Inventor May Have Cured Motion Sickness Without Drugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/11/inventor-may-have-cured-motion-sickness-without-drugs-and-could-mean-lot-us-military/152960/ <comment><USER2> Another article hiding the main information in a wall of text.

Here is the relevant information for those interested:

""Enter a young inventor named Samuel Owen, who has developed a prototype device called the OtoTech, from Otolith Labs. Worn on a headband behind the ear, it uses subtle vibrations to change the way the brain computes the fact that the body that it's attached to is in motion. Early tests show it relieves motion sickness without the side effects of drugs, Owen said, though he admits the science is so young that it's not clear just how.

The vibrations emanating from the OtoTech gently target two of the four fibers that carry data about body motion to the brain via a system of inner ear sensors called the vestibulocochlear nerve. "Two [of the four vestibulocochlear nerve fibers] go to the brain, two go to your reflexes," Owen said. The trick is to affect the former and not the latter.

"The working hypothesis is that [the vibration] causes a chaotic and noninformative stimulus to go to the brain. Somewhere, probably the cerebellum, there's a filtering mechanism that filters out noninformative sensed information. It's the reason you don't notice the shirt on your back right now," he said.

In other words, while you remain consciously aware that you're moving, the balance portion of your brain stops noticing the fact; the data has been drowned out in white noise from the device.""

<comment><USER3> I found that for myself and for a bunch of friends that chewing gum accomplished this.

Discovered this on a fairly bumpy flight, (gum is lousy for ear pressure imbalances but I carry it anyway). After that I began experimenting on others and it usually worked for them too.

<comment><USER4> I'll have to try that. My one weird trick here is a little different.

Long ago I read somebody's theory (Bruce Chawin's, maybe?) that the reason so many poisons cause dizziness is that the inner ear is an extremely delicate mechanism and so is easily thrown off such that visual perception and positional sense no longer matches what the ear is saying. The theory further suggests that the brain is evolved to work that backwards: if the body is sufficiently dizzy, it has been poisoned, so it had better empty the stomach.

For me the trick is to keep motion perception in sync with the inner ear. So if I'm on a boat, I'll aim my head in the direction we're heading and think of myself as moving with the boat. Same thing with cars: on a bumpy or swervy taxi ride I'll look straight ahead and think of myself as moving with the car.

It sounds ridiculous, but it works well for me. Living in SF, I've had many chances to try it out.

<comment><USER5> This was the home remedy for carsickness my parents used with me when I was a kid. "Look at the horizon" is how they put it. Within a couple of seconds I'd internalize the movement of the car and my gut would stabilize.

<comment><USER3> I was a miserable vomitous mass as a child and I still can't read in the car. The horizon tends to stop progression of symptoms but is pretty slow as a recovery method. It's pretty cold comfort for someone who feels like their guts are trying to escape.

At some point in late grade school I figured out it was a better use of my time to start "working the problem" rather than hold out for some folk wisdom to save me, from car sickness to sore throats (keep your neck warm to prevent laryngitis) and everything in between.

Hanging a hand out the window works much, much faster. Barring that, anything cold on the wrist will help, but it's hard to find the right spot while distressed. Air, window pane in the winter, ice, icepack (best runner up), or a can of soda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Followup comments from the inventor are here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/9ywify/inventor_may...](https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/9ywify/inventor_may_have_cured_motion_sickness_without/eac264j/?st=jpsqeepk&sh=26c8eb62)

(found via the Oculus Go article comments from earlier today, here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18696840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18696840) )

<comment><USER7> I wonder if this can explain the trick I learned on reddit on how to relieve the ringing-tone (tinnitus) by snapping your fingers on to your skull: [https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/these_guys_light...](https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/these_guys_lighting_a_mortar_shell_in_their_garage/cv3474n/)

In other words, can percussion on the back of your head somehow reset/affect the nerves deep inside your head that send signals from your ear to your brain? For tinnitus, it's the audio signal. For motion-sickness, it's the balance signal.

<comment><USER8> I always assumed that the loud noise reduces sensitivity, tuning out some quiet signals like tinnitus. Same thing as not being able to hear well after a loud concert.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's always struck me as curious that some game engines cause greater motion sickness that others, despite being similar. For instance I can play UT 2004 and HL1 based engines all day, but put me in front of a Source engine game and I want to barf after 15 minutes. Doom 1 engine makes me nauseous, but Build engine not so. Obviously it's the way my particular brain is picking up on the subtles cues from the engine, so I'd love to be able to strap something on my head and be able to enjoy more titles.

<comment><USER10> If I feel nauseated during a game, I look for some way to increase the field of view. That always does the trick for me.

<comment><USER11> Several years ago, I ran into the exact same nausea with the Source engine as the GP, but when I increased the FOV the problem went away.

I've run into nausea with other games that have a narrow FOV. Increasing the FOV (when possible) usually fixes the problem.

As far as I understand, the late Total Biscuit was similar. He frequently advocated for FOV sliders in games. I greatly appreciate his help making FOV sliders more popular.

<comment><USER12> Teared up a bit reading that last paragraph; I'll never forget his dogged insistence on checking for FOV sliders in options menus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is an interesting take on the technology of vestibular stimulation.

Something to keep in mind is that this technology has been around for a while in the medical field for treatment of balance disorders.

Also - I recall back in the very early 2000s there was a company that came out with a vestibular stimulation system for VR use - the idea was to induce the feeling of motion. You could plug it into your computer, and it had a Windows API that you could control it with.

They were still in a development phase; you could purchase a device and the API for developing with - it wasn't a retail product at the time. Ultimately, the dot-com crash took them out and they disappeared before they really got off the ground (also, VR was in it's "winter" \- that didn't help).

<comment><USER14> I attended SIGGRAPH 2005, and there was a group in the booths that had some headset you would put on that would alter your balance to make you walk in different directions. They had a video playing if someone walking with this device and blind folds on, and someone with a joystick could turn them left and right.

Looked it up and it appears to be a similar type of technology: Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation:

[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1187315](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1187315)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A few grams of whole ginger root is great for motion sickness, and the side effects are little more than a mild burning sensation in the gut.

It completely kills any horrible car sickness I get from any small motions.

<comment><USER16> Mythbusters found ginger is more effective than any other OTC motion sickness cure.

<comment><USER17> It is a remarkably powerful antihistamine - of drug-like strength.

<comment><USER16> Interesting, I wonder if it would also work for itchiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "The availability of immersive learning environments like virtual-augmented- mixed reality afforded by commercial off-the-shelf technology fosters has the potential to create the paradigm shift necessary to deliver the most ready force ever known," said Lt. Col. Matthew Strohmeyer.

Ya know what else will create the paradigm shift to deliver the most ready force ever known? Fire this asshat and promote someone who can speak meaningful sentences. After a decade in the Marine Corps, I continue to be amazed by the non-speak these officers use to cover their incompetence.

<comment> shaki-dora It's somewhat overwrought, but there actually is some signal in that noise:

\- Using off-the-shelf products, instead of bespoke projects. That was historically somewhat rare in the military, I believe?

\- "virtual-augmented-mixed reality" seems to be intended to make people think about more than just "virtual" reality, which is a somewhat tired concept

\- "most ready force" is a reflection of the military's priorities (not winning world wars, but being flexible)

\- "paradigm shift" Ok, I don't have much of an excuse for that one

Overall, I think there's a lot to unpack in that sentence. And I would struggle to repackage it in anything less than a paragraph, or a list as above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A little of an aside: I've often wondered if motion sickness is less prevalent in populations that got to their current locations largely by long ship rides (i.e. most Americans). These days sea sickness is a mild inconvenience, but I would imagine that in the 1700s, constantly vomiting for several weeks would reduce one's chances of passing on their genes.

<comment><USER20> Sounds legit, few million years of going on a long ship ride as a rite of passage (get it?) would do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, I never thought I would change my position on VR but here we are. If this works it will make VR viable.

It's so disappointing to remember the hype in 2012 and then look at VR in 2018 only to see an anemic library of titles, little adoption, and not much improvement of the actual headsets. It's pathetic.

I've heard of some headsets in the pipes that are supposed to actually be good. Extremely high resolution _and_ full field of view coverage are absolutely required. There is no technological limit that is stopping a headset like that from existing, and yet it doesn't. Pimax maybe. Am I missing one?

If you control motion sickness and have a headset like I described above, then you have a minimum viable system. Going beyond that, we need non-discreet light fields and perfect body motion capturing.

<comment><USER22> > Extremely high resolution and full field of view coverage are absolutely > required. There is no technological limit that is stopping a headset like > that from existing, and yet it doesn't.

GPUs are the technological limit.

The Vive and Rift push 2160 x 1200 pixels at 90Hz. 90Hz is the bare minimum speed for VR. Nvidia's new RTX 2080 Ti (retail $1,200) cannot maintain 90Hz at 3840x2160 in most games. Two in SLI probably could, but that is much more expensive than the original Vive/Rift CV1 GPU requirements were. We are several generations of GPUs away from being able to double the VR resolution while maintaining 90Hz for less than $600 worth of hardware.

<comment><USER23> We're getting very close to high quality and inexpensive eye-tracking technology that will make it cheap and easy to implement foveated rendering in VR headsets (basically, only rendering high quality where your eye is looking in a completely unnoticeable manner). That will really drop the hardware requirements and make high field of view/high resolution headsets totally doable.

