Oh, there are a lot of quests like that. Quests where you require 15 items, which are a 20% drop from mob type X that only spawns 10 times on the map, leading you to kill each spawn 7.5 times (probably waiting around inbetweentimes), which is stupid.
The problem with WoW and the grind factor is generally in the systems (Battlegrounds are a prime example) where the criteria are a simple "participate in some way in 25 games of Arathi Basin and 25 games of Warsong Gulch in order to buy your shiny boots". The player wants the boots because they're a PvE upgrade, but they have no interest in PvP and a more fun option for the player is to just load a bot and go do something else until their boots are handed to them.
You have a point, though, that rarity in terms of rare spawns is something that players aren't _meant_ to farm. "1% spawn off mob type X, with a 5% drop rate of a very nice item" is put in by game designers with the intent that "very occasionally, one or two lucky players will have this item drop for them", not "every player of class Y will have to grind mob X for ~500 hours in order to get best-in-slot drop".
There are two ways to look at these things. The old way, where you buy a widget and take it home and it's yours. And the new way, where you pay a company for the right to use one of their widgets (essentially you 'license' or lease it off them) and they can, as part of that license, dictate on what terms you use said widget.
Personally, I think the former is more ethical. If I buy a power drill, the company that made it should have no say whatsoever in whether I can hack that drill open and turn it into a blender, or a fan, or use the internals to power a skateboard.
A great example in the computing world is the Radeon 9700 / 9800 hack, where ATI sold perfectly good 9800s as 9700s because there wasn't the demand for their then-premium card (at premium rates). A simple jumper soldered on was all that was required to turn it back into a full speed 9800. Should it be outlawed to modify hardware that you've bought and paid for, to increase its performance, even if such modifications are not intended by the manufacturer? I argue that it should not. Should software have this protection where hardware does not? No, definitely not.
Should a service, then, have this protection? Well, as an ongoing contract, the provider can apply whatever conditions they want. The initial software media that you purchase, though, should still be yours freehold so long as you don't infringe on any copyright by redistributing the software.
I'm intrigued by this. You mean Blizzard deleted characters that your wife had levelled on official servers? Or that they deleted characters she'd created on a private server (which would be nigh impossible unless they were _running_ the private server)? The phraseology is confusing too - a "legal WoW account" is your account with Blizzard which lets you access official servers, and as they tell you every 5 seconds, you should never give your account details to anyone. A private server would, I would think, have its own authentication system and you would use a separate username and password to connect to it.
Just how far does anyone think a business would get if its only product was a home burglary or auto theft convenience kit? "Break into any car and be driving away in 30 seconds or less... OR YOUR MONEY BACK!!!" Yup, sounds like a winner.
Well, there's a dinky little store near where I used to live that sells hydroponics equipment. In the middle of the city. It may as well have run with a slogan of "Everything you need to grow, uh, tomatoes! In your attic!"
It's been there for a long time. And manufacture of narcotics is a long way up the scale from letting someone farm gold while they sleep.
Personally, I think that if a game has enough of a grind factor that a bot can do it better than a human, then either the gameplay needs to be made more complex, or the option to bot should be included explicitly. An MMO design I'm working on (aren't we all) calls for a variety of preset behaviours that a player can select for their character while they're offline. A character who specializes in crafting might stand around a marketplace and craft items in exchange for currency and materials. A character specialized in combat might hire themselves out as an NPC mercenary for a certain rate per hour, so that (say) tanks or healers could hire someone to DPS for them, making soloing less difficult for them.
No. If you get drunk and start yelling your password at the pub and I happen to overhear, that's a LOT different to me breaking into your house and installing a hardware keylogger on your computer.
Actually the chat system filters out some text strings. Back when Peons4Hire were doing their damn spamming thing constantly, I sent a whisper to a friend saying "damn this peons4hire bunch suck" and he got "damn this bunch suck". I haven't come across any other instances yet though.
Re:Even hard sf isn't that hard
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 1
Wasn't it literally a boat? The contention being that fine dust in a vacuum behaves like a liquid. The earthquake destabilized the dust and a bubble of gas, given off by some chemical process I can't remember, rose to the surface creating a dustslide.
Where are my mod points when I need them? This ain't a troll and it ain't flamebait. There are very valid reasons for self-publishing which don't involve suck (or suck related to the artwork, at least). One, as said, is that publishers would much rather fund the latest and greatest sequel that they can guarantee will be a mediocre success than they would back some guy in a garage who just happens to have a brand new sound. Another is that... well, it's _possible_ now in a way that it wasn't even 5 years ago. Digital content distribution is turning the Internet into the world's biggest, most open market.
