Shadowrun Pub
Shadowrun RPG => SR4 (Shadowrun 4th Edition) General Discussion => Topic started by: Pimp-Boy 2000 on October 17, 2005, 12:46:53 AM
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I love SR4, and am halfway through reading it, but... sweet baby Christ, their editor is utterly, thoroughly, exquisitely incompetent.
I've only been reading Shadowrun 4th Edition for 152 pages so far, and I've already found 160+ grammatical, syntactical, spelling, punctuation, and even a few contextual errors. (I am not counting errata, of course). It's literally an error or two per page, which is utterly unacceptable and startlingly shoddy work for a professional editor. He (or she) should have read through the final draft of SR4 several times before approving it! In one casual, halfway-completed read-through, I've found dozens upon dozens of errors. Some examples (these may not be exact errors from the book, but they get the idea across):
- The Travelling Period: "...on your next turn ." {Space, then a period.}
- The Lovebird Words: "...down onyour character sheet."
- The Goddess "Isis": "...why is your character is a Shaman?"
- The Evil Twin: "...if you do, than you can take an extra turn."
- The Ghost Period: "...on your character sheet" {Period is fully absent.}
- The Rappelling Period: "...your character's lifestyle
." {Period placed at the beginning of a new line rather than the end of an old one.}
You guys may think I'm some sort of asshole for nitpicking so extensively, but this person is a PROFESSIONAL EDITOR. Even President Bush is better at his job than this guy. What a waste of space.
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You know, I have to go with PB2K with this one. I've noticed this kind of thing happening more and more in novels, rulebooks, and just about any other printed text. It seems to me that these "professional" editors are begining to think that running spell check on your rough drafts is good enough to send something to print with. Personally, it makes me want to vomit. You've all read my posts. You all know I can't type or spell to save my life. And if I can point out all of the errors in a book, then something is drasticly wrong.
Gabriel
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LOL perhaps it's flavor text? you know, from the 'hackers' who invaded the datafile... hackers that can't spell...
and uh...
hmmm...
-RuskiFace the Pirate (I didn't really notice, but I'll fix thoes next time I edit the source file)
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No, spell check would have caught every sentence with a missing period (and there are QUITE a few of those). So... they didn't even use that! I know what you mean, though, Gabriel.
This is why I hate, hate, hate the fact that we're approaching entering an era where no one is required to be a master of English language composition -- even if their job demands it. Editors are the last line of defense between a perfect book and one riddled with errors.
This little editing situation truly hurts Shadowrun. As Gabriel mentioned, it doesn't take an insane English wiz (like yours truly) to notice these errors; some folks will begin to think it's a subpar system -- consciously or unconsciously -- based primarily upon the shoddy editing work. When the editing is perfect (as in Blue Planet v2), the game truly stands out as excellent; it lifts the game up. When the editing is bad, it brings the game down, makes it seem less... intelligent.
I wonder if FanPro needs a new editor? Bah, they won't hire me... I don't actually have a degree yet, and demonstrating one's editorial skills off the cuff is always difficult. Whomever their current editor is, I'm sure he's complacent and has a bit of tenure around his workplace, and God forbid you replace someone these days on account of mere incompetence and job ignorance.
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Well, as a Capitolist; I'd have to agree with the sentament that getting rid of someone on the basis of their cost to ability ratio being skewed. While at the same time i'd also like whoever their 'legacy' person is to keep his job, for the sake of security. he's probibly got 2.4 kids to feed.
-RuskiFace the pirate
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Well, as a Capitolist; I'd have to agree with the sentament that getting rid of someone on the basis of their cost to ability ratio being skewed. While at the same time i'd also like whoever their 'legacy' person is to keep his job, for the sake of security. he's probibly got 2.4 kids to feed.
-RuskiFace the pirate
Sorry, I prefer meritocracies. If he can't cut the cheese, he needs to go back to school. What if I'm poor, and have kids to feed, and I can do his job better than he can? It's better for me and for the company and for the company's product if I have the job. If you bring the company and the product down, you're deadwood and need to be removed.
