Originally posted by Impacatus

Originally posted by Morgaren

I wouldn't call alot of this hateful, its more....tactless, which I will whole heartedly admit me to being about this.  But then again, I'm one who will laugh at you, then when you come back at me, laugh with you, and think that the sooner we can all make light of the seriousness in the world, well all be able to deal with it a little better.

 

Well, good for you.  I respect that.

Let me guess, your a liberal?

If you want to talk politics, there's a forum for that.

I don't want to derail this thread anymore, so I'm probably done here.

I read the article linked and the additional blog posting about the visually impaired gamer. I do feel for a visually impaired people, I've taken care of my Grandmother who is blind for most of my adult life. I'm not going to knock on this poor guy for being blind (that's something that is beyond his control). Neither article states if this guy is sueing to expose "an injustice" but with the following passage in the suit: "Additionally, Stern contends that he is suffering a financial loss because SOE will not make their games accessible. Sony runs an official auction site where gamers can sell the items they've gained in the games for real money."  I doubt that it is.

As far as the ADA of 1990 and the updates of 2008, there is nothing in there that states that a consumer based product ( in this case an online video game) has to conform to disabled persons.

This passage is also in the suit:

"Stern contends that developers of other MMORPG games such as World of Warcraft and the developers of the PC adventure game Terraformers provide modifications either directly or through third-party modifications."

This is also weak grounds because that is a choice of the developers and lays in the hands of a third party developer to produce another product, which you can have for $9.99.  Also 3rd party applications/modifications are usually banned by developers EULA as Open UI's and 3rd party apps can cause harm to the user experience of the game.

<opinion>

IMHO this is just a frustrated person who was greedy enough (see first passage in red) and found a big enough dirtbag of a lawyer to file a suit for him. Dude you just wasted money/time in a state's judicial system that is already so far in the red... nevermind.....

<\opinion>

*edit for grammar *

 In addition to epileptic seizure and 'motion sickness' warnings, we now need warnings in Braille, TTS and BCI reading:

ACCESSIBILITY WARNING: Gameplay requires visual and auditory senses, finger mobility, basic literacy, assisted or unassisted breathing, and a lifespan greater than the duration of the installation process. Consult your parent, legal guardian, doctor, therapist, handler, interpreter, alternate personality or imaginary friend before use.

Originally posted by Impacatus

Originally posted by benmou13

BECAUSE THE MEDIUM IS ABOUT SIGHT IF YOU DONT HAVE YOU DONT PLAY

 

1.  WHO MADE YOU THE MMORPG POLICE?

2.  IN A WORLD FULL OF WAR, GENOCIDE, TYRANNY, TORTURE, AND MURDER, WHY DO YOU CHOOSE TO RAGE ABOUT THE GAMES BLIND PEOPLE PLAY?

Ugh, I hate getting into these things.

For a moment there I thought you said WAR, GENOCIDE, TRANNIES...

Was gonna say, don't pick on the cross dressers for no reason.

Originally posted by Saerain

 In addition to epileptic seizure and 'motion sickness' warnings, we now need warnings in Braille, TTS and BCI reading:

ACCESSIBILITY WARNING: Gameplay requires visual and auditory senses, finger mobility, basic literacy, assisted or unassisted breathing, and a lifespan greater than the duration of the installation process. Consult your parent, legal guardian, doctor, therapist, handler, interpreter, alternate personality or imaginary friend before use.

 

Could get away with leaving off at least half of those for WoW.

Originally posted by Saerain

 In addition to epileptic seizure and 'motion sickness' warnings, we now need warnings in Braille, TTS and BCI reading:

ACCESSIBILITY WARNING: Gameplay requires visual and auditory senses, finger mobility, basic literacy, assisted or unassisted breathing, and a lifespan greater than the duration of the installation process. Consult your parent, legal guardian, doctor, therapist, handler, interpreter, alternate personality or imaginary friend before use.

 

I laughed so hard I was in tears at this.

They can sue them all they want... THEY'LL NEVER SEE THE MONEY! LMFAO!!!1one

But no on a serious note, they should also sue GM, Ford, Honda, ect for not making blind-friendly vehicles... then sue the Govt. for not making the signs BIG or CLEAR enough to see with poor vision.

**off note** Which makes you wonder... why do they have braille menus available at drive-thru's? In case a blind person is driving, or in case the driver is an asshole and won't tell the passenger what is on the menu? If you think I'm lying request one next time...

 p.s. On second thought, maybe they could do something like with what they did in "Mr. Holland's Opus" when he made that song for the deaf with the big light show.

