Another thing that really annoys me is the uniform stat distribution for so many items. Like all 2h weapons from heroics being 186dps, for instance. It takes the gear from an individual piece with its own characteristics to a purely cosmetic item plus a stat token with distribution based on gear level. It's like all the gear in the game is made with the same geometrically scaled set of cookie cutters.
A one system fits all solution just results in either serious PvP imbalance, or seriously nerfed PvE.
Depends. I believe that if you build a system around PvP, then build a PvE world around that system once it's relatively balanced, then it's possible to have both. Of course some abilities won't work on bosses - for instance bosses are generally immune to stuns, incapacitate and slowing effects and roots, otherwise a bunch of rogues could stunlock anything to death given time, or a bunch of mages could kite it round in a circle until it dies.
Ur so rong. Sure, if you think World of Roguecraft or World of Deathknightcraft would actually be as fun as the sorta-balanced game we have now, then go for it. Pong is -------------> thataway. Balance is about making many different options equally strong, or as close to as possible, so that people have a choice how to play instead of being pidgeonholed into a single configuration.
More than that, balance is meaningless without talking about the skill level of the players involved. For instance, towards the end of vanilla WoW, warriors had access to very strong gear that made them hit incredibly hard. Mages gained less from gear, and so warriors started getting an edge, but they still had huge trouble actually getting close enough to hit mages, so unless the warrior was skilled, the mage would win, making mages overpowered vs. warriors at low skill levels. At higher skill levels, warriors were seen as overpowered vs. mages because if they got in range, they could kill them in two hits. But a very skilled mage could kill a warrior without taking a single hit, no matter what gear they were wearing or how well the warrior played, due to game mechanics. So at the top skill level, a warrior could not beat a mage 1v1.
Partly - and partly because, in trying to balance Shamans vs. Paladins, they found that they were essentially giving both classes the same tools. By giving both factions both classes, they were able to keep them distinct without giving one faction an advantage.
Remember, your fears of them giving everyone everything in aid of balance isn't new. People complained with the inclusion of Lurkers and Dark Templar in Brood War. "Waaah, now Zerg have AoE like Protoss! Terrans can heal like Zerg!" I still agree that it's blurring the lines a little more than is really healthy. My shaman's Riptide ability functions almost identically to my paladin's talented Holy Shock. My Paladins' increased-crit-damage talent (when he's Ret spec) now rolls a deep-wounds style melee DoT rather than simply boosting damage. The gear consolidation with gear for all spec/class combos down to "spell dps / spell healing / melee dps / tanking" for each armor type. It added a dimension, for me, that say a warlock wanted spellpower and stamina whereas a mage wanted spell crit and stamina. There was a reason for every item to go to a particular class first.
I use Vista at work and Windows 7 at home. Vista's OK, Windows 7 is a lot smoother and nicer though. W7 also boots up a helluva lot faster than Vista does - I never use the 'suspend' mode on W7 because it boots fast enough, but on Vista I suspend and only reboot on weekends because it takes 5+ minutes to finish booting.
As an ex-XP user who's been running Ubuntu for the last two years, I can agree with this. I've likewise been using the Windows 7 RC and it's pretty darn good. Everything works, I've had a couple of blue screens (trying to run Lego Star Wars in XP SP3 compatibility mode) but otherwise everything's been stable and my (fairly standard) hardware all works perfectly. The new start bar interface is nicer than XP / Vista's in my opinion and little touches like live previews in Alt+Tab windows switcher with no slowdown just make it feel more polished.
The only thing that's stopping me from saying "100%, will buy when released" is that they're trying to charge a retarded amount for it and I can get near-enough functionality for free in Linux.
Hmm, this is true. Although (now I'm just playing devil's advocate for the hell of it:P ) if you live in a cold climate such that some heating is needed for most of the year, that extra energy (which will dissipate as heat) won't be wasted, it'll just be a little auxiliary warmth.:)
+1 to worn connectors. My old phone (an Ericsson K700i) retired not due to any inherent problem with the phone itself (it'd survived being soaked with water multiple times at Songkran in Thailand, and being thrown (along with myself, but I'm waterproof) in a dam) but because the retarded little push-contact charging plug no longer connected.