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That's the Capitolist way, and why we have un-employment.
*shrug*
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Tsk, tsk, PB2K...
You should know that a meritocracy and capitalism can't be compared because one is a form of government and the other a form of economy...
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But, if we were nice loyal comunists, we'd just take our miss-spelled books, and burn thim to cover the heating shortage that was making us freeze to death.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Er... aren't heating bills going up like 70% this year?
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not if you don't turn on the heater, and just warm yourself by a fire in the fireplace, and put your cold feet on your husband's back in the middle of the night, and steal all the covers! then make that same coverless husband go downstairs to make you something warm to drink in the moring before you get out of bed.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Voice of experience?
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Perhaps.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Well, I'dhave to say probably.
Sounds like on of the joys of being married/starting living together with someone.
And since we all know you were married not too long ago...
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LOL okay okay, I confess.
Been married for two years now though.
(Dunno if that's a long time or not... it's kinda a long time for california in general... LOL I've had a couple of friends get married after me, and not all of them are still married.)
In other news, although only slightly related to what we are talking about, and not related at all to the topic at the top of the screen, we are trying to have a baby, so; that's cool. anyways... uh...
who want's a job as an editor? suppose we'll have to outsource that to china for $ 0.25 / day?
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Being an editor is a thankless job. (and in my case, also payless. But let's not talk about that at all.)
Let's say you edit a 100 page manuscript. If you catch 99.9% of the errors, someone is going to pick apart the fifteen you missed, and write you a letter about it. (For an example of such a letter, see Pimpboy's acerbic post at the beginning of this thread)
The larger the book, it becomes exponentially harder to edit. A four-page newspaper is going to have errors, and take about six hours to edit. An eight page newspaper... somwhere around four times as hard to edit. I just finished a 16-page paper, and it took me the better part of two weeks. And I'm really good at my job.
I can't even imagine what it would take to put together a multi-media (graphics, pictures, rules format, indexes, and stories, in both standardized and non-linear formats) book like SR4. It runs, what... 350 pages?
Yeah, if someone offered me that job, I would punch them somewhere it would hurt and they would remember it.
-kv
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No, you need to take the MONEY and THEN punch them.
-RuskiFace the Bully.
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Not in that case; taking the money means you agree to do it.
Punching them just lets them know they made a stupid mistake.
-kv
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Well, there's always the low road.
I.E. take the money for a job you don't want. then do a crappy job of it.
like; say you are an editor. as you edit people's stuff: add mistakes to it.
*shrug*
-Ruski
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hahahah... most people don't need that help. ;D
Even professional writers and english majors make mistakes.
-kv
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I know, but to edit it to make it WORSE!
now, that's tallent!
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Some of those errors are HORRIBLE. If I were that editor, I KNOW I'd get fired...
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Perhaps he was trying to get fired?
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Maybe they outsourced the job to India?
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Actually Indians generally have very good grammar, they're required to study it in school from an early age. They used to be a British colony too ;)
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You've mean you've never gotten a "call" before?
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Not a 'call' per say, but I've had to call many tech support lines. Mind you I'm not talking about the accent, but the grammar ;)
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Right, but you'd think they'd learn how to pronounce some of our names right :P
I mean, my name is not "Hendershow" it's HendershoT
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Bah, if someone is 'trying' to pronounce my name, I'm happy. at least they took the effort to listen once, and then repeat it. any way you look at it; i've been called worse. (expecially when I'm driving)
and an attempted name botch is more personal than a whole slew of generic pro-nouns.
Yes, Sir and/or Madem; This is our, the company's, policy.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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I can usually tell if it's someone trying to pronounce my name for the first time, or if it's someone who''s never met me before, making a sales call:
Sometimes my name is too long for databases- so they call me Mr. Hendrickso. ;D That one isn't as much of a problem now, but it was funny the few times it happened.
They try to pronounce it a few times, and then settle on the wrong one:
"Mr. Hendri... Hendrix... Hender... Henderson. How are you today?"
