you could have had a point until your blatant xenophobia showed its ugly behind

Quote from Hyperactive :

World of mayacraft?

better release that quickly then cause itll bomb after 2012 when the whole world will suddenly stop caring about mayans

Quote from stan.distortion :

Don't see anything wrong with cut scene's, there have been many games that focus on telling a story, kind of like a film or book but the direction the story takes is decided by the player.

the problem is games are neither films nore books (square enix in particular seem to have difficulty grasping this) and as such should not be entirely made up of cutscenes
one of the games that was successful at telling a story was halflife and it did so with iirc just 1 sequence that was strictly a cutscene and about 4is that were cutscenes in a wider sense

Quote from Vain :

I somehow read that in Yatzee's voice from Zero Punctuation.

how is that even possible in a paragraph that has 8ish pieces of punctuation in it?

Quote from E.Reiljans :

Why should a FPS game have proper vehicles?

it shoudlnt actually
but thus far they have insisted on putting verhicles in any game with a "cry" in its name and in all of them the vehicles were properly shite
imho the least they could do if they insist on forcing these stupid vehicles on you is make them handle like something that remotely resembles whatever vehicle youre in

will they **** it up with shittie vehicle sections and aliens/monsters again earning them the right to whine about evil pirates like they always do?

I realize that this isn't a business and wasn't thinking in sales . I was thinking that it would be rather frustrating to put a lot of hours into a hobby that people will maybe play for a few days before they go back to playing their main MMO.
Indie development both monetary based and freeware is grounded in being different from the mainstream and trying ideas that big publishers would never greenlight for being too far out of the box. In the same vein though thats also the only way those games can ever stand out against the blinding background of triple A titles and be seen recognized and played in the first place.

It is a very rare occurence for a small game like Counter Strike to make a splash against titles like Q3 or UT and I doubt there currently is a market tougher to break into than MMORPGS.

Quote from Becky Rose :

Hah. I think the reason grind gets put in to these games is finding a way to accommodate people who invest too much time for the amount of content you can reasonably create. There is only so much story you can tell.

The number one reason grind gets put into MUMORPUGERs is Skinner's Box. You're coniditioned to enjoy meaningless (in the grand scheme of things) numbers go up constantly while you play to keep you as a paying customer for all eternity; ideally (for the publisher) anyway. The problem is finding the right balance between sufficient gratification while making progress as slow as possible.
Basically achievements use the same principle to keep you playing.
And here's some relevant viewing to keep you from treating your players like pigeons:
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-skinner-box

Quote :

I have found in most games that the story just gets in my way, I dont want to read reams of text that was set to paper by a friggin' game dev and is about as good a read as The Sun newspaper - oh and if they try to be clever in their writing, oh it drives me nuts... and in a multiplayer game that time spent reading either wouldnt get done, or would cause a 20 minute encounter to potentially take much longer.

If you must make a MUMORPUGER (and you should not but I will get to that in the end of this post) the trick is to be able to tell the story of the game not through cutscenes and endless textboxes of narrative but through play and and the world around you. The way the world reacts to your behaviour as a player and the situations your thrown into can contain a ton of good narative without explicitly telling it. However that is probably way beyond the scope of what a single person (which I'm getting the vibe you are in this project) can concievably pull of well.

Quote :

I agree that I hate grind, and I very much hate the fact that an element of grind sits in front of the more fun aspects of the games - but how should a game go about accommodating players with different time commitments in to the game?

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Also 'experience' has ruined multiplayer games by punishing anybody who doesn't want to live and breathe a computer game. Where's the logic in a game designed to pit player against player when they give one of the players an advantage?

