Maybe not, you said "tons" and yanks use pounds for everything. Actually, saying that there is/are "tons" of a thing is a very standard American idiom for indicating that there are a large number. Moreover, it's not true that we don't use tons, even as a unit of weight measurement. The ton is commonly used here, whenever dealing with sufficiently large quantities of stuff (definitely whenever discussing 1 or more tons of something, although I sometimes hear people say "half-ton" instead of 1000 lbs, or "quarter-ton" instead of 500 lbs).
but humans are pack rats - we don't throw shit away - we don't really want to get rid of anything. apple understands this too - and realized that the secret sell for ipods INITIALLY was size. If Apple really understood this, they wouldn't have made the damnably stupid decision to not have a hard drive in the touch-screen iPod. If you want to have a flash option (in addition to a hard drive), great, but as long as I'm limited to 16 GB of music, I will NOT be buying it.
Then again, I think Apple keeps doing things wrong with the ipod anyway (first they screwed up their beautiful interface by putting the buttons on the wheel, now this), and it seems to be working out for them. More power to them, I guess.
At any rate, it's hardly unreasonable to be unhappy when a company forces you to use an OS you don't like, or rather, an OS other than the one you do like (I know it's not popular to admit it on slashdot, but people do like Windows, even Vista), in order to use their product. I bet you wouldn't be harping on him if he'd said the same thing about Windows, instead of Mac/Linux.
And you're correct, there's not a whole lot of reason to believe that someone who posted AC is going to come back to check their post. That does not, however, imply that they're posting just to hide. You're taking a possible explanation for posting AC, and deciding, even though you're wrong by counter-example, that all ACs post for that reason. Hardly being rational.
OK. You're clearly missing the point on this one. 10 minutes of downtime for no good reason than to penalize me for wanting to go somewhere else sucks. Making it more than 10 minutes would make it worse, not better. WoW travel: sucks. That's ironic, considering you missed my point. My point was that an impossible flight (ie, the flight from IF to SM, which does not exist) takes infinite time. There is only one 10-minute flight in the game, and while I'd like to see that one toned down, it's also something that never gets encountered any more, since no one has a reason to go from Darnassus to the southern parts of Kalimdor. In every other instance, flight times are just fine. I can fly across Outland in 3 minutes, tops. If that's too much downtime for traveling, cry me a fucking river.
No, it does not work well at all. It works badly, at best, especially in terms of the "levelling[sic] curve". It causes unnatural dependence of higher level characters on the lower level characters who have other reasons to kill the mobs which drop the linen or whatever. That has nothing to do with the levelling curve. That's a max-level player power-levelling a new profession. Oh, and God forbid that we go out and get our own mats. That would be just unthinkable, especially with the insane killing power that a higher-level player has against lower-level mobs. Dear me.
Just about anything else would be more interesting than what WoW has. WoW crafting is dull beyond all belief... In your own opinion. I like WoW's crafting just fine. That still doesn't address my point, though, which is that picking more professions is not inherently more interesting.
Yeah? How far can you solo? Level just one character just as high as you can in a complete void from all other players (this includes no auction hall, no opportunistic kills of a mob who has friends who are occupied by other folks, no grouping on any instance,.......... ) If you were the one and only subscriber you would not make such an absurd assertion. Your "rebuttal" is pretty weak there. I never claimed WoW is a game which should be played solo, nor did I say that if I had only ever played it solo, I'd enjoy it. If every other WoW player left, I'd still think it was a good game. That's all. Granted, I'd probably not be playing soon after that, due to the impossibility of getting anywhere in the game with just me (not to mention that Blizzard would have shut down the servers), but that still wouldn't change my opinion of WoW, which would be that it's a great game, even if no one else agrees.
WoW has issues, most of which are balance issues, but I have yet, in 2 years of playing, to run into an aspect of the game which is "shitty". It's a great game, and justifiably is the game which many other MMORPGS are copying. If you don't like it, that's your right, but the entire point here was not to convince a WoW-hater to like the game, it was to address the simply ridiculous notion that WoW is some paragon of bad game design.
I have a sense of humor, but it's awfully hard to tell the difference between the joke you made, and the serious opinion of a flaming anti-Microsoft zealot, which there are plenty of around here. The fact that I recognized that it could be a joke was why I asked at all, as a matter of fact. If I were certain you were serious, I'd have either ignored you, flamed you into oblivion, or argued with you, depending on my mood.
