Right. $5bn will buy you a 20 megaton warhead and associated ICBM. The company/country with the most cash gets the most warheads, and ends up the least vaporised. This is an example of how the Real World sucks, and games are better.:P
Aside from the contention-with-farmers issue, the problem is that gear does have a large effect on games such as WoW. Take one kid who plays after school, he's just hit lvl 70 and in instance blues and greens, farming for his flying mount. Now the rich bastid down the road (who's also just hit 70) gets 20k gold for christmas - instantly he's kitted out with an epic flying mount and a full set of epic crafted gear. When poor kid runs into rich kid he'll get creamed unless rich kid really really sucks. This is not fun for poor kid.
On the flip side, there's then me, the young software developer, who gets to play 2-3 hours a night but spends most of that time leveling alts because that's what his girlfriend wants to do. He gets maybe 3 hours a week to play on his mage, who's not going to hit 70 for another month or two, and when he does he'll have crappy gear because he can rarely commit to the block of time required to run a dungeon. He's gonna run into poor kid and rich kid, and even poor kid will have better gear because instead of doing homework, poor kid is raiding. In this case software dev will beat rich kid because rich kid can't play his class, but will still have trouble competing with poor kid. How is it bad for software dev to upgrade his gear by spending some of his copious hard-earned RL cash in lieu of spending his limited playing time?
Just for clarification, I've never bought gold and never will, because it'd be cheating and I hate cheaters.
On the contrary, Marxism only makes people more likely to stand up and take action when they're not getting any of it. Give Marxists their Marxism and they won't bother protesting! Which points to Marxism's addictiveness. Which makes it analogous to an opiate. Ergo, you flail.:P
I'm wondering if this has more to do with an architectural change than just a software modification. Maybe DirectX 10 specifications just require the board to have a daughter die similar to what the graphics processor in the 360 has. Well, according to nVidia:
The method of implementing CSAA in DX9 differs from DX10. This is due to a limitation in the DX9 runtime, which prohibits the driver from exposing multisample quality values greater than 7. For this reason, instead of specifying the number of coverage samples with the quality value, we simply set quality to a predetermined value which will be interpreted as a specific CSAA mode by the driver. So there. It looks like it's just as possible under DX9 but you can't give your devs the warm fuzzy glow of going "set supersampling to 11!"
Very true. It's for reasons like this that medical equipment is so expensive... any system with potential to be involved in a fatal accident is a huge liability for its creator. Which is stupid... it's like suing a taxi driver's parents if he crashes. Double standards FTL!:(
You're obviously not the problem, then. Off-road 4x4s are great when they're off the road for any appreciable amount of time. The problem is people who are born, live, work, play, and die in the suburbs, who still persist in buying the mobile lounge rooms that are SUVs, for any one of the following stupid reasons:
1) I need the space, my ass is wider than a standard car.
2) I need it to take the dog to the beach. (Put a blanket on the back seat, ffs)
3) They're safer because they're bigger. (To you, maybe.)
4) You can see over traffic. (No you can't because the moron in front of you is driving one too.)
Also, the above-described people have spawned the abomination known as the 'soft-roader'. I have no problem with real 4WDs, but some of these things don't even have locking diffs. Yuck.
Seriosuly, if anything it says "I have a week argument, so look at how much longer I've been going this!" Stating how much longer you've been playing is definitely a week argument. Seriosuly!
Then again I remember back when I played on a US WoW server, the range of 'foreign' accents actually added to the game.:) The tauren druid with the yee-haw texan accent, the stoner orc, the weedy sounding mages arguing over mana efficiency and crit versus spell power... It depends on whether you expect the player to play the role of the character, or the character to play the role of the player.
You're missing a vital point. Regardless of overall efficiency, an electric vehicle can be powered by any form of electricity generation. Nuclear, using an Integral Fast Reactor, is 'as good as it gets' in terms of power generation. Carbon neutral, no long-term radioactive waste output, inherently safe, and very efficient in terms of uranium usage (99.5% energy recovered as compared with ~1% in a standard nuclear reactor). In terms of CO2 output, switching to electric vehicles has no immediate negative impact and long term very positive impact.
According to this, the most efficient well-to-wheels technology is a hybrid drive burning a petrol/methane mix. However, hybrids still require fossil fuels which ultimately lead to carbon emissions, and they are orders of magnitude more complex to build than battery electrics, which are currently expensive only due to companies trying to recoup R&D investment costs, rather than inherent manufacturing expense.
