Coincedentially I just started playing this game this past weekend I do enjoy it but there are a few things that concern me
No full respecs -- As a new player with no idea on how different skills work I find the 1300+ point skill tree extremely daunting. I don't know the best (or even a mediocre) path to take for my character. I realize you can get respec points, but I have no idea how rare/easy they are to get, and if I screw up something early my character could be heavily penalized. I don't want to have to fill out a giant spreadsheet before I even get level 2 to decide how my character should be built. Now some people enjoy this system, but I do not. You also have limited character slots (not sure how many) so if I get to level 50 and don't like my build I would be forced to delete him.
No option to hide white items. Annoying to see the screeen filled up with 80% white items and accidentally clicking on a few...
No floating names on other players. Hard sometimes to spot my group members when there name isn't shown, also hard to spot them when in a town and 40 other players there as well
Only the first item is a major concern for me, other 2 are minor things.
your taxes arent complicated yet you don't know why they were asking for 10k? And your tax account somehow figured out how to reduce it by 10.6k?? Obviously either a) it is complicated, b) something unusually happened that year, or c) you didn't use the software properly and didn't double check your work.
Guess what, one time I did use software, I was making 35k/year at that time, and it said I owed 100,000 in taxes! OMG! Then I double checked my work and I had put an extra zero so I had entered in 350k as my income. So by your logic I saved $100,000!!!!!
No, every time I use gmail I am confused on what a button does because there is no text. Sure the common things that I use every day I eventually figure out, but the more obscure option I rarely use? I have to hover over a bunch of buttons waiting for a tool tip (oh right, you don't' get tooltips on a phone)
Let me guess whenever you use word, or libre office or whatever you use you ONLY use the toolbar and you instantly know what every icon does without the tooltip? Didn't think so. At least they give you a menu to look through options. Sure it looks more "sexy" with just icons, but usability goes down the drain
Ahh good to know, I guess fairly typical for/. to get the summary wrong. Taking a quic klook, it still doesn't seem that the @home version is for your typical home cook with a family of 4 trying to cook dinner in an hour. It still looks like it is meant for an upcoming/aspiring professional chef who doesn't have access to all of the equipment. I could be wrong though as I did only spend a couple minutes looking at it.
The thing about this book, is it isn't so much about the recipes but the SCIENCE and techniques of food. This set of books is meant for an upcoming professional chef. I bet 3/4 the recipes use either equipment or techniques that no home cook would have/know about Sure you get a basic recipe from allrecipes.com (most of them just mediocre, I bet there are only a few gems that would be just as good/better than a 5 star restuarant). It is one thing reading a recipe and following, but do you know WHY they use the method they choose, why one food reacts with a different one the way it does. Proper technique also makes a huge difference. I could put a handful ingredients along with a recipe on your counter, and exact same ingredients with exact same recipe on a professional chefs, and I pretty much guarantee you the professional chefs will taste better.
Also, how many typical home cooks are using sous vide technique to cook their meat, using liquid nitrogen for desserts, using a centrifuge to make beef stock. This set of books also use a ton of ingredients that you would not find at your local grocery store, or even a local specialty store, I bet quite a few need to be special ordered.
I am not saying you need to be a professional chef to make good food, of course not, nor do you need to know all of the techniques, or have all the crazy equipment. I was just stating this volume of books is not just your typical $10 recipe book that you find on amazon.
what features were removed? I am sure there have been a few, but I used firefox from version 3 to version 19 and didnt notice any features removed (at least once that I used) I however was getting sick of firefox, and find chrome to be a much better experience (even though they are at version 30 already.. but at least they don't even advertise it)
There already is a company sort of already doing this - Path Intelligence http://www.pathintelligence.com/ They track cell phones(both smart phones and dumb phones) in a store or a mall and provide aggregate date (i.e they DO NOT sell individual information) The store or mall also most post a notice in their store so customers are clear that they are being tracked.
Ok maybe not actually taking the phone call IN the meeting room, but we are allowed to excuse ourselves, are allowed to answer texts and emails.. as long as all of the above are work related but only in meetings that are a) not critical, and b) internal meeting (i.e not with clients) and c) you are not directly involved at that time.
Sometimes you need to be in that 1 hour long meeting even though you only directly involved in 5 minutes of it, sometimes you just need to be aware of what is going on, but our boss realizes that we are losing a bunch of productivity, so if we can answer texts/emails from clients/other coworkers without disturbing other people then so be it. Why would other people get disturbed if I am typing out an email on my phone?
You are right, down-rating isn't for being wrong, however he is down-rated for being off-topic, perhaps a bit harsh and I am guessing if he would have posted early and got first or second post (or even if he would have posted this as a reply to another post) he might have got +5 insightful or informative, however, looking at the post on its own it's off-topic (or irrelevant) This submission is not discussing the merits of one storage medium over another, it is discussing price fixing for optical drives.
yup, company I work for publishes medical books for veterinarians and we have a disclaimer saying we are not responsible. We put it in our mobile apps as well.