And then the idiots who run every executable handed to them will migrate to other OSes, and you will find that the problem is not solved any more. While securing your software is of course important, it's worth remembering that a smart Windows user still has a more secure machine than a dumb (any other OS) user.
People have better things to then waiting around for their avatar to reach a destination. i.e. Flying from Iron Forge to Scarlet Monastery is a complete waste of your time for 10 mins when you've already been there numerous times.
Considering you're talking about an impossible flight, it'd take a lot longer than 10 minutes. Hell, even if such a thing were possible, it'd not take 10 minutes. Flying across the ENTIRE HEIGHT OF KALIMDOR takes about 10 minutes. Going from IF to SM isn't close to that distance.
God help you if you PUG it, and you have to wait another 10 mins for everyone to get their act together.
Idiocy of the playerbase is not the fault of the designers.
Have you played RTS's at all? Dynamic worlds are always much more interesting then static worlds, virtual or not. Without change, things become stale, and boring.
I've played a great many RTSes, thank you very much. It's not true that dynamic worlds are always more interesting than static ones. First of all, a dynamic world can be poorly designed, and thus be less enjoyable than a well-designed static one. Second, static worlds are not inherently stale and boring. I've played some of my favorite games God knows how many times now, but they don't get stale and boring because they were at such a high level of interesting to start with.
There is no reason why the two can't be "zoned" to limit griefing (that's a much nicer term then calling someone douchebags.) Wow has just scratched the surface with a dynamic world -- look at the PvP zones / towers. It makes things more interesting.
Three points:
a)What exactly do you mean by the zoning you describe?
b)When describing the idiots that tend to populate WoW, I'm not going to mince words.
c)The pvp zones, and towers, do not make the game more interesting in my opinion. I completely ignore them, in fact. Certainly they don't make things worse, but they also don't make things an ounce better.
The crafting design is sloppy.
The crafting skill system is linear, instead of being two dimensional. You can level your skill up making few items and once your skill is high enough, you can make a second item that is gray, without any fail, even though you've never made it in your life. That's not intuitive or logical.
It may not be intuitive or logical, but it works quite well, especially in the context of the levelling curve. As you level, assuming you took your profession at the beginning, you make things which are more powerful, and more useful for you. I mean, sure, it'd make more sense to be able to fail on lower-level items you haven't made before, but what's the point?
Items are placed at arbitrary skill points, without any regard for items made before or after. Knowing how to make clothes from wool, silk, or cloth are all independent of each other, but in the game, they are artificially forced into some linear system, and that somehow a person is completely unable to make them because they don't understand the "basics". If I make copper bullets, I might have an idea how to make silver bullets.
Again, it makes sense to have some delineation of how things should be broken up. Certainly, what you say is true in a real world, but it doesn't need to be in the game world. In addition, it makes things better in the game world, because anyone who has the progression explained to them instantly knows, based on an item's name, how comparatively rare, valuable, and powerful it is.
Crafting forces an artificial reliance on NPCs. i.e. I'm an Expert Tailor, but apparently I can't make my own thread??
Again, this is intentional. If you don't like it, fine, but it's certainly not like it's unaccounted for (ie, not well-thought out, as was your claim).
There is no reward for when you fail to make an item. People learn the most when they "fail". A good game offers a "win-win" situation, so that players
The designers don't have a clue stick about "dead time." Spending half of your time traveling back and forth across zones before you get your mount at 40 is B-O-R-I-N-G. Flying takes far too long. The first point I'll give you. The second, not so much. Flying takes as long as it should, unless you're talking the Darnassus->Theramore flight, or something else that cuts across all of Kalimdor. Those take forever. Apart from that, flying takes barely any time at all, and is a good chance for me to view and appreciate the scenery. 2 years, and that hasn't gotten old for me, so don't lay the "It gets boring after the nth time" line on me.
The ONLY way to level up is to kill things. For those that only interested in creating/crafting things, you're screwed. This isn't bad design, this is just a design choice. If you're only interested in crafting, this isn't the game for you. Can't please everyone.
Quests are very limited. There 10 basic times, but only about 5 account for 95% of them: "Kill", "Random Drop", "Delivery", "Item", "Boss" Every quest in every RPG ever made can be boiled down to this if you strip away the fluff. It's the fluff which differentiates things, and makes them interesting.
