The name isn't misleading, it's a name. As long as it uniquely identifies something (in this case a flu outbreak) it's a good name. H1N1 does NOT uniquely identify this particular outbreak.
Since the name Swine Flu is already widely used and recognized, it would be stupid and futile to try to make up some other name to replace it.
There are a lot of things you can do to decrease hunger, if you're honestly feeling hungry all day. High-fiber and high-fat foods are good. Not getting calories from drinks (soda/juice and milk) also helps.
And this isn't very common diet advice, but drink coffee. Caffeine is an appetite suppressant, and it actually works really well. Even just 1 cup in the morning will decrease your appetite until lunch time or later. Great for those of us who sit behind a desk and don't burn enough calories to eat "normal" food portions.
Another caveat is that exercise increases appetite, so it's not a straightforward way to lose weight. Decreasing hunger and portions is much more reliable. But getting in exercise to increase you metabolism (and general health) is still a very good idea.
You forgot high-fiber foods, like whole grains and vegetables.
People think Atkins and the like means all carbohydrates are bad. The real problem is highly processed and refined carbohydrates that have 0 fiber and leave you feeling hungry again 30 minutes later.
A high protein and hight fat diet is just begging for acid reflux, osteoporosis, and numerous other health problems. Even Atkins advocates whole grains and vegetables after the initial starvation period gimmick that makes you lose a bunch of water weight (if you actually avoid carbohydrated ENTIRELY and your body goes into ketosis).
Of course, not like anyone actually reads the Atkins diet book, they just hear "eat meat and ice cream and lose weight!" and give it a super-half-assed attempt while claiming to everyone they're on a diet and trying to lose weight...
I'm not sure what you're suggesting, exactly. It sounds like you're saying that, eg. Id Software shouldn't release a Quake 5 because there are people who haven't played Quake 1-4?
With LK Blizzard has decreased the timesinks, grind, and difficulty of dungeons in the game substantially. They've stated publicly that MANY more players are getting to see the full content than ever before. This is in large part due to improving questing, and making dungeons more accessible while including Hard Modes to keep people challenged when they have better gear or more experience.
It does kind of suck to see content left behind. But if you actually hop in game, you'll notice people in trade chat LFG for all the old instances. People have always been interested in going back to see old content, and the Achievement system and some rare drops (mounts off raid bosses) help give people the feeling of completion that RPGs like this rely on heavily to incentivize people to experience (fun) content.
What if they release it as Pandarans in the US/Europe/etc. and just use a slightly different model+word in the Chinese version to avoid any reference to pandas?
Make em the grizzlies or furbolgs, something close enough to share content, but far enough to avoid any political nonsense.
Not meaning to be snarky here, but if you can't get through Ulduar and get loot from it, how do you expect to do the next raids after it? Typically content requires you be (mostly) geared from the previous tier of content.
Have any alts? I find raiding to push my tolerance to its limits for waiting on and relying on too many other people. 10-mans aren't so bad, 25-mans...imo they deserve the loot if they can coordinate that many people:)
But I've got way too many alts, and find it a lot of fun learning the other classes and seeing how they compare.
One way to look at it is expansions being an annoyance. But done right and at the right time, your players are getting bored and have finished the last expansion's content, and are thinking about quitting because they're out of things to do. An expansion gives them more to do.
Blizzard has done great at increasing leveling speed and taking a lot of the "treadmill" out of the game. The downside is that some people with too much time on their hands complain that they WANT to have to grind for 2 months straight to get 1 level.
Thankfully, Blizzard is mostly ignoring those people, or at least diverting them onto options like Hardcore Mode that aren't required for every player to make progress.
It used to be that only the REALLY hardcore players had more than 1 character at max level. Nowdays most people have 2 or 3 or more. IMO this is a very good thing, and indicates the fun and pacing have been improved.
There's also huge benefits to people rolling alts in that they get a much better perspective on balance than the standard "Buff my class!" demands.
I'd say it's more accurate to look at WOW as 3-4 different games.
Leveling is 1 game - typically the focus is on maximizing efficiency, which can be fun in itself. Do the most quests fastest, travel the least, etc.
Dungeons and raiding is another game - you could even separate the two. Raiding is primarily about maximizing your single role, dps, healing, or tanking. You gear specifically for it, you optimize your spec, and often optimize your group too (although at least its more about good players than good classes these days).
