There is an announcement on the Steam website that, effective immediately, the Steam version of Trackmania United no longer has StarForce malware included. Great news, those of us who care about our DVD drives will now be able to experience what is said to be a truly excellent game.
PS: Kudos to Steven for letting me know about this.
Skill balancing (more commonly known as ‘nerfing’) is probably the second most controversial issue in Guild Wars (after farming drop rates). PvP players scream about a skill which is too powerful in a very unusual, easily-countered situation, such as having 8 Paragons in one team. PvE players scream about an insignificant change to Soul Reaping, which is still the best primary attribute in the game (especially in PvE, with its frequent monster deaths).
This situation benefits nobody. The two elements of the game are constantly in conflict, one being damaged to safeguard the other. If a nerf is made because of harm in PvP (e.g. the near-constant Paragon nerfs since the release of Guild Wars) it can have unintended, disproportionate effect in PvE (e.g. if a skill is ‘balanced’ in a team of 8 Paragons, it’s useless in a PvE pug with one Paragon). If a nerf is delayed or cancelled because of the potential effect in PvE (e.g. making shout cancellation easier, which would mess up most of the Prophecies PvE game which depends on Watch Yourself to a great extent), then PvP is less fun due to the imbalance.
There are a number of solutions, some more drastic than others. The first, and most common, is to not so much a solution to the problem as an argument that no problem exists. Since Guild Wars values both its PvP and PvE components (unlike, say, World of Warcraft which as one commenter noted is overwhelmingly PvE-focused), many argue that it is inevitable for tradeoffs to be made between the two gametypes.
Another common solution is to split the two games from each other. Either by simply not having either PvE or PvP (although this is just as commonly suggested as flamebait as it is seriously), or by preventing PvE characters from playing PvP and allowing the two sides of the game to develop - in terms of skill balances, attributes, and everything else - completely separately from one another.
My proposal is for a less drastic (and less complicated) version of that second solution I mentioned. Separate PvE and PvP skill sets. Guild Wars is currently, belatedly, developing in that direction. A week or so ago saw the introduction of new skills powered by Sunspear points (easy to farm) and Alliance Faction points (bloody nightmare to farm). These were quite powerful, and would definitely have been termed ‘overpowered’ by nerf-loving GvG players (especially Eternal Aura. If the phrase ‘keep Avatars up indefinitely’ doesn’t have you drooling, you obviously don’t play Nightfall :P), but they are great additions to a skillbar.
What I would really like to see in Guild Wars 2 is a small PvP skillset. At the moment, Guild Wars has hundreds of skills per profession, all of which can be used in (and therefore have to be balanced for) PvP. Most them don’t even get used, since the metagame generally revolves around three or four builds per class. What would be much better is to have a smaller number - fifty, say - of PvP skills per profession, all perfectly balanced against each other. This would enable a fair, perfectly-balanced PvP game. The rest of the skills would be PvE-only, and would be balanced in terms of the difficulty of missions and quests rather than what happens when you take 8 characters with identical builds into a GvG match. Both sides of the game could be balanced appropriately, instead of the mutually destructive relationship they have in Guild Wars 1.
Not content with the end-of-summer sale that has become as much of a tradition to online shops as January is to boring shops, Play.com are having a start-of-summer sale.
No, this isn’t one of those crass, probably-paid-for ‘look at all these wonderful deals’-type posts (although you could get a lot less fun out of £10 than Guild Wars). This sale serves primarily to highlight just how badly designed Play.com’s website is. Although not a complete carbuncle like Amazon, it is still pretty difficult to browse. For example: the ‘DVDs under £5′ section of the sale has over 800 DVDs listed over 22 pages. There are no doubt some great offers buried in there, but I am not sifting through 22 pages of crap just to find one cheap DVD.
It’s not as if it’s hard to do it well. Comet (which has a pretty poor reputation) and Dabs (which has an excellent reputation) both manage to produce differently-focused, but excellent websites. For example, if buying a printer from Dabs I could choose whether I wanted Laser, Inkjet, Dot Matrix, or Thermal. I could then choose what price range I wanted, whether I wanted networking capability, and just about every other characteristic you could think of. Why can’t Play.com do something similar with its stuff? Allow us to narrow down a category - for example in the DVD sale I mentioned earlier, by genre, actors, director, and such things?
The BBC’s decision to offer its ‘iPlayer’ download service only to customers of Microsoft is facing referral to the EU’s competition authorities. For those of you outside the UK, I’ll give a bit of background:
The BBC is funded by the public through a tax known as the ‘TV licence’. Anyone who owns a TV is obliged to be a paying customer of the BBC, even if they have no interest in is content. Failure to pay results in criminal sanctions. As well as having to provide the service which members of the public have paid for (some under protest), the BBC is required by its charter to be impartial.
The company intends to use Microsoft DRM with its ‘iPlayer’ service, which results in the exclusion of all BBC customers who are not also customers of Microsoft (as the latter has not provided DRM players for other operating systems). This is despite the existing use of RealMedia for all of the BBC’s streaming video services - a DRM system which is available on most computer operating systems. This shows that there is no need to endorse one operating system vendor in order to ‘protect’ content.
EU law prohibits companies from concluding market-restricting agreements which harm competition or consumers. The Open Source Consortium (who I’ve never heard of, despite using a lot of OSS) plans to make a complaint to the EU authorities on this basis. Although I’m actually a Windows user myself, I think it is unacceptable for a publicly-funded broadcaster such as the BBC to refuse to provide its services to customers of companies other than Microsoft. What is worse is that the government has allowed this to go as far as the EU - this proposal should have been stomped on at the UK level.
Well Gordon Brown is now officially Leader of the Labour Party, and will become Prime Minister on Wednesday. I’m feeling much the same as people must have thought about John Major when he took over - he can’t be any worse than his predecessor.
Time will tell whether that is true, but let’s not pretend that all is well and Gordon Brown is the saviour of British politics - plenty of what he has been saying over the last few weeks simply does not tally with his actions in government:
So there are certainly quite a few issues with Gordon Brown’s record as Chancellor, but for now I’m just glad to be (almost) rid of the smarmy, warmongering arse we’ve been passing off as a ‘leader’ for the last ten years.