I don't know about the inherent pauses *adding* fun, I think that strongly depends on the IRL charisma score of the player who's holding things up.;) Last time I played I was a lvl 2 sorcerer (new char for new group) who had one spell, and that was 'light'. I had inordinate amounts of fun casting 'light' on things like 'the tavern wench's left breast'.:D
Why would you need tier 8 items to continue to run heroics? The heroic gear is the entry into raids (that raid gear into higher level raids, etc).
And this is exactly the crux of the issue. There is NO 5-man PvE progression past heroics in WotLK. At least in Burning Crusade you could grind heroics for badges and then when you did have the odd chance to raid, you were geared enough to participate.
The other problem is, of course, that there's nothing particularly scary in heroics once you get some heroic gear. Instead of progression path going:
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Raids -> Harder Raids
they need to build it so that it goes:
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Harder Heroics -> Even Harder Heroics
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Raids -> Harder Raids
I'm guessing by your entitled-raider attitude that you don't have a wife with Raid Radar(TM) and a magic ability to interrupt any raid you join? I'm happy to put in say 4 hours play time per piece of gear (a lot more than it takes if I score a run with my raiding guild), I just can't do those 4 hours in one big block any more without being dragged afk for 45 minutes in the middle. Believe me, it's quicker to get gear from raids than by grinding badges, and the gear from raids is better itemised.
Don't worry, you'll still have your full tier set to prance around capital cities in. Badge gear just gives non-raiders the ability to get almost-equal gear. If you can't tell the difference between someone in full badge gear and someone in raid gear then... well, I don't know what to say. It's people like you that I make sure I always equip one end-of-raid piece for, even if it's not quite as good as the badge gear, just to prove that I've cleared it.
I find it always mind boggling that people will pay incredible sums for their mices, but will get $9,99 keyboards with the argument that "it's just a keyboard, you know".
The term is 'meese'.;) As for $10 keyboards, my current keyboard was free. I got it off a 'dead keyboard' pile and it's awesome, can't beat the motion of the older keyboards.
More importantly, who were these people? Were they predominantly doing data entry, coding, document copy writing? Were they touch typists or did they hunt-and-peck? That's a pretty small sample of people to base a fundamental interface design change on.
That's actually exactly the book I was thinking of. Kudos to you sir!:)
I'm pretty sure several stories about Merlin use this trope too, along with 'amazing the savages with your control over the sun god' type tales, though I can't bring any specific examples to mind. Luckily for me, tvtropes.org can.
You've never played D&D, at least with the sort of crowd I've played with. You usually spend half an hour per round of combat because no-one can focus, and it just turns into a chore.
Because I like zombies and trolls and giant bats and magic swords and stuff more than I like apples and bananas and pennies.
Obviously I'm not the AC, but I actually really enjoyed the old badge system. I'd prefer a proper progression system for 5-mans but if Blizzard is unable to grasp the concept of "raids and small group content should be parallel, not sequential, progression paths", at least let us buy high end gear with large amounts of tokens dropped off heroic dungeon bosses. I liked the fact that, even though I can't raid and can only run a heroic or two a night after the missus was finally asleep, I could still work on my gear and progress my character. Again, it'd be awfully nice if they'd actually add tiered 5-mans to match the tiered raids, but failing that at least give me SOMETHING to do that doesn't involve a one-week lockout timer and 9+ other people. As it is, I have two characters that literally don't have any upgrades available without me either committing to raiding or getting a substantially better PvP ranking, and they're pretty much abandoned because they have no further character progression available. They've 'won' and that means game over.
Actually he's right. It's the same reason that they make it annoyingly time consuming to get good gear at top end - because time is money. Time is the only real currency in an MMO. If anything is quick or easy to get, then everyone can get it and it becomes essentially worthless regardless of its in-game quality. If players can instantly travel then the world shrinks and the sense of scale is lost.
I'm not saying that Blizzard didn't overdo it a bit with early WoW. Over the years they've dramatically reduced the required travel time, mounts are now purchasable much earlier, once you get into the expansion content you can teleport to any major city, flight paths have been tweaked to reduce flying time. Instances have 'summoning stones' which allow you to summon party members if you don't have a warlock to summon. You can queue for battlegrounds from anywhere in the world, and be teleported back to where you left off once your battleground is over.
Isn't that the old modern-guy-goes-back-to-medieval-times-and-pretends-to-be-a-wizard-by-remembering-eclipse-dates trope? I've seen it used so many different places, I'd be surprised if Columbus *didn't* use that trick.:P
I think what he's saying is that they should change the law so that what these people _did_ do was a crime. They would then be criminals... ah, what a flexible thing the law is.
For instance, you would have a law against 'being a dangerous pervert'. How do you tell whether someone is a 'dangerous' pervert, or not? For that matter, what is a 'pervert'? Sodomy was against the law fairly recently (and I think still is in some states?).
Pretty sure they can, as long as they don't distribute it. Why would you care? What about if someone draws a sketch of you doing something disgusting, for their own amusement, and never distributes it? Do you have any right to stop them?