Very limited world interaction. The world is static -- much like a ride through Disney Land. Your actions don't change the world. This is a GREAT design choice. It ensures that everyone is having the same experience in the world, and limits the ability of douchebags to have an impact on other people's play time. I'd like WoW quite a bit less if the world weren't static, because I know what maturity level WoW players tend to have, and how it would affect my game experience.
Crafting is not thought out. i.e. Smiths can make armor, but not repair their own?? On the contrary, this is thought out, and your claim to the contrary shows your lack of education on Blizzard's thought processes in the game's design. They've said that this is a deliberate decision to allow them to take gold out of the economy. Disagree if you wish, that's your right, but it most certainly was "thought out".
Wow is NOT a great game -- but is "good enough", and certainly is "better" then anything else out there. The UI mods alone show where the real innovation in MMORPGs are these days --> Making the game more accessible. On the contrary, WoW is a great game, precisely for the reason you mentioned: it's accessible. There are precious few games (of all types), let alone MMORPGs, that I've tried that had the accessibility level of WoW. Sure, there are always improvements to be made, but nothing is perfect. WoW is far and away the best out there at the moment, and while it may not fit your needs for an MMORPG, claiming that it's poorly designed is nothing short of asinine.
I've played for two years, and I'm not completely epicced out, although I have a decent percentage of epics (>50%). Even if I were still in dungeon blues, I'd be ok with it. The game is not necessarily about getting purple pixels, that's just what a lot of people want out of it.
This depends on what you want out of life. If you want to be a "wage slave", nothing more, then achieving that, in the field you want to work, is success.
YOU may want these things. A lot of people don't. Instanced PvE, at the very least, is the best damn idea ever. Raids would be incredibly annoying if you had to compete with other players to move through the dungeon, and to fend off the griefers (see: outdoor dragons). In PvP, the same is true in my opinion. World PvP sucks, battlegrounds are the way to go. And for those of you who like world PvP, they are trying to get something nice going for you in WotLK, with the Lake Wintergrasp zone (non-instanced, objective-based pvp).
Technically, yes. Emphasis on the word "technically".;)
I know that the plot in FF3 is on par with what's expected for its time, but for better or for worse, it is competing against modern RPGs. It has fun combat, and is good for fans of the series for nostalgia-ish purposes, but for RPG fans in general, I'd give it a pass.
Except we're talking about IT here. For the part of IT that includes things like server and network administration, what you say is plausible, but for end-user support it isn't. Someone needs to be on-site to do this stuff, ie, living in the US. End-user support isn't a job that can be easily outsourced, because you need to still have the guy there who knows how the hell to insert a PCI card.
I hate to point this out, but that doesn't follow, as much as people like to claim it does around here. I posted AC for years before I made an account, simply because I posted infrequently enough that I didn't feel like putting forth the effort to register. Not all ACs are people hiding because of an unpopular opinion/bad argument.
I can't speak for Zelda, but FF3, at least, is a pretty bad RPG all things considered. I'm glad I played it (I'm an FF nut), and it's amusing to an extent, but the plot is absolutely horrid. It wouldn't be hard for any RPG at all to outclass FF3.
Do you seriously not understand? NO ONE is saying that breaking the law is useless as a method of changing it. What we are saying is that in THIS PARTICULAR CASE, the people in question seem to be fighting the law quite successfully as it is, so there's absolutely no reason for them to break the law at this time. In fact, it might even weaken their efforts, as people may show a lot more sympathy to the poor guy who can't even say who he is, as opposed to the guy who broke the law just to do it.
And you completely missed his point. This isn't a point about the horrors that await people in the jails, the point is that since going to jail for their cause isn't necessary, they shouldn't do it. You suggest they should break the law just on principle, but that's not going to help get the law changed any more than they already are, so it'd be damnably stupid to take your advice. Only an idiot decides to go to jail when he can fight, and is fighting, just fine outside of jail.
That's only the right choice if taking one for the team and revealing their identity would accomplish something useful to advance their case. Since it seems to me that it wouldn't, I think they're quite justified in taking one for the team.
Defying unjust laws to defend your rights is admirable. Defying unjust laws when you were already defending your rights just fine without said defiance is idiotic.
True, but not all shooters are just brainless frag-fests. Halo, for example, has a very highly-praised story. So does Half-Life. I think that we're long past the day when one can say that a game isn't an FPS because it has a good plot... good plot is well on its way to being expected, not being expected to be absent.