My comment about this is, if they are replacing ads are they also depriving the websites from their ad revenue? I know ad block does the same but at least it is a user choice and I am not getting the ad revenue, but they are basically stealing revenue.
It would be almost like me rebroadcasting bells satelitte stations and then replacing their ads with my own, I would get sued 6 ways from Sunday.
hey come on this is slashdot, no one here knows a girl analogy, you need a car one It would be like sitting in a Lamborghini Reventon at a car show, not able to turn it on or even push any buttons.
Except it isnt a COD clone. YOu can instantly tell the COD players in BF from their playstyle and they lose horribly, BF has way more tactics and squad play. They did release one DLC (Close Quarters) that seemed like they were trying to appease the COD players
THe fixed a lot of the stuff you mentioned. I didn't enjoy BF3 either because of the problems you listed but I played beta with my friends and almost all of them are resolved
Commanders back Squads are 1 bigger now (5 people) Voice chat is in Point scoring is way more rewarding if you work as a squad as you get squad points now for completing objectives An engi+recon(which you should have if you are working together as a squad) makes taking down aircraft fairly easy, recon has a device that can paint a vehicle allowing any engi to lock onto the targeted vehicle. Since it beta I have no idea on griefing/hacking
then your iOS team sucks as you only need to test on at most 3 or 4 devices (depending on what version your are building for) We test against 3 devices. iPhone 4 running 5.1, And iPhone and iPad running 7. We will run through other versions quickly using the simulator to see if there is anything obvious, but we haven't found any bugs that werent present on the device testing.
I do know it isnt necessary for android to test against every device, like you we only test against maybe 2 devices and then let crash reports catch the rest, but the issue is if there is a crash report for a device, and the crash isn't painfully obvious and research doesn't turn up what the issue is, then you might be forced to go out and pick up the device.
I do development for ios and android. 85% of our downloads are on apple, 15% on android. We are a small shop so we are not going to go out and buy every device to test it on. Generally our apps are ok with most android devices, but there will always be one specific type of device that the app will crash on because it does something a little differently.
Not to mention all of the different versions, you have people running everything from 2.1 to the latest version. For our app on android 63% are running 4.0.3+, however 31% are running 2.3 so we can't abandon 2.x yet. With iOS you generally only care about previous version. So currently target for 6.1 or higher, if you REALLY want to squeeze out every last download stat you can, aim for 5.1 (since ipad 1 can't upgrade to ios 6) http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/ I find these statistics fairly accurate. Since we don't use any ios6 features we target 5.1+.
One of my cousins is a product manager at a medium sized mobile gaming company, he said they have a similar experience to ours. Their games download stats are about 10-20% android rest iOS, yet they spend 3x the resources on android support as they have about 90 devices laying around to test on, and people always calling up because "it runs slow on this device", "it crashes on this device". They completely killed android development except for their top couple apps
exactly, I can't see one reason someone who would make a AAA game and just release it on LINUX. First off, it would have to be a private company as the shareholders would cry bloody murder against any public company. So who does that leave exactly? Valve is the only one that would even remotely make sense, especially if they are pushing their steam box and they would be pissing off a huge amount of their fans. If anything they would maybe make it a time limited exclusive for a couple months, but even then... Still I don't think it would solve anything as people think "console" with steam os not linux,
Yup zencart does this to, puts a huge big ugly red banner at the top of the site telling you about any misconfigured settings, or keeping the install directory. They say at the very minimum change the directory name, or put it in a non web accessible location.
and then you have the same problem you have now, they aren't going to check the "remove installer files" checkbox, and probably even uncheck it if it was defaulted to checked.
<p>But most publishers occasionally churn out shit games. I think the game industry whole prefer that you spent more money on shit games OR spent money on trade magazines that tell you what games are shit or not. Your system, reasonable as it may be, ensures that money only gets spent on GOOD games which FORCES the industry to value high quality. I'm sure you know how much harder churning out a QUALITY games than shit games. It's A LOT harder. </quote>
I think that depends, now there are definitely games that are undisputed shit that everyone agrees, but stuff like Call of Duty and WoW, even though many people consider it shit (I among them) a lot of people also consider it good (as is backed by their sales/subscription numbers). Hell even the latest SimCity falls into this category. It also goes the other way, there are plenty of good high quality games, but they are in a niche market, or don't have the marketing budget, so they are considered flops sales wise.
