more effort in helping the diamonds shine amongst the dross, then it's probably a good thing.
Next on the hit list should be those incredibly invasive banner ads during shows that advertise other shows on that channel/network. I'm already watching one of your shows damnit, if you want me to stick with your channel stop completely ruining the experience for me!
It's a pretty ridiculous situation where we all have to buy special TVs to filter the content we're watching because the people making it refuse to listen to the wishes of their customers (or potential customers), but you're right, if I had the option to buy this on my next TV purchase I'd definitely take it, even if it cost a little extra, so it's interesting that it's not widely offered. Maybe it's one of those subjects people like to moan about but actually don't really care about (it's more of a problem for me - I have sensitive hearing and occasional migraines, combine those with the ad volume and it equals real physical pain and discomfort, well it would if I didn't just immediately switch channels).
I'm not sure - people have been complaining about this pretty much since day one of televised commercials (and perhaps for radio commercials even before that) and still the industry has refused to play fair (even though I'm highly dubious about whether this tactic even works - I always change channel for commercials now, primarily for this reason, I have very sensitive hearing and I have the TV at just the right volume for the programming, rather than risk being blasted I channel surf, if the volume was normalised I'd probably stick with the ads). In a situation such as this, where the market refuses to adjust to meet the desires of the customer, maybe that's the kind of situation where the law should be getting involved to ensure fairness, small irritant or not.
I guess it's a case of "each to his own" but I'm not prepared to put that much faith in games companies that I truly believe the add-ons they want to sell me are just that, rather than stuff they deliberately left out of the original game to sell to me later on.
ME2 and DA:O were two prime examples. The first DLC for both was obviously built at the same time as the core game and just detached for separate release, to the extent that ME:2 has a "space" on the character select screen in the basic game for a character who is only available with DLC, while DA:O has a DLC character standing right in your camp trying to sell you a mission. I have to say I bought both and enjoyed them and don't regret the purchases, but yes, pretty cynical move on the developer's part.
I keep hearing the argument that people don't want to be nickle and dimed to death. The gaming industry is an open market. If one developer is nickle and diming and people don't like it then other developers will fill the void and steal their customers. The very fact that this isn't yet happening and that people seem to be sticking with the games/systems where they're nickel and dimed would suggest that, actually, people are comfortable with the idea - or, at the very least, that it doesn't annoy them enough to vote with their Steam Wallets.
I suppose people who buy better sports equipment are cheating, because real atheltes craft it themselves? Also, if you believe these purchases give a game-altering advantage (and clearly you do, if you thought they were balanced or purely cosmetic then there'd be no "cheating" after all, since cheating implies gaining an unfair advantage) then how does your world view accommodate brand new players? Surely people who have been playing for years and have earned all the equipment through grinding are going to have a massive advantage over new players, and even if the new players spend the next three years catching up, the old players will have six years of grinding at that point - shouldn't the game be fun for those new players too? If being able to buy the equipment creates a level playing field, surely that moves us closer to your ideal of a game where no one player has an unfair advantage, because even players who have full time jobs and can't spend the time "honing their skill" can still jump on and play and have fun. In reality, these upgrades don't really confer any competitive advantage (maybe they will in the future but for now they don't) so it's all moot because someone who buys every piece of equipment can still be thrashed by someone with more skill using a clean vanilla install/account.
That's a very narrow view of the world. Some people have jobs and families and committments outside of gaming - that doesn't mean they don't enjoy grinding as much as the next gamer, but realising it takes 200 hours for an item to drop on average and you get to play maybe three or four hours a week while your friends play that every day makes it hard to keep up. That doesn't mean they wouldn't rather be playing the game or that they have giant egos - if anything I'd say the elitist people who believe you only have any demonstrable skill if you spend grinding out drops are the egotistical ones, since they care so much about losing some illusory advantage.