PVP is again a separate game, with its own separate gear and skill progression. Different talents, different goals, different rotations. Class comp matters as much as having good players (for arenas). Battlegrounds and arenas could easily be split into two different game types these days - the specs, classes, and strategies are very different.
The problem in here is that leveling takes a long time (although greatly improved). When you get to end-game, you can find yourself stuck playing a class that was fun to level, but that you don't enjoy in the 2 end games (Raiding and PVP). You never get to try out your class at endgame PVE and PVP until, well, the end. It's a big time investment for something that's a mystery until you get there.
They do not require a great deal of skill, or they would be a sport.
Sports require a great deal of skill?
4 year olds play sports, and have fun doing it. They don't usually keep score. Perhaps what you meant was: "Winning at top-tier leagues of competitive games"?
The most successful games are not the most successful because they're the easiest. It's because they have a gradual enough learning curve to keep people engaged and making progress.
Eh, in my view the data is the app. You could put 20 different front-ends on the same data, the data always stays the same. I don't understand devs who look at apps as code only, and then get annoyed that changing the data requires the data change, in addition to the code.
The problem is when an app has so many redundant layers that a data change means making the same change to 8-10 different layers of abstraction. And thats a *code* problem, not a data problem, and certainly not an SQL problem.
You're getting way too riled up over common practices in the industry. Microsoft doesn't care where you run Windows? What's that about virtualization in the EULA again?
The iPhone and iTunes have been (mostly) restricted due to the content industries and service providers (AT&T). The Kindle has run into the exact same issue, and same as Apple, Amazon's options have been "give up on the industry" or "play by the content industry's rules". At least Apple has used their market share to force things to open up in favor of the consumer - both in Music and in Phones.
I'm not sure what country you live in where wireless carriers don't lock down and nickel-and-dime any and everything on their networks. It sure isn't the US.
I think you're confused - HQL and Linq are there to hide the shortcomings of the *developers* (and development frameworks), not of SQL. They're basically there to try to force bad developers into using an overly-standard methodology, instead of doing things Right and Fast. You redefine Right to be "however the framework does it", and redfine Fast to be....extremely Slow.
Funny enough, I get wish list e-mails from half.com (owned by ebay) and I get the same item listed in EVERY email, which no longer actually exists. I even emailed them about it, but every month or so I get another wishlist e-mail with that same cheap imaginary item for sale...
I use Linux on my laptop and servers, and I've never touched "ntfs-3g" or "fs-driver". I'm not even sure what the OP is solving with his advice. This is no more reason to not use Linux than the fact that Windows users frequently have to hack their registries in bizarre ways.
Your average user won't be doing that hacking with linux OR windows. They'll probably just reformat and reinstall, or have their neighbor's kid do it for them.
Human death knight rejoining humans is not the same thing as Orcs (let alone orc death knights) rejoining humans.
While the human death knight kill his fellow humans, he has also "recovered" and still has friends, and "with the blessing" of the king (or thrall, for horde) is allowed to rejoin the Alliance.
As a representative of the Horde we'd like to return belfs to the Alliance, so all the noob 10-year olds can get back to the faction of fairies and adolescents playing as hot chicks. Please, take them back. They promise they'll stop abusing magic, and after that they're no different than nelfs, really!
Totally agreed. I used to see tauren warriors walking around in their big orange PVP shoulderpads, and always thought it was my friend at first. IMO there's a lot to be said for gear discrepancy in keeping unique toons looking unique.
However, realistically, that would mean having 2-3 versions of every BiS item for every class. Cause no matter what if 2 warriors get BiS for PVP, or for PVE, that means they're getting the same gear. Once you get to endgame I don't see a lot of options. At least nowdays it makes it easy at a glance to see how Well-geared a player is, if you know the tier gear for that class.
Back to Mr Potato Head, even if you end up looking the same, you had to work to get there, and it's somewhat prestigous and gives you a sense of pride to get there. Even if every other warrior has the same axe as me once they've raided Ulduar, I still had to work to get it for my character. It's very different from dropping into Counterstrike and pressing 4-3 to get your M4-A1.
The more you can change your toon around without penalty or effort, the more the game will turn into an FPS where you pick your character each time you login. It's definitely a grey area between the two, so it's not like letting you switch factions on the fly would be the end of the world. But those are the two extremes, and Blizzard wants to keep WOW closer to the RPG end of that scale than the FPS end.