Slashdot Mirror
Coincedentially I just started playing this game this past weekend
I do enjoy it but there are a few things that concern me
No full respecs -- As a new player with no idea on how different skills work I find the 1300+ point skill tree extremely daunting. I don't know the best (or even a mediocre) path to take for my character. I realize you can get respec points, but I have no idea how rare/easy they are to get, and if I screw up something early my character could be heavily penalized. I don't want to have to fill out a giant spreadsheet before I even get level 2 to decide how my character should be built. Now some people enjoy this system, but I do not. You also have limited character slots (not sure how many) so if I get to level 50 and don't like my build I would be forced to delete him.
No option to hide white items. Annoying to see the screeen filled up with 80% white items and accidentally clicking on a few...
No floating names on other players. Hard sometimes to spot my group members when there name isn't shown, also hard to spot them when in a town and 40 other players there as well
Only the first item is a major concern for me, other 2 are minor things.
your taxes arent complicated yet you don't know why they were asking for 10k? And your tax account somehow figured out how to reduce it by 10.6k??
Obviously either a) it is complicated, b) something unusually happened that year, or c) you didn't use the software properly and didn't double check your work.
Guess what, one time I did use software, I was making 35k/year at that time, and it said I owed 100,000 in taxes! OMG! Then I double checked my work and I had put an extra zero so I had entered in 350k as my income. So by your logic I saved $100,000!!!!!
No, every time I use gmail I am confused on what a button does because there is no text. Sure the common things that I use every day I eventually figure out, but the more obscure option I rarely use? I have to hover over a bunch of buttons waiting for a tool tip (oh right, you don't' get tooltips on a phone)
Let me guess whenever you use word, or libre office or whatever you use you ONLY use the toolbar and you instantly know what every icon does without the tooltip? Didn't think so. At least they give you a menu to look through options.
Sure it looks more "sexy" with just icons, but usability goes down the drain
Ahh good to know, I guess fairly typical for /. to get the summary wrong.
Taking a quic klook, it still doesn't seem that the @home version is for your typical home cook with a family of 4 trying to cook dinner in an hour. It still looks like it is meant for an upcoming/aspiring professional chef who doesn't have access to all of the equipment.
I could be wrong though as I did only spend a couple minutes looking at it.
The thing about this book, is it isn't so much about the recipes but the SCIENCE and techniques of food. This set of books is meant for an upcoming professional chef. I bet 3/4 the recipes use either equipment or techniques that no home cook would have/know about
Sure you get a basic recipe from allrecipes.com (most of them just mediocre, I bet there are only a few gems that would be just as good/better than a 5 star restuarant). It is one thing reading a recipe and following, but do you know WHY they use the method they choose, why one food reacts with a different one the way it does.
Proper technique also makes a huge difference. I could put a handful ingredients along with a recipe on your counter, and exact same ingredients with exact same recipe on a professional chefs, and I pretty much guarantee you the professional chefs will taste better.
Also, how many typical home cooks are using sous vide technique to cook their meat, using liquid nitrogen for desserts, using a centrifuge to make beef stock. This set of books also use a ton of ingredients that you would not find at your local grocery store, or even a local specialty store, I bet quite a few need to be special ordered.
I am not saying you need to be a professional chef to make good food, of course not, nor do you need to know all of the techniques, or have all the crazy equipment. I was just stating this volume of books is not just your typical $10 recipe book that you find on amazon.
"up to a maximum of $500,000"
So just pay $500,000 up front and continue operating as normal.
n/t
what features were removed? I am sure there have been a few, but I used firefox from version 3 to version 19 and didnt notice any features removed (at least once that I used)
I however was getting sick of firefox, and find chrome to be a much better experience (even though they are at version 30 already.. but at least they don't even advertise it)
There already is a company sort of already doing this - Path Intelligence
http://www.pathintelligence.com/
They track cell phones(both smart phones and dumb phones) in a store or a mall and provide aggregate date (i.e they DO NOT sell individual information)
The store or mall also most post a notice in their store so customers are clear that they are being tracked.
Ok maybe not actually taking the phone call IN the meeting room, but we are allowed to excuse ourselves, are allowed to answer texts and emails .. as long as all of the above are work related but only in meetings that are a) not critical, and b) internal meeting (i.e not with clients) and c) you are not directly involved at that time.
Sometimes you need to be in that 1 hour long meeting even though you only directly involved in 5 minutes of it, sometimes you just need to be aware of what is going on, but our boss realizes that we are losing a bunch of productivity, so if we can answer texts/emails from clients/other coworkers without disturbing other people then so be it. Why would other people get disturbed if I am typing out an email on my phone?