But don't blame SOE or anyone else... people have a hard enough time agreeing on the differences between:

PvE vs. PvP

Sandbox vs. Themepark

Camping vs. Questing

Hardcore vs. Casual

How in the hell would gamers agree on making a VIDEO (a sensory thing that has to do with your EYES) game for the blind. If I have no arms, I'm not going to sue Microsoft for not making a keyboard I can use by typing with my forhead. Hmm lets see...

7yytgrfuiietghyjkmi,lplijlootgrf4k,

Nope don't work. Imagine that.

Originally posted by Varny

Originally posted by Deien

2 all of the Soe hater's go suck on WoW's balls or something stop really it's dumb now.  Soe yes they are not the best company but make better games then most out there Aion, lotr, WoW and etc....  Just cause you dislike them doesn't mean they suck or should go under. Now with that said.

 

Really people are dumb and will sue for anything as long as they think it will bring them money.

 

Ruined Everquest
Ruined Planetside
Ruined SWG
Ruined EQ2


Why wouldn't anyone hate them?
 

 you can hate SOE all you like. but don't let your fanatical burning obsessive hatred blind you to the fact that this Lawsuit is fucking ridiculous.

No more stealthy rogue classes in MMO's anymore I guess.  I wonder if this kid understands the damage his lawsuit could cause to the Gaming Industry if he succeeds.  I suppose that wouldn't hurt him too much though, but does that mean we can sue him for not looking out for the rest of us?  Sorry kid, but this one goes two ways.

"The suit, which doesn't mention SOE games by name but appears to focus on massively multiplayer online titles,..."

I do believe all of SOE's published titles are Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.  Perhaps I'm incorrect?

Originally posted by Einherjar_LC

Originally posted by Astralglide

 I think that this is a good thing. This will force other game development companies to create open UI's (the suit claims that because of WoW's open UI, several 3rd party developers have come out with ease of access mods) which will lead to further development of new technologies and features.

 

No it's not a good thing, at least not in this genre.

 

Open UI's ruined AC1 and WoW, to name a couple prominent games.

Your opinion, not fact. I wouldn't consider WoW ruined at all

 

Open UI's open the door for hacks and cheats that ruin the game for those that don't use them. 

 All games have cheats and hacks without open UI- Look at AOC, Aion, AO, LOTRO just to name a few

Open UI's lend themselves to botting/macroing,  both HUGELY bad for MMO's.

 Again, open UI's don't encourage Botting (macros are built into many games- I have no idea where you are getting that from) Bots are almost always an EXTERNAL program and UI openness has nothing to do with it

Open UI's make things more challenging for the developers as well.  Not only do the devs have to design content to challenge the players within the mechanics of the game, they have to design content that takes into account mods that players create in an attempt to trivialize content.  This goes with the second example I listed as it quickly brings about the NEED to use mods to do certain content, at least in players minds, and thus spawns the "you can't be in this group/kin/whatever if you aren't running X mod(s).

 So? Are you telling me that Deadly Boss Mods ruins raiding because it helps you notice the stuff that's easily mised with all the visual "noise" going on? "Developers have to work too hard?" Please. Trivialize content? Double please, most of the features of mmos that are coming out are responses to the popularity of certain mods and addons. Addons inspire creativity. People will hack code and cheat at games no matter how open or closed a UI is, what open UI's do is allow for third party developers to fix things that annoy the rest of us and free up the developers to focus on content instead of having to fix UI issues all the time.

And those are just a few examples of why open UI's are bad.

Find new examples

There is no way a Judge is actually going to take this seriously.

What happened to the good ol' days when we used to push lawyers off a cliff?

"In 1992, a seventy-nine year old Albuquerque woman (Stella Liebeck) bought a coffee from a McDonald’s drive through. Her grandson was driving and he parked the car so she could add cream and sugar to the drink. She put the cup between her knees and pulled the lid toward her – inevitably the coffee spilt in her lap. She sued McDonald’s for negligence because she claimed the coffee was too hot to be safe. Unbelievably the jury found that McDonald’s was eighty percent responsible for the incident and they awarded Liebeck $160,000 in compensatory damages. But it gets worse: they awarded her $2.7 million punitive damages! The decision was appealed and the two parties ultimately ended up settling out of court for a sum less than $600,000."  (from listverse.com/2009/01/28/top-10-bizarre-or-frivolous-lawsuits/ )

If a company can be sued because hot coffee is hot... then yes anything is possible... in the US as far as legalities that is. It's not about what's "right" or "wrong"... but more how the lawyers can interpret or misinterpret the wording of law to the point it becomes believable to the majority. In a way, I'd classify them as your common exploiters in MMO's. They use the rules to their advantage, and then their defense is "well it's part of the system, so it's fair... even if it wasn't part of the intended design."

