Nettik

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You're kidding, right? All it would mean is any Griefer would need to sit at the mission entrance for 5 minutes and/or kill one or two MOBs, and then give a zero start rating. Also, if you make it too long; people will not stick around to rate anything, and then authors wil also get frustrated as it seems no one rates their arcs.

As othershave said above you no matter what ratings system you employ; if ppeople want to grief it, they WILL find a way to do it. No amount of software checks/balances will ever stop that behaviour.

No matter how well you write something (or think you write something); you WILL ALWAYS GET three types of responses:

1) Someone will LOVE it, and think it's the best thing ever done.

2) Somone will be 'Meh'; and not really have a strong felling regarding the work either way.

3) Someon will LOATHE it and think is's the worst piece of garbage ever created.

There is no literary (or other type) of work released to the public that is 100% accepted in type 1) above...NONE.

When you're dealing with such a diverse audience (which IS what we have in this game); you will never have something that is 100% positively accepted. The best you can hope for is that more people react (and rate) favoribly then those who do not.

But again, as longer as human perception is involved; there will be no way to eliminate those who want to grief; nor can you expect everyone to give you a 'fair shke'. If a mission has a real pet peeve of someone's - they will probably give you a zero star rating an just move on.

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I had intended to say something snippy about Perfect's dog icon and then give his arc 0 stars out of faux spite, but your misunderstandings of human behavior and false trichotomy have distracted me with anger.

Anger I say!

I just felt like sharing.

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We're having a discussion here, and personal attacks are neither warranted or welcome. So far everyone has contributed to the subject in a reasoned, civil fashion and I suggest you do the same.

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It's "neither... nor".

Carry on.

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Proof? Be serious, Its all around you in multiple forms. You don't really need me to point it out to you?

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Humor us.

P.S. Stop stealing my shtick other kitty!

Did you set them to something other than "nothing" or "passive"?

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It's not always beneficial to us in the real world either unfortunately. It is inherent to nature, human or otherwise. That does not mean that it is always a good thing. Too rich of a reward for too little effort leads to corruption and corrosion.

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Perhaps, but remember: When you make statements like this you are deciding rather arbitrarily and assigning your own metric by which to judge.

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No contest that it almost never happens. Does not change the fact (that is to say, my opinion) that it is unethical to abuse anything you have been given.

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The problem is that the words "ethical" and "abuse" are incredibly variable especially in this context.

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I have no idea what your trying to get at or what your point was.

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This entire board is, arguably, not the intended target for that piece.

It was not written to persuade anyone here and the very fact that it smacked of pure bias to Skarmory and others indicates that there is no use discussing this here.

My point, as obfuscated by lack of information as it was, was that there's no point discussing this here. It would be, largely, an exercise in reaffirming our membership in this society whilst we "talk [censored]" about the man who wrote the article and the article itself.

That being said, this thread might persist if people make posts that are not designed to reaffirm their position within our society and people who feel that their identity (at least here) is defined by this society take issue with said posts.

People, generally, only consider media biased when it contradicts or is at odds with their existing world view.

If you read that article and felt it was biased then it was not written for you.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...ptitlemd299wh0

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A certain amount of Farming won't hurt the game in the long run, but if it were allowed to increase beyond that level, it would drive non-Farmers away from the game, and make the game more Farm-oriented overall.

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What is your reasoning for this statement?

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Players are not dogs.

MOST players are not 16-year-old girls.

Logical fallacy. Please try again.

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Err -- what fallacy?

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And, have you attempted any of the listed things in this thread to get your experience to match up more with the rest? Because if not, I highly suggest you do. Because the teams are out there, there are plenty of people in the game. If you aren't willing to make your own team by politely sending tells and not being overly picky about your pickup groups, or getting on a supergroup, or a global channel, or in your server forum, ... then that's still exactly like the OP's "problem". Laziness is his problem. I hope it's not yours too.

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Not trying to pick on you Zekiran, but these solutions people continually offer are bugging me. People are complaining that they believe it is more difficult to find teams these days because of a perceived lower population -- and others are responding that the population isn't lower, yet informing them that the way they should go about finding teams is through Supergroups and the like.

Isn't that further indication of a lower population?

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Psst. They upgraded the servers in like 2006-2007 and the new "1 blip" indicates a lot higher load than the old "1 blip."

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Could you cite your source?

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Can you show me a real star rating system that goes to 0 stars?

If they intended it like this, they wouldn't make you jump through those hoops to make it work that way in the first place. A 1 rating means the same thing, the only reason one would want to use a 0 rating is for maximum damage to the star rating.

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So, just to clarify, by "maximum damage" you mean to say that the number isn't as high as you wish it were for some arbitrary reason?

Or do you just not understand math?

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Not as a farm, but for inappropriate content. I have multiple personality disorder, and my main is quite foul-mouthed!

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Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).

So a rating system with six, possible ratings is a bug, but one that has only five is perfectly legitimate?

