Re: Newsgroup suggestions - for moderators

From: lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)

Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 00:00:00 +0000

madcentral@aol.com (MadCentral) writes:

> That's like suggesting six months of Tic Tac Toe would be better
> than buying a Nintendo.

No, but some person might find 6 months of tic tac toe to be better
than 1 day of Nintendo. I don't presume what everyone else likes, but
you sure seem to.

> That's silly too.  Olympia is a good example though.  It went
> commercial, didn't it?  Games of that level do.  That's entirely my
> point.

Then your point is wrong. There are good games, like Galaxy, which
have stayed free. Olympia became the great game it was while the GM
was still doing it in his spare time.

> Well, what game is better than what game is very much a matter of
> opinion.  But my point was not that free games are bad, just that
> they are different.

I'm glad you now agree that it's opinion, but pay games are still not
necessarily different.  You shold try to prove your point, not assert it.

>  I'm not referring to the little cottage companies, some of whom are
> just stunning and some are pretty poor.  I'm talking about the
> larger commercial companies around the world.

Compare Food Chain to Nuclear Destruction. Low cost, easy
rules. Compare Galaxy to many of the other space conquest games out
there. The others mostly have bigger rules, but Galaxy has excellent
play value.

> They put many hours of work into games because that's their
> living and it shows!  In player numbers.  In quality.  In presentation and
> depth/style.  In reliability.

Uh, you think Food Chain is unreliable? Why? It's a quality
beer-and-pretzels game. Like most beer-and-pretzels games, it isn't
supposed to have depth, but it actually has more depth than you would
think from just reading the rules. (I don't notice you having ever won
Food Chain, so we'll note that you have no idea how much depth it has.)

> That there are problems.  But it simply stands to reason that a
> company working full-time on their games to make their living is
> going to do far more in far greater volumes than somebody doing it
> in their spare time for fun.

It simply stands to reason that software companies working full time
on their software will write far better software than hobbiests. Whoops!
Here I type on a machine running Linux, on a desktop being run with Xvnc,
into an article edited with emacs, and my newsreader is xtass, written by
the guy who wrote Olympia, in his spare time.

As for "full time", Olympia is run by a very part-time GM, who
provides reliable service. I don't know where this fixation on
full-time employment comes. I have a day job. I also have some hobbies
that I happen to do at a professional level. PBM isn't one of them,
but there are other folks who do PBM very well, such as the Galaxy
server people and the Diplomacy server people. How many _thousands_ of
people do you have playing your games?

> But I know I'm mostly preaching on deaf ears here.  Of course I am.  I'm
> talking to free-game fans in the most part.

I like commercial games, too. I just hate it when people slam free
games for false reasons. I mostly use free software, too. Think about
it.

-- g

References

Re: Newsgroup suggestions - for moderators
madcentral@aol.com (MadCentral)
Wed, 16 Sep 1998 00:00:00 +0000

Referenced By

Re: Newsgroup suggestions - for moderators
madcentral@aol.com (MadCentral)
Wed, 16 Sep 1998 00:00:00 +0000