It's an exciting time for VR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I must try this. I've always had serious 3D motion sickness, I was just looking at a friend playing Monster Hunter World for like 30 minutes and got sick. And then I just couldn't look at the game screen anymore, it would inflict sickness instantly. This is not even VR.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been wondering for a while if you could overwrite the signal on the vestibular nerve. This just drowns it in noise, but presumably it should be possible to electrically excite the same fibers with a signal that matches what you are seeing. I have heard that they do something similar already in medicine for helping people with balance problems caused by the inner ear, though I gather it has to be tweaked patient by patient.

</comment><comment><USER26> Another recent invention to help with motion sickness.

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/could-these- glasse...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/could-these-glasses-cure- your-motion-sickness-180969722/)

The glasses are quite expensive (for something you would never wear outside of the car).

<comment><USER27> You could make those pretty easily. I wonder if the peripheral ones are really necessary?

<comment><USER26> When the glasses were posted earlier, I made a comment about making them out of simple novelty straw glasses (like so [https://goo.gl/UKrkbt](https://goo.gl/UKrkbt)). Add some coloured water, cut and seal the ends and voila.

<comment><USER27> Great idea! I'll give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I really would like to know what these would feel like while one is in a sensory deprivation tank.

Or - what impact they have on deaf people (Specifically the idea of the vibrations hitting parts of the inner ear - if external vibratory stimulations have any impact in both of the above scenarios)

<comment><USER29> There is a whole pile of research out there into deaf people and motion sickness. The most interesting being that hearing loss due to certain kinds of nerve damage can result in basically becoming immune to motion sickness. I'm struggling to find the exact citation I want to share (I read it several years ago now) at the moment, but I read about it while I was researching into the early days of space flight, if I recall it came off of the early research as a result of following up what was the cause of one test subject being utterly immune to any attempt to make him motion sick. The end result being not very useful for the practical aspects of spaceflight, but ending up with the discovery that a group of people with a specific type of auditory nerve damage are basically 100% immune to motion sickness is certainly an interesting result in terms of understanding the cause of motion sickness.

<comment><USER30> Interesting. I am deaf, thanks to tumors on the auditory/vestibular nerves and do experience pretty bad loss of balance issues, to the point where people often think I am walking around drunk when I am not :) But I can't remember ever experiencing motion sickness! Time to apply to NASA I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Noticed in the materials for the product: "Nearly Silent (<50dB)". Seems like bogus copy - for every broadband acoustic measure of dB I'm aware of 50 dB would be very non-silent.

</comment><comment><USER32> ...And That Could Mean a Lot to the US Military, well yes because US Military travels around a globe very often. :\

</comment><comment><USER33> I thought the Sea-Band Wristband[0] type of products already went there, even for morning sickness relief?

[0] [https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/sea-band- wristband/ID=prod...](https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/sea-band- wristband/ID=prod2662944-product)

<comment><USER34> Why would those work?

<comment><USER35> My son said, "how do these work, is it just the placebo effect?". I replied that why would it matter if it was a placebo, as long as it worked?

But they did work, and he seemed happy enough conning himself.

<comment><USER34> I'm not your son. That you've found an explanation to convince a child to stop asking questions isn't exactly relevant to me.

<comment><USER36> The scientifically documented efficacy of the placebo effect _is_ , however.

<comment><USER35> Exactly, and my son was smart enough to recognise that it may just be a placebo, but with an amazing easy-going attitude was happy to see if this placebo worked on him.

<comment><USER34> And next time your son has a headache, you'll give him the sea-band. The placebo effect is a miracle cure that treats all kinds of things, right?

<comment><USER35> Yes, indeed I note that often in drug trials they hand out the placebo with the instructions "this is the drug to treat a different condition to the one you have"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ISIS Now Has 88 Pounds of Uranium - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/07/10/isis_uranium_iraq_rebels_seized_low_grade_nuclear_material_from_university.html

<comment><USER2> Flagged, because it's not hacker related, and it's an intentionally clickbaity title. It's not weapons-grade uranium, and everyone (including the IAEA) seems to agree ISIS most likely does not have the capability to turn it into weapons-grade uranium.

<comment><USER3> Anything sufficiently radioactive is a threat - turn it into dust with a high explosive charge, and kill half a city of people with inhaled carcinogens. So this Uranium is safe somehow?

<comment><USER4> > So this Uranium is safe somehow?

In as much that it's impossible to achieve supercriticality with a pile of yellowcake? Yeah. At worst, they risk heavy metal poisoning (as Uranium has effects similar to lead on the human body.)

It takes a lot to make an effective weapon out of Uranium. Building a working device requires separating the incredibly rare heavier isotope U-238 from all of the mostly inert U-235. That's what all the controversy about centrifuges in Iran was about: That's the kind of equipment you need to extract fissionable 238 to make a weapon.

Uranium isn't even radioactive enough to cause the kind of threat you assume. Materials like Cobalt-60 are far more dangerous, and are the real concern about "dirty bombs," (explosive devices that spread radioactive material, as opposed to a nuclear bomb) but it's far harder to work with, and it's more carefully regulated. The effect of Cobalt-60 without adequate shielding is cancer and eventually radiation sickness.

By contrast, the effect of raw Uranium is... to release small amounts of ionized helium gas over billions of years.</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing Recline.JS: a Javascript library to build data apps in browser - <AUTHOR> http://blog.okfn.org/2012/07/05/announcing-recline-js-a-javascript-library-for-building-data-applications-in-the-browser/

<comment><USER2> The work that Max Ogden has done in terms of making ETL something to easily do in browser is amazing. His earlier work (as you can guess from the name) was all layered on Couch but this can do so much more. Some of it is just the basic usefulness of writing costco style transformations in simple JS.

JS really is a fine language for data.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting. Would be fun to see how easily this could use VIE (<http://viejs.org/>) or Data.js (<http://substance.io/michael/data-js>) as the data source.

</comment><comment><USER4> This looks awesome. What are the future directions? Are there aggregations and more advanced filter in the plans?

</comment><comment><USER5> great stuff! I have been waiting for someone to produce widgets backed by a modern js framework (backbone.js in this case). Hopefully this means it is at least very easy to feed it data.

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome!

Not sure where I'd use this yet, but I love the timeliner.

<comment><USER7> The timeliner is most definitely driven by TimelineJS from <http://timeline.verite.co>. Not sure if this is a related project or how exactly Recline.js is driving it.

Does anyone see what Recline.js is doing here over the functionality in TimelineJS?

<comment><USER8> Visualising data is only one part of what Recline does; you can edit and refine data in the browser, and plug that into a visualisation front-end which renders a map, a graph, a timeline or ... (etc)

[ disclaimer: i work for the okfn, but not on Recline. ]</comment></comment></comment>


The Difference Between CNNs and RNNs - <AUTHOR> https://lionbridge.ai/articles/difference-between-cnn-and-rnn/ <comment><USER2> Like so many articles on ML the details are sound and the "so what?" is off.

Literally the first line of this post is wrong/misleading; CNNs can and have be used to process temporal or sequential data (1d CNNs in particular).</comment>


How Companies Kill Their Employees' Job Searches - <AUTHOR> http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how-companies-kill-their-employees-job-searches/381437/

<comment><USER2> These agreements should come with really great compensation so that the employee opportunity costs are funded as a matter of compliance with the contracts.</comment>


Can We Make a 3-D Map of the Whole World? - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lidar-mapping-the-earth <comment><USER2> This has got to be one of the most interesting things I've seen in a while. Fun idea, what could hackers do if we had such a map? Just imagine the new tools we could make.

<comment><USER3> The newest Microsoft Flight Simulator is using data like this to populate the entire planet. That's a major improvement over the previous version (2006), which procedurally generated anything outside a major city. It's so good that it's being touted as a potential fix to the pilot shortage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We already have. At least Microsoft did for the newest MFS</comment>


Windows 8 Consumer Preview: Multi-monitor desktop video review  - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/120491-windows-8-consumer-preview-multi-monitor-desktop-video-review <comment><USER2> I'm running it on a 3 monitor setup and so far so good, I wish they had included the notification area on each monitor, so among other things I can quicky glance at the time and date no matter what I have going on, also the monitor edge triggers are pretty much shot on a multi-monitor setup.

screen <http://i.minus.com/ibhcFWTFIYaO6d.PNG>

Beyond all that the biggest issue with Windows 8 for me at the moment is that they didn't include the Windows 7 Solitaire games.

<comment><USER3> Have they finally made it so that you can set per-screen wallpaper? I remember thinking that that was a really basic feature that was missing in win 7.

<comment><USER4> My video card driver allows it in Windows 7. The driver can also rotate display to portrait mode - one of these days I'll get a 3M monitor stand for that purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although it wasn't well thought out it certainly demonstrated a number of issues with the new interface.

</comment><comment><USER6> The review itself was pretty lame. Nothing planned or thought out. It looks it was made in the urge of getting the first report out

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, that was dull, and the reviewer didn't seem to know much about Windows (e.g. "only show Desktop on screen 1/2").</comment>


Why Instacart and Doordash workers don't always receive the tips you give them - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/why-instacart-doordash-workers-don-t-always-receive-tips-you-n965926 <comment><USER2> Happy to see this is getting some coverage. After the last Instacart article a few days ago I started pestering the DoorDash help line just to relieve some misplaced anger over all the money I've tipped on their app.