There are a lot of very efficient old cars (the Jetta is one that comes up time and again) - making cars go a long way on a small amount of petrol isn't any kind of mystery.
The problem is that the minimum level of acceptible luxury and safety in a car has gone up a long way since your Corolla was made. It may have a drivers' side airbag but that'll be about it, compared to a modern car of the same size which will have a passenger safety cell with multiple airbags, twice the airconditioning capacity, power everything leading to more strain on the engine. Add to that the fact that we demand better acceleration these days and you get a car that needs much more energy to move a given distance no matter how efficient the engine.
And sadly, if a 1000-to-1 bet has 1000 punters, chances are that one of them will win it. And will be called a visionary, and people will crap on about how he was amazingly insightful, and a genius, and all that, when in actual fact he just happened to be the one chump who got lucky.
The sad part is when the business man comes up with an idea and the geek implements it, the businessman usually doesn't give the geek enough credit, aka $$$.
That's because the business man provides the money and takes the risk. The geek's happy because he's working on something interesting, and being given enough bananas that he's not hungry and can afford his home internet bill. It's not difficult to come up with a business plan and to be the business man, but it's boring compared to fiddling with computers for a living, even though in the end it pays a LOT more. The sad thing is that us geeks very seldom *bother* to do the leg work required to turn an idea into a saleable product.
I'm not convinced. I know these new 'Wheel' interfaces are more user friendly but really... for expert users the 'keyboard' is here to stay. For one thing text entry and command line usage are still so much faster!!
That's actually fairly similar to what I want to do with the MMO design spec that I'm working on (what, doesn't everyone have one of those?:P ) with, among other things (AMG DUN STEEL MAH IDEEAZ!) each faction having a GM who controls them, in terms of tells them who to attack, gives work orders to build new encampments, chooses what quests they offer etc.
It would require a little more in the way of hands-on game management but the extra required manpower seems trivial in comparison with the gain in dynamicism. Saving a group of NPCs from extinction (or conversely wiping them out) adds another whole layer of depth.
Also, the only currency that really carries over from the real world is time. If you can instantly get a full set of 'endgame' gear then that gear isn't worth anything to you (witness the current experience in WoW where after two weeks worth of raids you're in 80% of the best gear and you have nothing to play for). The whole idea of level and stat based RPGs is that your character gets better at the game so you don't really have to.
As for the connection between slot-machines and MMOs, it's to do with the randomized loot. I can't find the exact article but actions with a random chance of reward trigger some center of the brain. This blog seems to cover it fairly well.
This is awesome IF it actually works. The problem is that stable ecologies are ridiculously hard to build, even when they only contain foxes and rabbits. When they contain the hundreds of different races and species that modern MMOs do, a real ecology would be well-nigh impossible to design that wouldn't end up 3 days later being overrun with mice while everything else has died out and a huge high-level monster is terrorizing the starter zones.:P
I'd beg to differ, slightly. "DPS Rotation" is a term that has very little meaning today in terms of "do X twice then Y three times". It's a flowchart now due to all the procs - for instance the prot warrior threat 'rotation' is:
* If you can shield slam, shield slam
* If you can't shield slam then revenge
* If you cant use revenge then devastate
* If you can't use devastate then thunderclap (move this to pt 2 if you have 2+ mobs on you)
DPS is more complicated if you want to actually min-max it instead of going for "good enough". They've tried to replace "do X then Y" rotations with more "if X then Y" but in effect, it doesn't make DPS more fun, it just makes it more attention-sapping. It used to be that DPSing was a nice break from tanking/healing, now it's just as stressful (and the 'bad dps' are just as bad for your group as the 'bad healers' and 'bad tanks')... hence the plethora of tanks and healers these days.:P Which of course is kudos to Blizzard, because traditionally it's been like pulling teeth to find people who will play these roles given the downsides.
You can generally assume that any player complaining that "I won't get to raid because class X can outdamage me" is bad at their class and doesn't know how to use it properly. All DPS classes are roughly equal, the few that are slightly behind just have to be patient for a while and they'll be buffed to be competitive. Remember that this isn't the real world, where the rules are fixed and the people who learn how to use those rules to their advantage will always win. This is a game, and there are unseen hands tweaking the fabric of reality to make sure that everyone's equal.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what you're trying to say is "The weld is not enough"?
Oh, there are a lot of quests like that. Quests where you require 15 items, which are a 20% drop from mob type X that only spawns 10 times on the map, leading you to kill each spawn 7.5 times (probably waiting around inbetweentimes), which is stupid.