But they are all played by guys. The real surprise is when it turns out to be an actual female. It used to be that way, but these days with the influx of newbies, most players don't seem to realise that most female characters are played by males. It's amazing how many players start hitting on my gf's female blood elf character within 2 minutes of meeting her (she's always helping lowbies find the flight master or set their hearthstones or whatever) - surely her typing can't be that feminine? >.> I've always played male characters as my 'serious' alts but this one time I rolled a female night elf priest (have you seen male night elves? bletch!) and ended up with a male nelf druid following me around 'helping' me. ><
On the main topic, though - why does it matter if it's an 11-year-old kid, a 42-year-old mother of three, a college drop out, or an IT worker on the other end of that mage? If he or she is courteous, skilled, and knowledgeable then s/he deserves respect regardless of any other factor. That's where online games, and indeed the internet in general, are great - they let you meet the person without prejudice based on appearance, age, gender, or any other factor (except literacy, I guess...:) Why should it matter if that person is currently living in the body of an 11yo boy or a grey-whiskered tabletop RPGer?
???. Do repeatable daily quests that give 10-20g per handin, and take probably 10-15 minutes to complete when done in a group.
Profit!:)
To be honest, though, reselling is the real path to riches. We had a guy on my old server that had around 50k gold when he quit the game, and I don't know if he had a character over about 29.
Source? There's nothing in the ToS about grinding, or even grinding and sending your money to someone else. Of course, if you're botting that's against the ToS and you'll get banninated.
Except thats NOT what is happening. The proper analogy is your friend spending $50 on a really nice bowling ball while you use the one from the bowling alley. That'd be a proper analogy if the really nice bowling ball was radio controlled and twice the size of regular bowling balls. They're getting equipment that makes the game substantially easier for them.
A better analogy would be that you and a friend are running in a marathon. Your friend gets bored and takes a taxi to the finish line.
If you do that, what's the point? You're replacing value=effort with value=luck. The level 56 will be pissed that he got beaten by someone who just got lucky, and the level 20 will crow about how awesome he is for about 10 minutes before realising that it means jack, then both will quit.:/
Sadly, there's a large group of people who would love to do exactly that. They'll bring a knife to a fist fight or a gun to a knife fight if they can get away with it. These are the type of people that twink characters for lowbie battlegrounds in WoW, for instance. They can't compete gear- or skill-wise with people at the level cap, so they sink hundreds of gold into setting up a low level character with the absolute best gear and enchants, and basically buy their way into having three times the health and damage of a normally equipped player of that level - and then deliberately avoid leveling up so that they can guarantee they'll have the strongest character on the playing field.
Some people just like to feel big, and if they can't do it by making themselves bigger they'll do it by surrounding themselves with smaller people.
While not an MS fanboy, I'd attribute any pro-MS bias I may have to being surrounded by rabid Apple zealots in high school. If they'd simply shut up and let me use the macs in the computer lab, I may well have started to like them. As it is, after constantly being told for five years that a PowerPC running MacOS 8 was far better in every way than the 'crappy windows' computer I had at home, I came to prefer Windows purely because Apple fanboys won't fuck off and leave me alone.
Let's face it grinding, grouping, and raiding are BORING. So when you can spend money to skip Time there is nothing left in the game. Or think of it like this... Contemporary MMORPGs are questing, grouping and raiding. (Grinding is optional with the number of quests available these days.) If you find questing, grouping and raiding boring, you are playing the wrong game. Go play a game that you enjoy. It sounds like you might find Guild Wars fun?
You can't drop the concept of time from an MMO because time is the only universal currency. The only reason you'll be proud of your warrior's Mortal Strike critting for 2000 instead of 700 is that it took you three months of leveling and gearing up and a lucky weapon drop (or a lot of effort leveling crafting) to attain. The time invested in a character is, itself, what makes that character mean something to you. If your character doesn't mean anything to you then there's no point playing.
Or, just possibly, it's complex enough that it can't be explained briefly in terms that simple, especially since 'anyone' is much less bright than you think. Something simple like a linked list is pretty easy to explain with boxes and arrows on paper, but I know one or two people who, while being otherwise excellent people, just don't have the mental capacity to understand the abstraction.
