Whoops! Woe unto he that doth disrespect the mighty Java! Forsooth, 'tis Microsoft that is to blame!
*repents fervently and in the least sincere manner possible* >.>
Admittedly, no, I didn't do many - as I think I said in another post, I skipped Blade's Edge because it was such a complete PITA to get around.:P I'll keep it in mind for any future characters, though, if it gives CE rep too. At any rate, rep grinds are annoying - I think the only good one I've come across is Tranquillien rep, as you do the quests you get good, relevant gear just as you need it.:)
I always thought the Magram/Gelkis quest chains, or the ability to gain Bloodsail rep, were wonderful. I wish they'd do more areas like that, have two zones that you start off neutral with, and one faction become friendly and the other hostile by gaining/losing rep. That's what reputation SHOULD be used for, not as a second XP bar that lets you use some piece of gear when you 'ding'.
Imagine a neutral battle ground between Tuskarr and Nerub, where the faction you befriended determined what side you were on. That would be awesome! Or imagine grinding up your Undercity rep past 'unfriendly' to allow your human character to enter unmolested (by guards at least). So much scope, wasted!:(
Which is exactly like 90% of other MMOs out there, and what I meant:) I believe that the problem he was referring to is not that as the game gets older and expansions come out, newcomers have more levels to get through before hitting 'endgame'. It's more what we have between expansion packs. For instance, heroic dungeons are meant to help players gear up for 10-man raids, but the 'bubble' of raiding players has passed heroic dungeons and it's now impossible to get a run on my server. Same thing with Kara - high end guilds can only get new players by poaching them from up-and-coming guilds (thus destroying said guilds) because they don't run the old raids any more, and so fresh players can't gear up. Expansions are really the only points that new characters can get into the 'endgame' because they're effectively gear resets.
I believe Microsoft takes the credit for that one. Sun's premise was "compile once, run anywhere". Microsoft made it not work on Windows. Not being able to reach 90+% of your target audience = dead product. That was just the final straw. The bulk of the work was done by Sun dicking around with the APIs, renaming methods for no reason, and allowing platform- and version-specific bugs so that you'd have to test and debug a program on every single JVM version let alone multiple platforms. Java was great up until 1.3, at which point it really started to go downhill. It's now a massive bloated confusing mess that's only good for generating new buzzwords for Web X.0 Inter-Oper-Acronym-Ation.
Not that I've played Halo 3... just sayin', realistic colors are unattainable (read up on color theory). Real colours, the kind you see when you look at that 'outside' place, are unattainable, but you can certainly display realistic colours a la TV, DVD etc.
Yeah! And get rid of those pesky opaque walls while you're at it. And remove all that annoying stuff about guns jerking around when they fire, just because they do it in real life doesn't mean that they shouldn't be perfectly accurate in game.
I don't think you understand the concept of 'worth'. If something is useful and enjoyable to someone (whether that something is religion, MP3, a hi-fi sound system, cocaine, a pretty rock, whatever) then it is worth something to them. Just because it's worthless TO YOU doesn't make it worthless full stop.
Well, the only morale question is "can I be bothered levelling yet another character?":P
But there were a few morally dubious quests in the game, especially from some of the undead questgivers. Take the one where the undead woman is angry that her neighbours survived the plague unscathed and still have a running farm - you have to head off and kill them. Or the 'new plague' questline where you end up poisoning a bunch of captives (Geneva convention anyone?) And another in Hillsbrad where you have to hunt down and kill some defecting undead - read the research journal that Warden Belamoore drops, without this quest in the storyline there would be some real chance of reconciliation between Forsaken and Human factions. They never adequately finished that quest chain though, I wonder what the artifacts they stole were for... regardless, on my undead character I did all of the above quests, but my orc refused on moral grounds.
Not only that, but there are deliberate cockblocks to levelling every 10 levels or so between about 35 and 60. I generally find 36-39, 46-49 to be horrible because there are no real quest hubs, you either grind or you spend 90% of your time running around trying to find quests. They did this because during development, they wanted to eke out the 'last little bit' before level cap (which started at 40, then went to 50, then 55, then 60, afaik).
