@VarietyMage Hey, I'm not disagreeing with you. Those are perfectly valid points. If part of your game exists online, you're always at the mercy of some company to allow you to continue gaming. That's true for every MMO and multiplayer game out there.
I doubt that EA / Maxis would pull the plug immediately after launch because it would give them too big a black eye, but years down the line you may very well find your game inoperable once they've pulled the plug on the servers. My guess is that rather than a subscription model that they'll use in-game purchases and upgrades like a free-to-play game, but I guess we'll have to see.
@Waffen8888 I'm not sure what the "welfare state" talk has to do with it. The people who seem to be doing the most spectacular killing aren't associated with welfare of any form.
And Newt Gingriches proposal to have kids clean schools was shot down because he was proposing it as a means for kids from low-income families -- who he presumes are lazy because they're poor -- can learn work ethics. And oh yeah, we'd pay 'em a little cash while they did it. It wasn't meant to be a general civics lesson for all kids. Just the poor ones, who would possibly be cleaning the trash and urine of the kids with means. The whole proposal was insulting.
Back to the main point though, if people were committing mass murders routinely with baseball bats or Molotov cocktails, then I'd be all for regulating those things. But it's not happening here. Mass killings with assult weapons is happening, so let's try to address that fact instead.
PS -- I bet those "good guys" who stop the killing sprees that we never hear about aren't doing it with rapid-fire weapons. For a skilled shooter with a specific target, there's no need for them.
I'm usually against DRM on anything (games, music, books, etc) but online (server-based) gaming is the one use case where I think it's warranted.
If part of your game is based on a server, you have maintenance and delivery costs that have to be accounted for, and you can't be adequately compensated if 75% of your data transmission is with people who haven't paid for your product. So it makes sense to have some way to ensure that only paying customers are allowed on those servers.
Based on what I've read here, it sounds like Maxis is building a city-building MMO. Sure, they could simulate a lot of the city effects on your local PC, but they're allowing the city's creation and results to be driven by the thousands of gamers in the city, not unlike the way your city or town is the product of all the people living there.
Anyways, I think this is a fine way to use DRM (maybe the only valid case), and I think the game concept sounds pretty cool too.
Cars, knives, screwdrivers, and baseball bats all have a primary purpose that is not involved with doing harm. Guns have only one purpose -- to kill or maim.
And Sen. Feinstein proposed an assult weapons ban, not a ban on all weapons. So unless she owns an assault weapon, there's no hypocrisy there.
@Waffen8888 I don't know how to fix the moral decay in our society. I'm pretty sure we can't legislate away evil. But since we know that such evil and moral decay are all around us, why not try to reduce (not eliminate, because we know that's not possible) the intersection of evil and easily-obtained, powerful guns?
The reason that the focus always goes to rapid-fire assault weapons is that they are always present when mass murders are commited. You clearly have more knowledge than I do about firearms, but the concern from folks like me isn't about the amount of damage done, it's about the scores of people that can be mowed down in a minute with certain weapons. And that's their only purpose, killing lots people as fast as possible.
Gun-rights advocates acknowledge that the gun has a special, singular place in personal defense. Why do they not acknowledge that it has an equally singular place in personal assaults as well?
@Waffen8888 You and I must have heard different speeches from Mr. LaPierre. He is adamantly against any new laws, and doesn't seem to have high regard for the ones that we have now (except for the Second Amendment, of course). He didn't advocate better enforcement of existing laws; he advocated having more armed "good guys." Those two things are not even close in concept.
Instead of arming more people and tasking them with the impossible job of defending us from psychopaths with guns, wouldn't it just be easier to keep the guns out of the hands of the psychopaths? Why does that concept offend the NRA?
I'm glad that even though CA Senator Yee mistakenly believes that videogames are singularly responsible for violent outcomes in our society, he's not naive enough to believe that the NRA really cares about such things. On this point I agree with him wholeheartedly.
I haven't bought this game, but it looked interesting enough that I figured I would buy it eventually, so skipping the bootleg versions that were floating around on day one of the game's release was an easy decision for me.
For those of you who are busy writing dissertations to justify your piracy, just save it. If you're okay with bootlegging a game from a small, independent developer rather than cough up a few bucks, then no argument from anyone is going to change your mind. We get it. But don't think your in-your-face attitude is going to make you look like anything more than a jackass to the rest of us.
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