I've been looking forward to GHWT for a while now. Really excited about it. But the Wii Music wasn't something I've read about before, and the article on it linked here looks pretty interesting.
Well I am by no means a Microsoft fan, and vastly prefer a thumb trackball over a mouse. But for once, MS has actually come up with something new and innovative that truly is new and innovate. I at least have not seen any tracking system like this before. It's not a huge improvement over current laser mice, that is true, but it is a definite improvement. Better DPI will come with time I am sure, as will lefty/ambi mice.
Well, 'protecting' free-speech is kind of relative. If you try to shut down the person(s) trying to shut down free-speech, are you protecting it or not?
Also, a website is kind of a broad definition of 'speech'. Hence the controversy over whether or not blogs fall under the 'freedom of speech' clause.
Depends on what you are looking for in "PvE". Yes, you can go fight NPC mobs. But then, you can do that in virtually ever PC game ever made that has combat. If you're looking for real MMO PvE content, it's pretty thin in WAR. There's only a handful of dungeons, and from what I could tell in my stint in the game, not many people bother with them since the best gear is from PvP anyway. Good luck finding a group for one. As for PQs, sure there's about 2-3 per pairing, per chapter. So once you get to the final chapter, there's going to be about 6-9 PQ's that offer 'end-game' gear. That might keep you busy for oh, 2-3 weeks if you keep going until you also have the best possible loot from each individual PQ. Your influence will be maxed in a day or two. To say you can "PvE all you want" is just plain wrong. You could spend as much time as you want doing PvE, but 'all you want' also includes plenty of variety in PvE content to keep you happy for a long time. WAR doesn't even come close to offering that. WAR is about RvR, plain and simple. It's the biggest selling point; it's the main goal of the game. To claim anything else is beyond absurd.
I'm with you there. That's also one of the things I liked about City of Heroes. One of my main characters there is a Tanker. Care to guess what he does?
Warhammer is definitely a good game, no doubt about it. I preordered, played open beta, and was right there at release. Judging by my short experience in open beta, I figured the game was going to be a keeper. But there's one huge problem with the game, that you don't really discover until you've been playing a few weeks/months. There comes a day when you just want to take a break from the leveling/questing/PvP and do some lazy work.. like crafting, fishing, or shoot the bull in town with a few dozen other players. The problem is, all those little time-wasters are completely AWOL. There's nothing even remotely like fishing, and the crafting system... is mostly useless, what little there is of it. And nobody uses public chat channels. I mean nobody. In WoW, if you ask a question you'll at least get a smart-ass response. In WAR, you get nothing. It's like there's no one else even in the game. Even dungeons are sparse. So at end-game that leaves literally with nothing but PvP, and so far it hasn't struck me really as being significantly better than what you get in WoW. Scenarios are nothing new, and that's what most players are doing right now because it's the fastest way to gain renown and XP. There's 'real world PvP' aka RvR where you attack or defend keeps, but that's mostly like AV with uneven sides. And talk about PvP grinds. WoW has nothing on WAR for grinding. I saw a forum post where someone did some quick calculations, and it will take an average player (20 hours per week doing scenarios) over 1 year to grind the renown needed for the best PvP gear.
The skills are also all mostly just slight variations of what WoW has. Yeah, there's knockback, which to be honest is more annoying than useful. And WoW has that now too, in the form of a balance druid talent.
So if you like to run BGs and/or attack/defend keeps all day, Warhammer is the game for you. If you like other little fun things to mix it up, better stick with WoW.
His entire goal is to ultimately raid Stormwind and Ironforge by himself, so obviously he's got some kind of system to do PvP. As for instantly killing several players at once, he's using all shaman. Fire off earthshock x 7 = dead player. With 15 shaman, he can do that twice at the same time, and depending on the player/class he may not need that many, allowing him to kill 3 or even 4 virtually instantaneously. And obviously he's planning on something like that or he would not be planning city raids. Whether or not he will actually be able to do it remains to be seen of course, but 32 shaman is going to dominate any other single player, regardless of anything else. Clearly, not everyone has the means to play 32 characters at once, which means this is a huge unfair advantage for this player, which Blizzard almost certainly will address given his ultimate goals.