Originally posted by Lansid

"In 1992, a seventy-nine year old Albuquerque woman (Stella Liebeck) bought a coffee from a McDonald’s drive through. Her grandson was driving and he parked the car so she could add cream and sugar to the drink. She put the cup between her knees and pulled the lid toward her – inevitably the coffee spilt in her lap. She sued McDonald’s for negligence because she claimed the coffee was too hot to be safe. Unbelievably the jury found that McDonald’s was eighty percent responsible for the incident and they awarded Liebeck $160,000 in compensatory damages. But it gets worse: they awarded her $2.7 million punitive damages! The decision was appealed and the two parties ultimately ended up settling out of court for a sum less than $600,000."  (from listverse.com/2009/01/28/top-10-bizarre-or-frivolous-lawsuits/ )

If a company can be sued because hot coffee is hot... then yes anything is possible... in the US as far as legalities that is. It's not about what's "right" or "wrong"... but more how the lawyers can interpret or misinterpret the wording of law to the point it becomes believable to the majority. In a way, I'd classify them as your common exploiters in MMO's. They use the rules to their advantage, and then their defense is "well it's part of the system, so it's fair... even if it wasn't part of the intended design."

I am so tired of people using this as an example of wasteful lawsuits. Fact: this particular McDonalds had been sanctioned for keepign their coffee too hot on several occasion in the past. Fact, this coffee was so hot that it burned of parts of this woman's genitalia which required skin grafts to repair. This was not a minor burn, and this McDonalds had a history of keeping the coffee too hot  as in to the point where safety was an issue and it was documented and made the case a whole lot easier for the plaintiff.

Originally posted by coffee

Seems SOE don't do enough to aid visualy imparied ppl to play their games.

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6239339.html?tag=latestheadlines;title;1

Touchy subject at best, seems they want SOE to improve the mod compabilties of their games to be more inline with WoW and others where apparently their are mods to help them.

 

I was going to paint up a great big /facepalm sign for the blind, but then I figured it wasn't worth the effort.

Seriously, to every one of you who is saying "Fuck the blind" and all of this, go back to your respective holes and stay there. Do the world a favor and don't bother to reproduce, either. It doesn't matter whether this is a frivolous lawsuit or not, that kind of behavior is uncalled for and quite frankly, just sad. I'm embarrassed to be placed anywhere near the same demographic as you.

That said, the guy is "Visually impaired". No one ever said he was completely blind. In some games (e.g: Guild wars, Warcraft), there are means to scale the interface so that it is easy to see, and (at least in WoW's case) UI mods to make NPC positions more clear, big giant arrows to point you in the right direction, etc. I don't see why It's not valid to request something like this in SOE games. Doing it by suing them and claiming financial damages seems a bit extreme, but I guess if you've exhausted all your other channels of communication, and you really could sue under the AwD Act, then what else would you do?

Originally posted by KirinShadow

Seriously, to every one of you who is saying "Fuck the blind" and all of this, go back to your respective holes and stay there. Do the world a favor and don't bother to reproduce, either. It doesn't matter whether this is a frivolous lawsuit or not, that kind of behavior is uncalled for and quite frankly, just sad. I'm embarrassed to be placed anywhere near the same demographic as you.

That said, the guy is "Visually impaired". No one ever said he was completely blind. In some games (e.g: Guild wars, Warcraft), there are means to scale the interface so that it is easy to see, and (at least in WoW's case) UI mods to make NPC positions more clear, big giant arrows to point you in the right direction, etc. I don't see why It's not valid to request something like this in SOE games. Doing it by suing them and claiming financial damages seems a bit extreme, but I guess if you've exhausted all your other channels of communication, and you really could sue under the AwD Act, then what else would you do?

With respect, there's next to NO information about what "disability impaired visual processing" is in anything I was able to research, save for a few things linked with Parkinson's and Schizophrenia. Personally I want more information on "why" he needs a themepark railride, and how his condition functions.

The way SOE runs its ship is their business. Suing because they do not add functions to a video game to accommodate visually impaired people is akin to suing someone for not making Mt. Everest wheelchair accessible. I mean we have the technology... so why hasn't it been done?

I agree with you that there aren't really any standards. That's why I said that a lawsuit seemed like an extreme measure to take.  That said, the guy still Might have a case under the Americans with Disabilities act, which means that somewhere along the line it was decided that a lawsuit like this is "perfectly acceptable if not required for the betterment of society". It's also worth noting that such a lawsuit simply implies the right of the person to have their clams examined, not that the company they sue will be unquestionably forced to take action in response.