The thing is, many "Christians", particularly in the United States, are not followers of Jesus.

They are follwoers of Mammon.

Originally posted by Celcius

Originally posted by SioBabble

Here's the thing about "flop":

If the expectation (and MMORPG.COM is helping this along) is that TOR wil "revolutionize" the MMO industry, then it will flop, based on that expectation alone.

Rift failed to do that.  Which is why it's a "flop".  Never mind that it seems to be doing well enough to keep operating.  This is true of many of the other "underachievers" out there over the past six years or so.

It's a relative term.

Now, keep in mind, SWG before it was radically transformed seemed to be doing well.  Maintaining a (pre WoW) respectable 1/4 million subs.  Obviously, many people tried it and didn't like it for whatever reason...not "Starwarsy" enough, too bugged, not enough "content" for them...whatever.  Supposedly it sold more than a million units, but couldn't retain more than a quarter of that number as subscribers.

It was probably in the black, making money for LA and SOE.

But it wasn't making ENOUGH money to satisfy either, especially after WoW burst on to the scene.  If WoW did not exist, SWG with the classic skill system and sandbox approach would probably still be running 200,000 plus subs a month right now.

WoW changed the industry, and in many ways, not for the better.  It reinforced the existing "formula" effect of EQ and made it the "industry standard", so much so that SWG was radically transformed into an EQ/WoW clone where it was not before the infamous CU and NGE.  Unfortunately for LA and SOE, their rush job to get some of that sweet sweet WoW playerbase backfired on them through their own incompetence and recklesness.

WoW expanded, greatly, the MMO audience.  People who had never tried an MMO tried WoW, based on the publisher's reputation (Blizzard) and the IP it was based on, Blizzard's very successful Warcraft franchise.

This ENLARGED the market for MMOs, but it did something that threw all the existing games for a loop.  Their market share shrank.  They were all probably still makeing money, but WoW was making more, because they enlarged the pie, and even though there was now more pie for everyone, the MBA mentality couldn't deal with a smaller market share.

So we've got this crazy thing were games that could well find a niche, be profitable and prosperous in and of themselves, are considered to be "failures" if they don't splash as much as WoW does.  Which is utterly silly, but that's American capitalism in the 21st century for you.  If you don't come up with huge scads of money always increasing, you're doing something wrong.   You must always be growing at all times.  If not, you're a flop.

So basically what you are saying from your opinionated wall of text is that  if a game does not revolutionize the genre, it is a failure? So you mean innovation clearly, something of which many people care about, but it is also an opinion..not a fact. Some people like innovation, some people like iteration on previous ideas.

The fact is that Rift is still alive and well; making more money then they are losing. That is a success. It does not matter if you don't believe they revolutionized the genre because the people who actually pay for the game like it. 

I would also love to see any posts by a Bioware developer saying that TOR is planned to revolutionize the genre. Hell, I have seen them say the opposite. Or a Trion developer for that matter..

I'm saying that building up expectations with hype is bound to be a letdown.  It's not BioWare saying it's going to "revolutionize" the genre, it's MMORPG.COM, which is basically, like all gaming publications, dead tree or online, a platform for advertising.  SOMEONE is pushing this "revolutionary" meme.  It may well be the usual clowns in sales and marketing who never ever learn the lesson to not over promise.

Rift is still alive and making some money, but the problem is, just making some money is not enough for idiots who know nothing about this industry but what they see on spreadsheets.  That's true of nearly every single enterprise in this country.  They see Blizzard, they see 10 million plus subscriptions, and the fact that Rift is in the black and paying off on the intitial investment is NOT GOOD ENOUGH for them.  They are not on the phone with contractors buidling olympic sized pools for all the money that's rolling in.  It's flopping!  It's making money, but not enough to buy me a new Maserati every month!

I'm describing the overall enviornment that MMOs are operating in.  Where you and I look at game play, at community, at content updates and graphics, the guys calling the shots only care about what is on their spreadsheets.  If it's not enough compared to some other place to invest, they'll move their money elsewhere.

One of the advantages that Blizz has is that there is still a corporate culture there which is about making great games that people will want to pay to play.  If BioWare is true to that idea, then I think they'll succede in the way you've described.  If that's enough for the MBAs, though, remains to be seen.