TFA doesn't say whether he uploaded the images or not, but either way - the only arguments against child porn are, as I see it, (1) Think of the Children, which doesn't apply here because no actual children were harmed, and (2) That's Yucky, which IMO is not a valid argument.
Dammit. You can plan for failure, but you can't plan for success.:P
I actually hoped it was the Liberal party of Australia that'd come out with it, although our Liberal party is (so I'm told) kinda more like the Conservatives in Canada. We're just in the process of (hopefully) having Conroy's Great Firewall of Fail thrown out as completely impracticable, so it'd be great to have a local party that recognizes that messing with the internets is bad.
You missed an important point: 'top' students. As you will well know, since you're very experienced, top software engineers are worth far more than average ones. Experience does help, but will in no way close the gap. In my experience, a best-in-class 3rd year student will be a better developer than a middle-of-the-road one with 10 years experience.
OK, maybe I should have put a disclaimer in there: "Unless, of course, the project is being kneecapped by constantly changing basic requirements, inter-departmental politics, and other external influences."
Regardless, a payroll system should not cost tens of millions of dollars to implement. If it does, you're doing it wrong.
I guarantee you that I could design and implement a database backend (and the rest of the system) for them for a fuckload less than $28 million, let alone $40mil all up.
Fire everyone who was in any way responsible for the old cock-up of an attempt and hire a few top students for $100k/year for a year when they graduate. That'll get the job done on time.
Not directly, but that cancels out because each pair of wheels is carrying half of the car's weight (roughly). Half the force, twice the distance, net result nada.
I think it's interesting that the tax breaks are for games with a British cultural setting, rather than simply being for British game development companies. I'm sure that a predominantly British development team will by its very nature develop games with a bit of a British bent to them.
The difference there is that the speed bumps don't sink under your car. The only lost energy from driving over a speed bump is the energy absorbed by your shockies as they damp the motion of your suspension. It's still a good point, though - the amount of energy they 'steal' per car is so trivial that no-one will notice. If you were driving on a road made of the things, it'd probably have a measurable effect on fuel usage, though.
OK, let's put the cars bumper to bumper at 15km/h (which is about usual for a car park) and assume they're 5m long and have a gap of 3m between them. Any given plate would then have a car moving over it every two seconds, or 1800 times an hour. They're going to have to have 132 plates to generate that amount of power per hour, and realistically they'll need at least twice that many.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the inherent pauses *adding* fun, I think that strongly depends on the IRL charisma score of the player who's holding things up. ;) Last time I played I was a lvl 2 sorcerer (new char for new group) who had one spell, and that was 'light'. I had inordinate amounts of fun casting 'light' on things like 'the tavern wench's left breast'. :D
Why would you need tier 8 items to continue to run heroics? The heroic gear is the entry into raids (that raid gear into higher level raids, etc).
And this is exactly the crux of the issue. There is NO 5-man PvE progression past heroics in WotLK. At least in Burning Crusade you could grind heroics for badges and then when you did have the odd chance to raid, you were geared enough to participate.
The other problem is, of course, that there's nothing particularly scary in heroics once you get some heroic gear. Instead of progression path going:
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Raids -> Harder Raids
they need to build it so that it goes:
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Harder Heroics -> Even Harder Heroics
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Raids -> Harder Raids
I'm guessing by your entitled-raider attitude that you don't have a wife with Raid Radar(TM) and a magic ability to interrupt any raid you join? I'm happy to put in say 4 hours play time per piece of gear (a lot more than it takes if I score a run with my raiding guild), I just can't do those 4 hours in one big block any more without being dragged afk for 45 minutes in the middle. Believe me, it's quicker to get gear from raids than by grinding badges, and the gear from raids is better itemised.
Don't worry, you'll still have your full tier set to prance around capital cities in. Badge gear just gives non-raiders the ability to get almost-equal gear. If you can't tell the difference between someone in full badge gear and someone in raid gear then... well, I don't know what to say. It's people like you that I make sure I always equip one end-of-raid piece for, even if it's not quite as good as the badge gear, just to prove that I've cleared it.
I find it always mind boggling that people will pay incredible sums for their mices, but will get $9,99 keyboards with the argument that "it's just a keyboard, you know".
The term is 'meese'. ;) As for $10 keyboards, my current keyboard was free. I got it off a 'dead keyboard' pile and it's awesome, can't beat the motion of the older keyboards.
More importantly, who were these people? Were they predominantly doing data entry, coding, document copy writing? Were they touch typists or did they hunt-and-peck? That's a pretty small sample of people to base a fundamental interface design change on.
That's actually exactly the book I was thinking of. Kudos to you sir! :)
I'm pretty sure several stories about Merlin use this trope too, along with 'amazing the savages with your control over the sun god' type tales, though I can't bring any specific examples to mind. Luckily for me, tvtropes.org can.
You've never played D&D, at least with the sort of crowd I've played with. You usually spend half an hour per round of combat because no-one can focus, and it just turns into a chore.
Because I like zombies and trolls and giant bats and magic swords and stuff more than I like apples and bananas and pennies.
