Exitium

Denial! Denial! It wasn't a spoof picture. Ducks do stupid things like that all the time and it's one of the reasons why some city councils in England are being petitioned to cover up sewer grates to protect these endangered ducks whose population is dwindling each year due to getting run over by vehicles and falling into pits all the time. Poor ducks. :D

Euthanize this thread.

I wish, that once and for all people would stop making D&D games with D&D locales and D&D rules. I mean, don't get me wrong - D&D has its place, but I'd like to see something new!

The price of games in Asia is steadily rising and is blamed on piracy regardless of the fact that more and more people own computers and are willing to pay for decently priced games (e.g. ones that don't cost half your salary). Locally produced games, like Prince of Qin and Ragnarok Online that cost a small fragment of imported games, have a far bigger market share than imported games because they cost less, and the existence of these games just goes to prove how willing most people are to buy original titles. I guarantee you, you won't be able to find a pirated version of either of these games in the market because people actually like the packaging of an original game and are definitely willing to pay for them if they're affordable - even though they cost much more than pirated ones do (which cost a dollar more than the CD they're burned on).

They downloaded it because they may have been: a) interested in seeing if it was worth buying B) not interested in paying for it in the first place. Even if the pirated copy was not available, they wouldn't have gone out and bought it. You have yet to disprove the argument that piracy results in lost sales. As for the copy working better because the copy protection was removed, that should be an argument FOR piracy, and not against, because what you virtually said that pirated copies were superior to the legitimate ones that have to be paid for. Who in the right mind would pay for an inferior copy of a product which he could get for free? It could be comparable to paying less for an illegal copy of a hardcover book with legible printing instead of paying more for a legal copy of a softcover book with its pages stuck together and many of its words blurred out due to poor printer quality. If you're wondering where this happens, it happens in China. The illegal copies of the hardcover Harry Potter books sold better in China than the actual legal, softcover copies that cost five times more and had illegible printing due to shoddy production costs. How's that for irony? Concerning legal copies of games, I think that many would-be piraters would pay for games like Warcraft 3, Diablo 2 and Counterstrike for their online multiplayer features which are only available to legitimate buyers, so in cases such as those, the only reason people would pirate them is to try them out offline, which do not have any of the online content.

Obviously Gromnir, you have no understanding whatsoever of economics. The mechanics of supply and demand, in basic form basically goes to suggest that the lower the demand, the higher the cost. If less people bought cars for whatever reason, the cost of the cars would rise due to the lack of profit. Game publishers, the RIAA and your hypothetical car dealers could learn a thing or two from Walmart and decrease the cost of their products in order to increase sales instead of increasing the price during the heavy sales period to make an extra profit because they'll only be losing potential customers who refuse to pay the higher costs. You say this as if a Lamborghini dealer would let you test drive the car. The only way you can test drive is if you're definitely buying, and have basically paid downpayment on it. At most, if not all of these expensive dealerships they run a triple credit check on you the moment you show interest in any of their cars. So much for try-before-you-buy, eh, Grom?

I'm curious as to why you have a PETA advertisement link in your signature, agris. Would you happen to belong to the organization?

'Theft' is largely a concept invented by the rich Lords to protect their own interests. Their refusal to share their goods and services with the rest of the community and their monopoly on certain assets (e.g. food, masonry, clothing) was a successful bid to force others to 'work for a living' by working for them. By working for the wealthy, the serfs were given the services and resources they required to live. If they were more productive, their employers would have more wealth, and having more wealth meant having an excess of goods, which they would occasionally share with their serfs, as a reward for their productivity. Now, if a person took something without working for it, it was considered an act of 'theft' and the person, the 'freeloader' was branded a 'thief' by the Lords so that the other serfs would feel betrayed and cheated by this thief and penalize him for his actions. This is of course, the most classic case of misdirection. Instead of criminalizing theft, the serfs should have, more or less, rebelled against their lords for hoarding the damn resources in the first place. I believe that people should work for a living, but I don't believe that a single person, or party, should be allowed to hoard and amass resources for distribution, as a middleman, making a huge sum of money based on the work that other people do. People should be allowed to trade and barter their own materials and resources without some fat jackass keeping it all to himself and thriving off the market of supply and demand by monopolizing the most wanted resources and selling them at a steep price, creating a biased economy (in favor of making himself rich). It's shrewd, but I don't think cruelty should be awarded with wealth. If you work hard, and if you work for somebody else, just ask yourself why your work doesn't even pay you as much as your boss gets. Chances are, he just sits around the office and tells people to do the thinking for him while he makes money out of other people's efforts. This is essentially the basis of publishing. Just don't get it mixed up with distribution, because distribution actually takes some work.