Originally posted by tillamook

You wanna know what Blizzards secret sauce is? quality content updates and expansions. As people begin to get bored or reach their end game, they always have something new to look forward to even after finishing what they consider "The Game". That's what has kept people playing WoW all this time. If they had no regular updates people would have left long ago and never looked back.

BioWare isn't stupid and is looking at supporting every aspect of this game as well as tying it into social media sites. Add that to the fact that it's based on a area of lore that has huge following Star Wars, and KOTOR and this game will do things you have never seen in the industry before. This isn't some fly by nite company with a piss ass budget, this BioWare backed by EA. YOu may hate EA, but they got deep pockets when it comes to promoting stuff.

SOE never figured out the secret sauce (it's Thousand Island dressing, btw..) of WoW.  Quality is the key word.  The darn thing works.  Well.  There are bugs, sure...there always will be in any software project of this caliber.  But they (Blizz) go about quashing them and they're better at communicating, and they telegraph the major changes months in advance.   They actually follow SOE's one time policy of In concept, in development, in testing.

I think BioWare has a solid chance to break the WoW syndrome, but keep in mind that today's BioWare is not the same one that gave us KOTOR.  They're doing a lot of things right, as you've pointed out, in the run up to launch.  I'm hopeful that they'll diminish the influence of the 800 pound gorilla.  It may not result in a sandbox game with an emphasis on building a community right away, but it will be a start in breaking the mortal lock of the gorilla on the imagination of those who direct the industry.

This all depends on how patient EA is with this property of theirs to succede. The damn 800 pound gorilla haunts the dreams of the MBA suits who run these operations.

Here's the thing about "flop":

If the expectation (and MMORPG.COM is helping this along) is that TOR wil "revolutionize" the MMO industry, then it will flop, based on that expectation alone.

Rift failed to do that.  Which is why it's a "flop".  Never mind that it seems to be doing well enough to keep operating.  This is true of many of the other "underachievers" out there over the past six years or so.

It's a relative term.

Now, keep in mind, SWG before it was radically transformed seemed to be doing well.  Maintaining a (pre WoW) respectable 1/4 million subs.  Obviously, many people tried it and didn't like it for whatever reason...not "Starwarsy" enough, too bugged, not enough "content" for them...whatever.  Supposedly it sold more than a million units, but couldn't retain more than a quarter of that number as subscribers.

It was probably in the black, making money for LA and SOE.

But it wasn't making ENOUGH money to satisfy either, especially after WoW burst on to the scene.  If WoW did not exist, SWG with the classic skill system and sandbox approach would probably still be running 200,000 plus subs a month right now.

WoW changed the industry, and in many ways, not for the better.  It reinforced the existing "formula" effect of EQ and made it the "industry standard", so much so that SWG was radically transformed into an EQ/WoW clone where it was not before the infamous CU and NGE.  Unfortunately for LA and SOE, their rush job to get some of that sweet sweet WoW playerbase backfired on them through their own incompetence and recklesness.

WoW expanded, greatly, the MMO audience.  People who had never tried an MMO tried WoW, based on the publisher's reputation (Blizzard) and the IP it was based on, Blizzard's very successful Warcraft franchise.

This ENLARGED the market for MMOs, but it did something that threw all the existing games for a loop.  Their market share shrank.  They were all probably still makeing money, but WoW was making more, because they enlarged the pie, and even though there was now more pie for everyone, the MBA mentality couldn't deal with a smaller market share.

So we've got this crazy thing were games that could well find a niche, be profitable and prosperous in and of themselves, are considered to be "failures" if they don't splash as much as WoW does.  Which is utterly silly, but that's American capitalism in the 21st century for you.  If you don't come up with huge scads of money always increasing, you're doing something wrong.   You must always be growing at all times.  If not, you're a flop.

Originally posted by synn

Originally posted by SioBabble

Originally posted by Celcius

Originally posted by Fadedbomb

By looking @ all the hype around a WoW-copy with a StarWars skin, it seems that SWTOR is getting SEVERAL times the "hype" that RIFT did.

Review:

-RIFT was supposed to kill WoW

-RIFT was also a WoW-copy (please move away from WoW-clone, it sounds immature, clone =/= copy)

-RIFT had the same UI, inventory, and skill system of WoW (same thing SWTOR is doing)

-RIFT flopped REALLY hard, so hard in fact that they viewed their sub number drop rate as a "failure in the making" and have started an aggressive freetrial, discount && "veteran return" plan.