Unfortunately, unless they have done this in a place where "tipped minimum" isn't a thing I doubt anything will come of it. Even then, IANAL but I'm not sure the case looks good for drivers AND customers. I add the customers part because I feel personally mislead by examining their wording after this came to light.</comment>


Seriously Facebook, stop treating us developers like sh*t - <AUTHOR> Long story short:
1-Monetizing our mobile apps with Facebook Audience Network for more than 2 years without any problem.
2-Facebook reports via email a violation without giving us enough details to fix it.
3-Email doesn't have any way to appeal or request more info (really Facebook, we want to fix this and stay in your good graces)
4-Join a Facebook group for developer support ask a question and get out account frozen because they think it's fake and have to wait one week so I can verify I'm a real person ¿?
Seriously Facebook, stop treating us developers like sh*t <comment><USER2> Maybe write a blog post about this and make it a HN article? I doubt whining like this in an AskHN will be very effective.</comment>


AI will cause "structural collapse" of law firms by 2030 - <AUTHOR> http://www.legalfutures.co.uk/latest-news/report-ai-will-transform-legal-world <comment><USER2> I'm currently working on a startup which supplies automated legal document analysis for the legal industry. [1] So I definitely see the power for AI for transforming the legal industry, but also encourage caution in reading the report.

One thing to note is that a huge amount of legal work done today is actually quite possible to automate. It's a lot of reading through documents and finding the few clauses that actually matter to a contract or document, then focusing in on those. It's defining an overall strategy and then fleshing out (mostly templated) documents to implement that strategy.

Another factor in favor of legal AI is that legal documents have much more restricted grammar than standard English text, leading to less ambiguity. This makes them both easier to parse and to create automatically (you don't need to make the text sound "natural"). By 2030, AI will be able to easily summarize a full legal document and provide relevant references. (In fact, probably much sooner.)

That being said, it's important to note that this report isn't predicting the disappearance of lawyers (nor am I). Instead, it's the collapse of traditional law firms, which depend on a pyramid of partners doing high-level sales and strategy work being supported by associates and paralegals doing the grunt work. The grunt work is rapidly becoming automated, but I don't think AI will ever replace the client interactions and recommendations component. We've seen a lot of success with AI-lawyer pairing and I do think we'll see much more of it in the future. This definitely challenges the organizational structure of law firms. In the future, I think we'll see a lot more small and individual practices where clients work with a partner they trust who can get a lot more done thanks to AI doing all the grunt work.

[1] [https://docnavapp.com/](https://docnavapp.com/)

<comment><USER3> Fascinating! I do wonder what happens to the traditional white-shoe partner track, where associates make their bones do sixteen hour days of grunt work (albeit with fantastic compensation) as a method of gaining experience and reputation. The skills of a high-level attorney, regardless of the practice, are honed through decades of experience. How would systemic AI affect the development of the profession?

<comment><USER4> Don't worry, the AI isn't going the replace the "Perry Mason" kind of lawyers, they are irreplaceable! AI is designed to replace the "Junior Grunt Joe" kind of lawyer/associate who is mostly involved in documentation and assistance.

<comment><USER5> And where do the next generation of Perry Mason lawyers come from, if there are no rungs on the bottom of the ladder?

<comment><USER4> Well, that logic applies to all fields, not just legal. Lower rungs are disappearing from everywhere. In accountancy, junior accountants used to manually do "debit-credit" first, now Excel does it for them, so what will they learn?

In IT, junior programmers used to toil hard with algorithms and data- structures to come up with barely working programs. Now there are IDEs, libraries, frameworks, CMSs all built and ready for them, so what will they learn?

In Physics and Math, Scientists worked hard on just the theoretical framework first and scratch their heads in classrooms. Now there are computer software that do it for them. Perhaps this explains we didn't get another Newton/Einstein since last few decades?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lawyer here. I do not know how soon AI will achieve either the humanity or know-how to replace lawyers, but will offer a few observations as a practitioner.

As for the know-how: Processing and comprehending legal texts does not seem to be an insurmountable technological task. However, the breadth of legal practice areas (family law, IP, criminal law, administrative law, etc.), and how these several areas often overlap to influence our daily lives seems a much more complex task.

As for the human element: legal problems are frequently extremely personal and require an empathetic response. This is so at the lawyer-client level, as well as the lawyer-lawyer level. After all, most legal issues require navigating complex relationships between humans, or groups of them. I don't think our society is ready for automated justice at this point. My clients certainly aren't.

So, it seems the human component isn't immediately threatened by AI, while the technical know-how might benefit those with deeper pockets and access to the "better" AI. Practically speaking though, the deep pocketed clients already have armies of lawyers at their disposal. With that in mind, the technical advances are likely to benefit smaller practitioners and clients (like me) who have limited resources.

I fully expect to be practicing law in 2030. If all the lawyer jobs are fully automated by then, I'll have MUCH more to worry about.

<comment><USER7> It's a common misconception that AI needs to be able to perform essentially any task a human can do to induce the "collapse" of an industry. But really, all it needs to do is make each lawyer 2x more efficient (by automating the easy-to-automate tasks) and suddenly half of all lawyers are unemployed _even though every lawyer employed today does some tasks that can 't be automated_. That's a collapse.

<comment><USER8> This assumes there's a fixed demand for legal help. You might as well envision that the efficiency gains cause a huge drop in legal costs which unlocks a huge latent demand. For instance software engineers are probably 10x more efficient now compared to 20 years ago, but this does not mean mass unemployment.

<comment><USER9> Akin to something that happened with accounting when computerised spreadsheets came about. Instead of killing the field it just expanded it as more people wanted advice and what-if scenarios explored.

<comment><USER10> And it's ludicrously _obvious_ how much extra potential work there is for legal contractors. Right now there are companies turning down revenue- generating opportunities because the time/cost of scrutinising proposed contract changes isn't worth it. Not to mention a huge number of agreements done on a "standard contract, no exceptions" basis for the same reasons. If automation allows these to be turned around in hours, for a fraction of the price, the variation and complexity in standard contracts is going to multiply exponentially.

Even if the process of checking the contracts is fully automated, there's still a role for an associate/paralegal level lawyer (overseeing many more contracts than their predecessors) to answer followup questions, because their clients aren't going to navigate through case law summaries to get a more thorough explanation of non-standard term 3.1b's applicability to their specific situation if they can still phone somebody with a law degree.

<comment><USER11> Standard contracts exist for a variety of reasons, time/cost being one of them. Another one I'd like to highlight is the principal-agent problem[0]. If, due to automation, contracts went up by orders of magnitude in complexity then clients would be exposed to a new set of risks with a legal basis that they do not understand. The question then is: are these new, inscrutable risks acceptable to a client? Perhaps not, unless they are already a very large business.

[0]. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's worth reposting this 2011 NYT article, "Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software"

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html)

> _When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department > antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure > task of "discovery" — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the > studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, > much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for > months at high hourly rates._

> _But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, > "e-discovery" software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a > fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo > Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000._

> _Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at > computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents > relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of > specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded > lawyers examining millions of documents._

<comment><USER13> The costs have remained largely static or even growing slightly because the volume of documents is increasing faster than automation is driving down costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What the article fails to discuss is what advances in the technology will push adoption over the tipping point. Are the algorithms going to get better? Are faster computers going to make until-now infeasible techniques practical? Is access to the Internet and big data going to make the difference? Legal automation technology has actually been around for quite awhile, and has seem limited uptake. So we're not at the point in the technology curve where we can just assume exponential improvements in the quality of the technology.[1]

And the limited uptake has not been for want of trying. There are plenty of firms that don't do document review in-house that would jump at the opportunity to take bigger cases away from mega-firms by leveraging technology. But the reality doesn't quite live up to the marketing. The overwhelming trend has been towards outsourcing work previously done by associates to low-priced contract attorneys, but even that shift seems to have reached a point of equilibrium.

[1] A good example is spelling and grammar correction. Word isn't much better at it than it was 15 years ago. You still can't do search and replace that fixes conjugation and numerical agreement.

</comment><comment><USER15> As a person who is not part of the legal industry but had to deal with the legal process, I would welcome technology becoming more prevalent in the legal industry. My experience was especially tiring due to my residency and jurisdiction of legal case, I was part of, being in two different countries. So I would prepare the reply line by line running into pages during the weeks leading up to the hearing, take an overnight flight to the country of jurisdiction the day before hearing and all my lawyer did was turn up on the day of hearing with a printed copy of my reply wrapped around the standard legal header/footer and hand it to the judge. Everytime I turned up, I would find a new junior handling my case who didn't know half of the details since the firm takes on so many cases at once. Eventually I got tired and settled just to avoid the stress of spending weekends in airplanes.

If I had the choice of registering my appearance via a video conference link, it would have been so much more easier. If a never tiring bot would do the research, it could check for references/past cases which a junior can simply not check due to constraints of time/energy. My lawyer would have a much more exhaustive list of points to check and assess which applies to my case. So on and on.