Their original vision was certainly to keep Shamans on Horde and keep Paladins on Alliance. But the reason they had to break that limitation is for class balance.
For instance, the Shaman class was TERRIBLE 1-60, and even up to 70. Look at how many new abilities and massive buffs they've had to give Shamans to get them remotely close to balanced with the other classes in the game. They could never have fixed the Shaman class as long as all the Alliance whiners kept insisting that Shamans are OP just because an overgeared one got a 2-handed windfury crit on a clothy once upon a time.
Compare that to Paladins, who have always been an invulnerable class, and now they got the damage buffs to go with it. Big surprise, they've been extremely overpowered and continue to need nerfs every single patch.
But if you look at the community, Paladins were all Q.Q and everyone claimed Shamans were super-OP. Penny Arcade even made a comic about how OMG A SHAMAN KILLED ME AND I CANT PLAY THEM SO THEY'RE OBVIOUSLY OP.
The reality behind this was that there were many more alliance players than horde, so the community leaned towards Paladin buffs and Shaman nerfs. Even though that's the opposite of what was needed.
Back to factions, the point of the faction changing is only to let people switch to play with their friends without having to level new characters from scratch. It will most likely cost money ($25 or more) and have other restrictions applied, just like the server transfers.
I would be extremely surprised if they make this something that lets you randomly switch back and forth from day to day. I'd also be surprised if the faction change doesn't have a huge downside to it, like losing all of your achievements and gear when you switch.
EQ 2 isn't built on a pre-existing and long-standing storyline in the context of which faction changes makes no sense.
WOW is.
This is why they're going to make it a rarely-used (most likely for-pay) feature to help out people who want to join their friends. But it's not something the game supports in a fully-flexible fashion. Among other things, it would take a tremendous amount of changes to the pre-existing game and quests.
Even if they did decide to flip the Warcraft universe on its head and have humans on the Horde and orcs on the Alliance. Which we can only hope they never do.
The lore does not accomodate that. An Orc who tried to join the alliance would be slain or at least ostracized. It's rare that the factions intermingle. They don't speak the same languages. They've slaughtered each others families. Etc.
That said, WOW does have other reputations that can be switched on a whim. There's a goblin town called Booty Bay that is at odds with a group of Pirates nearby. The default is that you're friendly with the goblins. But you can (and it's a blast) turn on the goblins and kill them all (including NPCs) and switch factions to the pirate side. You even get a pirate hat out of it =)
That goblin/pirate faction is probably the best one currently in the game, but they've tried it several times from several different angles. Eg. 2 different factions of centaur in Desolace, 2 different factions in Outlands that have independent banks and Inns and faction rewards, 2 different factions in Sholazar where you have to pick a side to do their quests.
So yes, there is the ability to switch factions in the game, but letting Orcs join the Alliance would pretty much decimate the faction lore and storyline, and allegiance/loyalty to your faction and race.
This is another reason they tend to charge for features like this - it's something they're only implementing grudgingly to help out players stuck apart from friends. But they absolutely do not want players to be changing race, faction, and class on a whim.
Being able to change your character dramatically on a whim make it feel like you're playing with Mr. Potato Head instead of playing with a long-lasting character who's worthy of investing your time and efforts. For an RPG, character progression is a huge part of the game.
Exactly, good call. I actually heard about it on WOW in a general chat channel. Sources hadn't announced his death yet, and only a few sources (eg. CNN) even had information posted that he had been sent to the hospital. People in the chat channel were claiming he was dead, others were accusing them of lying.
If we had gone from zilch to "yep he's dead" on every news site in 5 minutes, the traffic may not have been nearly as bad.
The fact that there were rumors and half-released information dragging out the announcement over a few hours meant the same people refreshing the same pages waiting for an update.
It sounds like the real issue here is that they DID disable your service, but continued to charge, perhaps even for the month after you canceled. Particularly if you let your subscription lapse rather than manually canceling, they would keep both disable your service (cant play) AND keep charging you for service. HUH?
I used to work for a company that ran as a half-pre-paid service and half always-on-utility. Sounds just like this awful Final Fantasy billing method. As soon as we could, I changed the billing to be pre-paid. Canceling is "cancel my subscription", not "turn my service off right this moment". Buying a month on April 1, buys the days from April 1 to May 1. Whether you play on any of those days is your own choice.
Trying to charge late fees and interest for a pre-paid services doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Getting rid of paper checks (the most common excuse for "dont deactivate me I sent you money already!") is a great first step.