I think the best way to do this is some kind of ladder and matchmaking system where your pitted against player of equal skill combined with a game that isn't build around persitant leveling. I.e. the only advantage a player with more time in the game has is actual skill not some built in advantage the game itself provides.
The only thing that can break that is diminishing influx of new players. As long as you have a constant rate of newbies picking up your game you will always have players of all skill brackets to pair up with anyone wanting to play the game. If the stream of new players ebbs away you end up with a playerbase that improves in skill constantly to the point where only the most commited new players have any chance of truely enjoying the game at some way off point in their future.
You can get a good sense of what this feels like by trying Quake 3 1v1 or Broodwar today if you have no or little prior experience with either.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Call me old fashioned but I remember when people played games for fun. Remember fun? Fun was great. Now we've got progress bars and gamers are more concerned with using their time efficiently than having fun. Ridiculous.

Absolutely
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkmBPtglbDs&t=3m41s

Quote from Becky Rose :

I agree with your point about subscription gaming, I dislike it. But I dont know what should replace it.

Look into League of Legends and all the other free to play games that are cropping up left and right these days. From what I know LOL's only stream of revenue is selling skins for your heroes; i.e. stuff that is entirely cosmetic and yet they seem to be doing just fine in terms of revenue.
Also more relevant videos:
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/microtransactions

Quote from Becky Rose :

On the flip side of this, the high fantasy genre has had the concept of leveling ever since Gary Gygax put the idea of Elves and Dwarves running around in to the concept of a "co-operative war game where you control 1 model on the board". It is part of the appeal of the genre, so I am not sure I can completely agree when you have an online game in that context - but I do see and understand your point totally.

MOBAs and Warcraft 3 both have non persistant leveling. If your game absolutely must have this having a level system on a per game basis is the way to go if you ask me.
Or alternatively you should design your system around gaining wider access to the games content and not stronger chracters. A good example of how not to do this is Jumpgate which had lighter ships that you could access at lower levers and heavier ships at higher levels. Conventional space shooter logic would mean that a light ship should be able to compete 1v1 vs a heaver craft if the player is good enough at handling it and can use the greater mobility of his craft to outwith the guy in a heaver ship. The reality in Jumpgate however was that heaver crafts were actually faster than lighter ones and by and large more maneuverable.
This creates two problems:
1) new players are forced to grind until they get to the point where they can actually do anything interesting in the game
2) the gear high level player use will be identical across the board making pvp entirely predictable and boring
The way around this would be to design characters at all levels of play to be inherently balanced as long as the player has the skill to fully utilize their potential. This means the new players will not be locked out of 99% of your game through inherent limitations but through their own. Which is especially important if it is a small indie game that wont have that much of a player base to begin with thus leaving your world deserted from most people point of view.

Quote from Becky Rose :

Another idea is to make the game entirely free, but instead of getting loot at the end of a quest, the best stuff you get a piece from a recipe, to complete the recipe you must buy some part of it with actual money in a web shop. This allows players to enjoy the full game for free, but to get the best gear you must both earn it by completing raids in gameplay, and then pay to get the rest of the bits you need for the recipe.

To quote the video I linked earlier (definitely do watch it!) DO NOT SELL POWER.


**********

Now for the rant.
First of all especially if you are alone on this don't try to make an MMORPG. It takes a ton of money and time to create enough content for it to keep players interested for more than a few hours on top of building the game itself and the chances of doing it singlehandedly are pretty close to nill. Secondly there is WOW, everyone who wants to play an MMORPG already plays WOW, it has effectively destroyed the market, there is no realistic chance of breaking into that. More well funded projects have tried and failed several times.
Secondly make something that is genuinely original. Whatever idea there is that has already been done before there are several better funded projects already doing it. Whether it is WOW, LOL and DOTA 2, Starcraft, iRacing any of the classic and relatively new genres has huge players already in it that are nigh on impossible to compete with unless you have at least some sort of gimmick they don't.
Thirdly I would advise you to make something based around insular instances of the same game that the player will play repeatedly, think any kind of traditional game where the state of the game gets reset after each instance of the game has ended (e.g. racing games where the gamestate resets at the end of the race or tetris where the game starts over after one player is eliminated). It keeps the amound of content you have to create at a realistically attainable degree and allows you to tack on content as you go along. Perhaps even to weave every game into a surrounding narrative at a later stage of the development where e.g. each game of a MOBA is a single battle of some greater war going on in the world.

