This all started because the topic for the channel was originally “<Matt> are you familiar with the Human Centipede?“, which stemmed from a conversation about… uhh… I forget what it was about. Probably something that had nothing to do with the Human Centipede, at any rate.

My contributions have been marked in blue.

(10:37:49 AM) dlc has changed the topic to: rickyduck is afraid of the human centipede
(10:37:58 AM) frank: lol
(10:38:06 AM) adam: It’s a start
(10:40:00 AM) dlc has changed the topic to: The three most dangerous things are a programmer with a soldering iron, a manager who codes, and a user who gets ideas.
(10:40:21 AM) rickyduck: dlc++
(10:40:57 AM) miguel [~Adium@windowsrocket.globe.com] entered the room.
(10:43:33 AM) Matt: I always thought the most dangerous thing would be a dinosaur who is also a vampire.
(10:43:39 AM) Matt: I mean, seriously, how do you fight that?
(10:44:19 AM) dan: with a large caliber weapon
(10:44:45 AM) Matt: You ever shoot a Dracula? Doesn’t end well.
(10:45:49 AM) adam: Catapult?
(10:47:14 AM) dan: that shoots silver infused water ballons
(10:47:40 AM) adam: Silver is fucking werewolves, asshole
(10:47:45 AM) adam: A Ballista: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballista
(10:48:05 AM) dan: silver is vampires too, dick
(10:48:16 AM) dan: have younot watched true blood enough
(10:48:39 AM) adam: Too busy staring at Bill’s naked ass to notice much else.
(10:48:56 AM) adam: Yeah, you’re right, I suck.
(10:49:31 AM) rickyduck: vampires suck.
(10:49:47 AM) Rosado: this is kinda old, but it will break up all the swear words in IRC for a bit http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/
(10:49:48 AM) Matt: True Blood vampires don’t count for this experiment.
(10:50:00 AM) rickyduck: vampire weekend sucks too, for that matter.
(10:50:23 AM) rickyduck: arcade fire does not however
(10:50:28 AM) Matt: And neither do those twinkly-sparkly Twilight kids.
(10:50:34 AM) Matt: (Do not count, I mean)
(10:50:52 AM) Matt: I’m talking manly vampires here.
(10:50:58 AM) Matt: Like a Nosferatusaurus, or some shit.
(10:51:31 AM) adam: Matt++
(10:51:34 AM) Rosado: Artie Lange had an uncle dying of cancer who stayed home watching TV all day towards the end, and got addicted to Buffy the Vampire slayer. Artie desc him as an old-school Italian. His summary of the show was “It;’s about a Jew broad who fights Draculas”
(10:51:58 AM) dd: or Stephen King’s new American Vampire
(10:53:03 AM) Matt: Listen, vampire dinosaurs do not sit around getting all emo about their complex relationships because they’re GODDAMNED DINOSAURS.
(10:53:37 AM) dan: i would think herbivore dinosaurs would be a little emo
(10:53:48 AM) dan: they eat fucking trees for heaven’s sake
(10:54:11 AM) Matt: Modern vampires are all like, “I’m a vampire and she’s a human, and our love is not meant to beeeeeeeeeeeeee!” and then listen to Evanescence and blog about their pain.
(10:54:26 AM) Matt: Dinosaur vampires would be “WHAT IS THAT IT LOOKS DELICIOUS HOLY SHIT I’M GONNA EATS IT!”
(10:54:31 AM) Matt: And there is no blogging.
(10:54:38 AM) Matt: Because they have tiny little arms that can’t reach the keyboard.
(10:54:58 AM) dan: i think my herbivore argument is still valid
(10:55:37 AM) Matt: Pfft. Who takes vegans seriously?
(10:55:57 AM) Matt: This ain’t Scott Pilgrim. No magic powers or all that.
(10:56:09 AM) Matt: Just teeth, and bloodlust, and the extinct undead.
(10:57:09 AM) dan: so only some dinosaurs are legit?
(10:57:21 AM) Matt: Dinosaurs are incredibly racist, Dan.
(10:57:21 AM) dan: wouldn’t that create an awkward ower struggle?
(10:57:30 AM) dan: slowly killing the collective from the inside?
(10:58:19 AM) Matt: You might think that those are snow-covered peaks in the distance, but really its a bunch of Brontosaurus at a Klan meeting.

Instead of rehashing my view on the subject, I’ll instead include the comment I was in the process of writing on the Black Ops forums when the topic was locked. Turns out that some people had decided to create multiple accounts in an attempt to skew the results of the poll they were conducting.

In my opinion, the problem with quick-scoping isn’t that it’s game-breaking in the sense that someone decimates the opposing team with a barrage of one-shot kills. It’s game-breaking in the sense that a quick-scoper’s own team is left to suffer at the expense of that player trying to collect clips for a montage, or flex their internet id. Snagging a few impressive shots means nothing if you had to go 4-17 to get them. Your team doesn’t care about those 4, only the 17 on the back-end.