Something slightly more complex, like the neurophysical basis of psychological addiction, may very well be explainable in simple terms, but I'd bet such an explanation would take a long time to give. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the actual mechanisms involved were complex enough that many, perhaps most, people would not be mentally equipped to actually understand them. It ends up being much simpler for a specialist in the subject to just say "trust me" than for them to try to explain it.
Of course, if they're going to ask something like that, it'd be nice of them to give a link to some literature on the subject, so that we peons may attempt to educate ourselves.:P
People all around the world sit down every night and watch 2-4 hrs of TV, and no one bats an eye. Yet if they spend that time playing a game instead, now they're addicts? I had this very argument with my mum when I moved 'back home' after coming back from travelling. I'm in the middle of an Arathi Basin game and if I don't drop it (most pre-gen-X people seem to have some physical barrier in their head to comprehending that you often can't 'just pause' multiplayer games) and talk to her for 15 minutes whenever she wants without even looking at the screen, I'm addicted to 'that game' and she's 'worried about me! *worried look*'.
But I try to ask how her day was while she's watching McCleod's Daughters and it's talk-to-the-hand. >.<
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Nope, he's referring to Deus ex machina, whereby magical code elves will finish writing Starcraft: Ghost while the Blizzard developers sleep.
Right. $5bn will buy you a 20 megaton warhead and associated ICBM. The company/country with the most cash gets the most warheads, and ends up the least vaporised. This is an example of how the Real World sucks, and games are better. :P
Aside from the contention-with-farmers issue, the problem is that gear does have a large effect on games such as WoW. Take one kid who plays after school, he's just hit lvl 70 and in instance blues and greens, farming for his flying mount. Now the rich bastid down the road (who's also just hit 70) gets 20k gold for christmas - instantly he's kitted out with an epic flying mount and a full set of epic crafted gear. When poor kid runs into rich kid he'll get creamed unless rich kid really really sucks. This is not fun for poor kid.
On the flip side, there's then me, the young software developer, who gets to play 2-3 hours a night but spends most of that time leveling alts because that's what his girlfriend wants to do. He gets maybe 3 hours a week to play on his mage, who's not going to hit 70 for another month or two, and when he does he'll have crappy gear because he can rarely commit to the block of time required to run a dungeon. He's gonna run into poor kid and rich kid, and even poor kid will have better gear because instead of doing homework, poor kid is raiding. In this case software dev will beat rich kid because rich kid can't play his class, but will still have trouble competing with poor kid. How is it bad for software dev to upgrade his gear by spending some of his copious hard-earned RL cash in lieu of spending his limited playing time?
Just for clarification, I've never bought gold and never will, because it'd be cheating and I hate cheaters.
On the contrary, Marxism only makes people more likely to stand up and take action when they're not getting any of it. Give Marxists their Marxism and they won't bother protesting! Which points to Marxism's addictiveness. Which makes it analogous to an opiate. Ergo, you flail. :P
Prolly is a good name for a prarrot.
Oh for crying out loud. A black and white, side on, nude photo. It looks more arthouse than anything else, and it's certainly not porn.
Please for the love of god tell me you weren't in the Deeprun Tram at the time.
Very true. It's for reasons like this that medical equipment is so expensive... any system with potential to be involved in a fatal accident is a huge liability for its creator. Which is stupid... it's like suing a taxi driver's parents if he crashes. Double standards FTL! :(
You're obviously not the problem, then. Off-road 4x4s are great when they're off the road for any appreciable amount of time. The problem is people who are born, live, work, play, and die in the suburbs, who still persist in buying the mobile lounge rooms that are SUVs, for any one of the following stupid reasons:
1) I need the space, my ass is wider than a standard car.
2) I need it to take the dog to the beach. (Put a blanket on the back seat, ffs)
3) They're safer because they're bigger. (To you, maybe.)
4) You can see over traffic. (No you can't because the moron in front of you is driving one too.)
Also, the above-described people have spawned the abomination known as the 'soft-roader'. I have no problem with real 4WDs, but some of these things don't even have locking diffs. Yuck.
Then again I remember back when I played on a US WoW server, the range of 'foreign' accents actually added to the game. :) The tauren druid with the yee-haw texan accent, the stoner orc, the weedy sounding mages arguing over mana efficiency and crit versus spell power... It depends on whether you expect the player to play the role of the character, or the character to play the role of the player.
It's about time they released an MMO with some decent PVP.
