As a player it was just less annoying back in the dedicated server days, since cheaters were dealt with immediately. Nowadays you have to report them in most of the competitive games and then it can take anywhere from several hours to weeks before anything happens. It just feels like the protections have become more and more invasive, yet are still far behind the original community managed servers from back in the day.
Not to mention company outings/excursions during the weekends and additional courses/education after work. Japan is usually coming up when talking about crazy work hours, but South Korea appeared to be just as bad, so I'm curious how such regulation would actually apply if all those extra hours are not being counted to your actual work hours.
Not to mentioned regional modified versions of the movie/tv show, especially in regards to music, where it will be replaced with some random song that often doesn't make any sense.
My parents got a Malamute puppy and he could be left unleashed without any issues until he was about 1.5 - 2 years old. Then the instincts kicked in and he would hunt after anything that moved, so that they had to start using a leash to prevent him from running off all the time.
At the time they lived in the country and had a hiking area directly behind the house. My father would just put a leash on the dog and then let him lead the way around the mountain. He mentioned that it felt like a good experience for both of them, since he managed to see new parts of the mountain, due to the dog guiding him off the trail every now and then, and the dog was happy to lead. However, things went a bit south after my father had to leave for several months and it was my mother's turn to look after the dog. He would just pull her behind him like a sled and she had no control whatsoever over the dog.
Eventually, she went to a dog trainer with him, which improved things significantly, so that she was at least able to walk the dog without being dragged behind him. However, everything went out the window as soon as he smelled some kind of dead animal, or when he saw a deer or porcupine. Nevertheless, there were no major incidents with the dog, apart from some growling when you were trying to get him off an animal carcass.
It was definitely a much more difficult dog to handle compared to other domesticated breeds I've had or met so far, but at the same time he provided some of the most unique experiences I've had with a dog whenever you would hike with him through the mountains.
For long distance flights, I'm doing the opposite of 2), where I'll stay awake on purpose the day before the flight, so that I can sleep through most of it. However, this only works if you're able to sleep in a plane.
Especially on consoles, there are a lot of platform specific exclusive in-game items/missions/cosmetics/... and I'm wondering if this starts to become more common for the different PC release platforms as well.
Twitch Prime provides some exclusive in-game items and steam has had exclusive cosmetics in the past as well already, so while having multiple venues to purchase your PC games from is always good for the market, I'm wondering if we're going to end up in a console-like situation where the exclusive addons are setting apart the games on the individual platforms.
Kickstarter still feels like such a grey area to me. Only a few of the games I've backed ended up in a product that I would've bought, if it was a regular released game. Nowadays, I prefer waiting until the actual release version is available and then decide whether to buy it or not, but I'm not funding any more kickstarter games due to all the bad experiences.
FWIW, I've had more successes than problems with games.
11 games I'd have bought anyway [1] (mostly RPGs), 1 failure (The Mandate. Should have known, overly ambitious) 4 that are way overdue but still active (Star Citizen, InSomnia, Popup Dungeon and After Reset), 3 that are still in planned development (Vigilantes, Stygian and D:OS2) and only 2 games I didn't enjoy at all and normally wouldn't have bought (Jagged Alliance: Flashback, Satelite Reign)
[1] Wasteland 2,
Shadowrun Returns,
Pillars of Eternity,
Antharion,
Balrum,
Torment: Tides of Numenera,
Balrum,
RimWorld,
Lords of Xulima,
Blackguards,
Shadowrun: Hongkong
edit: And 100% sucess rate with tabletop/card games
No, Star Citizen is not "way overdue". You can login and play it, and you've been able to for years now. That is disingenuous, because it's always been understood that the game would be under development for some time. As a November 2012 High Admiral backer, I think things are going extremely well for Star Citizen. Unlike a lot of other projects on Kickstarter.
I think if we're going to be fair, it's more accurate to say it's totally, unequivocally overdue. Large chucks are flat out late. But! That is fine. We can forgive a late game if it's good, and it looks to be awesome. Optimism invariably takes over at the start of project, and we all knew it was going to be a long haul.