I swore never to buy another phone with the same system, then I saw the W880i (damn you, Sony, for making such a slim sexy phone!) and now two years later I'm having the same issue.
If you're worried about the environment, consider that the wall wart is generally almost the same size as the phone itself these days, so by using wireless charging, you're halving the amount of material that needs to be manufactured. That, and we're talking 5 Watts. Even if it's only 50% efficient, that's only 5 Watts of wasted electricity. There are plenty of devices in your home that waste a lot more than that.
Basically yeah. I'd compare it also to the effort put into designing a secondary cell, charger, battery management system, blah blah blah. All compared to just putting a bigass lithium primary cell with a longer expected operational life than the rest put together.
The possibility of setting up 'free/cheap cell phone access points' so people can bypass att, verizon, etc.?
Wouldn't one then be kind of worried about impostor access points? You could set up one of these and do whatever you wished with the data going through it, complete with MITM attacks on any encryption going on. It'd be fairly hard to detect if done well, even for people who know the GSM system pretty well. For the rest of us who don't know anything beyond signal strength and the tower's broadcast name, it'd be well-nigh undetectable.
Disagree with this, too. Because Java is such a restrictive language, your solution space is reduced. There are patterns and program designs that are infeasible within the Java syntax. I'd argue that because it's harder to create a good design in Java, it's easier to create a bad design.
I'd approach this by saying that it's easier to draw a picture on blank paper than lined paper, if you are an artist. Then again, it's easier to write your budget out on lined paper.
Maybe I'm not 'advanced' enough but I must confess, I've never found a situation where multiple inheritance seemed like the best solution. Occasionally it looks like *a* solution but as you say, in those cases composition is generally more clearcut.
The point is that dynamic typing (to the extent of dynamic member addition being the only way to do it) makes things like this a lot harder to catch. Do it in C++ and the compiler will give you a polite "um, wtf?". Do it in Python and you have a good chance of missing one, leading to obscure and hard-to-trace bugs.
It can be a slippery slope if you treat these kinds of operations as "fixing people", but I think if you treat it instead as enabling them to do something new (to them, at least), you don't run the risk of "fixing" people who don't feel that they are broken.
Dude, if something about me doesn't work, it's broken. If they make it so it does work, it's then fixed. That's what these words mean. "But I like it like that" doesn't change anything.
Now, if you were talking about "fixing people" who have non-functionally-impairing differences (skin/hair/eye colour, accent, etc.) then that would be different.
You can resign yourself to nothing you do being original, because there's nothing new under the sun. Once you do that (and it's a painful realisation) you can start working on seeing that even so, you can still do things that are *good*.
So... you're saying that the word 'toon' now means something different, rather than what it's traditionally meant, and that we should use your version? Aight.
The 2007 CG remake of Beowulf is certainly not a cartoon. The Merriam-Webster definition is so generic as to be useless; "photographs of inanimate objects (as puppets) and that simulates movement by slight progressive changes in each frame" includes any frame-based animation of ANY sort.
I don't know how many times I have to explain it, but your character on World of Warcraft is not a cartoon.
Yeah, 'toon' always annoyed me too. It's part of the constant belittling of everything that many players engage in to hide their lack of self-esteem. Same with the 'X takes no skill', 'everythings easy' etc. It's the same mentality that makes the fat kid pay himself out for being fat. If he gets in first then somehow it hurts just a little less. It's also a snide way to insult - if you're bad and have no skill and yet you managed to beat someone else, they must be REALLY bad. It's sad to spend 60 hours a week doing something and then don't even have the self-confidence to say "actually, I did that pretty damn well" when they achieve something.
Maybe they don't value anything they have in *their* life, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't value anything in mine.
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Nor tanking cloth, or spell-dps plate, either. :P
Another thing that really annoys me is the uniform stat distribution for so many items. Like all 2h weapons from heroics being 186dps, for instance. It takes the gear from an individual piece with its own characteristics to a purely cosmetic item plus a stat token with distribution based on gear level. It's like all the gear in the game is made with the same geometrically scaled set of cookie cutters.