 

 

I've been around the MMO-block for quite awhile now trying, testing, and playing almost every single MMO out there (even the ones that I KNEW what to expect before trying them, but still tried so i was 100% sure). Yet, time after time AFTER TIME I see the same community over-hype of the "NEXT BIG THING" only to have it blow up similar to AION, RIFT, etc etc etc.

I'm only worried at the backlash that SWTOR's failure will bring. It's one of the largest fully developed MMO's of all time. Yet, they didn't feel that breaking from the "industry standard" of WoW's lowest common denominator was a "safe" investment, and that spelled their doom since the inception of SWTOR. Will we see a decrease in investing towards MMOs in general? Will we see more garbage "F2P" fad increases?

 

Or, could we possibly see a shift in the market towards triple 'A' sandbox development & implementation? Obviously I'm hoping for the latter, but I feel it'll be somewhere in the middle of less investing towards MMOs & a larger interest in sandbox MMOs. Granted, that's not a horrible thing to have happen, but it's obviously not the ideal.

 

 

Thoughts?

Rift did not flop. It was a success. You do not need 10 million subs to be a good game. 

Being a good game is not the measure of success, I'm afraid.  10 million subs is.  That's the way this industry thinks nowadays.  Never mind that WoW is in many ways a fluke. 

The only success that matters, ultimately, is the number of subs.  That's the yardstick.

By that standard, Rift utterly failed, as everything else has.  Unless SWToR gets millions of subscribers, it too will be perceived as a flop.

This sucks, it has nothing to do with the inherent quality of the game itself.

 that's like saying most if not all the people that come to these forums have failed in life because we don't have as much money as bill gates does :p  sure, rift may not be making the kind of money blizzard is making every month in subs but no other MMO in the market is. i think i read an article in one of those pc gamers mags that was saying a something like 250k active subscribers makes an MMO successful. I'll try and look look it up and post a link when i get home from work.

The sad thing is, for any number of people out there, unless you're as wealthy as Bill Gates, you're a failure.  It's the only way they measure success.

Just making a profit is not enough anymore, and hasn't been for the last 30 or so years.  Corporations shut down profitable divisions because they're not as profitable as others.

This is a sick reality of this society we live in.  It needs to change, but it will take a massive "significant emotional event" for it to happen.

Originally posted by Celcius

Originally posted by Fadedbomb

By looking @ all the hype around a WoW-copy with a StarWars skin, it seems that SWTOR is getting SEVERAL times the "hype" that RIFT did.

Review:

-RIFT was supposed to kill WoW

-RIFT was also a WoW-copy (please move away from WoW-clone, it sounds immature, clone =/= copy)

-RIFT had the same UI, inventory, and skill system of WoW (same thing SWTOR is doing)

-RIFT flopped REALLY hard, so hard in fact that they viewed their sub number drop rate as a "failure in the making" and have started an aggressive freetrial, discount && "veteran return" plan.

 

 

I've been around the MMO-block for quite awhile now trying, testing, and playing almost every single MMO out there (even the ones that I KNEW what to expect before trying them, but still tried so i was 100% sure). Yet, time after time AFTER TIME I see the same community over-hype of the "NEXT BIG THING" only to have it blow up similar to AION, RIFT, etc etc etc.

I'm only worried at the backlash that SWTOR's failure will bring. It's one of the largest fully developed MMO's of all time. Yet, they didn't feel that breaking from the "industry standard" of WoW's lowest common denominator was a "safe" investment, and that spelled their doom since the inception of SWTOR. Will we see a decrease in investing towards MMOs in general? Will we see more garbage "F2P" fad increases?

 

Or, could we possibly see a shift in the market towards triple 'A' sandbox development & implementation? Obviously I'm hoping for the latter, but I feel it'll be somewhere in the middle of less investing towards MMOs & a larger interest in sandbox MMOs. Granted, that's not a horrible thing to have happen, but it's obviously not the ideal.

 

 

Thoughts?

Rift did not flop. It was a success. You do not need 10 million subs to be a good game. 

Being a good game is not the measure of success, I'm afraid.  10 million subs is.  That's the way this industry thinks nowadays.  Never mind that WoW is in many ways a fluke. 

The only success that matters, ultimately, is the number of subs.  That's the yardstick.

