Prob the best LOLCat out there.... Post coming later... then not for about a week... OMG 0.0
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
I love these cats...
Prob the best LOLCat out there.... Post coming later... then not for about a week... OMG 0.0
Monday, June 18, 2007
Recent Betas vs. WoW
So much to blog about... Its a very exciting time right now... but I am trying to spread it out so that I have back up during down time...
As many of you know World of Warcraft (WoW) has been consuming the PC market (and most of our souls) for some time now. With Blizzards 8 million subscribers spending $15+ a month there are many companies out there right now that want a piece of that 120 million a month pie.
Recent news has shown that WoWs population has been on the decline. This decline in population begs an interesting question: Why is WoWs population in a decline.
Is it lack of content? I would think that the new expansion for the game would solve that issue. Perhaps it is that the content has turned stale? Does that mean that people are leaving the game for greener pastures? Perhaps...
There is quite a lineup coming out in the Realm of MMORPGs, lets look at a few:
Lord Of The Rings Online - Lots of words in the title.... even more in the game.
I had a chance to beta LOTRO back a few months ago before its release. This game is hands down for the fans of the books and true role players. The game mechanics are nothing special and offer little more then the ability to follow a story line. It dose however borrow from the school of Guildwars/FFXI where there is a set of Story driven quest that will help advance you through the chapters of the game. There are also minor things that erk me about this game... Like the lack of any true Magic users. Bards play the healing class in the game and "motivate" the players back to health. Thats another thing that bothers me about this game is that you have Motivation instead of Health and numerous other naming changes to basic building blocks to MMOs. This bothers me because it changes the way I have to communicate in a game changing common slang and having to learn new acronyms. I did however say that this is one for the role players. There are some cool things like a fully functioning music system built into the game, and also the badge system that lets you earn titles for completing certain tasks. All in all its a decent try at an MMO and will prob do well in the long run once it starts getting user feedback.
Warhammer Online - PvP galore from the people who mastered PvP
This game is still in Beta and is looking at a 2008 release date. I have played bits and pieces of this game through friends beta accounts and I am really liking what I am seeing. Even though I am not a huge PvPer myself I can definitely see this game making me one. The quests in this game are based around constant PvP taking place in different "Levels" that are defined to keep the PvP to the correct player ages (levels). The PvP taking place in a level will affect how the quests are given to you and what the objectives of those quest are, thus changing the experience each time through the game. Completing these quest will also help the overall end game RvR game play that takes place. All in all it seems like a good mix of PvE and PvP that should keep you on your toes at all time and eliminate some of the down time found in traditional MMOs.
Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising - ...And now for something completely different.
This game is still in Beta and is looking at a 2008 release date. Its a MMO set in a time period that is a little different then the normal run of the mill. There are some cool ideas here including the use of gods... however it is still too early to tell
Guildwars 2:
There is not really any info on this game yet... however takeing that Guildwars was basicly a really long trial and error period... This game should rock something hardcore.
Swords of the New World:
Complete and udder crap...
All in all a pretty exciting lineup for MMORPGers... So much to play so little time to play them... But I definitely see why people are leaving WoW as MMOs move away from a general all in one solution, and move to cater to specific play styles.
Game Over,
Chris Kincanon
As many of you know World of Warcraft (WoW) has been consuming the PC market (and most of our souls) for some time now. With Blizzards 8 million subscribers spending $15+ a month there are many companies out there right now that want a piece of that 120 million a month pie.
Recent news has shown that WoWs population has been on the decline. This decline in population begs an interesting question: Why is WoWs population in a decline.
Is it lack of content? I would think that the new expansion for the game would solve that issue. Perhaps it is that the content has turned stale? Does that mean that people are leaving the game for greener pastures? Perhaps...
There is quite a lineup coming out in the Realm of MMORPGs, lets look at a few:
Lord Of The Rings Online - Lots of words in the title.... even more in the game.