A one system fits all solution just results in either serious PvP imbalance, or seriously nerfed PvE.
Depends. I believe that if you build a system around PvP, then build a PvE world around that system once it's relatively balanced, then it's possible to have both. Of course some abilities won't work on bosses - for instance bosses are generally immune to stuns, incapacitate and slowing effects and roots, otherwise a bunch of rogues could stunlock anything to death given time, or a bunch of mages could kite it round in a circle until it dies.
Ur so rong. Sure, if you think World of Roguecraft or World of Deathknightcraft would actually be as fun as the sorta-balanced game we have now, then go for it. Pong is -------------> thataway. Balance is about making many different options equally strong, or as close to as possible, so that people have a choice how to play instead of being pidgeonholed into a single configuration.
More than that, balance is meaningless without talking about the skill level of the players involved. For instance, towards the end of vanilla WoW, warriors had access to very strong gear that made them hit incredibly hard. Mages gained less from gear, and so warriors started getting an edge, but they still had huge trouble actually getting close enough to hit mages, so unless the warrior was skilled, the mage would win, making mages overpowered vs. warriors at low skill levels. At higher skill levels, warriors were seen as overpowered vs. mages because if they got in range, they could kill them in two hits. But a very skilled mage could kill a warrior without taking a single hit, no matter what gear they were wearing or how well the warrior played, due to game mechanics. So at the top skill level, a warrior could not beat a mage 1v1.
Partly - and partly because, in trying to balance Shamans vs. Paladins, they found that they were essentially giving both classes the same tools. By giving both factions both classes, they were able to keep them distinct without giving one faction an advantage.
Remember, your fears of them giving everyone everything in aid of balance isn't new. People complained with the inclusion of Lurkers and Dark Templar in Brood War. "Waaah, now Zerg have AoE like Protoss! Terrans can heal like Zerg!" I still agree that it's blurring the lines a little more than is really healthy. My shaman's Riptide ability functions almost identically to my paladin's talented Holy Shock. My Paladins' increased-crit-damage talent (when he's Ret spec) now rolls a deep-wounds style melee DoT rather than simply boosting damage. The gear consolidation with gear for all spec/class combos down to "spell dps / spell healing / melee dps / tanking" for each armor type. It added a dimension, for me, that say a warlock wanted spellpower and stamina whereas a mage wanted spell crit and stamina. There was a reason for every item to go to a particular class first.
I use Vista at work and Windows 7 at home. Vista's OK, Windows 7 is a lot smoother and nicer though. W7 also boots up a helluva lot faster than Vista does - I never use the 'suspend' mode on W7 because it boots fast enough, but on Vista I suspend and only reboot on weekends because it takes 5+ minutes to finish booting.
As an ex-XP user who's been running Ubuntu for the last two years, I can agree with this. I've likewise been using the Windows 7 RC and it's pretty darn good. Everything works, I've had a couple of blue screens (trying to run Lego Star Wars in XP SP3 compatibility mode) but otherwise everything's been stable and my (fairly standard) hardware all works perfectly. The new start bar interface is nicer than XP / Vista's in my opinion and little touches like live previews in Alt+Tab windows switcher with no slowdown just make it feel more polished.
The only thing that's stopping me from saying "100%, will buy when released" is that they're trying to charge a retarded amount for it and I can get near-enough functionality for free in Linux.
Hmm, this is true. Although (now I'm just playing devil's advocate for the hell of it :P ) if you live in a cold climate such that some heating is needed for most of the year, that extra energy (which will dissipate as heat) won't be wasted, it'll just be a little auxiliary warmth. :)
+1 to worn connectors. My old phone (an Ericsson K700i) retired not due to any inherent problem with the phone itself (it'd survived being soaked with water multiple times at Songkran in Thailand, and being thrown (along with myself, but I'm waterproof) in a dam) but because the retarded little push-contact charging plug no longer connected.
I swore never to buy another phone with the same system, then I saw the W880i (damn you, Sony, for making such a slim sexy phone!) and now two years later I'm having the same issue.