By that standard, Rift utterly failed, as everything else has.  Unless SWToR gets millions of subscribers, it too will be perceived as a flop.

This sucks, it has nothing to do with the inherent quality of the game itself.

Originally posted by Pilnkplonk

Originally posted by SioBabble

Originally posted by Pilnkplonk

Originally posted by SioBabble

An important point is that the "theme park" game is what sells the most, and these guys are in this for the money, because for the really big games (we're not talking Kingdom of Loathing here) being a labor of love that you can make a living at has no appeal to the greedy investors out there who want some of that sweet sweet WoW profit .

Sandbox games just do not have the mass appeal, the huge audience, that the theme park games do.  This is a sad reality of the basic economic underpinning of the MMO industry.  WoW found the sweet spot...so everyone seeks to join Blizzard in that space.

Hmm... all AAA themepark games from WoW onward have flopped to a degree. So the statement "themepark game is what sells the most" is patently untrue. It is an ancient dogma which grew up from I really don't know where or how. It is just one of those "truisms" that if you look at close enough you find patently untrue.

Empirically, making an AAA mmo a "themepark" has been so far (past 7+ years) a PROVEN 100% recipe for fail.

As for sandbox games somehow inherently "not having a mass audience", that's a load of crap. The biggest IP in computer game history is the Sims which is nothing more than a sandbox. Civilization is "sandbox". The much maligned but massively profitable Farmville is "sandbox" - literaly! And now you have Minecraft, raking in the kills with its 8-bit graphics and it is... what? A "sandbox."

Imo the main problem why mmo industry is in such a rut compared to the rest of the gaming industry is precisely this "self-evident" fact that "sandboxes don't have a mass appeal". The first company that manages to create a AAA sandbox SUFFICIENTLY EVOLVED from the UO model as WoW was from EQ will be the one to make a real splash, comparable to what Bliz did with WoW. All the rest is just riding on the coattails of The Beast (you all know who I'm talking about.)

I agree with your last paragraph, completely.

The thing is, the moneymen are only interested in money.  The theme park game (WoW) has what, 12 million subscribers?  Which is like 11 million plus more than anyone else?

So the theme park RULES.  Not on the basis of the superiority of gameplay, but on sheer weight of numbers, as in simoleons.  The spreadsheet numbers are all that the investors care about.

Never mind that much of WoW"s success has to do with presentation, with accessability, and with just plain WORKING right out of the box.  Just being a theme park game is not enough, but you can't convince most of the MBA asshats who steer the ships of MMO development along. The Raph Kosters do not call the shots. The John Smedleys do.  All the John Smedleys see is the theme park.

This is the secret that no one has been willing to commit to replicating...instead they're still following the standard practice of the software industry to push a half baked product out the door and then patch it later with revenue derived from the original sale.  If you do that, compared to WoW, you will fail.  But they don't get that at all.  It's really quite simple, but the industry just can't grasp it.  Heck, even Blizz is falling into the trap nowadays.

I also do believe that the theme park, being very easy to keep mostly passive consumers engaged, has an edge on the theme park, which requires more imagination than a lot of players are willing, or capable, of investing in the game.  Thus we're seeing a lot more scripted storys being told in which you are basically a character in a movie, moving along a predetermined path, experiencing the movie world as you do so.  That's the entertainment value.  You're not really allowed to venture too far off the path, or start improvising.  Which for a lot of players is just fine with them.

Imo the problem is that moneymen actually have no idea what they're throwing their money at. That's the problem. Of course it's all about the money, it's an industry. I totally salute the drive of game companies to pursue maximum profit. However the probem is that the people calling the shots actually have no idea where the money IS and how to make a profit as is evident from all the big name failures in the past 7+ years.

The said suits initially looked at WoW, analyzed its success and came to all the wrong conclusions about what makes a mmo game profitable. And now this dogma, this "WoW recipe" is being repeated ad nauseum. And each time there is a new failure of the concept, the suits decide that it is not the concept itself that is flawed but that all they need to do is to sink even MORE money into the next project based on the very same concepts..