Technology would result in law firms have to significantly re-evaluate what they do and I think it is high time that happens.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure what country you are referring to but in some places you can video into the court room. I agree that's super convenient in comparison to what you are describing but it isn't exactly AI

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Right about time. I had to deal with several immigration lawyers and it struck my mind how simple and small their decision tree is. A simple deviation from a standard case makes them want to "check and get back" which they probably do mostly by asking their colleagues.

<comment><USER18> Isn't that what you would expect? Most cases fit within a predictable mold, on others they consult with the rest of their firm (or case law, journals—whatever else it is lawyers consult).

Why would that be a bad thing?

<comment><USER19> It isn't, and I don't think shadow0 thinks it is either. The point I think he's trying to make is that making an AI to do their job for them would not be difficult

<comment><USER17> Yup, exactly this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is one industry that I would be happy to see go away. The concept that the amount of justice and legal protection one citizen can effectively receive depends on his/her ability to pay more than their opponent is very troublesome, and has resulted in many gross inequities in the United States.

<comment><USER21> And then the competition of AIs begins. Want a better AI? Pay more. Want the best AI? Get one that trumps all others. The principles are great, but in implementation, all is unknown, and I suspect more, not less, likely for manipulation.

<comment><USER22> That's why they started OpenAI I guess? To try to prevent that from happening. I agree with the parent that I would like that perverse and sick industry to die but I think that has more chance by replacing the judges with AI than the lawyers. Which won't happen in 15 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I know AI is a hot topic these days, and the technology hurdles are finally being overcome, but what about the human factor? It's human nature to want to control things, and integrating AI in a meaningful way into your life means giving up control of certain things. Delegating things to other humans is enormously challenging for many people (in fact, it's a key reason many startups fail!). I can't imagine delegating tasks with any sort of ambiguity to a machine being any easier.

<comment><USER2> You're right that the human factor is huge. I work in this space and from all our conversations it doesn't seem like any legal clients would be comfortable working directly with an AI directly. They value the human touch and advice provided by an actual lawyer.

That being said, there is already a division of labor in the legal industry between client-facing work and more rote document analysis/prep. The latter is where I think we'll see most of the automation: instead of being supported by a bunch of associates, the partners will simply work with an AI.

Client interactions and higher-level decisions will still be entirely human.

<comment><USER24> > Client interactions and higher-level decisions will still be entirely human.

I wonder if people ever said that about travel agencies?

I think there are plenty of things that people _today_ wouldn't be comfortable with. I know many people that aren't comfortable with the idea of self-driving cars. 15 years from now, the things people are comfortable with could change.

<comment><USER25> "I wonder if people ever said that about travel agencies?"

Yep, they sure did. Or consider the restaurant business. With all other factors being equal, most of us would probably prefer a personal chef (or at least an expert one), an attentive, high-quality wait staff, fine china, real silverware, crystal glassware, linen tablecloths...

But they're not equal. In practice, McDonalds has a helluva lot more customers than Wolfgang Puck.

If this happens, it's probably going eat the legal industry from the bottom up. The rich will no doubt continue to have personal lawyers, just as they still have personal chefs. It will be the guys who want to contest a speeding ticket who will be the early adopters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> More than AI I would like to see standardisation and templates for common law problems. Like what creative commons did for copyright. Normal humans can use and very quickly understand them.

I have absolutely no interest in reading dozens of terms of service or purchase contracts I use every day, which are all wordy and hard to read, and say basically the same.

</comment><comment><USER27> Man, I remember in the nineties when SGI declared they were going to solve protein folding. Still waiting on that one...

<comment><USER28> To be fair, NVIDIA was spawned out of several SGI engineers jumping ship as it was sinking, and protein folding is primarily done on GPUs these days.

A person could imagine SGI not collapsing and bringing GPGPU computing mainstream decades earlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nearly half of my hours involve sitting down with clients to discuss their needs. I don't go anywhere near courtrooms. Having to draft a legal brief for a court, or even having to write a demand letter, means I have failed. I have yet to see any hint of AI capable of making such judgment calls on even simple matters.

How about this typical question: We shot a car commercial last month, but just noticed a McDonalds logo visible behind the car. The commercial is only being seen locally. Is it worth spending the money to pull the commercial and edit out the logo? (Spitting out trademark caselaw isn't an answer.)

</comment><comment><USER30> Meanwhile, accounting firms look like their keeping their accountants, which seems like an easier task to automate away..

<comment><USER31> The keyword there being "seems". Most of the firms that I've worked with are actively automating or offshoring repetitive tasks. Much of the work that is being done requires meaningful critical thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Great article - I run a legal tech startup which automates some of the process work around litigation - [https://rollrun.io](https://rollrun.io) and it's been receiving a lot of interest.

There have been a lot of the 'lawyers will be replaced by robots' type articles recently and I think the more positive spin is that lawyers will be able to spend their time more wisely with the help of AI. As a junior lawyer I spent a lot of time and effort doing tasks which were important to a case or a transaction but were more suited to a machine (the inspiration behind RollRun).

AI won't replace the skill and insight of a lawyer, but it will definitely speed us up and I'm grateful for that. And I'm sure clients will be too when it's reflected in fees.

</comment><comment><USER33> At the top end, human expertise will still be necessary.

For example here is some recent work over the last few days at a leading London law firm.

" ... is advising GE on the intellectual property, know-how and information technology aspects of the potential sale of GE's Equipment Finance and Receivables Finance businesses in France and Germany to Banque Fédérative du Crédit Mutuel.

We are working with Bredin Prat and Hengeler Mueller who advise on certain French and German IP and technology aspects of the transaction."

[https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent- work/recent-...](https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent-work/recent- work/recent-work-items/2015/slaughter-and-may-is-advising-ge---ip-know-how- and-it-aspects-of-potential-sale-of-equipment-finance-and-receivables-finance- businesses.aspx)

" ... advised Santander UK Group Holdings plc on its issue under its EUR 30 billion Euro Medium Term Note Programme of JPY 3,000,000,000 0.557 per cent. Notes due 2018 and JPY 27,000,000,000 0.787 per cent. Notes due 2020. The Notes are dual-listed and have been admitted to listing and trading on the Global Exchange Market of the Irish Stock Exchange and the TOKYO PRO-BOND Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Inc.

Mizuho International plc and Nomura International plc acted as Joint Lead Managers on the issuances."

[https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent- work/recent-...](https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent-work/recent- work/recent-work-items/2015/slaughter-and-may-advised-santander-uk-group- holdings-plc---issue-under-its-eur-30-billion-euro-medium-term-note- programme.aspx)

Bespoke work like this will still have human lawyers guiding and monitoring the course of the transaction.

At this level, the cost of elite lawyers is less than a rounding error on the balance sheet.

<comment><USER34> This misses that:

(1) Though the work in aggregate may be highly complex, it is disaggregatable. A very significant portion of the overall cost of these bespoke matters is composed of automable work (e.g., diligence, preparing closing documents). Humans may guide and monitor, but that could exist with significant changes to how legal work gets done.

(2) While "the cost of elite lawyers is less than a rounding error on the balance sheet", most serious companies (e.g., GE) take efficiency very seriously in their businesses overall. Why would they not expect and push for it with their outside lawyers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> We need an economic system so everyone can participate in the benefit of AI and also significant economic incentives for AI to be optimized to do work for people rather than be self aware. Once this is in place there should be no reason not to push forward as fast as possible.

</comment><comment><USER36> Funny thought on automated lawyers, to some extend lawyers are used to create standardized communication, aka contracts. So a law AI (lAI) would mean I give a natural language contract, my lAI translates to legalese and sends it to the lAI of the other guy which translates back from legalese to natural language. So legalese becomes just an interchange format for contracts, a badly designed protocol used only because we could not figure out how to transition to a better one. (Obvious JavaScript joke is obvious.)

</comment><comment><USER37> I have a theory that about a third of all people's jobs exist simply to define a reason for having said job, lawyers even more so. The only ones incapable of seeing that AI will remove the need for many lawyers are lawyers who's job already is largely just them justifying the need for their services

</comment><comment><USER38> AI may not replace lawyers themselves. But in my dealings with lawyers basic technology will mean that 1 lawyer can do the work of three.

For example: nothing is OCRed. So if a lawyer needs to get a section of a document they have to remember where it is.

There is some basic MS Word templating but really most law firms are stuck in the 19th century

<comment><USER39> There's likely still more than a little residual sting left from the era of WordPerfect 5.1, where there _was_ a degree of sophistication (and sometimes enormous expense) that looked stable for a long time... then simply vanished. It's been 20 years, but there's something about the experience of having too much of your knowledge trapped inside machines you can't (practically) use anymore that's a little bit scary, and just doing the same thing with another word processor (that obsoletes its old files every now and then) isn't something most people would look forward to doing. Things will get better, but memories have to fade and assurances need to be built first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is sort of what's wrong with HN lately. There seems to be a sweeping majority of Singularity believers that just take "AGI in 30-50 years" as just an obvious inevitability. So therefore we just go straight into SciFi mode and make all kinds of speculation with that premise. Then, this couples with this sort of, I don't know how to explain it, maybe its like an uncritically overly anti-establishment or "naively disruptive" current that just collectively nods like "Oh yeah, the traditional law firm is dead meat."