You might want to keep in mind that no one plays the PC game Majesty. I've never even *heard* of it, and I read gaming magazines and websites all the time.
You might also want to note that, at least in WOW, you're never waiting 20 mins to get somewhere except *maybe* if its your first time going there and you've never explored any of the places in between. Travel time is 5 mins at most. Waiting time is more often waiting for other players to do things (either in-game or real-life) so that the group can start. THAT is the wait-time that needs to be fixed, and already has (in WOW) for battlegrounds.
If they can do the same thing for PUG instances, you'll have a 3-part game in which leveling is the only one with any wait-time at all. The other 2 parts (PVP and dungeons) teleporting you in when a full group is ready and able to go.
There was a time when WOW has ridiculous travel times, but thankfully as of WotLK most of the time-wastes have been removed or substantially lessened. And they keep getting lessened even more, eg. flying speed getting faster and cheaper in the next 3.2 patch.
The comparison to cooking meat is a stellar example. There IS such a thing as "raw vegans" who think that cooking food is unnatural and therefore "bad" and unhealthy.
Personally, I'd wager that cooking food is tremendously responsible for improved survival of humans. It eliminates almost every troublesome bacteria and virus that can be transmitted via food.
Milk is an interesting combination of the two points. In it's natural form, milk is highly nutritious. Pasteurization destroys those troublesome bacteria in milk, but it also destroys most of the enzymes and vitamins that make milk healthy to drink.
That should say "a small portion of humans". The 90% statistic quoted is unique to Scandinavia, with the overall tolerance being about 50% of europeans, with much lower numbers (about 10%?) for Africans and Asians.
For humans to have evolved lactose tolerance at all, especially in such a short time frame, drinking milk must have been so advantageous that it contributed substantially to the survival of Europeans.
Just because we're largely intolerant of the sugar and protein in milk, does not immediately imply the benefits of milk are outweighed.
Likewise, there are plenty of foods that our bodies are entirely tolerant of that are terrible for our survival considering our alternative food sources. Soda pop, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
The name isn't misleading, it's a name. As long as it uniquely identifies something (in this case a flu outbreak) it's a good name. H1N1 does NOT uniquely identify this particular outbreak.
Since the name Swine Flu is already widely used and recognized, it would be stupid and futile to try to make up some other name to replace it.
There are a lot of things you can do to decrease hunger, if you're honestly feeling hungry all day. High-fiber and high-fat foods are good. Not getting calories from drinks (soda/juice and milk) also helps.
And this isn't very common diet advice, but drink coffee. Caffeine is an appetite suppressant, and it actually works really well. Even just 1 cup in the morning will decrease your appetite until lunch time or later. Great for those of us who sit behind a desk and don't burn enough calories to eat "normal" food portions.
Another caveat is that exercise increases appetite, so it's not a straightforward way to lose weight. Decreasing hunger and portions is much more reliable. But getting in exercise to increase you metabolism (and general health) is still a very good idea.
You forgot high-fiber foods, like whole grains and vegetables.
People think Atkins and the like means all carbohydrates are bad. The real problem is highly processed and refined carbohydrates that have 0 fiber and leave you feeling hungry again 30 minutes later.
A high protein and hight fat diet is just begging for acid reflux, osteoporosis, and numerous other health problems. Even Atkins advocates whole grains and vegetables after the initial starvation period gimmick that makes you lose a bunch of water weight (if you actually avoid carbohydrated ENTIRELY and your body goes into ketosis).
Of course, not like anyone actually reads the Atkins diet book, they just hear "eat meat and ice cream and lose weight!" and give it a super-half-assed attempt while claiming to everyone they're on a diet and trying to lose weight...
I'm not sure what you're suggesting, exactly. It sounds like you're saying that, eg. Id Software shouldn't release a Quake 5 because there are people who haven't played Quake 1-4?
With LK Blizzard has decreased the timesinks, grind, and difficulty of dungeons in the game substantially. They've stated publicly that MANY more players are getting to see the full content than ever before. This is in large part due to improving questing, and making dungeons more accessible while including Hard Modes to keep people challenged when they have better gear or more experience.
It does kind of suck to see content left behind. But if you actually hop in game, you'll notice people in trade chat LFG for all the old instances. People have always been interested in going back to see old content, and the Achievement system and some rare drops (mounts off raid bosses) help give people the feeling of completion that RPGs like this rely on heavily to incentivize people to experience (fun) content.