1) dont you dare put grind into it
2) the thing that worked best in jumpgate to up the fun level was messing up patches right before the weekend to the point where they had to reset the whole server to the state before the patch and announced that the weekend would be anarchy weekend where everything you did was going to be without consequence leading to massive massive wars

Quote from S.E.T.H :

i was always wondering why people were faster, and maybe that is the reason

no youre just slow

Quote from Becky Rose :

Props for an original rant, in all the years I have been around LFS I don't think anyone has even mentioned force mode let alone claimed that it gave them a speed advantage.

wait till he discorvers custom view and that it gives hom the same view of the track without the massively distracting jittering arrows

is it just me whos too stupid to find the download link for star wreck?

jeez is the word engineer really that meaningless in the uk?

Quote from Yuri Laszlo :

Well, that's it. Time to put some effort into finishing my screenplay about feminist lesbians from the future who come to earth to get revenge over men.

been done before (other way round but thats a technicality)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274518/

neither

resurrect dead was suprisingly fun to watch

Quote from e2mustang :

so why did they invent it if it doesnt do shit? just think about the pounding bass,and the electricity going thru cables,wheres it coming from and where it ends up etc.

because theres a ton of inductance bewteen the alternator and battery in the front of the car and the amps in the rear and you need to offset that with some capacitance to be able to draw current spikes

Quote from e2mustang :

An E39 has enough drain problems on the battery alone,and the alternators fail left and right.i do 1 or 2 almost every day.So whereever he can save some energy go for it.my opinion as a bmw tech.

a capacitor being lossy can only increse the overall stress on the alternator

i love how those amazing new coilovers arent even actual coilovers

oh boy where do i even start?

Quote from Matrixi :

The understanding part comes when you start actually using them, and that's when you see why people actually buy Macs, even with the premium pricetag.

ive used apple machines on and off and you couldnt get me to use one for a prolonged time if you held a gun to my head

Quote :

That is, until I tried a MBP and discovered how little things, like the multitouch trackpad, can make your life (and work) so much easier and more fun.

first of all all laptops these days even cheap eeepcs have multitouch pads (although i do have to agree that the one on the mbp is oen of the best)

Quote :

Same goes for the Mac Pro I'm using right now. If I wanted to change every single hard drive on my Windows PC, it would take about 15-20 minutes of wrestling with cables and screws. With this, I can do it all in couple of minutes without having to touch a single cable.

pretty much every singe workstation case has has hard drive backplates since before jesus was born
its nothing special at all if youre willing to pay the premium for a workstation (which doesnt necessarily include the additional apple premium)

Quote from stan.distortion :

Mac's rule in the [...] CAD world for much the same reason

oh boy what an utter load of uninformed bs
just to name a few catia hfss cst and pretty much every other ansys product arent even available for macos

Quote from Ball Bearing Turbo :

Honestly I think the bezels would ruin it for me, that's why I never got a surround set up. I tried Eyefinity at the local shop and the bezels just pissed me off so much I couldn't stand it.

solution:
3 projectors

Quote from jibber :

You're the one who called me an idiot if i may remind you.

if i may remind you you started with the insults

Quote from jibber :

Finally a useful reply from you. Seems like a very good presentation, i'll watch it in detail and more carefully when i have time to do so.

oh i fully agree your insults and posting incorrect graphs that you have no understanding of was really useful and conducive to the discussion

also ive never watched any of it other than the presentation of ridiculous products so i have no idea whether its any good

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Sure true objectivity is harder when you know what you're comparing, but then you could argue that there's no point comparing anything without laboratory conditions. Why try a new kind of coffee from the supermarket unless you can set up a double-blind test, etc.