Obviously I'm not the AC, but I actually really enjoyed the old badge system. I'd prefer a proper progression system for 5-mans but if Blizzard is unable to grasp the concept of "raids and small group content should be parallel, not sequential, progression paths", at least let us buy high end gear with large amounts of tokens dropped off heroic dungeon bosses. I liked the fact that, even though I can't raid and can only run a heroic or two a night after the missus was finally asleep, I could still work on my gear and progress my character. Again, it'd be awfully nice if they'd actually add tiered 5-mans to match the tiered raids, but failing that at least give me SOMETHING to do that doesn't involve a one-week lockout timer and 9+ other people. As it is, I have two characters that literally don't have any upgrades available without me either committing to raiding or getting a substantially better PvP ranking, and they're pretty much abandoned because they have no further character progression available. They've 'won' and that means game over.
Actually he's right. It's the same reason that they make it annoyingly time consuming to get good gear at top end - because time is money. Time is the only real currency in an MMO. If anything is quick or easy to get, then everyone can get it and it becomes essentially worthless regardless of its in-game quality. If players can instantly travel then the world shrinks and the sense of scale is lost.
I'm not saying that Blizzard didn't overdo it a bit with early WoW. Over the years they've dramatically reduced the required travel time, mounts are now purchasable much earlier, once you get into the expansion content you can teleport to any major city, flight paths have been tweaked to reduce flying time. Instances have 'summoning stones' which allow you to summon party members if you don't have a warlock to summon. You can queue for battlegrounds from anywhere in the world, and be teleported back to where you left off once your battleground is over.
That, or about hydrogen tasting like chicken.
I do play World of Warcraft and I get laid regularly. It plays havoc with my raid schedule, let me tell you. :P
Actually I'd claim that, now that the originals have come to light, those formally responsible have become formerly responsible. ;)
...stealing from other peoples history and legend to create their own.
I dunno what you're Tolkein about.
Isn't that the old modern-guy-goes-back-to-medieval-times-and-pretends-to-be-a-wizard-by-remembering-eclipse-dates trope? I've seen it used so many different places, I'd be surprised if Columbus *didn't* use that trick. :P
ProudFEET!
I think what he's saying is that they should change the law so that what these people _did_ do was a crime. They would then be criminals... ah, what a flexible thing the law is.
For instance, you would have a law against 'being a dangerous pervert'. How do you tell whether someone is a 'dangerous' pervert, or not? For that matter, what is a 'pervert'? Sodomy was against the law fairly recently (and I think still is in some states?).
Pretty sure they can, as long as they don't distribute it. Why would you care? What about if someone draws a sketch of you doing something disgusting, for their own amusement, and never distributes it? Do you have any right to stop them?
TFA doesn't say whether he uploaded the images or not, but either way - the only arguments against child porn are, as I see it, (1) Think of the Children, which doesn't apply here because no actual children were harmed, and (2) That's Yucky, which IMO is not a valid argument.
Dammit. You can plan for failure, but you can't plan for success. :P
I actually hoped it was the Liberal party of Australia that'd come out with it, although our Liberal party is (so I'm told) kinda more like the Conservatives in Canada. We're just in the process of (hopefully) having Conroy's Great Firewall of Fail thrown out as completely impracticable, so it'd be great to have a local party that recognizes that messing with the internets is bad.
...well, it was worth a try. :P
You missed an important point: 'top' students. As you will well know, since you're very experienced, top software engineers are worth far more than average ones. Experience does help, but will in no way close the gap. In my experience, a best-in-class 3rd year student will be a better developer than a middle-of-the-road one with 10 years experience.
OK, maybe I should have put a disclaimer in there: "Unless, of course, the project is being kneecapped by constantly changing basic requirements, inter-departmental politics, and other external influences."
Regardless, a payroll system should not cost tens of millions of dollars to implement. If it does, you're doing it wrong.
I guarantee you that I could design and implement a database backend (and the rest of the system) for them for a fuckload less than $28 million, let alone $40mil all up.
Fire everyone who was in any way responsible for the old cock-up of an attempt and hire a few top students for $100k/year for a year when they graduate. That'll get the job done on time.
Not directly, but that cancels out because each pair of wheels is carrying half of the car's weight (roughly). Half the force, twice the distance, net result nada.
I think it's interesting that the tax breaks are for games with a British cultural setting, rather than simply being for British game development companies. I'm sure that a predominantly British development team will by its very nature develop games with a bit of a British bent to them.
The difference there is that the speed bumps don't sink under your car. The only lost energy from driving over a speed bump is the energy absorbed by your shockies as they damp the motion of your suspension. It's still a good point, though - the amount of energy they 'steal' per car is so trivial that no-one will notice. If you were driving on a road made of the things, it'd probably have a measurable effect on fuel usage, though.
OK, let's put the cars bumper to bumper at 15km/h (which is about usual for a car park) and assume they're 5m long and have a gap of 3m between them. Any given plate would then have a car moving over it every two seconds, or 1800 times an hour. They're going to have to have 132 plates to generate that amount of power per hour, and realistically they'll need at least twice that many.