Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh no not another one of these threads. I'm sorry, but there is literally no point arguing about religion on the internet. Allow me to summarise the arguments:

Religious:

God is so impossibly omniscient and omnipotent that anything you claim to disprove his/her existance is simply a fault of your inferior organic reasoning. Also a few people and a book say he/she exists. Therefore god exists.

Atheistic:

We haven't seen god poke his head out of the clouds and say "Hi! I'm God, and yes, I do exist!" so therefore he almost certainly doesn't exist.


As you can see these arguments aren't provable or disprovable (except by god him/her/itself). Anybody arguing about this is essentially just preaching with the futile hope of converting people. As much as I would like to see people be logical and just give up on religion already, it is an unfortunate fact of human nature that we will find patterns in anything and then try to find something to explain those patterns. Once we have found that something, then we will selectively search for evidence to support it, ignoring evidence against it.

The only tried-and-tested way to get people to believe in the same thing as you is to demonstrate that your belief allows you to explain things that others can't. This is the purpose of science, and only through millions of years (at least) of scientific progress will we be able to truely demonstrate/disprove the existance of deities. The way I see it, god could well exist but his possible domain is limited to everything outside our current understanding of science. The only way to truely know whether or not god exists is to understand everything about the universe. Once we can explain every phenomenon observed then and only then will we be able to safely say that there isn't a god. Until that point I don't care if people want to claim that god created the big bang, just as long as they don't try to contradict observed fact (such as the anti-evolution lobby).

please..for god's sake...(ZING!)
This isn't such a bad thread, it can very well be enlightening and provide some insight into many things, and aspects in philosophy, religion and the like.
The bay12 forums are full of a rugged bunch of intelligent people, don't underestimate them.
If we don't make this thread into " hey, you're wrong and you should die and burn in hell/in nothingness" or whatever, it could be quite good.
Me for example tried to chip in my five cents to see what you guys thought.  My intention was never to convert someone.
I just find Armok's statements a little....well, arrogant, and I think he should stop thinking he is the king of the universe for a second.

On the topic of what you said; yes, nothing here is provable nor disprovable. But that's kinda the point of discussing it. We gain something from discussing bullcrap like this.
And, btw, we can probably never get to understand everything in the universe like you said, since we would have to have an infinite amount of storage to store all the memory. Since the universe is infinite( in some regard).
For example, there is always something made out of something. Like how molecules are made out of atoms. Atoms are made out of sub-atomic particles and so on.
It's always made of something else, and we will never find the bottom it seems.
But ey, just my opinion again. Have fun trying to make this thread work again ; P

Quote from: Tofu on February 28, 2010, 02:13:30 am

That must have been one hell of a cool dream..
I....remember I once had a dream about my female cousin running around in my other cousin's basement, in circles, naked with a large blue penis of weird shape.
I have never been the same again.

Disturbing...

You have no idea....

That must have been one hell of a cool dream..
I....remember I once had a dream about my female cousin running around in my other cousin's basement, in circles, naked with a large blue penis of weird shape.
I have never been the same again.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You people really don't get this, do you? The existence of god is not decided by a popularity contest. If a god exists, that's a fact abaut the world, not a value judgement.  I might be "mal-adjusted" but being unpopular dosn't make me less good at maths and biology and philosophy. And yes, those things are EXACTLY what you can use to tell if a god exists or not. Also, did you miss the part where I included philosophy and RELIGION as courses I have top grades in?

Sir Pseudonymous, you are confusing philosophy with the history of philosophers. And in fact, even throughout they were wrong, their opinions were very very much better than other peoples, by virtue of having spent their entire freeking lives studying and thinking about this stuff.

WTF is up with people here thinking they could do as well as professionals in their hosen feild of specialization? Do you also think you could build just as good a spaceship as a  rocket scientist, cure mental illness as well as a psychologist, or create new strains of rice as well as a microbiologist? Philosophy is a science and philosopher is a profession.

For the first part, you referring to us as "you people " insult me slightly..ugh..
I used to respect you, man. What happened to you ?Ah, well it doesn't matter though.

what blows all of what you have said out of the water is that everything that you see is what your brain has interpreted from your surroundings, as it is with all of us. Then how can you call your opinion "the ultimate answer to life and everythingamajig" or whatever.
Everything that exists is what you interpret it to be. No one's wrong, no one's right.
In the same sense that you might say that grass is green and you associate it with some sort of color in your head, doesn't mean it's the same color that I see, or my neighbor for that matter. Since it's just the name of the color that you know from us.
Then you can't really be sure of how everything is, since it's you interpreting it.
Sooo then everything in the universe is in fact decided in a "popularity contest" or whatever....I think.

I don't know if I make much sense, but I'm tired( up for a couple of days. Insomnia)
I'm trying to help.
And please..this thread isn't "the cancer that kills general discussion" or whatever, as long as YOU keep it civil. ESPECIALLY YOU, ARMOK D: <

I thought the Mass Effect syndrome was that the drab characters in a game would spout their life stories if you so much as nudge them...?

So the new version is just around the bend, ey? Been waiting for this for like a year now, but it will totally be worth it! Shit I'm so excited....


Hmmm....I've been wondering for a while how things like adrenaline will be handled. If it's just in the reqs or something then just point me in that direction, but I wonder how it will all pan out.
Will it just raise the stats temporarily, or will it work the same way as, say, how rage or trance works now ? ( I don't fully know how that works either.)

... Far less, most likely. I think the donation model only is a good alternative for really odd products (like DF) that normally would be impossible to sell.

That was kinda my original point, since I don't think the mainstream part of the industry could, or for that matter ever would think of it, as it is in human nature to milk the shit out of anything that can be milk, so be it down to the marrow or not.
Though what I would like a lot personally is this "business" model to be for a lot of other indie games developers, as that would spark more creativity and generally better games.
Since you can only make money if you stand out from the crowd of other indie developers, with creativity, or technical skills.
I'm not sure if this would work as good, but I think maybe it could...maybe.

....and even today the profits are most likely pretty small - even if they're in the dozens of millions, it's still an insanely small profit margin compared to the development costs.

Not really, except for some I guess. If you Have a mainstream game(most usually cost anything between 40 - 100 million dollars I presume)  that, let's say, has cost the developers 50 mill altogether, and has grossed a little over 150 million, which is a fair sum.
Most of this would have gone to the publisher, and the actual game selling shops, like the bloodsuckers at gamestop or something. There would still be enough money for the developers to cover the costs of development, that is their employees' wages, and have a little on the side.
And in the end, it's just a job, no matter what.
If they would cover the expenses of the wages and have some millions left, it would be profit. They won't be rich anytime soon it seems, but they still have their wages covered.
This seem to be the general bajizzl around the subject, but is there anything I've missed that's so crucial to it? So crucial that even small profit  is bad?
(shit I messed my English up here.....)

As to the stat guessing at a 80/20 ratio of sales/piracy, I have to call BS on that.

Ah, sorry 'bout that...thought the numbers were kinda weird, but whatever.  I think that's around the biggest ratio you can get though, not really common.