-kv
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I just tell them to call me 'Mr. Anderson.'
-RuskiFace the Pirate
Knock Knock Neo.
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hahahaha... speaking of which, that game Sara got me, "Matrix: The Path of Neo" is awesome!
-kv
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Names, while interesting, are perhaps a tad off topic yes?
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The topic is a loose subject to begin with; and mispronounciation of names could be construed as editing errors, but I don't want to push the point.
any other complaints about the editing errors in the SR4 book?
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Maybe they should get a Beta reader instead of an editor? Not only would they point out grammatical errors, a beta reader would point out sections that don't make sense.
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They have gamer test groups, but that's more to playtest the thing, not so much to fix gramatical errors.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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In the fanfic realm, a beta reader looks at both the story/plot/characters and grammatical structure.
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well, if its someone other than the developer's mother, they'll probibly want money to do that sorta thing.
and if you are working on a budget... that's space hard to find.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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I think they playtested and beta read thier own work, which is a little sloppy, but from what I've read of the developers, they were trying to keep rumors on it down, so they kept it in-house.
-kv
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Well, they were getting a lot of flack for the rumors that were getting out, so I can understand why.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Well, they did change the basic rules, eliminated one of the archetypes, and put thier own spin on the universe. I can see any one of those rumors getting out and making people angry, because...
I still don't understand why they're called Hackers now, rather than Deckers. Or why they started using real swearwords.
But hey, I'm not a developer- I don't know anything.
-kv
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Well, their target demographic didn't aparently really care about swearwords for the most part.
and 'hacker' was 'decker' for every sense of the word, so making it easyer for new people (with money, who'd buy their books) to relate to it is an understandable move.
for fun, make a new hacker, and name him decker.
LOL
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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And then give him a flaw that makes him think people around him are really androids and it's his job to hunt them down ;)
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Are they androids? it's getting so hard to tell... there's a test, of sorts. but it's not something you can just fire off on the fly. it's more of an interview style...
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Well, if you really think about the nature of that sort of thing, how long does it really take to make someone change from using the word "decker" and suddenly using the word "hacker"seems like it would take more than five years for everyone to suddenly using it. So maybe you make an old-school decker who still calls it "decking." You could always just say "frag it" and substitute your own plotline if you're that hardcore about it.
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Well, the fake slang was always part of the alure of shadowrun for me personally.
although, if you want to get REALLY technical; the term for what most 'hackers' are doing in SR4, is actually more akin to phreaking. (Hacking the wireless telephone system)
most hackers are good at bouth, but it is a specality area of expertiease.
-RuskiFace the Phreak
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I still don't see why they'd suddenly switch. The freakin' C2 deck was still called a "deck" even though it was implanted. How can a commlink designed to hack not be called a deck? Did all the old deckers just up and die in five years or what? It just doesn't make any sense.
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well, everyone has comlinks. only deckers use theirs to hack.
er... hackers use theirs to hack.
comlinks are like cellphones and computers. it's kinda a hybrid.
everyone's got them. most people can use them, hackers abuse them.
you don't have to have any special tools, really, to be a hacker. if you ran by and pulled the cellbud out of joe-corperate's ear, you could start hacking the world arround you with that. it's all about how you use and understand the technology.
actually, I never really liked the idea of a cyberdeck to be perfectly honest.
illegal modification of otherwise legal hardware asside, hacking IRL never really is about how great your computer was. you could hack with the biggest peace of crap you dug out of a dumpster if you wanted to. it's more about getting the utilities necessary, and knowing how to use them. my big complaint with the 'deck' system, was that even though you put 2 million newyen into hardware on the thing, it wasn't super enough to write code on. you'd have to get a diffrent 'just plain ol' computer' to write the code. and I think that the new system is actually a little bit more accurate to real life events.
