This was inspired by one of those "we care about you - our customers" commercials on TV. I want to see one company be honest and say "We don't care about you, but we do care if you get mad and complain - sometimes". It originally said "When a commercial says a company cares about you, they are talking to the 'you' in your wallet, not the 'you' that owns the wallet.", but that doesn't fit the /. 120 character limit for a sig.

Please cmd taco for the love of god put the old css back!

I am going blind with the new layout. Anyone else feel this?

This is just a place for me to note down some ideas I have about the kind of MMORPG I want to play. I have been writing comments and now want to try to collect the ideas I seen and thought of in one place. This is just a short note and a bit rambling so if you read this don't take it as an attempt to design the ultimate MMORPG. Yet.

• The end of direct control

  There seems to be a move towards more twitch. Gamers are using macro's to fight enemies so we force them to twitch to grind their XP. Eh, no. If players can come up with 1 macro to fight all your enemies then there is something wrong with your enemies. Create better AI and more diverse fighting styles. Current twitch reasoning seems to follow advertisers reasoning. People are going to the toilet during the ads. Make ads longer so people will still get ads when they return from the toilet.

  I am proposin a system closer to that found in games like Jagged Alliance. Your avatar in real time will find her way to the clicked destination based on skills, stance settings, enviroment and enemy presence. Leap/climb, sneak/run etc etc.

  Direct control has problems:

  1. High bandwidth, every twitch has to be send to the server and all the clients in the same area.
  2. Low predictability in low bandwidth enviroments.
  3. Bad animation match up. If I hit you with my sword and you block that is just statistics. The changes of the animation involved reflecting the numbers is zero. Because your position and mine ain't fixed on a grid the animator can't line them up.
  4. Low enviroment interaction. Check the animation for leaping over a fence in Jagged Alliance vs ANY free 3D game. Tomb Raider can only pull the really nice moves when the animator knows where she is going to be. How many MMORPGS with melee combat have anything like the melee combat we so love in Martial Arts movies? Leaping over the heads of enemies? Let alone actuall wrestling. Not even Oni style body on body interaction is possible.
  5. Low interaction between player and game. Because you have to control every twitch of your avatar you can't chat or control other elements of your game.
  6. Low strategic awareness. You can't look behind your avatar.
  7. Some stats don't make sense. Intelligence. If your avatar is not in some control then their intelligence is never tested. Intelligence would allow an avatar to determine how save a move is. Low intellgence avatars would make more stupid moves. Effects as fear become far more realistic.
  8. Easier to deal with connection losses. Your avatar would keep fighting according to your preset orders.

  There are offcourse disadvantages as well. The most obvious is the need for really good AI. Enemy AI is meant to be defeated. If they pull an amazing stupid move then that is okay. They are meant to die. It would be far less fun if your own AI avatar blows themselves up.

  Another problem is that by definition twitch has a more instant appeal. The only reason to go for less direct control is to increase the weight of tactics and that means a steeper learning curve.

  MMORPG's on the other hand are supposed to have long lasting appeal. My belief is that a strong tactical element lasts longer. Proof? The lifespan of Counter Strike vs Quake.

  • Adjusting world areas

    A MMORPG needs to be massive. A true RPG that allows you play a wide range of roles needs to have a truly gigantic space in wich the players move. To be a lone scout you need an area that is truly remote. To be a trader you need to have multiple areas worthy to trade between.

    To create this you would need to create several areas. At start of the game some of them will designated as developed and some as undeveloped. Developed areas are were the player starts live, these areas are well patrolled. Undeveloped areas are barren and extremely dangerous. Other areas are in between. As the game develops some developed areas will become more popular this can be offset by increasing taxation. In response some underdeveloped areas will further develop.

Boo hoo hoo!

Is anyone reading this sick and tired of the ".. well it works on my system... shrugs shoulders" attitude of developers who run the same packages with different hardware/software combinations as yourself?

I made the mistake of using -03 in Gentoo and everything is a mess and buggy. I had the infamous virtual terminal bug re-emerge. Its rare and it only affects my motherboard... I think? Virtual terminals ceast to work and alt backspace doesn't work either. This leaves me hitting the reset button on my computer when X acts up. Yes my files are correct.

The bug was fixed recently but it has now re-emerged. I tried posting about it a million times only to be insulted about how not to setup /etc/xorg.conf. I mentioned exactly what is in the file that appears correct only to hear next, well it works on my system. Problem must be you.