Okay, so assuming they abandoned the micro-payment system, how is that any better when you still have to grind that 200 hours for a hat (and by the way, I've seriously been away from this game for too long - people are grinding hats now?). The alternative is they just give everyone everything for free the second it's available, but that would be just as dull as grinding, at least with the proposed system, people who play a lot will probably feel a sense of pride in earning the hat, but everyone else can still have hat fun (maybe they could leave a price tag on bought items so that non-bought items still earn kudos). Of course, the final alternative is that they just stop releasing new content, but that doesn't seem in anyone's interest.
I have to admit, I haven't really played since just before (literally a few days before) the spy upgrades, but back then I thought the upgrades were really well balanaced. They added a new aspect to playing a class without being terribly game-changing, some upgrades actually seemed a little worse than taking the default equipment, but were still fun to use. I wonder how many people will be willing to pay for equipment that doesn't give them a definitive edge, though, and whether this micro-payment system will lead to the end of well balanced upgrades.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with technology for the sake of technology - hell, this is /. and I'm guessing a significant number of people here love technology for the sake of technology - however that doesn't mean we have to hail something like Avatar as the pinnacle of human achievement, or even human cinematic achievement, when in fact it's a tired old story with some pretty graphics. I can appreciate the technology for its own sake even if I realise the people using it are failing to explore the medium in any meaningful way (and of course, nor should they when their aim is to just churn cash, but let's just call a spade a spade).
What I dislike about the current crop of 3D is that they still don't give you a feel of depth, because the perspective is generally forced on whatever the director wants you to be looking at. Quite often during Avatar I'd want to ignore the main action and look at what was happening around the periphery, the result was really quite jarring and quickly made me feel sick. The whole point of 3D should be that I can fully appreciate the world on the screen, but most of the time it feels like I'm seeing less of that world, like I'm looking at it through a very narrow lens. Also, having lots of scenes where someone points or throws something directly at the camera is just incredibly cheap (and looks ridiculous when you're watching in 2D) and yet every movie so far seems to have employed this gimmick at least a couple of times - it's like the studios insist on a minimum number of "oh my god it's coming right at us" moments per X minutes of movie. I'd like to see a movie where the director treated the technology with a little more respect and not like a kid with a new toy.
Agreed - I sat through Avatar* and it just felt like a 3 hour tech demo to me, like one of those pointless videos graphics card manufacturers frequently put out that people probably stopped watching in 1997. I can imagine if you're unused to seeing such demos the movie would feel like something special, to me it was just Fern Gully with pretty graphics and it definitely fell foul of the same traps as all 3D movies (scenes where things obviously come towards the screen just to play to the technology without adding anything to the movie, or the fact that I can't focus on the pretty backgrounds because the forced 3D perspective means if I try to my brains will melt out through my ears). Unlike the creative use of colour and sound when those technologies became available, we've yet to see a movie which defines the 3D genre as anything other than a fun little gimmick.
That's not to say I don't ever think 3D could make a film better, but we need the current generation of film makers to cut their teeth on the technology and then hopefully someone will emerge to show how it should be done and set the standard. So far every 3D movie I've seen would have worked just as well in 2D, and considering I have to pay more to see it I don't think it's unfair to expect a 3D movie to deliver a better experience.
* Well, most of it, I'm slightly embarassed to say it's the first ever time I fell asleep in front of a movie, but it speaks volumes for what I thought of the movie that a chronic insomniac in a crowded, noisy cinema, cramped into an uncomfortable cinema seat, wearing uncomfortable 3D glasses and bombarded with noise and light from the movie still managed to fall asleep for five minutes during what I suspect was meant to be a big "wow" scene - the one where they fly for the first time...
And in an even weirder twist, I read your comment as Unicron.
I always wondered if the fact that Hobbits were used to eating 'shrooms and smoking their special tobacco is what made them slightly more resilient to the promises of the ring, and therefore the ideal ring-bearers, but the movie pretty much strips out all of that without really explaining why Hobbits are better suited to carry the ring than, say, the giant eagle (who presumably could have dropped off the ring in a couple of hours and been back in time for tea).
It would be nice to think they were only incompetent, but you don't hear stories of people frequently receiving credit errors, or portions of their bill inexplicably removed. Either this happens a lot and people keep it quiet, or the system is set up in such a way that, if there are errors, they always go in the company's favour, or that said errors never flag internally for investigation and removal, so the customer has to do all the legwork.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I assumed all links here since about 2001 went to goatse. On a side note, it's also why I never RTFA...