If he never uses them in PvP, you may be right. But looking at the increasing number of players doing 5-box teams, I predict the complaints are going to start coming in soon and the ban stick will hit. Considering that this is clearly an exploit and requires the use of third party software, it's almost surprising it hasn't happened yet.
It's not the download that's the problem in an MMO, it's the upload. I perused the original forum thread about this (linked somewhere here at/.) and one guy said he could get a max of 25 WoW accounts working properly on a 1.5Mb upload (any more than that lagged too much). So for 36, he's probably at about 2.0Mb upload, and that ain't cheap. Your typical 8Mb down/768Kb up cable connection ain't gonna cut it.
But you know Blizzard is going to have to take some action against multi-boxing now. Five-boxers were bad enough, with 32 you can dominate any BG. With 15 shaman in a typical battleground, he can literally kill 2-4 players instantly.
Right now Blizzard is in a much more comfy position that lets them do what they want and get away with it (at least so they think), while MS is hurting thanks to Vista adoption problems, XBox 360 RROD, etc. Thing is though, companies who pull those tricks often have them backfire on them. (Like MS.) Customers are a fickle lot, and can turn on you a lot quicker than you'd think, which Blizzard may just be setting themselves up to find out the hard way. Only time will tell.
Is your server in Bizzaro Universe? Because almost everyone I ever met who plays WoW would rather heal or DPS than tank. There's a select few (very small percentage, which you apparently are part of) that actually like it, and another few more who will play it simply because they know they can always find a group. BTW, tanking in no way guarantees you will be 'out in front calling the shots'. I've ran plenty of raids with raid leaders calling the shots who were not tanks. And you're not going to be 'out in front' until the raid/party leader tells you to. At least, not if you don't want to get booted.
Re:I think the title of this year are : RA3 and SC
on
Blizzcon 2008 Wrap-Up
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· Score: 2, Informative
Unfortunately everything I've read and heard about RA3 so far indicates it will be a huge bucket of suckage. Which is very disappointing to me, as my favorite RTS to date is still RA2, even though there's other 'better' ones like Starcraft.
Well, you may be somewhat correct about the gear problem, but lack of gear was by far not the only problem keeping people from playing Tanks. The bigger problem was it simply wasn't fun for most people. No big numbers, and all you really get to do is try to keep your threat high enough on the mob(s) you are tanking. And to make matters worse, tank specs are generally the most boring to do anything solo with. (Yes, even more boring than most heal specs for a lot of players, thanks to the spell dmg on healing gear.) So they're giving the old tank classes new abilities in their tank talent trees, and adding a new tank class that *should* be a fresh play style. Sounds to me like they're on the right track. Although for me, after playing a tank in City of Heroes I'm not sure I will ever be able to play a tank in WoW again.
Maybe a little less, not a lot. But my tower sits on the floor anyway; it's a pretty trivial matter to lay it down in the rare circumstance that's required to swap a part. Anything besides a motherboard can usually be done just fine without even moving it. But this Antec case... it just doesn't look useful for anything really. There's other system test bed setups that are a lot more accessible if that's your goal, and any other standard case is going to fit somewhere. This one just gets in the way, and you can't put anything on top of it. I'll just stick with my big tower with the quick-release side panel, thanks.
The design looks a bit impractical unless you've got lots of desk space though.
That's more or less what I was thinking too. It looks kind of cool, but where the hell would I put it? It doesn't fit anywhere a normal tower does. Think I'll just stick with my massive Chenming tower, which actually for me takes up 'less space' despite being twice the size.
I can see why you would think that, but you're incorrect.
How are you even aware of the CHOICE supposedly offered or that Christ ever EXISTED? Because church authorities said so. Why do you regard the Bible as mostly fact, but the Odyseey and the Iiliad (Greek myths) as mostly fiction? Because church authorities said so.
You were not THERE. You do not KNOW. You CANNOT know. There is absolutely no way around this. You have to take the WORD of early church authorities that they were telling the truth and recorded everything accurately.
With that logic, nothing can ever be proven. Everything is taken based on someone else's authority. You can't even be sure you actually exist, and that any of this is real.