If they're doing something to speed up the levelling doldrums that start mid-40s, then that's excellent. It doesn't take 20+ days/played to learn to play your class, they should just take out all the 'filler' quests. There's enough content to keep anyone occupied now without grinds.
Tons of 5 man dungeons, once you get through them fifteen to twenty times, you can then do them on heroic. Fixed that for you. The rep grind to get into heroic dungeons is a pain in the ass if you didn't farm the lower level dungeons as you levelled up, and even then you're running for rep long after you've got all the loot you need. And this is set to get worse:
"When is a game more than a game?" says Metzen. "When it's making you feel creepy or elated or heroic -- it's not just a mechanical experience of clicking and looting and killing and raiding. We want to provide as much context and fiction and psychology as possible, at least the first time -- you'll probably roll this dungeon 80 times -- but the first time was a hoot!" <rantmode>Why the hell would they ever believe that running the same dungeon 80 times is fun? It's not. NOT FUN. NOT BLOODY FUN! Hell, I probably ran UBRS a total of 30-40 times between all my lvl 60 pre-expansion characters, and that was way too much and only because there was nothing else to do. The 15 runs of Steam Vaults that I needed to get my heroic Coilfang key were too much. What could possibly delude an experienced game designer, who is obviously passionate about his job, into thinking that players would enjoy spending over 200 hours in the same damn dungeon?
</rantmode>
Zangarmarsh was OK, Hellfire had some nifty tricks early on (bombing run anyone?) but in the end was just Badlands 2.0, Nagrand was OK but for gods sake, enough with the "kill 30 raptors" and "bring me 25 raptor wangs" quests! Blade's Edge was just far too painful to get around without a flying mount, I guess the quests there are meant to be done for gold for your epic flying mount. At least they showed a small amount more variety.
Yeh, I wasn't particularly interested, she was just a friend-of-a-friend who needed a lift. Of course, your point stands - my fiancee now loves my driving style, and, well...;)
There is no need to install the SATA drivers when installing from a Windows XP CD when^H^H^H^Hunless ...it's a system that has two disks in a RAID0 that contain all your data (/facepalm!:/ ) and a Windows install with broken raid drivers. I eventually put a spare 80gb drive in, installed windows on that, installed raid drivers, then copied my data over to my shiny new IDE backup drive.:P Now one of those two SATA drives is my linux install, the other is 160gb of zeroes because I don't download enough junk, and I have an NTFS drive for all my backed up data.
As for unfair, I'm a user, I don't HAVE to be fair. That's what I do at work.:P When I get home I expect someone ELSE to have dealt with all that annoying technical jibba-jabba. Your point is fair, though.;)
I guess derogatory is in the eye of the beholder - I definitely didn't mean anything bad by the 'squiggly lines' comment, that's just what most foreign alphabets look like to me. I can read Normal (English). I recognize, but can't read, Englishy Things (anything using a basic Latin alphabet), Calculus (Greek), Backwards Letters LOL (Russian/Cyrillic), Sideways Funny Pictures (heiroglyphics), Snail Poo (any of a number of languages from the Middle East), Honda Accord Stickers (Japanese), and Funny Stick People (Chinese). Then there's all the bazillion others that look like either the last two, or don't. I'd fully expect Englishy Things to look like random squiggles or Backwards Russian or something to someone who can't decipher Latin-esque alphabets.
Good point about the TMI factor when getting a human to translate. Nothing worse than "It means, let me see... you have to add the seasoning in step 5. Or wait, that could be 'your wife is hot' depending on context. It's also vaguely insulting." when all you want to know is whether to put the freakin' seasoning or boiling water in first.:)
Why is this modded 'troll'? He's perfectly right, machine translation might not be sufficient for business transactions and classy conversation, but when you just want to know enough about what the hell those squiggly drawings mean to determine the subject matter, this would be perfect! Hell, usually a datasheet is readable after being machine translated, even if the grammar IS a little funky.