More than a million people turned up in London to protest the war in Iraq, I'm pretty sure it was the biggest single protest the country has ever seen, so I think you're being a little quick to toss out the sheeple cliché (albeit the government just ignored their wishes anyway, which is the really sickening part - they complain about voter apathy but when a significant portion of the country turns up to make their views heard on a subject and are ignored, why should voters be anything but).
Maybe they're thinking of the long game. Considering jpeg is still the norm and that's almost 20 years old, and the only two other common web image formats we use both added something useful above and beyond jpeg (transparency/animation and alpha transparency) which probably helped with their adoption, I think it's safe to say that things are pretty glacial in this field. Maybe Google are introducing this now with a view to it only being available across the board in a decade's time.
Given the proliferation of 10-20MP cameras on the mass consumer market (even though you can often get much better quality results with a 5MP camera with a better lense, particularly if it's only going to be used for standard photo sized prints or web usage) that's actually a really good idea, although we'd probably need the ability to throw away the larger chunks if they're not needed (I'm thinking an image intensive site that never needs to show the images at more than 550x550 and probably doesn't want to host a 16MP version of every image it has for storage reasons). We'd probably also need a method of preventing image crawlers like Google's own hitting up the 16MP version of images and nuking a site's entire bandwidth allowance in one mad download session. If we could solve those issues, this could be a really useful addition to the web.
I'm assuming the WebP images were compressed to a similar quality level to the JPEGs but merely resulted in smaller file sizes, otherwise the tests are pretty meaningless (in other words, sure you could compress the JPEG by 86% and still have an acceptable image, but if you could also compress the WebP image by 86% and have an acceptable image of the same quality but even smaller, then WebP would still win). Ultimately we need to be able to get our hands on a quality image editing tool that supports both formats to definitively answer which is best, but my point is just because you can make massive gains by optimising JPEGs, doesn't preclude even greater gains from optimising WebP.
That's probably just the justification to end users who don't currently care about bandwidth and don't understand how images eating bandwidth ultimately results in a slower, more costly web for everyone. Ultimately, though, even if images account for a small hit in web page load times compared to huge flash or slow ad banners, it's still a net gain if the images are smaller (of course, that itself depends on the people uploading them compressing them properly, which generally doesn't happen enough).
I often use my phone to browse the web, and since a lot of the imagery online aids in understanding the context or navigation of the website, it would be a horribly crippled experience to browse with images turned off. Incidentally, photos (on flickr, etc) look fantastic and rich on my Desire's big AMOLED screen, of course YMMV but I don't see that as a valid reason to never even try viewing images on a phone.
Or maybe Google isn't a single entity but rather a company with many diverse departments and many more diverse individuals working in said departments.
I don't really see the problem - isn't this one of the much touted advantages of Android, that if you don't like their store you can set up your own? If a provider locks the phone to a specific store, I'll not buy that phone from that provider, it's not like Android isn't on a huge variety of new handsets, if I wanted to be locked in, there's an App provider for that. I'm sure Amazon's aim will be, as usual, to try and stamp out the competition and become the sole gatekeeper - good look doing that when the competition is Google and they control the OS, but if it means a little competition to improve the usability of the respective stores, and perhaps a little more effort in helping the diamonds shine amongst the dross, then it's probably a good thing.
Next on the hit list should be those incredibly invasive banner ads during shows that advertise other shows on that channel/network. I'm already watching one of your shows damnit, if you want me to stick with your channel stop completely ruining the experience for me!
It's a pretty ridiculous situation where we all have to buy special TVs to filter the content we're watching because the people making it refuse to listen to the wishes of their customers (or potential customers), but you're right, if I had the option to buy this on my next TV purchase I'd definitely take it, even if it cost a little extra, so it's interesting that it's not widely offered. Maybe it's one of those subjects people like to moan about but actually don't really care about (it's more of a problem for me - I have sensitive hearing and occasional migraines, combine those with the ad volume and it equals real physical pain and discomfort, well it would if I didn't just immediately switch channels).