I had a chance to beta LOTRO back a few months ago before its release. This game is hands down for the fans of the books and true role players. The game mechanics are nothing special and offer little more then the ability to follow a story line. It dose however borrow from the school of Guildwars/FFXI where there is a set of Story driven quest that will help advance you through the chapters of the game. There are also minor things that erk me about this game... Like the lack of any true Magic users. Bards play the healing class in the game and "motivate" the players back to health. Thats another thing that bothers me about this game is that you have Motivation instead of Health and numerous other naming changes to basic building blocks to MMOs. This bothers me because it changes the way I have to communicate in a game changing common slang and having to learn new acronyms. I did however say that this is one for the role players. There are some cool things like a fully functioning music system built into the game, and also the badge system that lets you earn titles for completing certain tasks. All in all its a decent try at an MMO and will prob do well in the long run once it starts getting user feedback.
Warhammer Online - PvP galore from the people who mastered PvP
This game is still in Beta and is looking at a 2008 release date. I have played bits and pieces of this game through friends beta accounts and I am really liking what I am seeing. Even though I am not a huge PvPer myself I can definitely see this game making me one. The quests in this game are based around constant PvP taking place in different "Levels" that are defined to keep the PvP to the correct player ages (levels). The PvP taking place in a level will affect how the quests are given to you and what the objectives of those quest are, thus changing the experience each time through the game. Completing these quest will also help the overall end game RvR game play that takes place. All in all it seems like a good mix of PvE and PvP that should keep you on your toes at all time and eliminate some of the down time found in traditional MMOs.
Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising - ...And now for something completely different.
This game is still in Beta and is looking at a 2008 release date. Its a MMO set in a time period that is a little different then the normal run of the mill. There are some cool ideas here including the use of gods... however it is still too early to tell
Guildwars 2:
There is not really any info on this game yet... however takeing that Guildwars was basicly a really long trial and error period... This game should rock something hardcore.
Swords of the New World:
Complete and udder crap...
All in all a pretty exciting lineup for MMORPGers... So much to play so little time to play them... But I definitely see why people are leaving WoW as MMOs move away from a general all in one solution, and move to cater to specific play styles.
Game Over,
Chris Kincanon
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Nintendo Museum Tour.
I woke up this morning to quite a treat in my Google Reader. Its a little tour of the Nintendo Museum that was placed in a department store in honor of its 100th ani. It is so cool to see anything about Nintendo's past. The company always strives to not only bring the customers what they want but also to adapt to what the market needs. Even though most view them as a company stuck in the past, I see them as trailblazers in that even though they fall to market demands they always seem to have a trick up their sleeve. Anyways enjoy the little video and of course the 8-bit music... never goes out of style...
If you are into the history of Nintendo then I suggest you pick up this book. And if you want something more on the history of video games and their impact on the world this is always a good read.
Game Over,
Chris Kincanon
If you are into the history of Nintendo then I suggest you pick up this book. And if you want something more on the history of video games and their impact on the world this is always a good read.
Game Over,
Chris Kincanon
Friday, June 15, 2007
Netflix Challenge
Soooo..... I was talking with Robert, a friend I work with, when he tells me about this challenge that Netfilx puts out about a year ago (http://www.netflixprize.com). The basic idea is that they want a better way to recommend movies, and they want it to the tune of $1,000,000. So here is the catch... you have to make it at least 10% better.
So whats 10% better you may ask... well its all about predicting what users will rate a movie. They use the RMSE or the Root Mean Squared Error. This basically calculates how close you were in predicting the correct rating for users over a large data set. When all is said and done you have to score a RMSE of .8572 or lower just to qualify. This is not an easy task as of the time of this writing no one has qualified and the lowest score is .8782 by team Bellkor.
My first reaction to this problem was that the data set was way to narrow to make anything more then some sophisticated sorting algorithm. My experience with Netflix was all they really take away from your experience with a dvd is a simple 5 star rating. I mean sure all of the basic links are there: Actors, Directors, Writers, Date the movie was made, who produced the movie, what is the general theme of the movie, so on so forth. However there is so much more to a movie then simply what it is about and how made/stared in it. To me it is like saying "I like Pepsi" so they suggest Coke, not really knowing my motivation for liking Pepsi.