And I say that as a person with a few ships awaiting release, too. While I really want my Carrack, it's far more important that they make it good. The estimated release times have moved back a few time, but that's the expense of great work in the rest of the game. Backers seem to largely accept this as the cost of buying into an in-progress development: priorities must be fluid, and we have to make do.
The trick to Kickstarter is to only invest what you can lose (like anything!) and then be patient. Starcitizen is stupendously ambitious, and is going to cost a fortune to develop. They successfully made the transistion to being nearly self-sustained, basically using Kickstarter to kickstart their development process.
The original goal didn't include any of the massive stretch goals that were added in as funding ballooned. CR has been completely forthright about the schedule as the stretch goals have been designed and built. It's not overdue because nobody is expecting it to be finished right now except Derek Smart, arguably the world's shittiest game designer. Saying it's "totally, unequivocally overdue" because we've passed the original planned release date in November of 2012 on the Kickstarter page is totally, unequivocally disingenuous.
There was another release date 2016. Passed that too. Now there is this Vulcan thing. Meanwhile the full game universe is nowhere to be seen. They have now given up setting a release date at all.
I don't understand where the community gets all that positive vibes from but I've lost it and yes....I invested too.
I maintain positivity because it's not vaporware, just in feature hell. There's no silver bullet for that, just metric crap-tonnes of lead bullets, as they say.
And expectations are everything. I had endless hours of fun with Privateer as a kid, and had a blast with Freelancer when I was older. That covers a large chunk of my life, so my patience is tempered, a bit. Eve fills the niche while I wait, and I'm very excited to see my old memories come back in HD in a new universe. What's another 5 years out of 25? (And I'm serious - I had fun with Privateer, and in retrospect it was kinda terrible! Pushing past the uncanny valley of VR sim is effort worth waiting for!)
Honestly? Expectations are screwy. Eve has a sophisticated character creation system, and it's essentially to take a 200x200 pixel picture. Just fantastic, and almost as useless. But it really makes the game feel bigger and more real. Eve's taken more than 15 years to get to where it is, and that's sort of where I hold my standard. Time ain't the barrier to me.
We share our experience in the past but I must disagree on eve. Eves development is comparable to the one of WoW where it was nice to play in the early stages and only if you look back now, it looks terrible. Eve grew on something that was fabulous back then already. I know...I was hooked.
What we have with SC now is the shattered result of all those terrible management decisions and a CEO who does not take the critics serious (probably also because of this one popular "critics" criticism). I'm not sure if anything good can grow from this but I'm pretty sure some huge changes in management could help out here to at least get a clear and realistic target.
They owe it to the backers even if the loudest of them don't care. This is a project which will be an example for others. Future will show what kind of example...
You've got some kind of axe to grind and it's showing through in every one of your posts here. You haven't played the game, you have said a bunch of stuff that are outright lies, and a bunch of other stuff that doesn't reconcile with reality.
Do you actually read the emails and participate in testing? I am not even an evocatus tester and I can play in the persistent universe. I think you're thinking about the fact that -- before the final game launches -- there will be a universe reset. But what you've just said here is not true. [0]
> Please note: Even though we call it the ‘Live’ service, it’s still very much in the Alpha stage of development, and there are tons of features and optimizations to be added. Players on the ‘Live’ service are very much testers, too!
We are talking about 130 million dollar. A hill of mismanagement, ideas stacked on ideas and Spawn offs to keep the hype running. I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are talking about. This game is the peek of that new Alpha Game wave that is flooding steam for example. It's like now everybody wants to be like SZ. Greenlight some rough concepts, ???, profit/cancel.
Okay, so you've played the game and enjoy it immensely and think it's one of the best things to come along in years. You think it will serve as a fantastic example of the future of game development. I'm not sure what SZ is but you have such a high opinion of it that I might check it out. Thanks for the recommendation.
I guess I just don't see the stretch goals as bonus wins. They caused the whole game to be rethought and redesigned. They're integral to what the game is expected to be and have driven the ambition to make the game better. And again, even if we look at the components individually, many are still late from the times they were estimated to be released. And I wasn't being disengenous: I'm talking about simply the Carrack, the part I'm most excited about. But CIG's gotten good about not promising dates anymore, a lesson every Kickstarter and development group should learn!