I'm running an nVidia GeForce 6800 Pro, so I guess I have the advantage of running non-cutting-edge hardware. I haven't tried dual screens yet because my fiancee stole my second monitor for her computer =( nor have I managed to get it to clone output to monitor and tv-out simultaneously, which is a pain for watching movies but then again it didn't do that under Windows either.
Tip for tinkering with video (or any other crucial) setup (which you probably know more about than me if you read slashdot, but anyway...:P ), make copies of the config files involved. That way if things really go pearshaped and you can't load X, just take the command prompt option on boot and copy the affected files back. This has saved me a couple of times while I was trying to set up the aforementioned dual-head clone mode with my TV.
Often, what 'normal people' actually like IS the body kit and the loud exhaust. Any real performance features are secondary, and sometimes even unwanted. It's like that one time that I met this girl and she was all over my car, and wanted a ride in it. So I gave it some juice, thinking that like me, she was interested in the turbo or the handling. Turns out she actually liked the stereo and the 'wow sporty!!!' appearance, and practically crapped herself when I got the back end out around a corner. I never saw her again, wonder why...:P
What I'm getting at is that per-user file permissions, security, signed code, trusted computing... they're not what users want. 'Normal' users want a pretty GUI that can play their movies and games, and show them an interweb with myspace and youtube. They don't care that there's an anemic econobox engine and drum brakes behind the scenes. Oh god, why do people buy mags for cars with drum brakes? Most pathetic sight ever.:(
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Damn, maybe I should try that. If it'll take down a grizzly, it's sure to work on koalas!
Whoops! Woe unto he that doth disrespect the mighty Java! Forsooth, 'tis Microsoft that is to blame!
*repents fervently and in the least sincere manner possible* >.>
Admittedly, no, I didn't do many - as I think I said in another post, I skipped Blade's Edge because it was such a complete PITA to get around. :P I'll keep it in mind for any future characters, though, if it gives CE rep too. At any rate, rep grinds are annoying - I think the only good one I've come across is Tranquillien rep, as you do the quests you get good, relevant gear just as you need it. :)
I always thought the Magram/Gelkis quest chains, or the ability to gain Bloodsail rep, were wonderful. I wish they'd do more areas like that, have two zones that you start off neutral with, and one faction become friendly and the other hostile by gaining/losing rep. That's what reputation SHOULD be used for, not as a second XP bar that lets you use some piece of gear when you 'ding'.
:(
Imagine a neutral battle ground between Tuskarr and Nerub, where the faction you befriended determined what side you were on. That would be awesome! Or imagine grinding up your Undercity rep past 'unfriendly' to allow your human character to enter unmolested (by guards at least). So much scope, wasted!
Yeah! And get rid of those pesky opaque walls while you're at it. And remove all that annoying stuff about guns jerking around when they fire, just because they do it in real life doesn't mean that they shouldn't be perfectly accurate in game.
I don't think you understand the concept of 'worth'. If something is useful and enjoyable to someone (whether that something is religion, MP3, a hi-fi sound system, cocaine, a pretty rock, whatever) then it is worth something to them. Just because it's worthless TO YOU doesn't make it worthless full stop.
Well, the only morale question is "can I be bothered levelling yet another character?" :P
But there were a few morally dubious quests in the game, especially from some of the undead questgivers. Take the one where the undead woman is angry that her neighbours survived the plague unscathed and still have a running farm - you have to head off and kill them. Or the 'new plague' questline where you end up poisoning a bunch of captives (Geneva convention anyone?) And another in Hillsbrad where you have to hunt down and kill some defecting undead - read the research journal that Warden Belamoore drops, without this quest in the storyline there would be some real chance of reconciliation between Forsaken and Human factions. They never adequately finished that quest chain though, I wonder what the artifacts they stole were for... regardless, on my undead character I did all of the above quests, but my orc refused on moral grounds.
I went in for a brain scan but they didn't find anything...
Not only that, but there are deliberate cockblocks to levelling every 10 levels or so between about 35 and 60. I generally find 36-39, 46-49 to be horrible because there are no real quest hubs, you either grind or you spend 90% of your time running around trying to find quests. They did this because during development, they wanted to eke out the 'last little bit' before level cap (which started at 40, then went to 50, then 55, then 60, afaik).