This is a direct contradiction to orthodox Christianity. You are saying that the teachings of any random man on the street are exactly equivalent to those of Jesus Christ. If so, why aren't you following street preachers? And what about the Mormons? Why isn't Joseph Smith a real prophet?
I guess that depends on which 'orthodox Christianity' you're referring to. What I'm talking about is the original true Christianity described in the Bible.
Nonsense. You can argue the martyrs "lead by example", but their authority lies in their divine guidance, not that they managed to get themselves killed. You don't seem to grasp that it's Christian AUTHORITIES that determined whether or not X individual was divinely inspired and whether or not their story should be RECORDED. There are lots of martyrs, prophets, etc. whose stories were not recorded by Christian authorities because they were not "orthodox".
Actually, what I was referring to is a lot more simple and mundane. When you lead by example, it means you lead by doing instead of telling. You know, like when you want your kid to not steal stuff or lie, the best way to get them to not do that stuff is by not doing it yourself. Or when you want them to be a respectable person, the best way is to show them by being respectable yourself. It just doesn't work so well when you tell them to do one thing and do something different yourself. Same thing works with adults, for the most part.
You don't get to use the "No True Scotsman" fallacy with me. When cornered about the bad behavior of Christians, Protestants ALWAYS say "They weren't REAL Christians." because they want to promote their own little group (when you point out the bad things members of their Protestant sect do, they use it to justify the most recent split).
I'm just pointing out the most basic core elements of Christianity. It's right there in that book known as the Bible, in every translation and version I've ever seen. I'm not talking about fringe elements that are clearly open to debate. It's the basic stuff, like how an internal combustion engine runs on a flammable fuel. Yeah, people have tried to twist it around lots of times in lots of ways, but at the end of the day it still says the same thing in black and white. It hasn't changed in 2,000 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been looking forward to GHWT for a while now. Really excited about it. But the Wii Music wasn't something I've read about before, and the article on it linked here looks pretty interesting.
Well I am by no means a Microsoft fan, and vastly prefer a thumb trackball over a mouse. But for once, MS has actually come up with something new and innovative that truly is new and innovate. I at least have not seen any tracking system like this before. It's not a huge improvement over current laser mice, that is true, but it is a definite improvement. Better DPI will come with time I am sure, as will lefty/ambi mice.
So give credit where it is due.
Well, 'protecting' free-speech is kind of relative. If you try to shut down the person(s) trying to shut down free-speech, are you protecting it or not?
Also, a website is kind of a broad definition of 'speech'. Hence the controversy over whether or not blogs fall under the 'freedom of speech' clause.
You can also be arrested for creating a public nuisance.
Depends on what you are looking for in "PvE". Yes, you can go fight NPC mobs. But then, you can do that in virtually ever PC game ever made that has combat. If you're looking for real MMO PvE content, it's pretty thin in WAR. There's only a handful of dungeons, and from what I could tell in my stint in the game, not many people bother with them since the best gear is from PvP anyway. Good luck finding a group for one. As for PQs, sure there's about 2-3 per pairing, per chapter. So once you get to the final chapter, there's going to be about 6-9 PQ's that offer 'end-game' gear. That might keep you busy for oh, 2-3 weeks if you keep going until you also have the best possible loot from each individual PQ. Your influence will be maxed in a day or two. To say you can "PvE all you want" is just plain wrong. You could spend as much time as you want doing PvE, but 'all you want' also includes plenty of variety in PvE content to keep you happy for a long time. WAR doesn't even come close to offering that. WAR is about RvR, plain and simple. It's the biggest selling point; it's the main goal of the game. To claim anything else is beyond absurd.
I'm with you there. That's also one of the things I liked about City of Heroes. One of my main characters there is a Tanker. Care to guess what he does?