It's surprising to m,e as I believe the community is largely made up of technologists, that I never see much questioning the fundamental claims here.

For that wet dream of that Internet Bayes Theorem Religion, that I will not name, to come true, it needs to first be possible and second, there must br credible, serious people to actually be working on it. Granted, artificial intelligence is a very hot area of research. However, for anyone that is either a researcher in this field, a graduate student in the field, or just someone actually very current on the latest papers and the current research programs, knows this is AGI of the SciFi sort is not really what is being worked on.

Not to go into all of the field but sure there are many interesting things happening in pattern recognition, NLP, machine learning and data mining and much work done with things like convolusional neural networks ..... but I'm sorry to say that these an AGI Overlord do not make. They are fancy techniques that yield very powerful and interesting results but in consideration of an AGI they are rather boring and banal.

Largely, the techniques have been discontinuous incremental improvements on reasonably simple ideas from the 1950s and 1960 but now utilizing massive parallelism. Unfortunately, I think, for AGI a non-trivial number of techniques are rooted in statistical and probabilistic methods, which I think anyone would agree is probably a a wrong track toward intuitive and creative problem solving.

It's not that those of us critical of AGI proclamations think that it is impossible, that would be rather bold, or that we think humans are magical or something. We probably just think that our brains, or even abstractly "true intelligence", are things that are unlikely able to be simulated by something like a Turing Machine. Any skeptic knows that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I gotta tell ya, the way facial recognition works or even Watson, ain't it.

Also, I will say, just because something in the world is a certain way or if it is not exactly like Uber, does not mean it is necessarily a bad thing .... I'm just sayin' ....

An AGI Overlord would probably not be like the wild-eyed disruptor but more contemplative and understanding of the world as being very complex.

<comment><USER41> To follow on with your points, if the term "AI" had never been coined, and Terminator (and other such) movies had never been made, all the breathless articles would be about "learning algorithms iterated quickly, with simple inputs, simple outputs and a clear measure of success to help with the feedback".

Nobody would be under any illusion that this was anything we could label "intelligence".

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is there automated service that takes long end user agreements and makes them easily understandable?

There is Terms of service didnt read but that seem to be manual. [https://tosdr.org/](https://tosdr.org/)

</comment><comment><USER43> I think Ai will take away the advantage larger firms have over smaller firms or individual lawyers. Large firms can and do bury small opposition firm or lawyers in grunt work that wastes time and people with few resources give up.

</comment><comment><USER44> The phrase "structural collapse" does appear, to be fair, but what the report actually talks about is the hollowing out of low- to mid-level associate class that exists to do things like documents review and straightforward searches, not any reduction in the actual impact of law firms. Law firms will still exist, because (unsurprisingly!) they are legally mandated to exist. If you attempt to "disrupt" the legal profession as a non-lawyer you will be visited first by lawyers, and then by unfriendly men with guns. If you attempt to disrupt it seriously as a lawyer in a way that reduces its aggregate importance, you will be made illegal.

</comment><comment><USER45> 2030? I would say 2025 or even earlier, and not just Law Firms. If you have a white color job, AI is coming for it, and fast!

<comment><USER40> I hope your joking or this sarcasm. If not, I think you should really read the latest journals and conference proceedings to see if you still think that ...

<comment><USER22> As others said already; you only need more efficiency, not full AGI to do that. And that simply is already happening.

<comment><USER40> They can say but that it still isn't true. Read the journals. Many of these professions which are supposed to disappear cannot actually be "made to disappear" because of a slightly better version of a primitive algorithm. It seems pretty obvious if you just stop and think about what would actually need to happen.

Autonomous vehicles, fine. If you ignore all the things that currently make transportation complicated, it's a fairly simple problem. I mean hell in the 1800s, they just put the vehicles on tracks with an engine and they were done. But most "white collar job" roles, if you get past cynical jokes, are actually well beyond the state of the art of AI research.

I mean, I love science fiction; I'm a big fan. But I'm also like a realist ...

<comment><USER22> I do not think they will disappear any time soon but I believe you need less people per case. So maybe there will be more cases and thus still the same amount or more lawyers required but one lawyer being able to do more cases assisted by some form of AI. And yes, most complete jobs can not (yet) be taken over but let's not forget the financials; if you can replace someone costing $40k per year by a less efficient service costing $10/mo then people will do it even if it does not fully replace the person. There are a lot of factors in that but for instance my accountant fired most of his staff when the SAAS package he uses got efficient enough; his right hand and him have to work slightly harder but he saves a very significant amount of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article spells a doomsday scenario for the legal industry but having worked in a law firm during college I don't find that scenario to be very plausible.

Some legal work is just rote paperwork and perhaps much of this could be automated but it still requires a person to sign off on it etc. It remains to be seen whether this will just reduce the demand for lawyers. You are effectively just increasing the supply of legal services so while the quantity of services demanded (assuming some arbitrary quantifiable unit) will increase. It is not immediately clear that fewer lawyers will be in demand, I could see AI lowering the cost/barrier to entry for people seeking services and therefore more actual lawyers being required.

The rest of legal work is not just rote paper work and perhaps cannot be automated in the near future. If one person sues another person, I don't see any type of AI being capable of just calculating their way around who the problem and spitting out an answer for who gets what. Such a system that manages to account for every edge case would have to be unimaginably complex. You don't hire a lawyer to handle regular repeatable tasks that are well suited for computers, you hire them to handle things when something happens that is out of the ordinary or to consult on circumstances that are specific to you as an individual.

Law is also a field where reputation is tremendously important, and reputation isn't the type of problem that you can just engineer your way out of. Hundreds of years of tradition are not just going to be upended over night by some kid with a laptop because it isn't that sort of problem.

A prime target for AI is research. I could have saved a ton of time by scanning a document that gets OCR and then does a bunch of NLP to suggest related primary and secondary sources from a database. The specific algorithms aren't really that important but it would be a nice tool to augment the practice not replace it.

It's also important to note that the legal industry moves at a snails pace compared to the tech industry, people have a tendency to do things the way they've always been done and I don't think it is as prime for disruption as people on the outside from the tech industry would like to think. They will have a big impact to be sure but it isn't just going to crash like a tidal wave over night and put all these people out of jobs.

A further barrier is that all of this stuff still has to be adopted. Law is a very domain specific field that requires a lot of time and study, so is AI. The intersection of people who have experience in both is very slim indeed so the value proposition for lawyers at the top of their field who would be making these decisions is going to be a hard sell. It's going to be even harder when they realize it might decrease their billable hours.

tl;dr; AI will augment the legal field, not replace it. This viewpoint comes from my experience working in a law firm with software designed to automate some tasks, not pure speculation like this article seems to provide.

</comment><comment><USER46> Lawyers won't allow it, I'm sure.

</comment><comment><USER47> Wohoo!

</comment><comment><USER48> That's fine, as long as religion and faulty economics are also exposed as completely illogical by AI.

<comment><USER49> Religion, that's what you want AI researchers to spend resources on? Even if "exposed as completely illogical", it would not stop religion from helping people live their lives with comfort and guidance. I'm not saying everyone needs religion, but it does help many people. What reaction are you expecting the world to have in the scenario that AI shows religion to be illogical?

<comment><USER48> Religion has hurt a great many people too.

Religious arguments are full of logical fallacies. Getting those pointed out a non-human with no axe to grind might help a lot of people find there way out of this trap more quickly.

When I was 22, I remember a taped debate about religion I had borrowed from my brother. It helped me figure out that there really was no proof for all the assertions that I had accepted as true.

Being able to reach that conclusion without being in a debate myself was very useful. I wasn't trying to protect my self image or save someone else.

In much the same way, computer intelligence might be just the thing many need to help them out of the maze. Especially if they can have a conversation with it and it can precisely point out an error. And if the same intelligence can deal successfully with other complicated problems and negotiations.

<comment><USER22> But you can do that as a human too. The problem is that all ends with 'but you cannot prove that He does not exist ans the bible says people will try to discredit Him'. Religious people are not all to rational usually so why even have the conversation? In the EU I see religion dying rapidly; I live in a tiny (40odd people with a bigger 100 people village in the valley next to it) village in the south of Spain where I moved down to from Amsterdam. In Amsterdam I was used to people being atheist. Even my maroccan friends who do go to the mosques only go because it is social thing not because they believe. Same for my Jewish friends. In Spain I thought the old men and women at least would believe and I was surprised to find that they actually almost all do not. 'Don't be silly, I go to church because after that we drink a lot' says my neigbour.

Not sure why the US is so religious but the education and lifestyle will kill it. No AI needed.

<comment><USER50> _Not sure why the US is so religious but the education and lifestyle will kill it. No AI needed_

I think you profoundly underestimate the power of both religion and philosophy on the soul and imagination of man. Back in the 16th century, the "new learning" confidently predicted it would sweep away religious belief and other forms of "antiquated" thinking. How silly and facile that seems now. The fedora-clad New Atheists are no different—arrogantly predicting the demise of something far more powerful and permanent than they are.