Bioshock certainly isn't dumb, but a shooter is exactly what it is. What the hell else should we call a game where you spend most of your time shooting enemies with weapons (guns or plasmids)?
The irony is that while there is no pro-religion flamebait, you still had your anti-religion flamebait ready to go. Maybe we shouldn't drag religion needlessly into discussions?
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, I think Apple keeps doing things wrong with the ipod anyway (first they screwed up their beautiful interface by putting the buttons on the wheel, now this), and it seems to be working out for them. More power to them, I guess.
At any rate, it's hardly unreasonable to be unhappy when a company forces you to use an OS you don't like, or rather, an OS other than the one you do like (I know it's not popular to admit it on slashdot, but people do like Windows, even Vista), in order to use their product. I bet you wouldn't be harping on him if he'd said the same thing about Windows, instead of Mac/Linux.
And you're correct, there's not a whole lot of reason to believe that someone who posted AC is going to come back to check their post. That does not, however, imply that they're posting just to hide. You're taking a possible explanation for posting AC, and deciding, even though you're wrong by counter-example, that all ACs post for that reason. Hardly being rational.
WoW has issues, most of which are balance issues, but I have yet, in 2 years of playing, to run into an aspect of the game which is "shitty". It's a great game, and justifiably is the game which many other MMORPGS are copying. If you don't like it, that's your right, but the entire point here was not to convince a WoW-hater to like the game, it was to address the simply ridiculous notion that WoW is some paragon of bad game design.
I have a sense of humor, but it's awfully hard to tell the difference between the joke you made, and the serious opinion of a flaming anti-Microsoft zealot, which there are plenty of around here. The fact that I recognized that it could be a joke was why I asked at all, as a matter of fact. If I were certain you were serious, I'd have either ignored you, flamed you into oblivion, or argued with you, depending on my mood.
Ha! So I'm not the only one!
And then the idiots who run every executable handed to them will migrate to other OSes, and you will find that the problem is not solved any more. While securing your software is of course important, it's worth remembering that a smart Windows user still has a more secure machine than a dumb (any other OS) user.
Do you seriously believe what you said? You know that it's not in the least true, right?
People have better things to then waiting around for their avatar to reach a destination. i.e. Flying from Iron Forge to Scarlet Monastery is a complete waste of your time for 10 mins when you've already been there numerous times.
Considering you're talking about an impossible flight, it'd take a lot longer than 10 minutes. Hell, even if such a thing were possible, it'd not take 10 minutes. Flying across the ENTIRE HEIGHT OF KALIMDOR takes about 10 minutes. Going from IF to SM isn't close to that distance.
God help you if you PUG it, and you have to wait another 10 mins for everyone to get their act together.
Idiocy of the playerbase is not the fault of the designers.
Have you played RTS's at all? Dynamic worlds are always much more interesting then static worlds, virtual or not. Without change, things become stale, and boring.
I've played a great many RTSes, thank you very much. It's not true that dynamic worlds are always more interesting than static ones. First of all, a dynamic world can be poorly designed, and thus be less enjoyable than a well-designed static one. Second, static worlds are not inherently stale and boring. I've played some of my favorite games God knows how many times now, but they don't get stale and boring because they were at such a high level of interesting to start with.
There is no reason why the two can't be "zoned" to limit griefing (that's a much nicer term then calling someone douchebags.) Wow has just scratched the surface with a dynamic world -- look at the PvP zones / towers. It makes things more interesting.
Three points:
a)What exactly do you mean by the zoning you describe?
b)When describing the idiots that tend to populate WoW, I'm not going to mince words.
c)The pvp zones, and towers, do not make the game more interesting in my opinion. I completely ignore them, in fact. Certainly they don't make things worse, but they also don't make things an ounce better.
The crafting design is sloppy.
The crafting skill system is linear, instead of being two dimensional. You can level your skill up making few items and once your skill is high enough, you can make a second item that is gray, without any fail, even though you've never made it in your life. That's not intuitive or logical.
It may not be intuitive or logical, but it works quite well, especially in the context of the levelling curve. As you level, assuming you took your profession at the beginning, you make things which are more powerful, and more useful for you. I mean, sure, it'd make more sense to be able to fail on lower-level items you haven't made before, but what's the point?