What if they release it as Pandarans in the US/Europe/etc. and just use a slightly different model+word in the Chinese version to avoid any reference to pandas?
Make em the grizzlies or furbolgs, something close enough to share content, but far enough to avoid any political nonsense.
Not meaning to be snarky here, but if you can't get through Ulduar and get loot from it, how do you expect to do the next raids after it? Typically content requires you be (mostly) geared from the previous tier of content.
Have any alts? I find raiding to push my tolerance to its limits for waiting on and relying on too many other people. 10-mans aren't so bad, 25-mans...imo they deserve the loot if they can coordinate that many people :)
But I've got way too many alts, and find it a lot of fun learning the other classes and seeing how they compare.
One way to look at it is expansions being an annoyance. But done right and at the right time, your players are getting bored and have finished the last expansion's content, and are thinking about quitting because they're out of things to do. An expansion gives them more to do.
Blizzard has done great at increasing leveling speed and taking a lot of the "treadmill" out of the game. The downside is that some people with too much time on their hands complain that they WANT to have to grind for 2 months straight to get 1 level.
Thankfully, Blizzard is mostly ignoring those people, or at least diverting them onto options like Hardcore Mode that aren't required for every player to make progress.
It used to be that only the REALLY hardcore players had more than 1 character at max level. Nowdays most people have 2 or 3 or more. IMO this is a very good thing, and indicates the fun and pacing have been improved.
There's also huge benefits to people rolling alts in that they get a much better perspective on balance than the standard "Buff my class!" demands.
I'd say it's more accurate to look at WOW as 3-4 different games.
Leveling is 1 game - typically the focus is on maximizing efficiency, which can be fun in itself. Do the most quests fastest, travel the least, etc.
Dungeons and raiding is another game - you could even separate the two. Raiding is primarily about maximizing your single role, dps, healing, or tanking. You gear specifically for it, you optimize your spec, and often optimize your group too (although at least its more about good players than good classes these days).
PVP is again a separate game, with its own separate gear and skill progression. Different talents, different goals, different rotations. Class comp matters as much as having good players (for arenas). Battlegrounds and arenas could easily be split into two different game types these days - the specs, classes, and strategies are very different.
The problem in here is that leveling takes a long time (although greatly improved). When you get to end-game, you can find yourself stuck playing a class that was fun to level, but that you don't enjoy in the 2 end games (Raiding and PVP). You never get to try out your class at endgame PVE and PVP until, well, the end. It's a big time investment for something that's a mystery until you get there.
They do not require a great deal of skill, or they would be a sport.
Sports require a great deal of skill?
4 year olds play sports, and have fun doing it. They don't usually keep score. Perhaps what you meant was: "Winning at top-tier leagues of competitive games"?
The most successful games are not the most successful because they're the easiest. It's because they have a gradual enough learning curve to keep people engaged and making progress.
Eh, in my view the data is the app. You could put 20 different front-ends on the same data, the data always stays the same. I don't understand devs who look at apps as code only, and then get annoyed that changing the data requires the data change, in addition to the code.
The problem is when an app has so many redundant layers that a data change means making the same change to 8-10 different layers of abstraction. And thats a *code* problem, not a data problem, and certainly not an SQL problem.
ZZZzzzzzzz
You're getting way too riled up over common practices in the industry. Microsoft doesn't care where you run Windows? What's that about virtualization in the EULA again?
The iPhone and iTunes have been (mostly) restricted due to the content industries and service providers (AT&T). The Kindle has run into the exact same issue, and same as Apple, Amazon's options have been "give up on the industry" or "play by the content industry's rules". At least Apple has used their market share to force things to open up in favor of the consumer - both in Music and in Phones.
I'm not sure what country you live in where wireless carriers don't lock down and nickel-and-dime any and everything on their networks. It sure isn't the US.
I think you're confused - HQL and Linq are there to hide the shortcomings of the *developers* (and development frameworks), not of SQL. They're basically there to try to force bad developers into using an overly-standard methodology, instead of doing things Right and Fast. You redefine Right to be "however the framework does it", and redfine Fast to be....extremely Slow.
Funny enough, I get wish list e-mails from half.com (owned by ebay) and I get the same item listed in EVERY email, which no longer actually exists. I even emailed them about it, but every month or so I get another wishlist e-mail with that same cheap imaginary item for sale...
