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Messages - bjlong

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346
Other Games / Re: An MMO...
« on: June 27, 2009, 05:36:26 pm »
One way to make regional skills without the metagamey skills-only-work-in-certain-areas while keeping teleporting is making gaining skills time-consuming at first, and making teleporting difficult to have as a commute. For example, you teleport to a new area. You bought a round-trip ticket, so you are given a ticket stub. That's it, that's all you have. That and some equipment.

You head to the local dojo, where the master hemms and haws about making you his student, and tells you to come back tomorrow.

You head back, and check the ticket prices for tomorrow. You notice that ticket prices have gone up significantly. The teller says that because you teleported recently, that makes teleportation more difficult. This could be an exponential effect, which means even power gamers would have trouble after some time.

You go to your local dojo, and the guy there hems and haws, and tells you to come back tomorrow. After a few days or weeks of standing around and maybe performing menial tasks, he declares you "worthy" and you become his student. Now you can start learning! You wouldn't have been able to keep this up at that other dojo.

Here's the thing, though. After you become an accomplished student, you should be able to 'port to a dojo for a day to learn some, possibly gaining a boost to your fighting abilities, possibly gaining a new skill. The waiting period would only have to be done if you were "unaccomplished." Similar stuffs can be done with crafting.

347
Other Games / Re: An MMO...
« on: June 26, 2009, 10:01:38 am »
Quote from: Shoku on June 25, 2009, 04:42:50 pm
If a half pound chunk is available to a low level player with a low level pocketbook then it's not scarce.

You could sort of juggle this issue by allowing the item unmade and then remade if the artisan managed to produce something of higher quality else the material be reduced to near worthless scrap. Seems like you could make it so people would want to funnel available resources into novice learning and so on up to the top if you did it right but seeing as this would take so many interperson reactions the benefit needs to be large enough to make up for the time it takes if there aren't so many people just can just find anyone a tier below yourself.

I'm not entirely sure that I follow you, but I think you see ways that we can balance the learning curve so that novices etc can make useful, if not top-quality stuff.

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If you are traveling for more than a day something is very wrong. It's nice for immersion but horrible in every other aspect.

Now, if you combine the foraging skill with my idea for food and water only being an issue when you were away from easy access (expedition mode,) you'd have a progressive mechanism for how far from city centers players could go other than that the monsters get tougher~

Traveling for more than a day is necessary for the idea of true wildernesses. That said, if you travel in civilized places, you should come across hamlets very, very often.

And the foraging thing? That was my idea. It'd also help with "guides" as a way to make money.

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Nobody tries to make griefing easy.
Yeah, but we could make greifing-prone activities time consuming--for example, mining. This would be in the spirit of the game and allow guards etc to be effective.

348
Other Games / Re: An MMO...
« on: June 25, 2009, 10:25:28 am »
Quote from: Shoku on June 25, 2009, 07:06:23 am
"No, you can't have iron because you'll just turn it into garbage and those of us with money want some high quality gear. You can learn how to make armor good when this becomes the land of milk and honey but for now you sure as hell can't afford it."

I suppose this would require some balancing--iron shouldn't be prohibitively expensive, but iron miners need to make a living. Adjusting carrying capacity and how fine-grained the units are might help a player-based economy. (Most armor needs surprisingly small amounts of metal. Not just-a-few-grains small, but around 4-8 pounds for a complete set is realistic. So you could train on gauntlets with a half-pound chunk easily.)

Pack mules should pay for themselves quickly for miners. Might help.

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Just having food and water to rest after battles with is annoying to most people. It will be easy to make it about as exciting as most professions are but that's not saying much.

True, but I take Harvest Moon as a proof-of-concept. Cutting down the food requirement to 1 meal per day that you log in might make things more forgiving. It would also make travel more interesting if you could forage for food. 

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As far as long range travel and other stuff goes, please remember that we should be able to play this game in 1 hr. increments at the least, and 24 hr powergaming segments should be discouraged.

Scarcity exploits should definitely be looked at. One way to look at this is by adding in taxes, restrictive limits on carrying capacity, and more making scarce resources pay out slower, and the pay not last as long. This will encourage the formation of "companies" or what-have-you to exploit this resource. Probably not a bad thing, either.

Fixed for you.

The idea of greifers in a free-form world like this would require guards. If we require that they be PC guards, that'd be an easy way to make money. It would also be boring. Possibly hiring NPC guards would help. I'd like to make the point that greifing should be hard to do in these worlds. That'd help some.