How does that make sense?

Or is it just that you want the devs to tweak the math so you can feel like your arc has a higher rating?

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Actually, there's a key difference between the one-person cartel and the activities you mention. The activities you mentioned weren't singularly excluded. Rating one's own arc was.

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You seem to be making an incredibly arbitrary distinction.

The developers have taken action to stop accounts from rating their own arcs; nowhere, to my knowledge, have they stated that they do not want individual people who own multiple accounts to rate their own arcs and their behavior is not indicative of any such want.

Again, you've decided, for entirely arbitrary reasons, that one, particular action that multiple accounts can partake in is exploitative.

I must ask, why?

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One could argue that it is a shortcoming in the English language that we cannot differentiate between singular and plural second person pronouns. Words like y'all, yunz, and youse were all created to fill that gap.

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Well we did have one at one time. The lack of a separation between those pronouns, if I recall correctly, goes back to the English nobility who decided at some point that they didn't particularly care and phased it out. This becomes funny when you point out that "thou", which now sounds nigh-royal to our ears, is actually the less than polite singular form.

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... I'm sure someone will point out the grammatical errors, but you're right. When people speak, they don't follow the rules of written grammar. On the other hand, written dialog should probably be somewhere between the grammatically correct ("I would like to invite those of you who are present to visit my home again on some future date") and the more realistic gobbledygook that most of us use when actually speaking ("Dudes, seriously. Like, yeah, we should... [waves hand, indicating their current location] y'know. Yeah.")

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People don't follow grammatical rules, but you never write dialogue the way it is actually spoken. To do so would be needlessly convoluted; people in fiction never speak like you or I do.

In reality people repeat words, restart sentences, correct themselves and use interjections such as "uhm" or "uh" constantly -- but you sure as hell don't want to have to read that.

Pay attention to the way to actually talk sometime and think about whether or not you'd really like to read a novel that was written as such.

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Once more, I'm saying it is NOTICABLE that there are more.

If there aren't more, please do tell me where they aren't, since I can look in the game itself and *see them there*.

So freaking what - my god, the OP doesn't want to try hard enough to get a team. It's easily done. I don't need to cite a [censored] source for something that any given player can *see* in the game.

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First and foremost, Zekiran, you said there was a "measurable" amount of player growth. I am simply asking for you to cite your source.

Secondly, you are making a positive claim, that there are more people in game than there used to be, and the burden of proof is therefore upon you. Your behavior is often referred to as "lobbing the burden of proof". You have made a claim and, instead of backing it up with anything substantial, have demanded that I disprove it. This is not logically sound.

Thirdly, you most certainly do have to cite a source when you make claims such as the one my first point. The claim that it feels as though there are more people in game is perfectly valid and can be legitimately backed up with anecdotal tales of your experience in game. But this is not what you claimed, you claimed that, "The population of the game has *increased* measurably...". This claim is utterly invalid without proof thereof.

I'm sorry if this conversation has upset you; such was not my intention. I am, quite honestly, interested in seeing any proof of an increase in this game's population and I was hoping that you might be able to show me said proof.

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Indeed. The fact that there are so many COMPLAINTS about how much more noisy it is, how many times Freedom and Virtue are capped on the weekends, and how many people I have never encountered before both in the game AND in the forums show up... I would say that "visibly" is my term and I'm sticking with it. There are *clearly* more people around, more active, many having returned from absences, many on trials, many checking it out for a month, many having come from the TR bailout.

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Err -- that's entirely anecdotal and can be easily explained by factors other than an increase in population.

You said the population was measurably higher. Could you please cite the source for that statement?

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... but I think we can agree that grinding Freaks on a cargo ship map over and over and over isn't it. I think we can agree that that kind of behavior is not the kind of behavior that the token economy of a good game will foster.

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We most certainly cannot and I believe you should take a closer look at the idea behind a token economy and give this problem a bit of thought. As it stands now I feel like you're misunderstanding what it is and how it relates to MMOs.

If MMOs are based upon a token economy (and it isn't difficult to find people who would disagree with that assertion) then they are incredibly complex ones. I don't believe that a cursory look at wikipedia (I assume) is enough for you to rebut my argument.

I apologize sincerely if these statements come across as offensive or arrogant; that is most certainly not my intent. Rather, I think that you are quite intelligent and would very much like to hear what you have to say about this after you've given it some more time and thought.

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That was the stated reason given mate.

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Can you cite your source?

I've recently returned to the game.

Also, I understand where you're coming from Bureaucrat. I adore Derrida -- but only when I don't have to read his original work.

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The population of the game has *increased* measurably and visibly in the time since I13+ has been out.

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Could you cite your source?

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Wait, what? The TF nerf? You don't think they capped the rewards for a particular TF in a particular amount of time to 'force' people to broaden their content pallette?

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I do not and I would be rather offended if that were the reason.