(Let me step back a bit.. I'm not saying that the concept of themepark is "bad" in itself. What I'm saying is that WoW is really not a even a good themepark. Its main reasons for success are many, and fixing some obvious concept flaws from the  previous generation of mmos was definitely a part of its success. However being a themepark is not THE reason for WoW becoming what it is. Being a first really polished mmo with excellent UI (lets face it, all the mmos before that were crap in that regard, I couldn't bring myself to play DAoC after trying WoW) and all at the moment broadband became widespread was all waay more important for its success than it being "sandbox" (you know, game area graded by levels, gear rush, quests and all that crap)

It all reminds me of the Hollywood crisis of the musicals back in the 50's and 60's. Rather than admit that the time for "ginger and fred" musicals has passed the producers kept sinking more and more money into ludicrously expensive productions no one wanted to watch anymore... and then came gritty, realistic films that no one believed in (because it was't "common sense" that mass public would want to wach real people, just like it's "common sense" today that no one wants to play a sandbox) such as Bonnie and Clyde which actually saved Hollywood from drowning in it's own glitzy dogma.

The idea that "sandboxes" somehow require too much imagination from players is imo one of those "trusims" that turn on their heads once you look at them. Why should they require "too much imagination"? Does farmville require "too much imagination" or the sims? It is just one of the throwbacks from the primitive days of sandboxes that we still hold on to simply because no one made a revolutionary step with AAA sandbox genre comparable to the what, again, Blizzard did to themeparks with WoW. It's like saying Themeparks will never be popular because you can't have players queuing for boss figths for hours (hello instancing!) or that the very mmorpg concept is doomed to failure because mass of players won't stand harsh XP penalties for dying.

The easy path is the one that the developers are going to take.  At least what they perceive is the easy path.

The thing is the sandbox is, at the current time, a niche product, as far as MMOs are concerned.  If an updated UO comes out that captures the public's imagination as WoW has, that will change.  But given how formula driven the MMO industry has become, much like Hollywood has always been, it will take someone brave to present a breakout product that will, in turn, create a new formula that the others will slavishly follow.  Because original thinking is risky, and these guys are all about avoiding risk.  They want the sure thing.

Frankly, I think the sandbox concept can work if the presentation is right, but the problem is getting someone out there to dare to break out of the formula.  I do believe, strongly, that most of the public can't handle the sandbox.  I saw this in SWG, where people were screaming for "content" which meant for someone to present them something to do...they couldn't manage to create their own content, which was what Koster had planned for...and the directed content that was obviously in the original design never got presented for the most part, or was presented (remember Cries of Alderaan?) and then forgotten about.

Originally posted by Pilnkplonk

Originally posted by SioBabble

An important point is that the "theme park" game is what sells the most, and these guys are in this for the money, because for the really big games (we're not talking Kingdom of Loathing here) being a labor of love that you can make a living at has no appeal to the greedy investors out there who want some of that sweet sweet WoW profit .

Sandbox games just do not have the mass appeal, the huge audience, that the theme park games do.  This is a sad reality of the basic economic underpinning of the MMO industry.  WoW found the sweet spot...so everyone seeks to join Blizzard in that space.

Hmm... all AAA themepark games from WoW onward have flopped to a degree. So the statement "themepark game is what sells the most" is patently untrue. It is an ancient dogma which grew up from I really don't know where or how. It is just one of those "truisms" that if you look at close enough you find patently untrue.

Empirically, making an AAA mmo a "themepark" has been so far (past 7+ years) a PROVEN 100% recipe for fail.

As for sandbox games somehow inherently "not having a mass audience", that's a load of crap. The biggest IP in computer game history is the Sims which is nothing more than a sandbox. Civilization is "sandbox". The much maligned but massively profitable Farmville is "sandbox" - literaly! And now you have Minecraft, raking in the kills with its 8-bit graphics and it is... what? A "sandbox."

Imo the main problem why mmo industry is in such a rut compared to the rest of the gaming industry is precisely this "self-evident" fact that "sandboxes don't have a mass appeal". The first company that manages to create a AAA sandbox SUFFICIENTLY EVOLVED from the UO model as WoW was from EQ will be the one to make a real splash, comparable to what Bliz did with WoW. All the rest is just riding on the coattails of The Beast (you all know who I'm talking about.)

I agree with your last paragraph, completely.

The thing is, the moneymen are only interested in money.  The theme park game (WoW) has what, 12 million subscribers?  Which is like 11 million plus more than anyone else?

So the theme park RULES.  Not on the basis of the superiority of gameplay, but on sheer weight of numbers, as in simoleons.  The spreadsheet numbers are all that the investors care about.