If you're worried about the environment, consider that the wall wart is generally almost the same size as the phone itself these days, so by using wireless charging, you're halving the amount of material that needs to be manufactured. That, and we're talking 5 Watts. Even if it's only 50% efficient, that's only 5 Watts of wasted electricity. There are plenty of devices in your home that waste a lot more than that.
Chemicals, man, they're everywhere!
Great. Now whenever I see 'qi' I'll mentally pronounce it as 'aieee! *pound*'
Basically yeah. I'd compare it also to the effort put into designing a secondary cell, charger, battery management system, blah blah blah. All compared to just putting a bigass lithium primary cell with a longer expected operational life than the rest put together.
The possibility of setting up 'free/cheap cell phone access points' so people can bypass att, verizon, etc.?
Wouldn't one then be kind of worried about impostor access points? You could set up one of these and do whatever you wished with the data going through it, complete with MITM attacks on any encryption going on. It'd be fairly hard to detect if done well, even for people who know the GSM system pretty well. For the rest of us who don't know anything beyond signal strength and the tower's broadcast name, it'd be well-nigh undetectable.
Disagree with this, too. Because Java is such a restrictive language, your solution space is reduced. There are patterns and program designs that are infeasible within the Java syntax. I'd argue that because it's harder to create a good design in Java, it's easier to create a bad design.
I'd approach this by saying that it's easier to draw a picture on blank paper than lined paper, if you are an artist. Then again, it's easier to write your budget out on lined paper.
I think it's probably easiest just to say "class C++ : public ProceduralLanguage, ObjectOrientedLanguage { ... };"
Maybe I'm not 'advanced' enough but I must confess, I've never found a situation where multiple inheritance seemed like the best solution. Occasionally it looks like *a* solution but as you say, in those cases composition is generally more clearcut.
The point is that dynamic typing (to the extent of dynamic member addition being the only way to do it) makes things like this a lot harder to catch. Do it in C++ and the compiler will give you a polite "um, wtf?". Do it in Python and you have a good chance of missing one, leading to obscure and hard-to-trace bugs.
I see someone rolled a natural 20 on their smug check.
It can be a slippery slope if you treat these kinds of operations as "fixing people", but I think if you treat it instead as enabling them to do something new (to them, at least), you don't run the risk of "fixing" people who don't feel that they are broken.
Dude, if something about me doesn't work, it's broken. If they make it so it does work, it's then fixed. That's what these words mean. "But I like it like that" doesn't change anything.
Now, if you were talking about "fixing people" who have non-functionally-impairing differences (skin/hair/eye colour, accent, etc.) then that would be different.
OH SNAP
Wow, I bet you post in every "WAR ROBOTS: Remote Controlled Cars With Guns" thread about Skynet and Cyberdyne.
Ah, who am I kidding? The first thing I thought when I read the heading on TFS was "damn, I need to watch that movie again".
You can resign yourself to nothing you do being original, because there's nothing new under the sun. Once you do that (and it's a painful realisation) you can start working on seeing that even so, you can still do things that are *good*.
So... you're saying that the word 'toon' now means something different, rather than what it's traditionally meant, and that we should use your version? Aight.
The 2007 CG remake of Beowulf is certainly not a cartoon. The Merriam-Webster definition is so generic as to be useless; "photographs of inanimate objects (as puppets) and that simulates movement by slight progressive changes in each frame" includes any frame-based animation of ANY sort.
I don't know how many times I have to explain it, but your character on World of Warcraft is not a cartoon.
Yeah, 'toon' always annoyed me too. It's part of the constant belittling of everything that many players engage in to hide their lack of self-esteem. Same with the 'X takes no skill', 'everythings easy' etc. It's the same mentality that makes the fat kid pay himself out for being fat. If he gets in first then somehow it hurts just a little less. It's also a snide way to insult - if you're bad and have no skill and yet you managed to beat someone else, they must be REALLY bad. It's sad to spend 60 hours a week doing something and then don't even have the self-confidence to say "actually, I did that pretty damn well" when they achieve something.
Maybe they don't value anything they have in *their* life, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't value anything in mine.