Items are placed at arbitrary skill points, without any regard for items made before or after. Knowing how to make clothes from wool, silk, or cloth are all independent of each other, but in the game, they are artificially forced into some linear system, and that somehow a person is completely unable to make them because they don't understand the "basics". If I make copper bullets, I might have an idea how to make silver bullets.
Again, it makes sense to have some delineation of how things should be broken up. Certainly, what you say is true in a real world, but it doesn't need to be in the game world. In addition, it makes things better in the game world, because anyone who has the progression explained to them instantly knows, based on an item's name, how comparatively rare, valuable, and powerful it is.
Crafting forces an artificial reliance on NPCs. i.e. I'm an Expert Tailor, but apparently I can't make my own thread??
Again, this is intentional. If you don't like it, fine, but it's certainly not like it's unaccounted for (ie, not well-thought out, as was your claim).
There is no reward for when you fail to make an item. People learn the most when they "fail". A good game offers a "win-win" situation, so that players
I've played for two years, and I'm not completely epicced out, although I have a decent percentage of epics (>50%). Even if I were still in dungeon blues, I'd be ok with it. The game is not necessarily about getting purple pixels, that's just what a lot of people want out of it.
This depends on what you want out of life. If you want to be a "wage slave", nothing more, then achieving that, in the field you want to work, is success.
YOU may want these things. A lot of people don't. Instanced PvE, at the very least, is the best damn idea ever. Raids would be incredibly annoying if you had to compete with other players to move through the dungeon, and to fend off the griefers (see: outdoor dragons). In PvP, the same is true in my opinion. World PvP sucks, battlegrounds are the way to go. And for those of you who like world PvP, they are trying to get something nice going for you in WotLK, with the Lake Wintergrasp zone (non-instanced, objective-based pvp).
No, that's only if you're an idiot. Most people don't play WoW in lieu of paying attention to the rest of their life.
I know that the plot in FF3 is on par with what's expected for its time, but for better or for worse, it is competing against modern RPGs. It has fun combat, and is good for fans of the series for nostalgia-ish purposes, but for RPG fans in general, I'd give it a pass.
Except we're talking about IT here. For the part of IT that includes things like server and network administration, what you say is plausible, but for end-user support it isn't. Someone needs to be on-site to do this stuff, ie, living in the US. End-user support isn't a job that can be easily outsourced, because you need to still have the guy there who knows how the hell to insert a PCI card.
I hate to point this out, but that doesn't follow, as much as people like to claim it does around here. I posted AC for years before I made an account, simply because I posted infrequently enough that I didn't feel like putting forth the effort to register. Not all ACs are people hiding because of an unpopular opinion/bad argument.
I can't speak for Zelda, but FF3, at least, is a pretty bad RPG all things considered. I'm glad I played it (I'm an FF nut), and it's amusing to an extent, but the plot is absolutely horrid. It wouldn't be hard for any RPG at all to outclass FF3.
Do you seriously not understand? NO ONE is saying that breaking the law is useless as a method of changing it. What we are saying is that in THIS PARTICULAR CASE, the people in question seem to be fighting the law quite successfully as it is, so there's absolutely no reason for them to break the law at this time. In fact, it might even weaken their efforts, as people may show a lot more sympathy to the poor guy who can't even say who he is, as opposed to the guy who broke the law just to do it.
And you completely missed his point. This isn't a point about the horrors that await people in the jails, the point is that since going to jail for their cause isn't necessary, they shouldn't do it. You suggest they should break the law just on principle, but that's not going to help get the law changed any more than they already are, so it'd be damnably stupid to take your advice. Only an idiot decides to go to jail when he can fight, and is fighting, just fine outside of jail.
Defying unjust laws to defend your rights is admirable. Defying unjust laws when you were already defending your rights just fine without said defiance is idiotic.
True, but not all shooters are just brainless frag-fests. Halo, for example, has a very highly-praised story. So does Half-Life. I think that we're long past the day when one can say that a game isn't an FPS because it has a good plot... good plot is well on its way to being expected, not being expected to be absent.
Bioshock certainly isn't dumb, but a shooter is exactly what it is. What the hell else should we call a game where you spend most of your time shooting enemies with weapons (guns or plasmids)?
The irony is that while there is no pro-religion flamebait, you still had your anti-religion flamebait ready to go. Maybe we shouldn't drag religion needlessly into discussions?