Starsman

Guess it was expected for a holiday release. /sigh

If the game has enough gore, it will be remembered for centuries.

More of a disbelief system.


Mind you, if we go into semantics, atheism and religion are not mutually exclusive. In fact, many Buddhists are atheists (by definition an atheist is simply some one that rejects the existence of deities.)

There are closed minded people everywhere. I know atheists that are such not because they think it does not make sense for there to be a god, but because they either hate the church that discriminates against their sexual orientation or because they only know uneducated Bible belt Christians that are against most education therefore they jump to a blind conclusion that all religion must be false.

I don’t have an issue with the final idea, but I have an issue with any blind jumps of faith like that. For one, some churches and religions have no issue with same sex relationships, and Catholicism is very “progressive” in scientific advancements (although narrow minded in their sexuality and conception ideas.)

If you are an atheist because you have realized that a god does not make sense in the universe, great. If you are an atheist because you are cranky at the church you were raised into, or due to what some group of people in certain religion did… then you are doing just as bad (those atheist tend to be extremely intolerant) and end up falling in the already mentioned category of “faith in atheism” group.

(I acknowledge I am simplifying things down drastically, but this is a topic that would take books worth of typing to cover)

I strongly disagree with that last bit. It takes some very strong mindset, and a very hopeful mentality to go forth without faith. It still may sound easy, but there are a lot of people that are being slapped by life left and right so hard, it's nearly impossible to develop any self-confidence.

I have family in this state. If you are close to people like this, you may see interesting things. People feel the strongest about religion the worse they are doing in life.

I guess my real grudge is that the nature of Buddhism made it very hard for the religion to take over the world in a time where blood thirsty Christians killed anyone that dared think different. A world with Buddhism as its largest religion would be an insanely prosperous one.

Not saying I have any believe in the reincarnation bits, but the core of the religion is all about tolerance and enlightenment. Would you not love to see those words describe all religious people?

Regularly, I let people have their faith and avoid commenting on it because I know a few bits about how people without faith would just collapse into endless depression. Without faith in a god, many would collapse in an instant.

My problem comes when religious groups take faith further than it should and try to use it as a way to sell politics and impose absurd moral choices on everyone else or get in the way of scientific advancement.

I also have a bit of a thing about the whole “you have no proof against” arguments.

Start by grabbing any documentation on said god and look at its comments on creation and the state of the shape of the universe (Earth center of it all) eventually you will find a very high percentage of proof against that documented god.

There is no proof that God is anything but an egocentric cat that died 6000 years ago either. There are many things there is no proof of; I can't go around giving the benefit of the doubt to everything that "we have no proof against".

Mind you, we have proof the “world” was not created in 7 days and that man was not created from mud and women from his ribs. So either we do have proof against that creator or we have proof against the guys that wrote that book.

No, reasonable implies reason is involved. Giving any benefit of doubt to something that no one ever has been able to provide evidence for is not reasonable at all. It IS reasonable to avoid a punch to the face from some religious zealot and just avoid the topic, though. Neil DeGrasse Tyson does a darn good job at that.

Hmmmmm


Depends how much you willing to tolerate the trekkies screams of nerdrage. Star Trek by nature opens it's doors for countless forms of alien tech finding it's way into players hands, and in the future the game can always be expanded to allow players be more than Federation or Kingon. It's a huge universe. You are already allowed to create your own race, why not allow you to be a completely independent faction?

No. If I am a customer, and I own the game, even if they "open" up the service so I can either host my own server or have my private one-player game, that does not give me ANY right at redistributing what I got. Copyright protection is still there at full strength.

IP protection (copyrights) are not about limiting use, it has never been. It's only about limiting... well... what the name says: copying.

Anyone expecting any such law to provide perpetuity is fooling themselves. Such law should simply provide either proper methods for transitioning to an equivalent service or the ability to take the service offline or self-host should the service be unique enough to be non-transferable.

This will sound like derail but it isn’t: the open source movement started not as a “freedom of code and software” hippie party. The original ideology behind “open source” was to make software as versatile as hardware. If I own an old Impala, I have all the power in the world to pop open that hood, find a faulty piece and get it repaired somehow, even if this means retrofitting a new piece or going to extremes as having it custom-made.

With non-open-source software, once the company that sold the product goes out of business, discontinues the product or your support contract is up, you are out of luck. With open-source (as in pop-open-the-hood) you can open up the code, change something and recompile, or hire someone to do the custom changes for you.

A service protection law may have such a thing as a goal, not to make infinite service but to at least force the hood open once services are discontinued.



Such a law will never be done for games; if it ever comes to be it will be targeted at general cloud services and web based games may be covered simply due to an umbrella effect.

I would predict completely free services to be exempt of such laws. Services that accept money, even optionally or for “upgraded treatment” will likely not be exempt. This is all guesswork, should this EVER come to the table in the next century (and within a century digital will be so important that laws regulating it WILL be drafted.)