The problem with WoW and the grind factor is generally in the systems (Battlegrounds are a prime example) where the criteria are a simple "participate in some way in 25 games of Arathi Basin and 25 games of Warsong Gulch in order to buy your shiny boots". The player wants the boots because they're a PvE upgrade, but they have no interest in PvP and a more fun option for the player is to just load a bot and go do something else until their boots are handed to them.
You have a point, though, that rarity in terms of rare spawns is something that players aren't _meant_ to farm. "1% spawn off mob type X, with a 5% drop rate of a very nice item" is put in by game designers with the intent that "very occasionally, one or two lucky players will have this item drop for them", not "every player of class Y will have to grind mob X for ~500 hours in order to get best-in-slot drop".
There are two ways to look at these things. The old way, where you buy a widget and take it home and it's yours. And the new way, where you pay a company for the right to use one of their widgets (essentially you 'license' or lease it off them) and they can, as part of that license, dictate on what terms you use said widget.
Personally, I think the former is more ethical. If I buy a power drill, the company that made it should have no say whatsoever in whether I can hack that drill open and turn it into a blender, or a fan, or use the internals to power a skateboard.
A great example in the computing world is the Radeon 9700 / 9800 hack, where ATI sold perfectly good 9800s as 9700s because there wasn't the demand for their then-premium card (at premium rates). A simple jumper soldered on was all that was required to turn it back into a full speed 9800. Should it be outlawed to modify hardware that you've bought and paid for, to increase its performance, even if such modifications are not intended by the manufacturer? I argue that it should not. Should software have this protection where hardware does not? No, definitely not.
Should a service, then, have this protection? Well, as an ongoing contract, the provider can apply whatever conditions they want. The initial software media that you purchase, though, should still be yours freehold so long as you don't infringe on any copyright by redistributing the software.
I'm intrigued by this. You mean Blizzard deleted characters that your wife had levelled on official servers? Or that they deleted characters she'd created on a private server (which would be nigh impossible unless they were _running_ the private server)? The phraseology is confusing too - a "legal WoW account" is your account with Blizzard which lets you access official servers, and as they tell you every 5 seconds, you should never give your account details to anyone. A private server would, I would think, have its own authentication system and you would use a separate username and password to connect to it.
Just how far does anyone think a business would get if its only product was a home burglary or auto theft convenience kit? "Break into any car and be driving away in 30 seconds or less ... OR YOUR MONEY BACK!!!" Yup, sounds like a winner.
Well, there's a dinky little store near where I used to live that sells hydroponics equipment. In the middle of the city. It may as well have run with a slogan of "Everything you need to grow, uh, tomatoes! In your attic!"
It's been there for a long time. And manufacture of narcotics is a long way up the scale from letting someone farm gold while they sleep.
Personally, I think that if a game has enough of a grind factor that a bot can do it better than a human, then either the gameplay needs to be made more complex, or the option to bot should be included explicitly. An MMO design I'm working on (aren't we all) calls for a variety of preset behaviours that a player can select for their character while they're offline. A character who specializes in crafting might stand around a marketplace and craft items in exchange for currency and materials. A character specialized in combat might hire themselves out as an NPC mercenary for a certain rate per hour, so that (say) tanks or healers could hire someone to DPS for them, making soloing less difficult for them.
No. If you get drunk and start yelling your password at the pub and I happen to overhear, that's a LOT different to me breaking into your house and installing a hardware keylogger on your computer.
You don't think it would be? Damn, I'm tempted to just for the pure technical challenge.
Actually the chat system filters out some text strings. Back when Peons4Hire were doing their damn spamming thing constantly, I sent a whisper to a friend saying "damn this peons4hire bunch suck" and he got "damn this bunch suck". I haven't come across any other instances yet though.
Wasn't it literally a boat? The contention being that fine dust in a vacuum behaves like a liquid. The earthquake destabilized the dust and a bubble of gas, given off by some chemical process I can't remember, rose to the surface creating a dustslide.
One has to ask, "do you have a mother?" If so, "have you spoken to her in years?"
:P
There are some universal constants, and one of those is that mothers enjoy feeding their children, however grown up those are.
No, actually because it's a law they'll have something to nail you with if ever they feel the need.
Where are my mod points when I need them? This ain't a troll and it ain't flamebait. There are very valid reasons for self-publishing which don't involve suck (or suck related to the artwork, at least). One, as said, is that publishers would much rather fund the latest and greatest sequel that they can guarantee will be a mediocre success than they would back some guy in a garage who just happens to have a brand new sound. Another is that... well, it's _possible_ now in a way that it wasn't even 5 years ago. Digital content distribution is turning the Internet into the world's biggest, most open market.