349
Other Games / Re: An MMO...
« on: June 23, 2009, 07:08:25 pm »
The problem of forever behind is put off if you make the crappy fighters/equipment/whatever still in demand. For example, if every suit of armor comes from a PC armorsmith, then even the not-as-good armorsmiths could make money. Quantity versus quality, in short. The functions for crafting should be noisy, too, with different peaks for different qualities according to some techniques in crafting.

As for food etc., this deserves a look. Cities could require certain amounts of food for the PC to not need rations of his/her own, and pay good money for them. PC rations are an excellent idea as long as the hunger system isn't demanding or annoying. The key is to make PC farming be fun and exciting.

As far as long range travel and other stuff goes, please remember that we should be able to play this game in 1 hr. increments at the least, and 24 hr powergaming segments should be discouraged.

Scarcity exploits should definitely be looked at. One way to look at this is by adding in taxes, restrictive limits on carrying capacity, and more making scarce resources pay out slower, and the pay not last as long. This might encourage the formation of "companies" or what-have-you to exploit this resource.

350
General Discussion / Re: World hunger 'hits one billion'
« on: June 22, 2009, 07:41:40 pm »
Also, politics. Specifically, the type of politics that says "Food? We don't need no stinkin' food! MARIE! KEEP THE STARVING PEOPLE AWAY FROM THE CAMERAS!"

351
Other Games / Re: Big Bad Thread of Games to Play Before You Die
« on: June 22, 2009, 12:29:13 pm »
Myst 1, 2, and 3. The ending of 3 is particularly moving, IMO, and meeting someone in the game is always startling. To say the least. That's not even getting in to the gameplay.

352
General Discussion / Re: Giant robots are a terrible idea so...
« on: June 22, 2009, 10:06:52 am »
I started writing a post, but after doing some reading to make sure I knew what I was talking about, I decided we have different views of nanotech. I see nanotech as using nanomaterials to perform an action on the nanoscale that ends up being useful to us in a human scale. You see nanotech as anything that incorporates nanomaterials.

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamantane

The simplest diamondoid has been made easily manufacturable.

353
General Discussion / Re: Winning the War on Unapproved Military Tactics
« on: June 22, 2009, 09:24:06 am »
Quote from: Idiom on June 22, 2009, 12:56:36 am
1) We need to gas the whole region with some kind of relaxants. I support Israel keeping their holy land they were given back. That's it. The only thing I am certain of about Palestine is that I am amused they haven't been able to take the land back. As Servant Corps is apparently more on top of current events than I am, talk to him.
Quote from: Servant Corps on June 22, 2009, 12:33:37 am

Sure they do. Fatah currently support the two-state solution. Hamas offically doesn't, but it has stated that they will accept the two-state solution if such a solution gets approved by a referendum of Palestianians and are willing to make cease-fires with Israel in the meantime. And polls shows that both Israelis and Palestianians support the idea of the two-state solution.

It's all the minor issues, such as Jewish settlements, East Jersasulm, and the right of return, that keep the issue fermenting.

And, of course, the focus on Palestine means that there are less focus on other terrorists such as the nationalist PKK (Kurdish terrorists attacking Turkey), the Maoists in Nepal and India, Chrisitan rebels in India, abortion bombers in USA, etc. This is a War on Terrorism, not the War on Islamic Fundmentalists.

Interesting. I was under the impression that Hamas was entirely against the two-state solution. I'll have to look at the situation more.

Also, I'd like to point out that the abortion bombers in the USA are few and far between compared to a lot of your examples. As a target, they're very low priority.

Quote from: Idiom on June 22, 2009, 12:56:36 am
2)Depends on:
-Public perception of the groups. Which would gain voter support.
-Interests to us. Who controlling what territory/resources could benefit us?
Which of course could end with us supplying both sides (but the group that falls under the second query will win).

That's very Machevellian of you. Any thought as to how the arms-dealer image would follow us? And (hypothetically) you would support a villian with good PR over someone with better methods and intentions?

Quote from: Idiom on June 22, 2009, 12:56:36 am
3)HUGE overbloated military spending that drained our surplus overseas right when a depression is overdue in response to a single attack that lead to the overthrowing of one dictator (how many to go now?) and terrible international relations... we really overreacted which is exactly what I think they wanted, horrible timing, but that was the last administration and can't be undone. Yes, civilians are concerned about economy right now. I'm renting out rooms because of it. Really, if they can keep the costs low enough, I don't care what we're doing overseas right now. We just can't do what we did again, and fortunately our new administration is not as insane and can understand that.