*shrug* but it's not like the game IS real life, so they could do whatever they want with it.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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I think the implication of the cyberdeck was that there is too much data to hack code directly so you need a computer that can run a program to do it for you. I mean, sure, you can use your hacking pool to write an attack util on the fly, but spending the cred to have that rating 9 utility with deadly damage is much more efficient.
As for the programming part, I always treated a cyberdeck as a computer. However, I'd want all my programming softs stored somewhere besides active memory.
The whole hacking thing still bothers me, because they've suddenly made the nature of data in SR4 seem "less" than what it was in 3rd edition. If you can simply hack without any of the gewgaws from 3rd edition, what happened to the companies that made said gewgaws? Did companies suddenly stop putting hostile protection in their systems. All that infrastructure just disappears, people suddenly change their vocabulary, and a new system comes in. It's a terrible continuity error, if you ask me.
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no, i think perhaps I didn't explain my possisition well enough.
I was thinking more 'cyberdeck' versus 'tortouse' not so much 'cyberdeck' vs 'just using your brain'
because, while the creation of software is a very complex process, the actuall running of programs is much less so.
and, most of the 'effects' of thoes programs you run, takes place on the target computer.
so, really, the speed of your own computer/deck wouldn't make much of any diffrence at all.
the points when processer speed is important, like cracking amazingly complex encription routines, is almost compleatly overshadowed in the rules. *shrug* go figure.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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Eh, you ever look at the multiplier on the Counterfeit utility? It's 8, that's a LOT. Certified cred however is deeply encrypted though.
The way Matrix rules in 3rd edition were described made everything sound way more complex than perhaps it's given credit. I mean, if we knew exactly how much a megapulse is (which we shouldn't since its an abstraction) you can consider that it's just a wonder that a person doesn't need the aid of their machine just to get anything done at all.
The game always implied that you have to upload your programs to your icon in the system, this basically represents your bandwidth/processing usage. This is why you can't "deck" someone's desktop computer, because it doesn't have the processing power to actually handle an icon's programs. Now, reverse that and consider that a Red-8 host is going to do everything in it's collective power to stop you from doing what you want. This is millions of megapulses of processing power dedicating itself from stopping you. Now, sure, if you're significantly godlike enough at decking, you could break through the system, but in the end, you're gonna want help from your own personal super-computer to break those memory address algorithms stopping your attack programs and some extra hardening to keep the blaster IC from nuking the same.
Without an accurate gauge of how much processing is actually going on, it's not really appropriate to use present-day analogue to compare hacking and decking. Which is why I think that Fanpro is full of crap. It's like saying "Well, we don't need nuclear weapons anymore" Five years later, are all the nukes gone? Nope.
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well, that's actually helping my point.
if you have this super code busting machine to support your persona, and run software able to stop the bajillion megapulse attacks of Red-8 systems... why can't you write software on it?
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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You can, the active memory and storage simply have to meet the requirements, so no running other softs with your deck. I'd rather have my desktop computer writing my softs while using my nova-hot deck to steal bits of code from elsewhere. Better yet, if you're gonna write code with a deck, I'd rather deck a high-rated Orange host and use it to code my softs, or use my Agent to auto-code half of it and work on the rest while hiding inside the system. A deck can be used as a computer, even if the canon doesn't say so, but a spendthrift would use his deck for other endeavors. As long as your deck can hold the programming library: Oblong, Renraku Teng, etc. then you can code with that. Your desktop computer is just a cyberterminal with no real attributes and I don't think that the rules intended to say that you can't use a deck to program, because most matrix work is programming.
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*shrug* oh well. I guess it dosn't really matter at this point.
4th edition everyone's just phone phreaks.
and no one wants to program anything on their cellphone.
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in other news, I've got a compiler that can write code for cellphones. anyone want to bet me that I can't write a virus for cellphones? LOL
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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lol Just don't send it to me
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Oh... right... uh... don't read any of the text messages you get in the next little bit.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
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lol!
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feel free to send any viruses you want to test to 828.308.3356 Ruski, my Ex girlfriend would love them I am sure.
I would sure as hell laugh!
Janus