Money 'rightfully' earned by publishers who have too much money to even fit into the banks who overcharge their products on purpose because they know they can make a small killing from the people who buy their products? Wow, pity them that they won't be seeing their 18th Jaguar because some acne-riddled kid refuses to spend his monthly salary on a game and has to instead spend it on college fees. Not too long ago (in the 1980s) CEOs had a monthly salary of $20,000 dollars. It was considered good money, and still is, but somewhere along the line they decided to boost their income into the 6 to 7 figure zone, bankrupting their companies, inflating the economy and amassing a large fortune for themselves in the process. What the hell happened to balance? If this keeps up, you regular folk with your regular salaries will become poor in 10-20 years because your money will be considered valueless compared to the billions of dollars held by the top 1%. Yeah, that's a society I want to live in. Yeah, pity them.

More power to you.

... and it annoys! Publishers like Electronic Arts and Herve Caen's Interplay annoy me to no end. Sometimes I even wonder why anyone would feel bad for ripping them off when all it means is that the boss can't buy his 19th Porsche.

Well okay, I guess you have a good point, Gromnir, but I still don't see why the law should favor the first world (e.g. USA! USA! USA!) and screw everybody else. I think that even though piracy is wrong, everyone should be allowed the same luxury of computer games as anybody living in the first world. I don't think these people should be penalized just because a few selfish publishers refuse to lower their prices for these countries. Don't they realize how detrimental it is to their own sales figures? I'm pretty sure that if imported games cost as much as locally made ones in Asia did which are priced decently at 45 dollars in their own currency, rather than $45 US the imported games would sell just as well. In case you were wondering, locally made games in Asia do indeed sell well and are the only reason why games like Lineage and the Korean edition of Starcraft manage to sell better than the imported games. It's all comes down to idiocy on the part of the major publishers. If anyone even thinks to mention the following sentence in any form: "If you live in a third world country... TOUGH!" I'll have to point that out as the reason why piracy is so rampant and why local governments don't even bother to do anything about it. A lot of these people see piracy as a solution to a problem that no one else will fix.

Wealthy people don't steal bread, Gromnir. It is the poor who suffer from these laws and I would ask whether you want to live in Sudan. edit: Oh I'm sure you could argue that some wealthy people do steal bread but they probably do it for some psychological rush. Still, why penalize the poor to serve as a deterrent to a few rich psychopaths?

Sadly, suggestion #4 is missing from Silent Storm and the end result is a little too much waiting. Fog of war isn't a bad thing to implement at all, provided it's implemented correctly and in the right places. TOEE's dense fog of war in the towns was totally unnecessary and as I found out, they were a late addition to the game by Atari, and not by Troika. I will digress for a moment and state that Atari also added the 'piss fog' (there's no other way to call it) to the TOEE box art. :angry: It would be nice if Silent Storm provided for a 'concurrent turns' option in the same vein as Temple of Elemental Evil, as it would certainly speed up a lot of the rounds which as a previous poster noted, take too long. As for TOEE's condition, all I have to say is to wait for the next patch. It's being worked on. It's not some damn rumor, either.

All games today are copy protected, GamerFromStart. You might not realize it but if you tried to duplicate your cd it would probably reject your attempt, hence making it rather difficult (For the average user) to make a back-up copy of the CD, which is in your legal right to do. The mere fact that some of the copy protection mechanisms slow-down your game's performance (sometimes to a halt, causing random freezes or outright crashes) is unacceptable to many, and is precisely the reason why a lot of people opt to download 'fixed' executable files to circumvent the copy protection, which are also legal, by the way - so long as you own a legitimate copy of the software. I think it's a real hassle to search for your CD just because you want to run a game for the sole purpose of initializing the copy protection mechanism when everything you need to run the game is on your hard drive. I'd rather not take the CD out of its case, or it might get damaged through wear-and-tear or outright shatter if the CD is of low quality, as evidenced by the first batch of Neverwinter Nights cds, which didn't even come with a jewel case. If anything, copy protection serves only as an annoyance to real customers who paid for the product. The fact that there is no game or software in the market with copy protection that has ever been left uncracked should serve as a message to the industry about the futility of copy protection. Do any of you remember the copy-protection mechanism that was easily bypassed by pressing the shift key? Word.