Warhammer is definitely a good game, no doubt about it. I preordered, played open beta, and was right there at release. Judging by my short experience in open beta, I figured the game was going to be a keeper. But there's one huge problem with the game, that you don't really discover until you've been playing a few weeks/months. There comes a day when you just want to take a break from the leveling/questing/PvP and do some lazy work.. like crafting, fishing, or shoot the bull in town with a few dozen other players. The problem is, all those little time-wasters are completely AWOL. There's nothing even remotely like fishing, and the crafting system... is mostly useless, what little there is of it. And nobody uses public chat channels. I mean nobody. In WoW, if you ask a question you'll at least get a smart-ass response. In WAR, you get nothing. It's like there's no one else even in the game. Even dungeons are sparse. So at end-game that leaves literally with nothing but PvP, and so far it hasn't struck me really as being significantly better than what you get in WoW. Scenarios are nothing new, and that's what most players are doing right now because it's the fastest way to gain renown and XP. There's 'real world PvP' aka RvR where you attack or defend keeps, but that's mostly like AV with uneven sides. And talk about PvP grinds. WoW has nothing on WAR for grinding. I saw a forum post where someone did some quick calculations, and it will take an average player (20 hours per week doing scenarios) over 1 year to grind the renown needed for the best PvP gear.
The skills are also all mostly just slight variations of what WoW has. Yeah, there's knockback, which to be honest is more annoying than useful. And WoW has that now too, in the form of a balance druid talent.
So if you like to run BGs and/or attack/defend keeps all day, Warhammer is the game for you. If you like other little fun things to mix it up, better stick with WoW.
Come on, even an AC has to be smarter than that. Download patch once, copy to all systems.
His entire goal is to ultimately raid Stormwind and Ironforge by himself, so obviously he's got some kind of system to do PvP. As for instantly killing several players at once, he's using all shaman. Fire off earthshock x 7 = dead player. With 15 shaman, he can do that twice at the same time, and depending on the player/class he may not need that many, allowing him to kill 3 or even 4 virtually instantaneously. And obviously he's planning on something like that or he would not be planning city raids. Whether or not he will actually be able to do it remains to be seen of course, but 32 shaman is going to dominate any other single player, regardless of anything else. Clearly, not everyone has the means to play 32 characters at once, which means this is a huge unfair advantage for this player, which Blizzard almost certainly will address given his ultimate goals.
If he never uses them in PvP, you may be right. But looking at the increasing number of players doing 5-box teams, I predict the complaints are going to start coming in soon and the ban stick will hit. Considering that this is clearly an exploit and requires the use of third party software, it's almost surprising it hasn't happened yet.
It's not the download that's the problem in an MMO, it's the upload. I perused the original forum thread about this (linked somewhere here at /.) and one guy said he could get a max of 25 WoW accounts working properly on a 1.5Mb upload (any more than that lagged too much). So for 36, he's probably at about 2.0Mb upload, and that ain't cheap. Your typical 8Mb down /768Kb up cable connection ain't gonna cut it.
He's doing it to raid Stormwind and Ironforge.
But you know Blizzard is going to have to take some action against multi-boxing now. Five-boxers were bad enough, with 32 you can dominate any BG. With 15 shaman in a typical battleground, he can literally kill 2-4 players instantly.
Maybe this explains why I usually don't bother voting.
Right now Blizzard is in a much more comfy position that lets them do what they want and get away with it (at least so they think), while MS is hurting thanks to Vista adoption problems, XBox 360 RROD, etc. Thing is though, companies who pull those tricks often have them backfire on them. (Like MS.) Customers are a fickle lot, and can turn on you a lot quicker than you'd think, which Blizzard may just be setting themselves up to find out the hard way. Only time will tell.
Is your server in Bizzaro Universe? Because almost everyone I ever met who plays WoW would rather heal or DPS than tank. There's a select few (very small percentage, which you apparently are part of) that actually like it, and another few more who will play it simply because they know they can always find a group. BTW, tanking in no way guarantees you will be 'out in front calling the shots'. I've ran plenty of raids with raid leaders calling the shots who were not tanks. And you're not going to be 'out in front' until the raid/party leader tells you to. At least, not if you don't want to get booted.
Unfortunately everything I've read and heard about RA3 so far indicates it will be a huge bucket of suckage. Which is very disappointing to me, as my favorite RTS to date is still RA2, even though there's other 'better' ones like Starcraft.