Never mind that much of WoW"s success has to do with presentation, with accessability, and with just plain WORKING right out of the box.  Just being a theme park game is not enough, but you can't convince most of the MBA asshats who steer the ships of MMO development along. The Raph Kosters do not call the shots. The John Smedleys do.  All the John Smedleys see is the theme park.

This is the secret that no one has been willing to commit to replicating...instead they're still following the standard practice of the software industry to push a half baked product out the door and then patch it later with revenue derived from the original sale.  If you do that, compared to WoW, you will fail.  But they don't get that at all.  It's really quite simple, but the industry just can't grasp it.  Heck, even Blizz is falling into the trap nowadays.

I also do believe that the theme park, being very easy to keep mostly passive consumers engaged, has an edge on the sandbox, which requires more imagination than a lot of players are willing, or capable, of investing in the game.  Thus we're seeing a lot more scripted stories being told in which you are basically a character in a movie, moving along a predetermined path, experiencing the movie world as you do so.  That's the entertainment value.  You're not really allowed to venture too far off the path, or start improvising.  Which for a lot of players is just fine with them.

Originally posted by KingGator

Originally posted by Fadedbomb

HOLY CRAP.....that looks TERRBILE. FARRRRR too much WoW in that game for me. Seriously, watch that video! I've been following this game with a vague interest, but after watching that E3 video I compared it to random WoW-instance videos & realized how copied WoW has become.

 

Literally, look @ the stat system & inventory system of WoW not to mention the skill system of WoW then look @ SWTOR. SWTOR is, IN ZERO WAY, revolutionary. Worse than RIFT, 100% copy of WoW with a StarWars skin.

 

If you're looking for a true take on Star Wars SWTOR is not for you, but if you're looking for a Single Player game with COOP elements && you like WoW then SWTOR is for you!!

 

-Faded

WOW looks alot like DAOC and EQ, they didn't invent the mmo. They just made one simple and accessible enough to hold the attention of ADD America. :)

DING DING DING DING DING!

We have a winner!

The other thing Blizz did was not release the thing half baked, but rather more like 4/5ths baked, which made a huge difference.

An important point is that the "theme park" game is what sells the most, and these guys are in this for the money, because for the really big games (we're not talking Kingdom of Loathing here) being a labor of love that you can make a living at has no appeal to the greedy investors out there who want some of that sweet sweet WoW profit .

Sandbox games just do not have the mass appeal, the huge audience, that the theme park games do.  This is a sad reality of the basic economic underpinning of the MMO industry.  WoW found the sweet spot...so everyone seeks to join Blizzard in that space.

So we're not going to see a revolution, especially in the current economic climate.  We're going to see evolution.

"Revolution" is, as I indicated earlier, copy from a PowerPoint slide for the moneymen who back the games.

You will always have the problem of PvP and PvE rulesets creating conflicts in the design of the game.  What works for PvP balance tends to make PvE problematic, and vice versa.

WoW is a PvE game with PvP bolted on, and it shows, badly, in a lot of ways.

I PvP on occasion, but I'm mostly there for the PvE.  So, yes, I'd play a PvE only game.  In fact, when I fire up a single player game, that's what I'm doing.

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by matf91

Lol, but the game industry is something that has slowly been dragged out and is plummeting. 

You know we heard the same argument about Donkey Kong back in '81, right?

Gamers get burned out.  Yet the industry itself is doing better than it ever has.  $27.3 billion dollars in 2011, more than pop music and Hollywood films combined.

Definitely plummeting.  All hope is lost.  Doom.

What this means is the media observers are imposing their own perspective on everyone else, and declaring a trend to be "over".  Based on their careful observation of their small little clique.

Originally posted by Ihmotepp

Originally posted by SioBabble

 

---

Originally posted by Ihmotepp  

I don't think the numbers work.

It doesn't seem like .03% of Christians actually follow this "Christian" guy.

If that were true, wouldn't there be the "Christian" equivalent to Al Qaeda, The Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, or at least SOME organizations?

But I don't know of ANY.

Do you?

On the other hand we do know Al Qaeda followed Osama bin Laden, and others have similar ideologies. We know these organizations recieve funds from countries like Iran, and "charities". We know that people in the streets have rioted supporting these ideologies, chanting death to anhyone that looks at a cartoon of Muhammed.