Sounds like you object more to the peak cost and the the timing than the bottom line, which isn't really a factor in a war of attrition. Seems to me, then, that with a little more time, we can safely step out of Iraq (save for the obligatory army base) and call this a success.

Quote from: Idiom on June 22, 2009, 12:56:36 am
4) IE pressure from us for other nations to give into angry people's demands rather than us telling the angry people to shove it up their arse. Not necessarily the Mid East (would require us participating in genocide I think). More like us telling Britain to finally completely leave Northern Ireland already. Is this an acceptable solution or course of action that will ever be taken? Ha. I wish. But exactly that. Politics are fun when you can make a mockery. I know just enough to pretend that I know.

For the most part, countries try to make concessions to upset groups. Terrorism happens when a country can't or won't give the groups enough. Generally, terrorists are fringe groups supported by a disgruntled populace. Simply giving them what they want is difficult. For example, the Northern Ireland problem is compounded by a boatload of people in Dublin who want to remain part of the UK. Each case is unique, where simply giving in is very difficult to implement.

354
General Discussion / Re: Giant robots are a terrible idea so...
« on: June 22, 2009, 08:56:24 am »
Yeah, I forgot we were talking about crysis-style suits.

I'd still say they're quite some time off. Manufacturing things in the nanoscale requires significant noise reduction, which is helped greatly by having a bulky apparatus. Developments in biotech will help, but, ultimately, as long we're using the manufacturing techniques we know now, we won't be able to make nanoscale stuffs with anything smaller than your torso. (Not counting the stuff you could get for free with huge quantities of assemblies, like tables with pistons for legs.)

IWM: The bullet stuff is more realistic than the armor stuff.

355
General Discussion / Re: Giant robots are a terrible idea so...
« on: June 22, 2009, 08:08:08 am »
Baughn: Are you talking about nanotech assemblers? If so, we're quite a ways off from that, and even then, I doubt we'll be making nanotech cheap for a long, long time. I should mention that I work on the edge of nanotech, with NSOM technologies, to be precise. If you want, I could go into why I think this.

Also, I don't think I made this clear, but you are right about the singularity. I usually picture the singularity as involving transhumans, somehow, and often need to be reminded that this need not be the case.

E: When I say on the edge of nanotech, I mean that my work goes from the microscale to the nanoscale, and the stuff I work with is probably going to make a circuit board in the nanoscale soon. Not that I'm at the cutting edge. >_>

356
General Discussion / Re: Winning the War on Unapproved Military Tactics
« on: June 21, 2009, 08:45:33 pm »
Idiom: I'd like to know what you advocate for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, since the Palestinians aren't willing to accept a two-state solution.

I'd also like to know how you'd determine which terrorist groups to support in the case of conflicting terrorist groups.

I'd also like to know why you think that we're losing a war of attrition, when, as I can see it, we've passed the peak in violence in Iraq, and civilian political interest is focused solely on the economy. I couldn't find any simple resources on casualties in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, I'd like to know what exactly you would do to "solve the problems that created terrorism in the first place." As I understand it, you'd have to be talking about specifically Islamic terrorism against the western world, rather than terrorism in general.

357
General Discussion / Re: What's up with the laws these days?
« on: June 21, 2009, 04:36:53 pm »
Yeah, my concern isn't that they were having sex--obviously, this is something that will happen, like it or not--but rather that she made such a decision that (IMO) clearly shows that she didn't think through the consequenses. The pictures, once taken, could be spread at her expense, coming back to bite her as she looks for jobs, or even (gasp!) looks for colleges. I'm not sure about the legal response, but this is a problem with this 14-year-old.

358
General Discussion / Re: Winning the War on Unapproved Military Tactics
« on: June 21, 2009, 10:12:16 am »
Terrorism is a mediocre military tactic. All it can do is force a stalemate. See the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Thing is, terrorism rates have plummeted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seems like we've made some progress. Really, the way to remove terrorism as a tactic is to make it unprofitable, which requires both military retaliation and little media coverage.

359
General Discussion / Re: Nuclear fusion
« on: June 20, 2009, 07:52:08 pm »
Apologies, this is correct. However, this mass is unlike any that we experience in our day-to-day lives, so I find it much easier to explain as a "massless particle," with the caveats thrown in if people seem interested.

360
General Discussion / Re: Nuclear fusion
« on: June 20, 2009, 06:27:01 pm »
Photons specifically don't have mass. If they did, they'd not be able to travel at the speed of light. It's a relativity problem. See the above posts on momentum.

Doomzappy is a good name. So is Boomstick. And Dan.

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