I think you've gone a bit walnuts and sledgehammers with this, to be honest.

maybe but to run with your example there isnt a whole industry built around marketing expensive beans to stupid people
i guess theres these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak and no matter how good it might taste youre still drinking something that came out of an animals arse but the vast majority of coffee (and indeed most other products) wont break your bank and to stick to coffee when you consider it had to be shipped halfway round the globe youll find it has a ridiculously low profit margin compared to audiophile equipment

whereas on the other hand you have audio equipment containing electronics you could pick up for a couple of bucks and solder them together yourself sold for hundreds if not thousands
and even if there were or is a measurable difference in the products it usually bears zero correlation to the pricing
also im fairly certain if you actually took the time to do the measurements youd probably be able to find that for every single component in your audio setup with the possible exception of the speaker enclosures theres a replacement model from china that either contains exactly the same pcbs as the one you bought or causes an either impossble to measure or at least inaudible degradation for a tenths or hundredths of the price

and thats before we even get to the truely ridiculous products that cannot make any difference like these
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ&T=13m10s

someone also meantioned earlier in this thread that there are apparently people who believe that scratching cds in a certain pattern will make them sound better or that cd demagnetizer which assuming its not a joke product im sure someone out there has spent money on
first of all its clear that you could sell anything to these people no matter how ridiculous and secondly to tie this back into the claim that cds sound worse clearly this highlights that people havent got the faintest idea how any of their audio equipment actually works



to conclude and summarize when buying coffee your observation bias wont cost you hundreds or thousands of euros in stupidity tax

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Are you saying that this kind of testing is useless?

yes because outside of a controlled environment all youre going to "measure" by listening to gear is your own observation bias

theres a very good reason why listening tests for lossy audio codecs are done blind

Quote from thisnameistaken :

I don't think Jibber is the sort of mug who swallows what hi-fi shops try to sell their customers, he just loves classic hardware and enjoys using it. Nothing wrong with that, and he has some really gorgeous gear judging by the stuff he posts here.

i think you spoke too soon

Quote from jibber :

I think some of the stuff that they sell to audiophiles might actually improve sound quality, the question is by how much, and if that's worth a few thousand bucks.

There's stuff i clearly avoid when it comes to these kind of products, like stupid expensive cables that sound the same as a 5-10 euro cinch stereo cable. Power bars that provide "perfect" power, when there is no audible difference at all compared to when my equipment is connected to the outlet in the wall of my room (i actually tested a few of those products out of curiosity and took them back to the store the next day).

why would he even test these he should know that its a complete waste of time
not that testing audio equipment by listening to it outside of a very well controlled environment is the least bit meaningful but thats an entirely different can of worms

Quote :

However, at home people usually play a CD in a CD player (when it comes to a standard hi-fi system)... and in this regard, i still believe a clean high quality vinyl with a halfway decent turntable will sound a lot better (again trusting my own ears here).

it sounds better to your ears is a completely different measurement than saying the sound is measurably better
and if you did the same kind of horrid distortions the whole vinyl process does to the sound to the data comming from the cd i can guarantee you you wouldnt be able to tell the difference in a double blind test

Quote :

he thinks what he learned at some university is the ultimate truth and that anybody else with a different opinion is either an idiot or an american.

so basically what youre saying here is decades worth of scientific study are less accurate than you ears?

Quote from ATHome :

Oh nein, ze overcorrect arrogant German haz struck again!

Keeping up ze reputition of Germans beeing ****s once again.

sod off if all you have to contribute is calling others ****s

Quote from jibber :

I'm not playing anything. I made a cheeky comment about your two times claimed professional skills on this subject matter. I even put a smiley at the end for you.

right...

Quote :

We still don't know what it is you actually do for work and in which kind of way this is giving you the knowledge/experience for you to say that you are standing above any other opinion/claimed facts/etc regarding this discussion.

if you want me to post a cv here forget it

Quote :

Instead of seeing this as some sort of internet argument or game that has to be "played", you could simply stop the kindergarten stuff and explain to us what exactly it is that you know and makes you so certain about your answers. Hint: maybe try explaining your answers, instead of just saying something is bollocks and answering stuff with "no you don't".

im not gonna type out what would be a 2h uni lecture on how pcm and quantization works for you
if you really want to know this stuff feel free to pick up a kammeyer or proakis or whatever