I use Linux on my laptop and servers, and I've never touched "ntfs-3g" or "fs-driver". I'm not even sure what the OP is solving with his advice. This is no more reason to not use Linux than the fact that Windows users frequently have to hack their registries in bizarre ways.
Your average user won't be doing that hacking with linux OR windows. They'll probably just reformat and reinstall, or have their neighbor's kid do it for them.
Human death knight rejoining humans is not the same thing as Orcs (let alone orc death knights) rejoining humans.
While the human death knight kill his fellow humans, he has also "recovered" and still has friends, and "with the blessing" of the king (or thrall, for horde) is allowed to rejoin the Alliance.
As a representative of the Horde we'd like to return belfs to the Alliance, so all the noob 10-year olds can get back to the faction of fairies and adolescents playing as hot chicks. Please, take them back. They promise they'll stop abusing magic, and after that they're no different than nelfs, really!
Totally agreed. I used to see tauren warriors walking around in their big orange PVP shoulderpads, and always thought it was my friend at first. IMO there's a lot to be said for gear discrepancy in keeping unique toons looking unique.
However, realistically, that would mean having 2-3 versions of every BiS item for every class. Cause no matter what if 2 warriors get BiS for PVP, or for PVE, that means they're getting the same gear. Once you get to endgame I don't see a lot of options. At least nowdays it makes it easy at a glance to see how Well-geared a player is, if you know the tier gear for that class.
Back to Mr Potato Head, even if you end up looking the same, you had to work to get there, and it's somewhat prestigous and gives you a sense of pride to get there. Even if every other warrior has the same axe as me once they've raided Ulduar, I still had to work to get it for my character. It's very different from dropping into Counterstrike and pressing 4-3 to get your M4-A1.
The more you can change your toon around without penalty or effort, the more the game will turn into an FPS where you pick your character each time you login. It's definitely a grey area between the two, so it's not like letting you switch factions on the fly would be the end of the world. But those are the two extremes, and Blizzard wants to keep WOW closer to the RPG end of that scale than the FPS end.
Their original vision was certainly to keep Shamans on Horde and keep Paladins on Alliance. But the reason they had to break that limitation is for class balance.
For instance, the Shaman class was TERRIBLE 1-60, and even up to 70. Look at how many new abilities and massive buffs they've had to give Shamans to get them remotely close to balanced with the other classes in the game. They could never have fixed the Shaman class as long as all the Alliance whiners kept insisting that Shamans are OP just because an overgeared one got a 2-handed windfury crit on a clothy once upon a time.
Compare that to Paladins, who have always been an invulnerable class, and now they got the damage buffs to go with it. Big surprise, they've been extremely overpowered and continue to need nerfs every single patch.
But if you look at the community, Paladins were all Q.Q and everyone claimed Shamans were super-OP. Penny Arcade even made a comic about how OMG A SHAMAN KILLED ME AND I CANT PLAY THEM SO THEY'RE OBVIOUSLY OP.
The reality behind this was that there were many more alliance players than horde, so the community leaned towards Paladin buffs and Shaman nerfs. Even though that's the opposite of what was needed.
Back to factions, the point of the faction changing is only to let people switch to play with their friends without having to level new characters from scratch. It will most likely cost money ($25 or more) and have other restrictions applied, just like the server transfers.
I would be extremely surprised if they make this something that lets you randomly switch back and forth from day to day. I'd also be surprised if the faction change doesn't have a huge downside to it, like losing all of your achievements and gear when you switch.
EQ 2 isn't built on a pre-existing and long-standing storyline in the context of which faction changes makes no sense.
WOW is.
This is why they're going to make it a rarely-used (most likely for-pay) feature to help out people who want to join their friends. But it's not something the game supports in a fully-flexible fashion. Among other things, it would take a tremendous amount of changes to the pre-existing game and quests.
Even if they did decide to flip the Warcraft universe on its head and have humans on the Horde and orcs on the Alliance. Which we can only hope they never do.
The lore does not accomodate that. An Orc who tried to join the alliance would be slain or at least ostracized. It's rare that the factions intermingle. They don't speak the same languages. They've slaughtered each others families. Etc.