Let’s be clear about this, though: this isn’t the same as arguing against grenade spam. No matter what you think of it (I’m not a fan, but that’s neither here nor there), spamming grenades is a strategy that is ultimately beneficial for your team. There is a greater chance of going positive, defending a capture point, protecting your headquarters, etc. by lobbing explosives then there is trying to quick-scope. Unless you’re in the top X% of talented quick-scopers you are most likely presenting a detriment that the rest of your team has to work harder to overcome.

At the same time I understand that quick-scoping isn’t something that everyone can do successfully. A sniper rifle is a precision weapon, so naturally it takes a degree of skill to be able to pull off a quick-scope in game. I’ve tried it, and have been awful at it, so I wouldn’t try to do it in a team setting.

Sleight of Hand Pro as it was intended to be used is not overpowered. For a traditional sniper it offers greater utility in that, should a shot present itself, it can be lined up all the quicker. If your target is making a move for cover, it gives you the chance to put a shot on them before they can hide. Situationally that changes, and the perk becomes a problem. At the risk of being flagged as part of the realism argument (which I’m actually not trying to make), a sniper rifle is the extreme end of the ranged spectrum, much the same way that a pistol is the extreme end for close quarters (melee attacks not withstanding). It’s a weapon designed to drop a target in one shot at a distance. To argue that snipers should be able to quickly ADS and drop a target at close range is akin to saying that pistols with 12x magnification scopes should be coded into the game.

Ultimately though, the problem here isn’t the playstyle, it’s the perks that enable it. There were aggressive snipers in previous Call of Duty games – games where Sleight of Hand Pro didn’t exist. There will still be aggressive snipers in Black Ops. Comparing any of these games to the way things work in Modern Warfare 2 is flawed, because regardless of its popularity it remains, at its core, a flawed game. It may have made quick-scoping easier, sure, but it did so at the cost of game balance. That’s what’s going to attract and keep players: balance. Catering to a small subsection of the community simply doesn’t accomplish that.

I will say though that when it comes to rogue playstyles, quick-scoping is probably the least worrisome. Modern Warfare 2 also introduce the Commando perk, which increased melee range to approximately ten feet, and introduced a gap-closing lunge that moved fast enough to make countering it difficult. (Stories of people “teleporting” through a spray of bullets to hit their target aren’t uncommon.) Perhaps the worst offender is the tandem perk setup of One Man Army and Danger Close, allowing the user to equip a barrel-mounted grenade launcher and rain death from a corner of the map. With Danger Close increasing all explosive weapon damage, and One Man Army allowing to change kits on the fly (and refreshing all ammo in the process), games quickly degenerated into who could spam the most grenades the fastest.

Black Ops is a step away from these playstyles. With One Man Army and Commando having been removed from the game, effectively hindering two “clever uses of game mechanics”, that only leaves quick-scoping on the chopping block. And if the information out there is any indication, then it too will be retired.

Personally, I won’t miss any of them.

The sense of entitlement here is staggering.

For those who don’t know, Minecraft is currently in its alpha stages. It’s a build-your-own world game that is the result of ONE man’s work. Think of the game like playing with virtual Legos, used to build whatever you can think of. Landscapes are generated on the fly. If you happen to venture out into the world after dark, monsters attack you. The game has over 1 million registered users, and has generated enough revenue that its creator is able to grow his company from the success of alpha sales alone.

There’s that word again: alpha. The game still hasn’t graduated to a beta release, and is still far off from hitting RC0 (release candidate zero; shippable code) status. It’s not finished yet. It’s not supposed to be finished yet. And in addition to continuing his work on the game, Notch is dealing with lawyers, searching for office space, and doing the the things that someone in his position should do. To help fund the project, a discount pricing plan was offered that allowed folks to buy and play the game for roughly ten bucks. They won’t have to pay again when RC0 hits. They’ll have the full game for no additional cost.

And yet some of these people feel like they’re owed something, like they deserve something they’re not getting. They either don’t understand how software development works, or they simply don’t care. This is the internet at its worst, where relative anonymity means you can try and brute force someone into conceding to your demands. It means that a group of people can dictate the rules to hundreds of thousands.

Again, this is a game built by one person. There is not a team of developers churning out code here. There’s no change control board to deal with. There’s no publisher backing. And now it’s all being held hostage by the collective immaturity of the internet. Belligerent children have kicked, and screamed, and stomped their feet, and now they’ll hold their breath until mommy and daddy give in.

What should be an inspiration and source of motivation to programmers now serves as a warning of what can happen if you get too successful, and that’s a shame.

My only concern here is that it might end up being like the last bit of training that they sent us to, which was for XSL. Holy crap was it horrible. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s a valuable thing to know for a web developer, but to a certain degree I knew it already, and everything that the gentleman in the black shirt told us was something that I very well could have just looked up on Google. That, and he decided it would be worthwhile to teach the language using a specific IDE. This is never a good idea, since it’s highly unlikely that we’ll all use the same tool set moving forward for the rest of time. I’ll take it a step further and say that unless you’re learning something like Eclipse plugin development, or you’re developing in .NET, it’s never a good idea to teach using the IDE. Ever.

So what do we do, then? We start fresh. We take things in a new direction and build from here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not “Netscaping” the whole thing and tossing out all the old to build up from scratch. Some of it will find its way here in some capacity, but a lot of it will simply find itself archived and quietly ignored.

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