There is no bill posted here so not sure what law you talking about. If you are talking about a law on "services", no, they would have been free to discontinue the car BUT still service its parts (and car makers actually keep servicing parts for years to come.)

If you talk "cloud services" or "online services" then it would have not been affected at all.

My clarification changes the scope of the statement by a huge margin. But I think where this is headed so I will stop at stating my opinion on one simple matter (hopefully not to spark argument but to STOP any argument because you won’t ever change my mind on it and likely I won’t change your mind either)

I believe it IS the job of the government to institute regulations that protect consumers from ripoffs, frauds and even bad management. In the age of cloud computing, new regulations will be required. I'm not a fan of Google, but at least they are doing their best to make sure you can jump ship at any time with all your data. (Please don't counterpoint this, you made your point clear already, this is precisely so you understand that's a dead end in discussing this we just wont ever agree.)

As for “retiring”, that’s a horrible example. If you want to retire and kill your services you won’t get a penny for your company. Anyone in their right mind would keep things running until they find an interested buyer and THEN retire.

What laws? What country? In the US the only "IP" you can lose if you don't enforce your rights are Trade Marks.

I think his point was:

So basically: if the service is profitable it should not be allowed to be killed. Not saying I entirely agree, not with just those small clauses, but he was not saying that no one should not ever be allowed for no reason at all to cancel any service.

You know, this is something you may disagree with (or not, am not sure about your full stance) but there is a huge difference between CoH and this game simply due to the fidelity of the graphics.

I am sure very very few people over the years would claim Jessica Rabbit is nearly pornographic material, regardless of her huge cleavage and breast size. Bay Watch with Pamela Anderson whose breasts would never get close were always considered to appeal to the kid's pant tingly senesces.

Thing is, City of Heroes graphics, at the end of the day, were not that far from a cartoon. Sure, lots of clothes looked like painted on, but skin itself looked like crayon work, a far cry from the specular shaders used to simulate full body skin oiling in Blade & Soul.

BTW, how does this hurt them? Lots of store chains refuse to carry M rated games, and others will lock M rated games where they can’t be easily found by kids. Many chains also have rules about posting any kind of marketing material for an M rated game in their walls or floors. That is something that can hurt the game’s adoption heavily.

Other than my NCSoft boycott, I am not wishing the game any direct bad luck, but I admit I will smirk warmly on any news about NCSoft being bit in the as by all mighty karma.

Link?

Actually, a public traded company is legally forbidden to lie in any press release because that can lead to a huge world of fraud.

They CAN withhold certain information, but should they be 100% certain that the company is doing badly then they are forced to say it. It does not matter if you are an investor or not, because either you or the people managing your 401k in your behalf may end up investing in the company due to lies.

I’m not exactly sure of the tiny details, but information can be withheld as long as it's not information that can hurt any future investor.

For example, Amazon never tells us how many Kindle's they sell. As long as the sales can’t hurt the company, that's ok. If they suddenly somehow found out that kindles are emitting child killing radiation, they MUST tell everyone about it because the recall and lawsuits for medical costs will surely threaten the company.

Anyways, there is a legal standard of honesty that is expected from every public traded company and that is precisely why they never said City of Heroes was canceled due to it having a small player base or it having no profits: because it would have been a LIE.

Again, can't reiterate this enough: It does not matter if you are currently a shareholder. Everyone can eventually decide to be one and such decision should be made with critical information at hand. But again: there are bits that are not necessary to reveal.

It's very unlikely City of Heroes cancelation (costs involved in the process and lost profits, since it WAS profitable) would hurt the company in a significant way so they don’t have to say much about the real reason. But once more: they can’t lie to us. They can be vague, though.

I don't think they will suffer anything due to CoH cancelation.

However, the way they are managing NCSoft Interactive, and if I understand correctly, the way NCSoft Interactive (west) keeps losing money EVEN with the release of GW2 (although the whole company is not losing money) will result in the entire western operations being moved back to Korea and just do international support for their games going forward.

Do you have a link to some numbers to see how things spiked over all the 7 years?

I find it very odd that Issue 13 had such a big drop in players... sure, PvP was gutted but how many players actually did any PvP? The reason it was revamped was precisely because it was not seen as a big risk (i think.)

I kind of remember not being very active since before issue 11 and actually picking back up precisely with i13 (Merits+Shields!)

I am curious why you feel so strongly about denying the mature orientation of the art when NCSoft themselves admit the entire art direction is very risqué.

I didnt post that shot based on endowement, only to show the ridiculous default proportions.

As far as endowement, though, got to see other shots in other angles.

Ah ok my bad. I thought you meant to say that the "feminist" bit proved the entire thing was pure bias.

Does not invalidate the entire post.