It doesn't seem that these percentages are correct, since we have little or no evidence of Equivalent "Christian" organization and activity, supporting killing the "infidels" or whatever term "Christians" might use for non-Christians.  

---

The problem we have here is that someone here "knows" things that are utterly abusrd, and if this person wasn't so intent on displaying appalling ignorance of reality would be laughable.  Why would Iran (which is a Shia country) support Al Qaeda  (which is Sunni based) at all?  The fact of the matter is the Shia and the Sunni, at the exreme ends, are deadly enemies.  Al Qaeda is as much an enemy of Iran as it is of the United States and the rest of the West.

The appalling ignornance of what is "Islam", when it's as fractured and diverse as Christianity is, destroys whatever argument you're trying to make, because it's based on pure prejudice uninformed by any fact.  "We know" is just pure garbage.  Utterly without any basis in observed reality.

If you're going to operate in this manner, then this guy in Norway is a perfect representative of all things Christian.  Because you apply that very trope to any Muslim off the street.

You are hoist on your own petard of illogic and inttelectual dishonesty.

 

Killing for Allah is killing for Allah.

I don't deny radical Islamists of various organizations kill each other for Allah, as well as non-Muslims.

This has been a fact ever since modern "Jihad" and radical Muslim terrorism started .

Most victims of radical Islam are probably Muslim.

Killing for Jesus is killing for Jesus.

Christians have been killing each other in the name of Jesus for millenia.

This guy is a member of your tribe.  Suck on it.

Originally posted by kobie173

Wow. I see that David Koresh, Tim McVeigh and this twatbag are not "Christians," and nor, apparently, are they True Scotsmen.

The issue here is not whether "radical Christians" kill more people per day, week, hour, month or year than "radical Muslims." Of course radical Muslims do, partly because there ARE a lot more of them, and partly because the vast majority of them live in third-world hellholes where it's a lot more convenient for them to blow people up, and because that part of the world is rife with sectarian squabbles that have existed LONGER THAN CHRISTIANITY. And nobody is disputing that violence and terrorism from radical Muslims is something that should be ignored or anything like that.

The issue IS that every time some right-wing Christian nutjob pulls off an act of violence, the usual suspects whitewash it to paint that individual as "not  a REAL Christian" (as if the people who dropped the towers on 9/11 were REAL MUSLIMS) or other nonsense.

Right-wing, ultraconservative, ultranationalist xenophobia caused this tragedy. This is indisputable fact, and if you attempt to dispute it, you're an intellectually dishonest asshole who cannot see more than 3 inches in front of him. Fact. Period. End of fucking story.

The fact of the matter is, any time an incident like this occurs, the media rushes to judgement and declares that it must be those terrible Muslims who are doing it.  They did this in the OKC bombing as well...for two days, all the speculation, with absolutely no basis in any verified fact, was that it had to be Muslims.

Of course, when we find out it was a white self identified Christian, a former soldier who had been in the first Gulf War, the tropes change.

Suddenly, the incident is no longer a political statement, but the work of a deranged madman.  It's not "terrorism" anymore, because, obviously, only Muslims can be "terrorists."  Even though McVeigh ADMITTED to a political motivation, and chose the date of the attack for a specific political and RELIGIOUS reason.

This scenario plays out again in the case of the Norway incidents.

Then we start seeing an innudation of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy that makes the mythical great flood look like a puddle on the sidewalk.

ToR is "revolutionary" only in the sense that it's the most hyped new kid on the block.  "WoW-killer" is copy from a PowerPoint slide, and so is "revolutionary".

It's evolutionary, at best.

The rest (to include the official MMORPG.com content) is advertising copy.

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Originally posted by Ihmotepp

 

I don't think the numbers work.

It doesn't seem like .03% of Christians actually follow this "Christian" guy.

If that were true, wouldn't there be the "Christian" equivalent to Al Qaeda, The Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, or at least SOME organizations?

But I don't know of ANY.

Do you?

On the other hand we do know Al Qaeda followed Osama bin Laden, and others have similar ideologies. We know these organizations recieve funds from countries like Iran, and "charities". We know that people in the streets have rioted supporting these ideologies, chanting death to anhyone that looks at a cartoon of Muhammed.

It doesn't seem that these percentages are correct, since we have little or no evidence of Equivalent "Christian" organization and activity, supporting killing the "infidels" or whatever term "Christians" might use for non-Christians.
 