<comment><USER22> Like said besides the US and the middle east I do not see that in reality. And I do not underestimate the power of religion or philosophy: I just think only the latter will remain. Or hope it will. And it is not really silly yet: that is only a few 100 years ago. It takes time to get all humanity out of poverty, not dying young and educated. If we still believe in some intelligent entity(ies) that architected the universe and life in 2000 years you can call it silly. I for one find it silly that people believe in such an entity while I was raised and schooled as a christian until I was 20. But I started doubting it and asking questions that were answered with 'the bible says so ; do not doubt!' at a very young age. Which has the whole: everything points to this all being a nice story to keep the people quiet and docile and no science to back it up.

<comment><USER50> _you can call it silly_

But I didn't call it silly; I said it should be taken seriously. And frankly, "because science says so!" can be just as dogmatic (or even more so) than religion. "Science" isn't a monad anyway; we can't simply reference one overarching, completely non-contradictory science. And there are Christian approaches to science that, in fact, do not resort to "do not doubt." And that's just for starters—it's very misleading to posit a "religion or science: choose one" duality given the number of Christians in STEM professions, from Faraday to Larry Wall.

As far as "not sure why the US is so religious"—I don't think the US is more religious than other cultures, or why you would single the US out for approbation in that way. It's probably the case that Christianity has influenced Western civilisation and that has been expressed in a particular manner in the US on the Constitution with its enumerated rights and ordered liberties. The influence of Christianity on the West has much to do with why Western cultures are advanced in terms of technology, literacy, general learning, and the arts, even when those things are used for non-religious ends.

<comment><USER22> I do think the US is more religious than other developed nations. Take high GDP places like Scandinavia and Swiss and Netherlands which are atheist. That is why. And I agree with you about the influence. I do not understand how educated people think this can work and why the US with smart people works like that.

<comment><USER50> The USA isn't high GDP? Fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The true purpose of the legal profession, as with other jobs like accounting and IT, is to provide something to do for people to keep them from spending their free time challenging entrenched power structures. If bots can do some job in law, then the law will change to require more human audits of such work.

<comment><USER51> Because my comment follows guidelines, I presume some disagree with this opinion. Perhaps you're young and haven't worked out the true meaning of most paid work. I remember reading about a study about 15 years ago that assessed what proportion of various countries jobs actually contributed directly to production, e.g. mining, agriculture, etc, as opposed to "made-up" jobs like law, taxation, etc. Australia had a mere 7%, though other developed countries weren't much higher.

Not many jobs in law and justice contribute to catching and rehabilitating criminals who break laws that hurt others, and even then everything's done in triplicate (prosecution, defense, judge). Most legal jobs revolve around crimes that don't harm others, and civil and business law.

If the types of people who don't go into business don't have jobs, they might revolt and in some other way challenge entrenched power structures. So the government makes laws to maximize the number of people in work.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which service to use for livecoding? - <AUTHOR> I'd like to set up a stream of myself doing some basic AI stuff, learning Haskell, generally programming. After the Livecoding.tv debacle (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486476), I'm interested in what other options are out there. I know twitch and youtube are both open to this kind of content -- anyone have livecoding experience with these or other streaming services? <comment><USER2> Twitch and YouTube are both sufficient.</comment>


Is the MMORPG Dying? - <AUTHOR> http://anewdomain.net/mmorpg-dying/ <comment><USER2> One problem with MMORPGs is that they just take so much time. As a young adult working full time and trying to maintain a reasonably balanced lifestyle, I don't know how to find a guild or establish friendships in a game while acknowledging that I'm only gonna be putting in a couple hours a week. Heck, I can't imagine how people with children manage to pull it off. I know I'm not going to be that good, since I'm only interested in playing for fun.

I also find playing for long periods of time gets a bit exhausting. This means that in recent years I've started to gravitate towards more linear stories. I'm not usually interested in collecting stars or points, I just want to shut my brain off for a few hours and kill stuff.

If you play with friends, it can become a bit frustrating too if some of them are more in the "hardcore" side of things. Nobody wants to fight constantly against someone they can never get a chance to beat. It can be fun when playing certain co-op games, but anything highly competitive just gets too overwhelming.

<comment><USER3> Isn't MMORPGs taking time very much a design issue? Not even inherent in the genre itself, but enforced intentionally to bind users?

Tabletop RPGs have been getting by without "grinding" for decades, yet this is the current focus of most CRPGs (even more so than some past examples).

There are plenty of activities that could be done with a more occasional time investment (quests/dungeons that don't require groups/guilds, fiddling with your own house/manor/hold etc.).

<comment><USER4> Activities that could be done occasionally is basically a single player game - go play skyrim or fallout 4 - you don't need MMO for that.

MMORPG should be left for the kids with enough spare time to raid 4+ hours a day. Many would disagree, but from my experience it is friends that keep you coming back every day and you can't make them this days with all this casual queues and playing few hours a week.

<comment><USER5> This - sorta... There are several different types of community that MMORPG's can sustain, but the multi-player bit is the big ingredient. Folks can be selling crafts, raiding or questing, but the critical bit is that n-people should be needed. The bigger n is the more compelling the driver (I think).

WOW lost a lot of luster when 40 mans got retired...

<comment><USER6> I __hated __40-man raids. They just weren 't fun. Cat-herding 40 people, the endless waiting, dc's, egos and fights. No fun at all.

My best memories of WoW raids were the drunken Friday night guild runs through UBRS. We knew the bosses well enough so that they didn't really require any effort or co-ordination and we were free to chat and talk crap amongst ourselves. Our tank usually got so drunk by the time we got to the end that we were glad the hunter had to kite the boss away.

I had to stop playing because the time commitment required to be an active member of the raid group got ridiculous. Literally every evening and most of every weekend. If you couldn't do that then you couldn't compete. Stuff that, this is a hobby not a job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been trying to relive the incredible high of pre-expansion Everquest for a while now, but nothing quite comes close to the massive amount of investment you'd have to put into it, the total lack of help outside of the in-game community (no guides, no in-game extensions, bare-bones UI), and the sheer terror of death that the game would instill in you. UO folks probably can relate to that as well. Those games felt like sandboxes where you'd be thrown into the deep end with tons of real consequences for carelessness, decisions felt meaningful, alliances with other players essential for survival. Nowadays you can grind your way through an MMO on your own, everybody gets their personal rollercoaster ride, everybody gets to win. Probably a big reason why we've seen a resurgence in games like Dark Souls and rogue-likes.

I did "enjoy" EVE quite a bit too, although parts of it felt more like a job rather this incredible treacherous journey through a magical and hostile world. EVE was more about the politics and logistics than the game itself.

I agree with many other first-gen MMORPG old farts that we will simply never be able to re-create that experience in the same format, that era is gone and is best left as a positive memory. Perhaps as others pointed out VR will be that next big leap forward that will allow us to suspend belief once again.

On a side-note, I really do hope that creators keep making titles where the game world is a nasty, hostile, inscrutable place and you and the people around you have to band together and figure it out, nothing is going to spoon- fed you the solution. It makes such a big difference to the end-user experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> I reinstalled EQ recently to try to relive that experience, and was astonished at how primative the game seemed. My recollection of it is vastly different. 16 years makes a huge difference.

<comment><USER8> I can get past the somewhat clunky UI and extremely dated graphics, but what always throws me when I try to get back into EQ is the controls. After years of playing EQ2, Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, etc. I've become so accustomed to controls 'just working' out of the box including the ever-present RMB camera controls that going back to the jank that is EQ drives me nuts.

It really stinks, because no modern MMO gives me the thrill I had playing EQ as a teen. Maybe to an extent it's the rose-tinted glasses, but I really miss having a real penalty for dying (and as much as I love this in EVE every time I resub I quickly lose interest due to the time sink of refitting ships, flying to a dozen different systems to pick up parts, etc.) and I think that was the key. Oh, and not having NPC's just throw up a wall of text or a cutscene to introduce a quest (SWTOR handles this well, and as much as I love FFXIV's great cinematics I really wish they had any interactivity) - having a conversation with an NPC to discover a new quest instead of having a marker over their head made discovering new content actually feel like that, a discovery.

<comment><USER9> For those of us who never played: What made dying in Everquest different?

<comment><USER8> You didn't just suffer a minor penalty on EXP gained and durability loss, you actually lost EXP (which was significantly harder to grind, losing a level could happen and could set a high level player back days).

Before some of the mid life expansions you also lost your gear and had to make the dreaded "corpse run" to retrieve it before it despawned (which took a long time IIRC, 24 hours or more). They later gave you the ability to have an NPC summon your corpse before removing the gear loss entirely.

Death in EQ was very serious in the old days as a result, and it was always wise to have at least one other player that could drag your corpse to a safe place if you were entering a challenging zone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, the corpse run. I forgot about that. We used terrain to try to get close enough to our corpse to get it without attracting the monster's attention. Basically, without your gear you could get beat down with a wet noodle.

<comment><USER8> As such it was always a wise idea to keep a spare set of gear in the bank, even if it was objective "worse" than your main set - trying to run back to your corpse naked is always scary, I still remember more than once having to ask a high level guild mate to go drag my corpse out of areas I shouldn't have been in at my level.

Oh, and one thing I forgot, while they added the corpse summoners in Planes of Power (I think?) they weren't cheap at the time, costing anywhere from several plat to close to 100 plat - so it was still usually a good idea to just make the corpse run unless it was literally impossible for yourself or a friend/guild mate/cheaper merc to get to your corpse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I played Ultima Online for over a decade. Missed the start by a year, but after that pretty much saw it through the highs and the eventual decline. Stopped playing during grad school as I just couldn't do the hours needed and balance that with the career, school, relationships, etc.