Thank you! It looks much cleaner now and people can address the actual subject in discussion instead of engaging in unwitty, infantile arguments.

Can you be any more clueless? If the courts listened to your suggestions the already-congested prisons will be clogged with people who download games and music. I really don't think that their offences are any way comparable to a rapist who brutalizes women, child molesterers, carjackers, bank robbers, street thugs and murderers. If such a law goes through, not only would it elevate software piracy to the level of hard crime, but degrade real hard crimes to being nothing more than minor fusses. It's bad enough that the system is full of (otherwise productive) pot smokers and relatively innocent people who just got caught doing ecstacy or crack. Your suggestion for harsher punishment is ridiculous. Enforcement and punishment for minor crimes like software theft (which is, unarguably, a crime nonetheless) is an asinine solution to a problem that will always be pervasive to the society we live in. Notice how states with the death sentence hardly have lower murder rates than any other state. In fact, studies suggest that murderers who know they are going to be sentenced to death are more likely to commit killing sprees than those who are able to get a maximum life sentence because they feel that they have absolutely nothing to lose. In Muslim socities where the punishment for many crimes (rape, murder, drug dealing) is death, the crime rates are even higher than those of more civilized socities. The threat of getting your hands cut off never stopped those thieves from committing theft and all it does is leave those poor people useless, unproductive and completely worthless to society without their hands, so how is that a good solution to anything? As for computer games, I think that the best way to ensure a legitimate sale over that of an illegal download is to lower the prices to something affordable (70 dollars for NWN is hardly affordable to most people, especially those living outside the US) and to include extras in the package that people consider worth paying for. US Publishers could take a cue from Poland's publishers by including things like thick manuals, a help/hint guide, a novel (Poland's TOEE release comes with one), limited edition souviners (like bumper stickers, baseball caps, or a t-shirt) and most importantly proper jewel cases - NWN came in paper sheets. Most of these items would be included in the "collector's edition" in the United States, priced at an unaffordable 85 dollars. Production costs aren't even a quarter as high as that considering the fact that everything in it would be mass manufactured and not freaking hand made. The profiteering has got to stop.

Once a thief, always a thief.

Yeah, it kind of does. Heh!

It's also considered dishonorable to loot the corpse of a valiant warrior (Samurai) and people who do so more or less sign their own death warrants.

I second that idea. Samurais kick ass! I'd really like to see more Chinese or Japanese oriented games in the market, though I refer not to anime or Final Fantasy but instead refer to historical settings which are really quite interesting, even more so than medieval Europe, IMO. Besides, Kung Fu is the epitome of badass and Yin/Yang would work well as a Karma/Reputation oriented RPG system with Feng Shui for magic - it's like a winning combination right there.

Majority votes yes.

This is a joke, right?

its all you babe Project X is better than sex, to paraphrase IPLY.

In an ideal situation the game design shouldn't have to compensate for weaknesses of a system. The more conditions or clauses included, the less room there is for creativity. For example, assuming Torment was TB, would it have been a good decision to remove the cranium rats reduce tedious combat? Probably not, as good chunk of the plot - ie Many as One (which was good) would have to be changed. I think that the implementation of cranium rats or similar creatures would be a very happy welcome in a turn-based gaming experience. The experience created by the 'joining' of cranium rats to form a powerful mage-like collective capable of casting spells of mass destruction is certainly cause for much suspense in a pen and paper Planescape game. Just in case you were wondering, I was referring to the very weak rats of Fallout and in other words, referring to 'weak' creatures that would never ever pose a threat to the player character. Cranium rats do pose a unique challenge (in which they assimilate into a collective to cast spells), unlike their regular rodent counterparts which serve as nothing more than fodder and annoyance for the player in the late game.