Funny how these opensource zealots attack proprietary software companies for not clearing bugs or not listening to their users? Well commercial software in my opinion is becoming better quality well opensource is going downhill.

It was never this bad back in the redhat 5.x days? Things used to just work and bugs were fixed. Then the windoze developers came in and changed things.

Well dont flame us if we switch back to windows or pick Solaris over linux in certain environments. Claiming by blind zealotry without reason that your better without offering an alternative will not help.

better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
mv /etc/northpole/santaclaus ~/town
cat /etc/passwd >list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice >giftlist
mv /etc/northpole/santaclaus ~/town
who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | egrep 'bad|good'
for (goodness sake) {
    be good
}

better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
mv /etc/northpole/santaclaus ~/town
cat /etc/passwd >list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice >giftlist
mv /etc/northpole/santaclaus ~/town
who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | egrep 'bad|good'
for (goodness sake) {
    be good
}

Discovering a better mousetrap has devolved into discovering a better consumer trap.

For supporting info, see these links.

I had a little thread going about NLP. Last entry is here. Any additional comments anyone has are welcomed.

The weirdest thing I have seen since goatse.cx but not inteded to be offensive and gross.

I was looking for a particular flash based on supermario last night and I found this one instead. (May not be worksafe in teh US/Canada due to the meaning of "twanger")

Twanger is british lingo for a musical instrument with strings like a Banjo. But it has lets say a different meaning as well. ;-)

Info how the unaired episode came into existance is mentioned here.

Yes, slashdotters this is a real children's show!

Tis the season.

This is a letter I'm sending to the authors of the
relevant software:

Dear Devs,

No doubt you've heard of the controversial "rootkit" bundled with
many of Sony's CDs to prevent unauthorized copying. By now I hope
you've been informed that this rootkit contains and uses code from
your Free Software projects. (LAME, id3lib, mpglib, bladenc: see
http://hack.fi/~muzzy/sony-drm/) I write as a concerned member of
the digital community in hopes that you will seek punative damages
against Sony, to ensure that this never happens again.

Statutory damages for copyright infringements go as high as
$150,000 per copy. Given that there are at least 20 cds, selling
hundreds of thousands if not millions of units even a modest
settlement quickly adds up to the largest copyright infringement
lawsuit ever. You all stand to earn tremendous judgements; think
of all the Free Software you could write when independantly
wealthy. But more importantly, this is a chance for the common
person to fight back.

I would urge you not to settle however. For far too long,
mega-corporations have been allowed to buy and sell the law, run
amok, and generally ruin the lives of common people. Until now,
even the largest class action lawsuit could be written off as a
cost of doing business. If we are ever to correct bad behavior
we MUST apply real punishment. A judgement that bankrupted Sony
would be a wakeup call to every corporation in the world, and
I urge you to persue this for the sake of social justice
everywhere.

It's pretty ironic that Sony violated copyright in software
designed to prevent copyright infringement. I like irony, and I'd
also like to see the irony of the media industry being bit by the
very teeth they lobbied into the law in the first place. Thanks
for reading this, and good luck.

This sig came from Tyrdium in a post in a slashdot story of course. Thanks Tyrdium!

Whew, long topic on ID. While reading through it, I was reminded of a passage from an ecology book I once read. I paraphrased it from memory, I hope its relevance to ID is obvious:

Let me tell you a little story about long shots and averages and how not understanding the two lead to an incorrect hypothesis. Some time ago ecologists were interested with the rate that trees would repopulate a volcano after an eruption. They observed the trees, and figured out the average distance that a seed would fall from the tree, and from that they calculated an expected movement of the treeline.

However this was wrong, the trees repopulated much more quickly than expected. While the ecologists had figured out the averages correctly, they failed to realize that a small proportion of seeds would be carried much further than the average. The seeds that came from these trees would have a head start and some small portion of the next generation would be carried even further.

Do you see what I'm getting at here? Are you sure that in your calculations of expected rate of evolutionary change you're not making the same mistake these ecologists did?

Oh noes!

Despite the fact that my last "going away" JE never had anything to do with me going away (uh, go reread it fellers), a lot of people took it as such.

Alas, however, I waste far too much time with the morons on this site, so I must bid you adieu. My password has been blindly changed to random gibberish, and the email address changed to one I no longer have access to.

To those of you with at least half a brain, thanks for the laughs. To the rest of you?

Go sit on a unicorn's face and spin. Don't forget to think fondly of me in your last moments you pathetic, bloody morons.