Um, and why is that insane? Do you know what you’re talking about? Experience/academic knowledge/credentials?
I would be kind of surprised if Capcom could do it for that little. $100,000 would barely cover the cost of a couple of programmers for six months of work, in most cases – and that’s not for veteran-level work, that’s for assembly line “get it done and crank it out” work, which means a greater risk of more bugs.
Then, of course, there’s the cost of issuing the patch, who knows how much that would be for two separate platforms. It wouldn’t be a pittance, I can tell you that.
And what would Capcom get for their money? How many people are just itching to buy HDR and MvC2, if only Capcom will patch those titles? What else could Capcom do with $150K that makes more sense, and would please more consumers?
We got two great games for, what, $15 each? Capcom owes us nothing. None of us has any call to complain.
No, I don’t think that people who love Street Fighter are going to stop buying new Capcom titles because HDR hasn’t received a second patch. Capcom’s brand integrity is stellar; failing to release a patch on a game that is already very well-received, and apparently good enough for inclusion in major tournament venues, will have a negligible effect on future products. (Just look at the iPhone 4, which is still in extremely high demand and still getting 4/5 and 5/5 reviews, despite a well documented problem with its antenna.)
Again: Consider that MvC3 is coming out early next year. How many of these MvC2 players are not going to play MvC3 because MvC2 on XBox 360 and PS3 hasn’t been patched? Capcom’s brand integrity is not threatened by a lack of patches for these games, dude.
I used the 150k figure from Aquasnake’s post and assumed it meant that 150k was what it was going to cost just to get the patches out after they were made. Of course there would be a ton more to get the programmers back (ether in-house or try to find backbone employees who worked on the project) and work on it.
It looks bad on a company to treat two of their most popular fighters like that, especially after all that fucking hype. I think they owe the fans a polished final product, quite honestly.
Then again, after thinking about the strife Sirlin went through to get HDR out in the first place, maybe Capcom didn’t really care enough to begin with…
Again, no doubt. His arguments definitely reflect the more rose-colored, “progressive,” “you’re an idiot for not making everyone else’s life easier” attitude of those who espouse the unconstrained viewpoint.
Well thanks to you guys, I know what I’ll be reading over the next few days! Substance often gives way to hyperbole on the boards, so it’s nice to really have something to take away from here that could leave a lasting impression.
Pick up some Rand while you’re at it. You might find it appeals to the ole confirmation biases, but be warned: I don’t think Shrugged comes with the little effigies of FDR any more.
Probably because the Austrian school says that, in large-scale economies, systemic processes that develop over long periods of time as a result of the decentralized interactions between mass numbers of individual units are ultimately more efficient than any public institution spending model that claims that central bodies can realistically engineer complex economies to consistently positive effect.
EDIT: Perhaps more importantly (since we’re talking about empiricism), there is very little evidence that the Keynesian model (i.e. public institution spending and central planning) actually works (just look at what has happened to America after the sub-prime mortgage debacle and massive gov’t spending under pro-Keynesian Congresses, and the dreadful situations in Europe, with Greece being at or near the epicenter of central planning in that region of the world), whereas there is bountiful evidence that decentralized economies thrive and improve the standard of living for the overall population.
Well, Rand wasn’t an economist, she was a philosopher. (And she was REALLY good at talking trash and applying damning metaphors to her ideological opposition.)
Very smart lady. I can’t say that I agree with her on everything that she wrote, but the majority of her stuff is definitely on point, and logically unassailable.
I think her Donahue appearances might be on YouTube. Those are a hoot!
See, I’m thinking supply side economics died sometime in 2008, and you’re thinking Keynesian economics did.
If only someone well versed in the principles of laissez-faire economics - tempered perhaps with Objectivistian respect for rationality - had been in charge of the Federal Reserve from 1987 - 2006!
"Probably because the Austrian school says that, in large-scale economies, systemic processes that develop over long periods of time as a result of the decentralized interactions between mass numbers of individual units are ultimately more efficient than any public institution spending model that claims that central bodies can realistically engineer complex economies to consistently positive effect.
! Why pinch my cheeks and call me Dawkins, I can’t believe it’s not irreducible complexity! I suppose “Austrian Economics” sounds better than “Economic Creationism”…
BRB, sacrificing a homeless schizophrenic to the invisible hand. Before you call me a barbarian, I’ll have you know that the letter opener I’ll be using is quite tasteful and very expensive.
All in fun. I wouldn’t take this conversation very seriously if I were you :smokin:
Oh no, Keynesian economics most certainly did NOT die. It’s been a mainstay weapon of the ruling class (in America, it has been particularly well received by the Baby Boomer generation, which now holds complete sway in Washington, D.C.) pretty much since its inception. It’s a fundamental intellectual movement that tells them that it’s not just OK, but actually best, to maintain a command and control, non-laissez-faire economy.
shrug Whether Greenspan was that person or not, I think that the problems that America has had for the past five or six decades have been well disseminated over all of the economy and society. The locus of the malaise is hardly limited to the Reserve.