My point is that lateness isn't the sin people make it out to be. A well polished and expansive game can come late, and so long as the medium still does it justice it'll be great. All the gnashing of teeth and whining will be forgotten as people play fun. Setting expectations for deliverables is far better than expectation for delivery times, since you can miss deadlines while still delivering (leaving you with a lose-win pattern). And it's better to set expectations realistically rather than disappoint, because then at best you can deliver disappointment on time. SC has some damn good pedigree, so I think it's easy to believe they'll deliver on quality and expectation, and that overrides everything else.
I was thrilled about NMS (and had a blast with it), and I think it panned a bit because it rushed. There was some noise that warped expectations, and yet the game became just what it set out to be. Further updeates made it even more fun to play, and to quote Day9 "I will play the shit out of No Man's Sky 2." Heck, we even have celebrated failures like VoxelQuest, which is one of my favorite KickStarter epics. Obduction was just what I expected from Cyan. And I'm honestly kinda excited to see if Hiveswap manages to deliver despite hype. Broken Age was a bit bizzare, since it actually probably would have been better if it stopped in the middle (but still a lot of fun). We live in such a golden age of choice it's possible that Dual Universe will be good!
Imagine having NMS, SC, and DU all with their own take on a large persistent universe - pick the style you like! I'll happily wait years to see that, and we can usually play them before they're done, which takes the sting out of waiting I think.
What are you even talking about, leaking a little oil? This is exactly what they're supposed to be doing. I'm interested in what about Star Citizen development you think qualifies as "leaking a little oil".
I've always been cautious on these sites since failure is always an option. I tend to fund mostly games that have no chance of being made otherwise, for being niche or part of my weird passions (I love logistic survival games, there were none good being produced, backed factorio)
I prefer to back those even if they fail than back mainstream succesful projects that would have been made anyway.
Well, it's not a store. You're funding development of something that may not otherwise exist. They are pitching you their idea, you decide if it's something you're interested in and give them some of your money.
I've never backed anything on Kickstarter. But if everything you have backed has delivered something to you, it sounds like you've chosen projects very well!
>Only a few of the games I've backed ended up in a product that I would've bought
I don't have any special insight but I get the feeling that this is how very many game development investments pan out. Generally I think it's safe to say that commercial software projects are hyped and oversold.
It becomes most galling with games because they are software that people WANT to engage with, rather than being forced to.
You're approaching it the wrong way. When I back I never expect anything and I most often forget about the game when it's actually released. I'm still happy backing and supporting the creators though.
That's the most pragmatic approach. I don't give money to something untested and with no guarantees of getting a working/high-quality product (which aren't covered by regular consumer rights).
My first time visiting the US was by car, as we planned a road trip to visit some of the bigger cities and parks along the way.
We were held for 2 hours at the first border crossing, since the agent processing our paperwork believed the address we provided for our first stop was made up: "There is no address in SF that is just the number 1, it's always in the hundreds.".
We were being treated as if he had made his catch of the day and we'd be denied entry, or worse, any time now.
They had to verify the address (surprise, some streets start with the number 1, who would've thought?) and then another officer gave us the needed visa and let us into the country, all the while the original officer was glaring at us as if we somehow managed to find a loophole to gain entry into the country.
One big problem with Timthumb was that several themes came pre-bundled with it and to make matters worse, they often changed the name of the file, so that it wasn't enough to just scan for the filename but also for variants and file contents.
At the time it was the exploit that kept on giving, since you would suddenly find another timthumb related file on the server that was being targeted, followed by another, ...
In the end, a lot of the hosts simply blocked requests to timthumb related files, in order to try and stop it on the server level and not the individual account level.
As you mentioned, these days the sites that I'm being contacted about that have been defaced or were hosting abusive content, are usually related to severely outdated plugins. I haven't seen a timthumb issue in quite some time, but had to restore a site that was affected by the original(!) Revolution slider exploit recently, due to having a several years old version of it installed.