Well, you may be somewhat correct about the gear problem, but lack of gear was by far not the only problem keeping people from playing Tanks. The bigger problem was it simply wasn't fun for most people. No big numbers, and all you really get to do is try to keep your threat high enough on the mob(s) you are tanking. And to make matters worse, tank specs are generally the most boring to do anything solo with. (Yes, even more boring than most heal specs for a lot of players, thanks to the spell dmg on healing gear.) So they're giving the old tank classes new abilities in their tank talent trees, and adding a new tank class that *should* be a fresh play style. Sounds to me like they're on the right track. Although for me, after playing a tank in City of Heroes I'm not sure I will ever be able to play a tank in WoW again.
You didn't see that coming?? For real? I called that the minute I first heard D3 was becoming a reality.
Maybe a little less, not a lot. But my tower sits on the floor anyway; it's a pretty trivial matter to lay it down in the rare circumstance that's required to swap a part. Anything besides a motherboard can usually be done just fine without even moving it. But this Antec case... it just doesn't look useful for anything really. There's other system test bed setups that are a lot more accessible if that's your goal, and any other standard case is going to fit somewhere. This one just gets in the way, and you can't put anything on top of it. I'll just stick with my big tower with the quick-release side panel, thanks.
The design looks a bit impractical unless you've got lots of desk space though.
That's more or less what I was thinking too. It looks kind of cool, but where the hell would I put it? It doesn't fit anywhere a normal tower does. Think I'll just stick with my massive Chenming tower, which actually for me takes up 'less space' despite being twice the size.
Yes, it really is funnier in German than English.
You are simply wrong.
I can see why you would think that, but you're incorrect.
How are you even aware of the CHOICE supposedly offered or that Christ ever EXISTED? Because church authorities said so. Why do you regard the Bible as mostly fact, but the Odyseey and the Iiliad (Greek myths) as mostly fiction? Because church authorities said so.
You were not THERE. You do not KNOW. You CANNOT know. There is absolutely no way around this. You have to take the WORD of early church authorities that they were telling the truth and recorded everything accurately.
With that logic, nothing can ever be proven. Everything is taken based on someone else's authority. You can't even be sure you actually exist, and that any of this is real.
This is a direct contradiction to orthodox Christianity. You are saying that the teachings of any random man on the street are exactly equivalent to those of Jesus Christ. If so, why aren't you following street preachers? And what about the Mormons? Why isn't Joseph Smith a real prophet?
I guess that depends on which 'orthodox Christianity' you're referring to. What I'm talking about is the original true Christianity described in the Bible.
Nonsense. You can argue the martyrs "lead by example", but their authority lies in their divine guidance, not that they managed to get themselves killed. You don't seem to grasp that it's Christian AUTHORITIES that determined whether or not X individual was divinely inspired and whether or not their story should be RECORDED. There are lots of martyrs, prophets, etc. whose stories were not recorded by Christian authorities because they were not "orthodox".
Actually, what I was referring to is a lot more simple and mundane. When you lead by example, it means you lead by doing instead of telling. You know, like when you want your kid to not steal stuff or lie, the best way to get them to not do that stuff is by not doing it yourself. Or when you want them to be a respectable person, the best way is to show them by being respectable yourself. It just doesn't work so well when you tell them to do one thing and do something different yourself. Same thing works with adults, for the most part.
You don't get to use the "No True Scotsman" fallacy with me. When cornered about the bad behavior of Christians, Protestants ALWAYS say "They weren't REAL Christians." because they want to promote their own little group (when you point out the bad things members of their Protestant sect do, they use it to justify the most recent split).
I'm just pointing out the most basic core elements of Christianity. It's right there in that book known as the Bible, in every translation and version I've ever seen. I'm not talking about fringe elements that are clearly open to debate. It's the basic stuff, like how an internal combustion engine runs on a flammable fuel. Yeah, people have tried to twist it around lots of times in lots of ways, but at the end of the day it still says the same thing in black and white. It hasn't changed in 2,000 years.
Yep. And I'm happy enough with Nintendo products, I'm quite willing to support them like this. :)
Sign me up. Already have a Lite, but will probably pick up one of these too.