UO started out brilliantly simple - not much of a story line, some basic rules and a never ending cycle of PvP. This total risk of losing everything and having to start over, including houses being robbed and such, actually resulted in an almost life-like story line that players made themselves.

Guilds formed, turf was claimed, order maintained or chaos wrought. Playing completely solo was really tough, just like surviving in the real world is harder by yourself.

But the team managing the game seems to have decided that the difficulty and PvP were liability and not assets. They tried to retrofit the quests and what not to the game that really didn't need them. The result was, just as the article laments of more modern games - boring, predictable, safe experience. But what's the point?

After enough complaining by the "old guard" UO team made Seige Perilous shard (server) with old style rules and punishingly tough economics. This kept me playing for another 6 years...

I tried some newer games, but the safe/boring environment doesn't really let human creativity/nature come out. There really isn't much of "role playing".

If I ever have time for games again, private UO servers with pre-trammel rules will probably be it for me. If they still exist that is.

<comment><USER11> I played UO for years as well. I was on Lake Superior for a couple years until they introduced Trammel. Then I tried Siege for a few weeks but didn't have the foundation to get established with a group of people so it just turned out brutal and frustrating.

Later on (early 2000s) I played on IPY, the extremely popular pre-Trammel free shard. From the get-go I had a friend with me and he introduced me to a friend of his from World of Warcraft. The 3 of us met another group of people and we joined up to form a guild. We were so successful that we all became friends and played on multiple subsequent free shards together. A few years ago I even took a trip down to the Bay Area to stay with some of them; they've become lifelong friends.

Playing UO with a group of people you know really well that know how to work together as a team is a thrill like no other. Taking trips to a dungeon together and getting into street battles along the Vesper strip is just fantastic. On several occasions we found our whole group red (branded as murderers) and being chased by a mob of people from town.

UO is the only MMORPG I'm aware of where you can actually steal items from other people. I had a ton of fun playing a thief who could also cast spells. So many people expected a thief to run away instead of fighting back! They got a nasty surprise when they attacked me.

<comment><USER12> A bit out of context but it reminds me how I met my current team 8 years ago on Crysis and the awesome memories I have with. We see each others for a full week every year, and I'm even flatsharing with one of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Largely an article devoid of content. He sums it up by saying. "The next successful massively multiplayer online game, whatever that is, will have to be innovative, it will have to be more compelling than collection quests, and it will have to take risks."

He ignores all the MMO's that have been innovative and risk taking ventures. EVE, Guild Wars 2 ,Black Desert, Wildstar - just to name a (very) few, all have something different enough about them to make them reasonably unique.

Even World of Warcraft is evolving. The latest expansion offers more to do than any other expansion that came before it, and they are adding more dungeons and more story lines all the time. It still has Collect 10 Rat Asses quests, but that's not the game's focus.

MMO's aren't dying; there's never been a greater choice of high quality entertainment in this genre.

<comment><USER14> Well, the genesis of his paragraph is that he played a game, which he wasn't interested in enough to buy, for a weekend.

Why this piece got so far up I can't say, but I suppose interesting headlines count the same as interesting writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the question is more about our expectations. MMOs frequently cater to the casual gamer now and so the hardcore experience we had when we were young is virtually unattainable now. There are no fresh unique experiences in the MMO. Where other genres bump up the bar, again and again, to thrill us in new and more extreme ways, the MMO fails to make the same leaps so our sort of "tolerance" to the MMO thrill doesn't get exceeded to produce a new peak experience. MMOs have tried to change with games like Terra but ultimately there isn't anything new to feel. For me, it was the way games forced me to work together with other people that was enlightening. There will be a revolution in design at some point as budgets creep up and a hole in the market for something unique causes pent up demand to grow. It's only a matter of time before someone really throws something new at us and we can burn another 1000 hours in a game until that too seems stale. Perhaps VR will be the advent that throws a curves that MMO need to produce immersive social experiences. Who knows but there is pent up demand for sure.

<comment><USER16> _> There are no fresh unique experiences in the MMO._

That's because multiplayer RPGs first became massive multiplayer RPGs, and then became massive multiplayer [games]. You get the drift. Lot's of good things that make roleplaying experience unique went down the drain in the process, and even the name started reflecting it. The massive aspect itself makes it challenging to preserve roleplaying environment. Proper scaling of multiplayer roleplaying game is a tricky issue, and most don't address it well and don't even want to, since it would mean limiting the audience and less profits in result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a remarkably content free article.

Summary: are mmos dying? They could be, because they're repetitive and that's boring. Write better stories.

<comment><USER18> I think the author is feeling pain and expressing it poorly. I think that because I too grieved when WoW "died" for me (the Panda release was the last straw). I respond a bit differently in that I tend to analyze the crap out of things like affect me like that.

There is a sense of place, and to some extent community, in a multiplayer game. Ones that hit the right notes in terms of complexity, variability, and struggle tend to bring their communities together. Ones that tend to be manipulative often alienate communities. I have fond memories of hanging out with a Paladin and working through the content. We had compatible schedules and ended up great friends in the game but to this day I have no idea who they were in "real life."

So what I have come to understand is that a company stumbles upon a mix which like an ensemble cast of unknown actors that just "clicks" makes for a place where the content facilitates people getting to know each other, to help each other, and to compete with each other without getting too much in the way of the relationship side of things.

That gets them a bunch of customers but over time you can't relive the same experiences over and over again and find them "new" any more. You really need to mix it up somehow, and randomness helps but only goes so far. When the glow starts to fade and people drift away, the owner of the place will try new things to get people involved but at the end of the day, they eventually upset the balance and even their more loyal visitors start to taper off and fade away. And for people where the first time they completed a major quest line with new friends, or overcame a raid boss, and remember that time fondly, they can't go back. Just like you can't go back to being 15 again and riding around on bikes in the neighborhood without a care in the world. Nostalgia sets in and you move on, grieving what you lost.

I have played a number of MMOG's, and the RPGs are most notable because your "character" has developed in game and has a gravitas all its own. So how do you make a world where it is always fun to visit? You need a system where the world has its challenges but it isn't static. WoW avoided _feeling_ static because it had so much content, but if you take 10 - 20 'toons' from their starting zone to the maximum character level you pretty much learn all there is to know about the place. And it doesn't change over time. And while it had a lot of variation at the beginning, over time successive updates homogenized more and more of the features such that all the classes and races began to feel like the tier 10, 11, and 12 armor sets which were exactly the same artwork but with different texture maps.

I think the game that was Everquest and WoW and others in the MMORPG vein has crested, the next version of that will have to be very different in order to get the conversion rates those had. That said, once we have procedurally generated worlds rather than scripted worlds I thing you'll find they will remain engaging for a longer period of time.

<comment><USER19> > _the X was the last straw_

As someone who played WoW reasonably consistently from launch to a few months after the expansion that gave level 70, people declaring they left because X was so bad... they were there from day 1 (admittedly, early WoW was quite buggy). WoW has always had people saying "well now, THIS is the last straw!".

But yes, you can only do the same thing for so long before moving on. Most courses have a far greater 'intro' level and a much narrower set of ongoing students who stick with it, for example. It's a problem MMOs have, because they're predicated on people sticking around, and content is consumed much, much faster than it can be created.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Older MMO's, like Everquest or World of Warcraft, were pretty blatant skinner's boxes. You were lucky if a NPC sending you out to collect bat-wings got a little bit chatty. Some more recent MMO's, such as Bioware's The Old Republic or Cryptic's Star Trek Online, are much more story driven. STO, for example, has enough single-player instanced story-driven content to reach the maximum level, at which point you either quit or dive into the skinner's box that passes for an endgame.

That being said, single player games still seem to set the bar for story- driven content. It's a simple matter of how resources are spent. A MMO has to be able to suck people in long-term and be interesting for at least some players after they've put hundreds of hours into the game. A single-player game can end after 30-40 hours and not be called "too short" by reviewers. The budget for any given minute of gameplay is therefore much lower for MMO's than for single player games.

We're probably going to see a blurring of lines between single player games and MMO's in the near future. Games will have a high production value, story- driven, single player component that's all a lot of people will want to play, but they'll also have an open-ended MMO component. Some games will start players out in single-player and, at the end, dump them into a MMO universe, trained and equipped well past the newbie stage. The upcoming Star Citizen is apparently going to use a model similar to this. This solves the newbie- training problem that MMO's often struggle with while allowing players enamored with a single-player game's universe to continue inhabiting it, albeit by consuming content made with lower production values.

So, no, the MMORPG is not dying. It's just having lots of sex with single player RPG's and producing mutant offspring.

<comment><USER21> I think Ubisoft's "The Division" meets and melds some of the concepts you're talking about in the direction MMO's seem to be going. You start out grabbing a few solo missions, and the game procedurally teaches you elements of the game by making you...well...go out there and kill bad guys. Periodically in early game you'll be on a mission, pinned down when a bullet whizzes by from out of nowhere, oh look another player walking by decided to come join.