Motivation, feeling, past experiences, perception, and current mood all are individual to each client and plays an important role in how they reacts to movies. Some times it only takes one scene to trigger a painful memory to make a 5 star movie a 1 star. It could simply be the person is in a bad mood that day and it can turn a good movie into a bad movie. There is alot of "randomness" in the reaction to movies that depends on alot of hard to track variables. And enough bad data points due to this "randomness" and the whole recommendation system is thrown off.
So at this point I signed up for the challenge and deiced that it would be worth taking a look at the data that they amassed for the example set. There is a basic set of information here including a MovieID, Date of release, CustomerID, Date of rating, and Rating. Not much to go on...
The data is split into three main sections. One being information about the movies. This provides information such as an internal Movie ID, the date of the release (This can either be of the dvd or of the theatrical release... not much use in identifying the time period the movie came from) and of course the title, as it is stored by Netflix, of the movie. The next part is the training data which is split into one file per MovieID. In each file there is a MovieID followed by all CustomerID, Date, and Ratings for that movie. The last section is a file that contains a list of MovieIDs and customers who rated them and on what day.
From this it looks like you could at best single out individuals that seem to have the same taste in movies and recommend movies that people in the group had not seen that others in the group rated higher. This clustering of tastes does not seem like a great solution because from my experience in life just because I agree with someone on one movie dose not mean I will on the next. This is kind of like a model of a book club where each month a group reads a book and then instead of discussing the book at the end of the month everyone just shows up and assumes that they all liked the book for the same reasons.
Anyways for now I am going to load this data up in a database and then start messing around with some C# to see what kind of information I can get out of it... I will post more on this subject as I have some results working with the data.
Game Over,
Chris Kincanon
So whats 10% better you may ask... well its all about predicting what users will rate a movie. They use the RMSE or the Root Mean Squared Error. This basically calculates how close you were in predicting the correct rating for users over a large data set. When all is said and done you have to score a RMSE of .8572 or lower just to qualify. This is not an easy task as of the time of this writing no one has qualified and the lowest score is .8782 by team Bellkor.
My first reaction to this problem was that the data set was way to narrow to make anything more then some sophisticated sorting algorithm. My experience with Netflix was all they really take away from your experience with a dvd is a simple 5 star rating. I mean sure all of the basic links are there: Actors, Directors, Writers, Date the movie was made, who produced the movie, what is the general theme of the movie, so on so forth. However there is so much more to a movie then simply what it is about and how made/stared in it. To me it is like saying "I like Pepsi" so they suggest Coke, not really knowing my motivation for liking Pepsi.
Motivation, feeling, past experiences, perception, and current mood all are individual to each client and plays an important role in how they reacts to movies. Some times it only takes one scene to trigger a painful memory to make a 5 star movie a 1 star. It could simply be the person is in a bad mood that day and it can turn a good movie into a bad movie. There is alot of "randomness" in the reaction to movies that depends on alot of hard to track variables. And enough bad data points due to this "randomness" and the whole recommendation system is thrown off.
So at this point I signed up for the challenge and deiced that it would be worth taking a look at the data that they amassed for the example set. There is a basic set of information here including a MovieID, Date of release, CustomerID, Date of rating, and Rating. Not much to go on...
The data is split into three main sections. One being information about the movies. This provides information such as an internal Movie ID, the date of the release (This can either be of the dvd or of the theatrical release... not much use in identifying the time period the movie came from) and of course the title, as it is stored by Netflix, of the movie. The next part is the training data which is split into one file per MovieID. In each file there is a MovieID followed by all CustomerID, Date, and Ratings for that movie. The last section is a file that contains a list of MovieIDs and customers who rated them and on what day.
From this it looks like you could at best single out individuals that seem to have the same taste in movies and recommend movies that people in the group had not seen that others in the group rated higher. This clustering of tastes does not seem like a great solution because from my experience in life just because I agree with someone on one movie dose not mean I will on the next. This is kind of like a model of a book club where each month a group reads a book and then instead of discussing the book at the end of the month everyone just shows up and assumes that they all liked the book for the same reasons.
Anyways for now I am going to load this data up in a database and then start messing around with some C# to see what kind of information I can get out of it... I will post more on this subject as I have some results working with the data.
Game Over,
Chris Kincanon
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