/played to learn to play your class, they should just take out all the 'filler' quests. There's enough content to keep anyone occupied now without grinds.
If they're doing something to speed up the levelling doldrums that start mid-40s, then that's excellent. It doesn't take 20+ days
Zangarmarsh was OK, Hellfire had some nifty tricks early on (bombing run anyone?) but in the end was just Badlands 2.0, Nagrand was OK but for gods sake, enough with the "kill 30 raptors" and "bring me 25 raptor wangs" quests! Blade's Edge was just far too painful to get around without a flying mount, I guess the quests there are meant to be done for gold for your epic flying mount. At least they showed a small amount more variety.
Yeh, I wasn't particularly interested, she was just a friend-of-a-friend who needed a lift. Of course, your point stands - my fiancee now loves my driving style, and, well... ;)
She's using it to play WoW! ;)
As for unfair, I'm a user, I don't HAVE to be fair. That's what I do at work.
I guess derogatory is in the eye of the beholder - I definitely didn't mean anything bad by the 'squiggly lines' comment, that's just what most foreign alphabets look like to me. I can read Normal (English). I recognize, but can't read, Englishy Things (anything using a basic Latin alphabet), Calculus (Greek), Backwards Letters LOL (Russian/Cyrillic), Sideways Funny Pictures (heiroglyphics), Snail Poo (any of a number of languages from the Middle East), Honda Accord Stickers (Japanese), and Funny Stick People (Chinese). Then there's all the bazillion others that look like either the last two, or don't. I'd fully expect Englishy Things to look like random squiggles or Backwards Russian or something to someone who can't decipher Latin-esque alphabets.
:)
Good point about the TMI factor when getting a human to translate. Nothing worse than "It means, let me see... you have to add the seasoning in step 5. Or wait, that could be 'your wife is hot' depending on context. It's also vaguely insulting." when all you want to know is whether to put the freakin' seasoning or boiling water in first.
Cables for the tie security to tightly. Convenience then you for believe more than!
Absorb interpret tentacles the multiple of available for perhaps, orifice many maybe? ^_^
Why is this modded 'troll'? He's perfectly right, machine translation might not be sufficient for business transactions and classy conversation, but when you just want to know enough about what the hell those squiggly drawings mean to determine the subject matter, this would be perfect! Hell, usually a datasheet is readable after being machine translated, even if the grammar IS a little funky.
I'm running an nVidia GeForce 6800 Pro, so I guess I have the advantage of running non-cutting-edge hardware. I haven't tried dual screens yet because my fiancee stole my second monitor for her computer =( nor have I managed to get it to clone output to monitor and tv-out simultaneously, which is a pain for watching movies but then again it didn't do that under Windows either.
:P ), make copies of the config files involved. That way if things really go pearshaped and you can't load X, just take the command prompt option on boot and copy the affected files back. This has saved me a couple of times while I was trying to set up the aforementioned dual-head clone mode with my TV.
Tip for tinkering with video (or any other crucial) setup (which you probably know more about than me if you read slashdot, but anyway...
And truly one-time.
Ima steal that as my new sig, it was about time I had a new one. ;)
So you run 7 kits per kat? How do you deal with special karacters?
Often, what 'normal people' actually like IS the body kit and the loud exhaust. Any real performance features are secondary, and sometimes even unwanted. It's like that one time that I met this girl and she was all over my car, and wanted a ride in it. So I gave it some juice, thinking that like me, she was interested in the turbo or the handling. Turns out she actually liked the stereo and the 'wow sporty!!!' appearance, and practically crapped herself when I got the back end out around a corner. I never saw her again, wonder why... :P
:(
What I'm getting at is that per-user file permissions, security, signed code, trusted computing... they're not what users want. 'Normal' users want a pretty GUI that can play their movies and games, and show them an interweb with myspace and youtube. They don't care that there's an anemic econobox engine and drum brakes behind the scenes. Oh god, why do people buy mags for cars with drum brakes? Most pathetic sight ever.