The difference here is that World 3-2 didn't just disappear one day because someone 10,000km away from you complained that it was offensive.
That needs to go on a roflposter with the caption "Truthiness. For when facts just don't cut it."
Magic works. Homeopathy... you just think it does.
There are a lot of very efficient old cars (the Jetta is one that comes up time and again) - making cars go a long way on a small amount of petrol isn't any kind of mystery.
The problem is that the minimum level of acceptible luxury and safety in a car has gone up a long way since your Corolla was made. It may have a drivers' side airbag but that'll be about it, compared to a modern car of the same size which will have a passenger safety cell with multiple airbags, twice the airconditioning capacity, power everything leading to more strain on the engine. Add to that the fact that we demand better acceleration these days and you get a car that needs much more energy to move a given distance no matter how efficient the engine.
And sadly, if a 1000-to-1 bet has 1000 punters, chances are that one of them will win it. And will be called a visionary, and people will crap on about how he was amazingly insightful, and a genius, and all that, when in actual fact he just happened to be the one chump who got lucky.
The sad part is when the business man comes up with an idea and the geek implements it, the businessman usually doesn't give the geek enough credit, aka $$$.
That's because the business man provides the money and takes the risk. The geek's happy because he's working on something interesting, and being given enough bananas that he's not hungry and can afford his home internet bill. It's not difficult to come up with a business plan and to be the business man, but it's boring compared to fiddling with computers for a living, even though in the end it pays a LOT more. The sad thing is that us geeks very seldom *bother* to do the leg work required to turn an idea into a saleable product.
I'm not convinced. I know these new 'Wheel' interfaces are more user friendly but really... for expert users the 'keyboard' is here to stay. For one thing text entry and command line usage are still so much faster!!
GPP still had a point about Vista, though.
"You have to use your hands? That's like a baby's toy!"
That's actually fairly similar to what I want to do with the MMO design spec that I'm working on (what, doesn't everyone have one of those? :P ) with, among other things (AMG DUN STEEL MAH IDEEAZ!) each faction having a GM who controls them, in terms of tells them who to attack, gives work orders to build new encampments, chooses what quests they offer etc.
It would require a little more in the way of hands-on game management but the extra required manpower seems trivial in comparison with the gain in dynamicism. Saving a group of NPCs from extinction (or conversely wiping them out) adds another whole layer of depth.
Also, the only currency that really carries over from the real world is time. If you can instantly get a full set of 'endgame' gear then that gear isn't worth anything to you (witness the current experience in WoW where after two weeks worth of raids you're in 80% of the best gear and you have nothing to play for). The whole idea of level and stat based RPGs is that your character gets better at the game so you don't really have to.
As for the connection between slot-machines and MMOs, it's to do with the randomized loot. I can't find the exact article but actions with a random chance of reward trigger some center of the brain. This blog seems to cover it fairly well.
This is awesome IF it actually works. The problem is that stable ecologies are ridiculously hard to build, even when they only contain foxes and rabbits. When they contain the hundreds of different races and species that modern MMOs do, a real ecology would be well-nigh impossible to design that wouldn't end up 3 days later being overrun with mice while everything else has died out and a huge high-level monster is terrorizing the starter zones. :P
I'd beg to differ, slightly. "DPS Rotation" is a term that has very little meaning today in terms of "do X twice then Y three times". It's a flowchart now due to all the procs - for instance the prot warrior threat 'rotation' is:
:P Which of course is kudos to Blizzard, because traditionally it's been like pulling teeth to find people who will play these roles given the downsides.
* If you can shield slam, shield slam
* If you can't shield slam then revenge
* If you cant use revenge then devastate
* If you can't use devastate then thunderclap (move this to pt 2 if you have 2+ mobs on you)
DPS is more complicated if you want to actually min-max it instead of going for "good enough". They've tried to replace "do X then Y" rotations with more "if X then Y" but in effect, it doesn't make DPS more fun, it just makes it more attention-sapping. It used to be that DPSing was a nice break from tanking/healing, now it's just as stressful (and the 'bad dps' are just as bad for your group as the 'bad healers' and 'bad tanks')... hence the plethora of tanks and healers these days.
You can generally assume that any player complaining that "I won't get to raid because class X can outdamage me" is bad at their class and doesn't know how to use it properly. All DPS classes are roughly equal, the few that are slightly behind just have to be patient for a while and they'll be buffed to be competitive. Remember that this isn't the real world, where the rules are fixed and the people who learn how to use those rules to their advantage will always win. This is a game, and there are unseen hands tweaking the fabric of reality to make sure that everyone's equal.