The key concept is efficiency, not complexity. Large-scale economic systems cannot be commanded efficiently by a central body – again, check contemporary Europe and post-WW1 Russia, where attempts at command and control economies rule/ruled the day, with disastrous results. (Note also that Russia’s economy improved dramatically after its collapse and partial decentralization in the mid 1990s.)
Hell, look at Capcom’s fighitng games. Does anyone here really think that the character tiers work out exactly as the game’s designers intended? Did Capcom mean for Chun-Li to dominate Third Strike, did they mean for alpha counters and Valle CCs to rule Alpha 2, did they intend Lord Raptor to K.O. his opponent for making a single small mistake, did they want roll canceling to be an integral part of CvS tournaments, did they want there to be infinite combos in Marvel games and Alpha 3, etc. etc. etc.? Is it just a coincidence that SF2 wound up being the most balanced and best designed game of the series, after five versions spanning at least as many years of development time, with yet another revision given to us by Dave Sirlin about fifteen years after the last one, which is arguably even more balanced?
You know what? If you truly want to believe that a system where it costs over a hundred thousand to move some Akuma hitboxes around is totally fine and reasonable, then go ahead, I won’t try to convince you otherwise.
As I wrote quite plainly one or two days ago, maybe it’s not “fine and reasonable.”
I’d just like to see you back up your denigrating Microsoft with some facts, something more than “I did some coding for console games and I know some programmers who agree with me.”
Me, I’m quite comfortable admitting that I don’t know all the facts, and that my over twenty years of experience making games professionally, and Microsoft’s incredible track record of success, give me pause at calling their practices “ridiculous” or “outdated.”
And here I was getting ready to defend all my colleagues at the University of Chicago and all my Austrian brothers and sisters (although I myself as I stated am a pretty orthodox neoclassist in market economic matters, in political economy that’s a whole different subject matter!) from these baseless and opportune insults… and then he said that last line, and I stepped off my high chair, took a deep breath and ate my wife’s chocolate chip banana bread while watching my students take their pre-class test so I know how much they know… by the way, the results so far are pretty dismal… I’m not too surprised since I got stuck teaching a class of introductory microeconomics this semester…
Sorry, Thelo. You know I totally respect you, but I gotta disagree with you on this one. The possibility of patching makes developers VERY lazy. If I: 1) Were More of a jerk than I actually am. 2) Didn’t already know the actual answer to this question, I would ask you, “Have you ever WORKED for a software company?” in typical forum troll fashion.
Truth is, software companies release buggy software all the damn time. And they do it on purpose. Software companies have DIVISIONS that are there solely to work on patches, because they know they’ve postponed so many bugs. It’s a result of schedule-based releases. I can imagine for bigger companies like EA and for bigger releases like Madden, they have their own CRT department for patching. But for something like Backbone, their main devs, who are working on their next project, are probably the only people available to work on patches as well. So… work on patches that get no money? Or work on the next game that will actually (hopefully) earn them profit?
It’s why I hate patches PERIOD for video games. I’m used to my days on NES and SNES consoles where games HAD TO WORK OR ELSE. It DID make Devs better because they only had one shot or else. With patches, games have gotten continually more and more buggy and it makes me angry. Especially on the PC market, where I’ve always felt games were horribly buggy. I accept patches these days because games are WAY more complex to make, so you can’t avoid them, not like back in the NES days (and even then there were lots of bugs). But from my experience, patching very much makes people lazy.
But what are we gonna do about it? It’s one evil or another. We either get shittier products that get patched all day, creating far more jaded users, or more expensive patches that make people less willing to do them. Most people aren’t as dedicated as we are, and even some of us (coughmecough) aren’t even immune to it. I played the original BlazBlue and hated it. The online code was AWFUL. So I quit the game (no one local played it with me) and never went back to it. Later, I found out that the netcode was patched and was AWESOME afterward. Maybe some of the best ever. And I missed out on it because the initial impression I got was horrid.
Frankly, the best chance of having the patch actually come out for HDR would be for a bunch of us to petition to change everything free of charge, and we will all do it for them for free. But that would never fly. All it would take is one jerk to sue Capcom for money. And we can’t guarantee that one of us who helps the game won’t turn INTO a jerk. So there’s no way Capcom would ever bite.
I’m not even sure that all this hulabaloo is warranted, is it?
I mean, what exactly are we talking about, here? Thelo mentioned moving some hitboxes on Akuma. OK, fine, but why? Because he’s cheap? He was cheap in vanilla ST. Akuma’s overpowered-ness seems pretty consistent to me; it’s certainly not a show stopper. Seems reasonable, even right, to me that a compressed tiers-Akuma still dominates the game by a healthy margin.
For this, people are crying bloody murder?
I think HDR is fine as-is. There were some fairly bad bugs on release, those got hammered out forthwith, and we’re left with something that has proven its tournament-worthiness. (Personally, I’d rather see something done about Claw’s cheap ass, but again, he was already [media=youtube]P-PmNGOjGTw#t=11"]bullsh!t in ST[/u[/media] and Sirlin did make him slightly less scrubby, so nothing lost and nothing gained, there. Or maybe lift Chun-Li back out of the suck pit that Sirlin dunked her into. Neither of these are must-haves, though.)
I guess I’m just not sure why we must have an HDR patch.