I'm not sure - people have been complaining about this pretty much since day one of televised commercials (and perhaps for radio commercials even before that) and still the industry has refused to play fair (even though I'm highly dubious about whether this tactic even works - I always change channel for commercials now, primarily for this reason, I have very sensitive hearing and I have the TV at just the right volume for the programming, rather than risk being blasted I channel surf, if the volume was normalised I'd probably stick with the ads). In a situation such as this, where the market refuses to adjust to meet the desires of the customer, maybe that's the kind of situation where the law should be getting involved to ensure fairness, small irritant or not.
I believe GP was employing this.
I guess it's a case of "each to his own" but I'm not prepared to put that much faith in games companies that I truly believe the add-ons they want to sell me are just that, rather than stuff they deliberately left out of the original game to sell to me later on.
ME2 and DA:O were two prime examples. The first DLC for both was obviously built at the same time as the core game and just detached for separate release, to the extent that ME:2 has a "space" on the character select screen in the basic game for a character who is only available with DLC, while DA:O has a DLC character standing right in your camp trying to sell you a mission. I have to say I bought both and enjoyed them and don't regret the purchases, but yes, pretty cynical move on the developer's part.
I keep hearing the argument that people don't want to be nickle and dimed to death. The gaming industry is an open market. If one developer is nickle and diming and people don't like it then other developers will fill the void and steal their customers. The very fact that this isn't yet happening and that people seem to be sticking with the games/systems where they're nickel and dimed would suggest that, actually, people are comfortable with the idea - or, at the very least, that it doesn't annoy them enough to vote with their Steam Wallets.
I suppose people who buy better sports equipment are cheating, because real atheltes craft it themselves? Also, if you believe these purchases give a game-altering advantage (and clearly you do, if you thought they were balanced or purely cosmetic then there'd be no "cheating" after all, since cheating implies gaining an unfair advantage) then how does your world view accommodate brand new players? Surely people who have been playing for years and have earned all the equipment through grinding are going to have a massive advantage over new players, and even if the new players spend the next three years catching up, the old players will have six years of grinding at that point - shouldn't the game be fun for those new players too? If being able to buy the equipment creates a level playing field, surely that moves us closer to your ideal of a game where no one player has an unfair advantage, because even players who have full time jobs and can't spend the time "honing their skill" can still jump on and play and have fun. In reality, these upgrades don't really confer any competitive advantage (maybe they will in the future but for now they don't) so it's all moot because someone who buys every piece of equipment can still be thrashed by someone with more skill using a clean vanilla install/account.
That's a very narrow view of the world. Some people have jobs and families and committments outside of gaming - that doesn't mean they don't enjoy grinding as much as the next gamer, but realising it takes 200 hours for an item to drop on average and you get to play maybe three or four hours a week while your friends play that every day makes it hard to keep up. That doesn't mean they wouldn't rather be playing the game or that they have giant egos - if anything I'd say the elitist people who believe you only have any demonstrable skill if you spend grinding out drops are the egotistical ones, since they care so much about losing some illusory advantage.
Okay, so assuming they abandoned the micro-payment system, how is that any better when you still have to grind that 200 hours for a hat (and by the way, I've seriously been away from this game for too long - people are grinding hats now?). The alternative is they just give everyone everything for free the second it's available, but that would be just as dull as grinding, at least with the proposed system, people who play a lot will probably feel a sense of pride in earning the hat, but everyone else can still have hat fun (maybe they could leave a price tag on bought items so that non-bought items still earn kudos). Of course, the final alternative is that they just stop releasing new content, but that doesn't seem in anyone's interest.
I have to admit, I haven't really played since just before (literally a few days before) the spy upgrades, but back then I thought the upgrades were really well balanaced. They added a new aspect to playing a class without being terribly game-changing, some upgrades actually seemed a little worse than taking the default equipment, but were still fun to use. I wonder how many people will be willing to pay for equipment that doesn't give them a definitive edge, though, and whether this micro-payment system will lead to the end of well balanced upgrades.