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The problem we have here is that someone here "knows" things that are utterly absurd, and if this person wasn't so intent on displaying appalling ignorance of reality would be laughable.  Why would Iran (which is a Shia country) support Al Qaeda  (which is Sunni based) at all?  The fact of the matter is the Shia and the Sunni, at the exreme ends, are deadly enemies.  Al Qaeda is as much an enemy of Iran as it is of the United States and the rest of the West.

The appalling ignornance of what is "Islam", when it's as fractured and diverse as Christianity is, destroys whatever argument you're trying to make, because it's based on pure prejudice uninformed by any fact.  "We know" is just pure garbage.  Utterly without any basis in observed reality.

If you're going to operate in this manner, then this guy in Norway is a perfect representative of all things Christian.  Because you apply that very trope to any Muslim off the street.

You are hoist on your own petard of illogic and intellectual dishonesty.

You know, I'm pretty much convince the OP has terminal reading comprehension problems.

I basically agree with him, but offer the caveat that the virtual world's engine will determine how things play out, what players will be able to do, how well they'll be able to apply real world military tactics in the virtual world.

Then he makes curt, not terribly well thought out comments.

There's also the issue, that he's unable to grasp, best I can tell, that the social interaction of players, with team mates and their opponents, has a very strong affect on how "real" any combat is going to be.  That PUGs are inherently going to distort how people fight a virtual battle...that they are inherently weaker than a group that plays together regularly, and thus has the advantage of having a good idea of what each other will do...they may very well have assigned roles within the group, beyond the nominal game ruleset roles.

To sum up, real world military tactics may or may not work based on the game engine.  How close it comes to replicating the real world is key.

For example, your entire day can be ruined by a jammed weapon at a crucial moment.  Is that going to happen on your virtual battlefield?  All depends on the design.

Of course there are tactics in WoW, and WoW clones.

Those tactics more often than not have nothing to do with real world tactics.  But even Super Mario brothers has a manner of play that can be, loosely, described as "tactics."

There are definitely tactical and strategic decisions being made in both group PvE and group PvP encounters in any MMORPG.  Their relationship to real world mlitary tactics are tenuous, at best, because real world military tactics are applied with the ultimate physics engine's rules in place.  In my first post, I alluded to this...that you're not going to see real world tactics applied in a virtual world that doesn't replicate real world physics.  WoW and WoW clones hardly qualify on that basis.

You see players attempting to exploit quirks in the world engine all the time in WoW.  It's pure gamesmanship.  Soldiers attempt to do this in RL, too.  The thing is, there is no crew of developers working to create balance in RL.

You play in the world you're given.   Actual application of RL military tactics is not going to happen if the world you're in has things like mobs that can shoot through walls and you can't shoot through walls back.  Not to mention that melee combat simply doesn't exist in RL warfare.  A long time back I posted about this, how military theorists imagined that the decisive moment in battle, up to WWI, would be "cold steel"...that is, a bayonet charge.  The reality however had overcome military theorists who were not paying attention to what rifled muskets, breech loading, and cartridges did to ranged combat in the American Civil War.  The theorists who travelled to the battlefields assumed that the Napoleonic tactics of the early 19th Century would be seen on the battlefields of America.  The increased firepower that rifled muskets, breach loaders, and cartridges made possible changed the way battles were fought.  The entire siege of Petersburg was a sneak peek at trench warfare as was seen in WWI.  With the "holy trinity" of the MMO in place, with melee still having a role in it where in RL it vanished nearly a century ago, even in theory...

So, yes, most MMO combat has very little to do with RL combat.  Which means that you're not going to see the sort of application of military tactics to MMOs.  For one thing, in RL, it's boom headshot (or bodyshot) all the time.  Which doesn't make for a very entertaining game.

Originally posted by Ryukan

This seems like a shameless attempt at keeping people subscribed to what should be a f2p game at this point. The fact that they are still charging a sub fee for a game that is confirmed to be shutting down in less than 6 months is fucking ridiculous---errr I mean just like SOE.

John Smedley is totally about picking your pocket, at all times.  Everything he does is about revenue streams.

They should make everyone a "blue glowie" as a final slap in the face to those who grinded their way to the flashlight prior to the NGE.

Just out of pure spite.