You're missing a vital point. Regardless of overall efficiency, an electric vehicle can be powered by any form of electricity generation. Nuclear, using an Integral Fast Reactor, is 'as good as it gets' in terms of power generation. Carbon neutral, no long-term radioactive waste output, inherently safe, and very efficient in terms of uranium usage (99.5% energy recovered as compared with ~1% in a standard nuclear reactor). In terms of CO2 output, switching to electric vehicles has no immediate negative impact and long term very positive impact.
According to this, the most efficient well-to-wheels technology is a hybrid drive burning a petrol/methane mix. However, hybrids still require fossil fuels which ultimately lead to carbon emissions, and they are orders of magnitude more complex to build than battery electrics, which are currently expensive only due to companies trying to recoup R&D investment costs, rather than inherent manufacturing expense.
On the main topic, though - why does it matter if it's an 11-year-old kid, a 42-year-old mother of three, a college drop out, or an IT worker on the other end of that mage? If he or she is courteous, skilled, and knowledgeable then s/he deserves respect regardless of any other factor. That's where online games, and indeed the internet in general, are great - they let you meet the person without prejudice based on appearance, age, gender, or any other factor (except literacy, I guess...
???. Do repeatable daily quests that give 10-20g per handin, and take probably 10-15 minutes to complete when done in a group. :)
Profit!
To be honest, though, reselling is the real path to riches. We had a guy on my old server that had around 50k gold when he quit the game, and I don't know if he had a character over about 29.
Best. Post. EVER.
;)
God knows many WoW players need a RL peen leveling service, xp is hard to come by, although when you do the grind is fun.
Source? There's nothing in the ToS about grinding, or even grinding and sending your money to someone else. Of course, if you're botting that's against the ToS and you'll get banninated.
A better analogy would be that you and a friend are running in a marathon. Your friend gets bored and takes a taxi to the finish line.
If you do that, what's the point? You're replacing value=effort with value=luck. The level 56 will be pissed that he got beaten by someone who just got lucky, and the level 20 will crow about how awesome he is for about 10 minutes before realising that it means jack, then both will quit. :/
Sadly, there's a large group of people who would love to do exactly that. They'll bring a knife to a fist fight or a gun to a knife fight if they can get away with it. These are the type of people that twink characters for lowbie battlegrounds in WoW, for instance. They can't compete gear- or skill-wise with people at the level cap, so they sink hundreds of gold into setting up a low level character with the absolute best gear and enchants, and basically buy their way into having three times the health and damage of a normally equipped player of that level - and then deliberately avoid leveling up so that they can guarantee they'll have the strongest character on the playing field.
Some people just like to feel big, and if they can't do it by making themselves bigger they'll do it by surrounding themselves with smaller people.
While not an MS fanboy, I'd attribute any pro-MS bias I may have to being surrounded by rabid Apple zealots in high school. If they'd simply shut up and let me use the macs in the computer lab, I may well have started to like them. As it is, after constantly being told for five years that a PowerPC running MacOS 8 was far better in every way than the 'crappy windows' computer I had at home, I came to prefer Windows purely because Apple fanboys won't fuck off and leave me alone.
You can't drop the concept of time from an MMO because time is the only universal currency. The only reason you'll be proud of your warrior's Mortal Strike critting for 2000 instead of 700 is that it took you three months of leveling and gearing up and a lucky weapon drop (or a lot of effort leveling crafting) to attain. The time invested in a character is, itself, what makes that character mean something to you. If your character doesn't mean anything to you then there's no point playing.
Or, just possibly, it's complex enough that it can't be explained briefly in terms that simple, especially since 'anyone' is much less bright than you think. Something simple like a linked list is pretty easy to explain with boxes and arrows on paper, but I know one or two people who, while being otherwise excellent people, just don't have the mental capacity to understand the abstraction.
:P
Something slightly more complex, like the neurophysical basis of psychological addiction, may very well be explainable in simple terms, but I'd bet such an explanation would take a long time to give. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the actual mechanisms involved were complex enough that many, perhaps most, people would not be mentally equipped to actually understand them. It ends up being much simpler for a specialist in the subject to just say "trust me" than for them to try to explain it.
Of course, if they're going to ask something like that, it'd be nice of them to give a link to some literature on the subject, so that we peons may attempt to educate ourselves.
But I try to ask how her day was while she's watching McCleod's Daughters and it's talk-to-the-hand. >.<
Sex is like oxygen... it's only important when you aren't getting any.