That said, WOW does have other reputations that can be switched on a whim. There's a goblin town called Booty Bay that is at odds with a group of Pirates nearby. The default is that you're friendly with the goblins. But you can (and it's a blast) turn on the goblins and kill them all (including NPCs) and switch factions to the pirate side. You even get a pirate hat out of it =)
That goblin/pirate faction is probably the best one currently in the game, but they've tried it several times from several different angles. Eg. 2 different factions of centaur in Desolace, 2 different factions in Outlands that have independent banks and Inns and faction rewards, 2 different factions in Sholazar where you have to pick a side to do their quests.
So yes, there is the ability to switch factions in the game, but letting Orcs join the Alliance would pretty much decimate the faction lore and storyline, and allegiance/loyalty to your faction and race.
This is another reason they tend to charge for features like this - it's something they're only implementing grudgingly to help out players stuck apart from friends. But they absolutely do not want players to be changing race, faction, and class on a whim.
Being able to change your character dramatically on a whim make it feel like you're playing with Mr. Potato Head instead of playing with a long-lasting character who's worthy of investing your time and efforts. For an RPG, character progression is a huge part of the game.
Exactly, good call. I actually heard about it on WOW in a general chat channel. Sources hadn't announced his death yet, and only a few sources (eg. CNN) even had information posted that he had been sent to the hospital. People in the chat channel were claiming he was dead, others were accusing them of lying.
If we had gone from zilch to "yep he's dead" on every news site in 5 minutes, the traffic may not have been nearly as bad.
The fact that there were rumors and half-released information dragging out the announcement over a few hours meant the same people refreshing the same pages waiting for an update.
Well, the real question is who they launch it against.
If they nuke South Korea, sadly, we may not see many in the US flinch. If they nuke Hawaii or California though, you certainly will.
The WTC attacks were the last time I remember the internet getting hit hard by a news event.
Thanks for the post, pretty informative.
It sounds like the real issue here is that they DID disable your service, but continued to charge, perhaps even for the month after you canceled. Particularly if you let your subscription lapse rather than manually canceling, they would keep both disable your service (cant play) AND keep charging you for service. HUH?
I used to work for a company that ran as a half-pre-paid service and half always-on-utility. Sounds just like this awful Final Fantasy billing method. As soon as we could, I changed the billing to be pre-paid. Canceling is "cancel my subscription", not "turn my service off right this moment". Buying a month on April 1, buys the days from April 1 to May 1. Whether you play on any of those days is your own choice.
Trying to charge late fees and interest for a pre-paid services doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Getting rid of paper checks (the most common excuse for "dont deactivate me I sent you money already!") is a great first step.
You might want to keep in mind that no one plays the PC game Majesty. I've never even *heard* of it, and I read gaming magazines and websites all the time.
You might also want to note that, at least in WOW, you're never waiting 20 mins to get somewhere except *maybe* if its your first time going there and you've never explored any of the places in between. Travel time is 5 mins at most. Waiting time is more often waiting for other players to do things (either in-game or real-life) so that the group can start. THAT is the wait-time that needs to be fixed, and already has (in WOW) for battlegrounds.
If they can do the same thing for PUG instances, you'll have a 3-part game in which leveling is the only one with any wait-time at all. The other 2 parts (PVP and dungeons) teleporting you in when a full group is ready and able to go.
There was a time when WOW has ridiculous travel times, but thankfully as of WotLK most of the time-wastes have been removed or substantially lessened. And they keep getting lessened even more, eg. flying speed getting faster and cheaper in the next 3.2 patch.
The comparison to cooking meat is a stellar example. There IS such a thing as "raw vegans" who think that cooking food is unnatural and therefore "bad" and unhealthy.
Personally, I'd wager that cooking food is tremendously responsible for improved survival of humans. It eliminates almost every troublesome bacteria and virus that can be transmitted via food.
Milk is an interesting combination of the two points. In it's natural form, milk is highly nutritious. Pasteurization destroys those troublesome bacteria in milk, but it also destroys most of the enzymes and vitamins that make milk healthy to drink.
Humans have evolved lactose tolerance
That should say "a small portion of humans". The 90% statistic quoted is unique to Scandinavia, with the overall tolerance being about 50% of europeans, with much lower numbers (about 10%?) for Africans and Asians.
For humans to have evolved lactose tolerance at all, especially in such a short time frame, drinking milk must have been so advantageous that it contributed substantially to the survival of Europeans.
Just because we're largely intolerant of the sugar and protein in milk, does not immediately imply the benefits of milk are outweighed.
Likewise, there are plenty of foods that our bodies are entirely tolerant of that are terrible for our survival considering our alternative food sources. Soda pop, for example.