That's when you learn about forming parties. So on and so forth. It's not a perfect experience by any means (especially on PS4 which seems to both fall behind in updates and seem to be the buggiest port), and it does get a bit "grindy" at times, but for me it's been quite a unique experience. You can very well solo some of the missions, but you _will_ be punished for it.

My main critique is that end game (the "Dark Zone") is essentially one giant arena built for "let's see how far I can push the gear envelope today".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> MMORPG publishers stopped releasing even approximate subscriber numbers years ago, and the best you'll find with a Google query like "mmo subscriber numbers" are statistics almost a decade old, heavily footnoted with notices that numbers are educated guesses at best.

However, as far as anybody can tell, there is a definite downwards trend and the biggest player, World of Warcraft, has been hemorrhaging subscribers for years, currently down to an estimated 5.5 million from a peak of _12 million_ in 2010.¹)

It used to be that the MMO playerbase would migrate. A new MMO game would come out and everybody flocked to the new hotness, and if the game was any good, they'd stick. But World of Warcraft changed that. People still bought new MMOs as they came out, but they played them precisely as long as the number of months of free subscription included in the box, and then moved right back to WoW, leaving the challenger to wilt and eventually switch to a free-to-play model.

However, the droves that are leaving MMOs the last couple of year don't seem to be going to other MMOs, they just evaporate.

The people that enjoy raid-style content with a large multiplayer component probably end up in MOBAs²) like LoL (League of Legends) and DOTA (Defense of the Ancients), which offer all of the tension and drama of typical MMO end- game content without any of the boring grinding needed to unlock it. And according to Steam, DOTA 2 is the most played PC game in the world.³)

Others have moved to MMO-FPS games like The Division on PC and Destiny on consoles, and the rise of casual and mobile gaming coincides with the fall of MMORPGs. But as far as I can tell that still leaves millions of players that simply stopped playing.

My guess is that the world is just sick and tired of MMORPGs and I think it will take the death of WoW and a few years without any big MMO releases before a new generation of players can make any new MMO popular.

¹) [https://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of- world-o...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of- warcraft-subscribers-by-quarter/)

²) Multiplayer Online Battle Arena.

³) [http://store.steampowered.com/stats/](http://store.steampowered.com/stats/)

<comment><USER23> The impression i have of WoW is that over the year it has become IRC with colorful avatars. People i used to do LAN parties with etc are virtually impossible to reach online outside WoW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think there is a twin problem of too many convenience features added, and the advent of Youtube and community wikis.

The former has turned the process of getting from one end of the map other, and that of forming groups for dungeons and such, virtually effortless.

As best i recall, if you wanted to travel to another city without doing it overland in EQ, you had to locate a player character wizard with the right spell unlocked and the right reagents on hand. Similarly if you died far out in the wilderness you had to rely on a PC necromancer services to recover the corpse and gear.

These days you can just click a npc, pay some in game currency and presto, either problem solved.

Similarly you can these days just put a checkmark next to the dungeons wanted, hit "find group" and be teleported to the entrance.

The other issue is access to outside information.

Just about every puzzle and dungeon will have multiple video guides up on Youtube etc within days of game launch or update. And most games these days have wikis that are either officially or community maintained.

These things kill all sense of wonder and exploration, as one can always alt- tab to the browser to tell what one need to do next.

edit: Never mind that most overland areas are specifically designed to be soloed no matter what class or gear one have chosen. Just follow the virtual breadcrumbs of quest markers and you will be max level and can start on "endgame" before you know it. At that point the MMO turns into an overly elaborate lobby game, as nobody ventures out into the overland areas ever again.

And we can see this in how more recent MMOs are set up with quite elaborate shard/instance load balancing. Meaning that they can scale the server farm up or down without ever taking a whole "realm" or named server offline.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the MMORPG concept could get a nice boost from live AR (Ingress/Pokemon Go). I think it would be pretty cool to form a group, walk around and fight spawning mobs and play some sort of instances. Would probably easy to monetize with in game purchases (I think the traditional monthly fee wouldn't work as well). Blizzard is probably already working on something like this :) There's also potential for a non-grindy version where quests span the globe and unique NPCs are spread around the world (and the world could mirror earth...northern Europe being Vikingy etc.)

I played DAOC a lot but due to that experience stayed away from the WoW crack pipe. Still want to try EVE some day but that would probably require me being retired :P

</comment><comment><USER25> My theory is that the time sink of life is impacting the time sink of MMOs, but the way to solve time sink issues is through pure skill gameplay design, which is inherently difficult to do in an mmo from an back end architecture perspective. Increases in compute power are going to keep MMOs from dying though, because it won't be long before someone merges the two. Its just that the standard template for an mmo has infected designers minds, so few even attempt to break the mold.

Bonus: for those of you missing UO and that dynamism, and hardcoreness, Mortal Online is worth a look. (F2p skill cap of lvl 60)

<comment><USER26> WoW is currently trying to appeal to a wide audience rather than a specific group of players that something like a pure skill system would require. They've built in their time sink grinding that is always there but they've also doubled down on the lore and immersion while breaking content into chunks that are designed for players of different skill levels, time constraints and interests. You can see this with the inclusion of much more voice acting, artifact knowledge research, artifact weapons that grow with the player. There are normal, heroic, mythic and looking for group dungeons and raids all of which have different levels of difficulty and mechanics to overcome. For those players looking for a skill based challenge without the time sink of raiding the mythic + dungeon system is also new. In this system there are keys which unlock a dungeon at a specific difficulty. As the level of the key increases the difficulty of the dungeon increases and something called affixes are added. These affixes change the way the dungeon operates from decreasing healing to increasing mob difficulty overall or depending on how many are engaged at one time and several others. Additionally as you move up the difficulty you go from no affixes up to three affixes at once.

For the first time in a long time I find WoW to actually be compelling and worth spending time in game. I'll likely only play through each of the classes to max level and all of their story lines while experiencing the raid dungeons from the very casual looking for group version but everything is accessible and can be done at my own pace. Not all of the story lines are well done and I think they need to consider if they are giving equal writing time to each class but that's never been the strongest suit for Blizzard.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this as I've been feeling much the same way. I recently went through a bunch of my old games trying to put my finger on what I miss about them.

I re-installed Neverwinter Nights 2 and started going around some of the persistent world servers out there, and I really enjoy the role-playing that goes on among players. I've actually been considering resurrecting my DM gear and finding some pencil and paper players.

</comment><comment><USER27> I used to play bare bones EverQuest and World of Warcraft for a few years. I dabble with Guild Wars 2 these days. Questing and exploration is fun. When it comes to raiding and forming groups, that is where the pain starts. The time investment required is high. All games become a grind one way or another as players are able to consume content faster than developers can produce it. At least with living world, Guild Wars 2 is able to keep kindling the interest of the player base every now and then in between expansion packs.

</comment><comment><USER28> Other ideas and concept they can be using: \- Grinding for world understanding/knowledge instead of XP (don't open use your browser ;D) \- Allow player skill to have a larger effect on your performance. \- Make interesting/hard to play classes. \- Make grinding fun, and thus battles engaging. (Allowing people to have boring grinds can be achieved with different classes.) \- Consider skill-based classes, rather then templates.

</comment><comment><USER29> I waited for so long for WoW to be released and when it finally came and it continiously cost money to play, I didn't start with it, because I was poor.

This problably saved my life, lol.

2-3 years after the release I met so much people who lost jobs, dopped out of university or destroyed their relationships with it.

On the other hand I also met a few that got jobs at Blizzard, starting with being a GM and later getting into other things like admin stuff etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> There are some MMORPGs out there that have attempted to innovate by introducing elements from other genres. Some names off the top of my head, Starbreak, Steambirds alliance, Blade & Soul.

Also, maybe those .io games, where you can just pick up and play have gotten the attention of the younger generation? Especially since they are easier to access and dont require downloading of a client nor signing up for an account

</comment><comment><USER31> Procedural generation and perhaps some better AI will help a lot. No Man's Sky was basically just a crude demo.

AI bots where you can model actual game theories, and dare I say, philosophies, of people would be really cool, and I think would just take some investment from a visionary company.

<comment><USER19> Procedural generation has proven to be something considerably less than a silver bullet. Some games implement it well, and many do not. Spore was another big launch that promised the world on the back of procedural generation... and failed quite remarkably to deliver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Were they ever alive? It seems like the market only ever had so much room to begin with.

<comment><USER33> WOW had 12 million subscribers at its peak.

<comment><USER32> But they were one of the few winners amongst a lot of losers that could never get critical mass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How did this non starter got to HN front page ?

This "article" pretty much says nothing but stating the obvious. Playing the same thing for 10 years grows old, WoW seized the MMORPG market preventing innovating titles from commercial success. How can he not see that he is part of the problem he writes about ?

<comment><USER35> If you think a submission is inappropriate for HN, flag it and move on. The community is made up of members with all kinds of different interests. This submission has clearly attracted the interest of some.</comment></comment>


Reddit wants free speech, as long as it agrees with the speaker - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/reddit-free-speech-gawker?fb=optOut

<comment><AUTHOR> Those who oppose an open Internet always drag up things like pedophilia, abuse porn, stalking, libel, and bullying. These are forms of abuse and harassment, not free speech.

Very, very badly handled... so badly in fact that the dirt seems to stick. Also, as the article points out, very bad for the cause of genuine free speech.</comment>