You are right, down-rating isn't for being wrong, however he is down-rated for being off-topic, perhaps a bit harsh and I am guessing if he would have posted early and got first or second post (or even if he would have posted this as a reply to another post) he might have got +5 insightful or informative, however, looking at the post on its own it's off-topic (or irrelevant)
This submission is not discussing the merits of one storage medium over another, it is discussing price fixing for optical drives.
maybe because between the period of 2004-2010 it wasn't $15? (heck did a 32gb stick even exist in 2004?)
yup, company I work for publishes medical books for veterinarians and we have a disclaimer saying we are not responsible. We put it in our mobile apps as well.
in a RESTful way
My comment about this is, if they are replacing ads are they also depriving the websites from their ad revenue? I know ad block does the same but at least it is a user choice and I am not getting the ad revenue, but they are basically stealing revenue.
It would be almost like me rebroadcasting bells satelitte stations and then replacing their ads with my own, I would get sued 6 ways from Sunday.
hey come on this is slashdot, no one here knows a girl analogy, you need a car one
It would be like sitting in a Lamborghini Reventon at a car show, not able to turn it on or even push any buttons.
Except it isnt a COD clone. YOu can instantly tell the COD players in BF from their playstyle and they lose horribly, BF has way more tactics and squad play. They did release one DLC (Close Quarters) that seemed like they were trying to appease the COD players
THe fixed a lot of the stuff you mentioned. I didn't enjoy BF3 either because of the problems you listed but I played beta with my friends and almost all of them are resolved
Commanders back
Squads are 1 bigger now (5 people)
Voice chat is in
Point scoring is way more rewarding if you work as a squad as you get squad points now for completing objectives
An engi+recon(which you should have if you are working together as a squad) makes taking down aircraft fairly easy, recon has a device that can paint a vehicle allowing any engi to lock onto the targeted vehicle.
Since it beta I have no idea on griefing/hacking
then your iOS team sucks as you only need to test on at most 3 or 4 devices (depending on what version your are building for) We test against 3 devices. iPhone 4 running 5.1, And iPhone and iPad running 7. We will run through other versions quickly using the simulator to see if there is anything obvious, but we haven't found any bugs that werent present on the device testing.
I do know it isnt necessary for android to test against every device, like you we only test against maybe 2 devices and then let crash reports catch the rest, but the issue is if there is a crash report for a device, and the crash isn't painfully obvious and research doesn't turn up what the issue is, then you might be forced to go out and pick up the device.
I do development for ios and android. 85% of our downloads are on apple, 15% on android. We are a small shop so we are not going to go out and buy every device to test it on. Generally our apps are ok with most android devices, but there will always be one specific type of device that the app will crash on because it does something a little differently.
Not to mention all of the different versions, you have people running everything from 2.1 to the latest version. For our app on android 63% are running 4.0.3+, however 31% are running 2.3 so we can't abandon 2.x yet. With iOS you generally only care about previous version. So currently target for 6.1 or higher, if you REALLY want to squeeze out every last download stat you can, aim for 5.1 (since ipad 1 can't upgrade to ios 6)
http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/ I find these statistics fairly accurate. Since we don't use any ios6 features we target 5.1+.
One of my cousins is a product manager at a medium sized mobile gaming company, he said they have a similar experience to ours. Their games download stats are about 10-20% android rest iOS, yet they spend 3x the resources on android support as they have about 90 devices laying around to test on, and people always calling up because "it runs slow on this device", "it crashes on this device". They completely killed android development except for their top couple apps
exactly, I can't see one reason someone who would make a AAA game and just release it on LINUX. First off, it would have to be a private company as the shareholders would cry bloody murder against any public company. So who does that leave exactly? Valve is the only one that would even remotely make sense, especially if they are pushing their steam box and they would be pissing off a huge amount of their fans. If anything they would maybe make it a time limited exclusive for a couple months, but even then...
Still I don't think it would solve anything as people think "console" with steam os not linux,
Yup zencart does this to, puts a huge big ugly red banner at the top of the site telling you about any misconfigured settings, or keeping the install directory. They say at the very minimum change the directory name, or put it in a non web accessible location.
and then you have the same problem you have now, they aren't going to check the "remove installer files" checkbox, and probably even uncheck it if it was defaulted to checked.
Nearly sold out! But the 1 was sold to Ballmer, as an expensive coaster.
<p>But most publishers occasionally churn out shit games. I think the game industry whole prefer that you spent more money on shit games OR spent money on trade magazines that tell you what games are shit or not. Your system, reasonable as it may be, ensures that money only gets spent on GOOD games which FORCES the industry to value high quality. I'm sure you know how much harder churning out a QUALITY games than shit games. It's A LOT harder.
</quote>
I think that depends, now there are definitely games that are undisputed shit that everyone agrees, but stuff like Call of Duty and WoW, even though many people consider it shit (I among them) a lot of people also consider it good (as is backed by their sales/subscription numbers). Hell even the latest SimCity falls into this category.
It also goes the other way, there are plenty of good high quality games, but they are in a niche market, or don't have the marketing budget, so they are considered flops sales wise.