Too bad the moderators on e2 are obsessed with cancelling nodes.
I've on occasion filled in at least a minimal description of some orphaned nodes, only to have my writeup completely removed for insufficient information with the comment "You can do better", resulting in the node becoming completely empty again. How the hell is *NO* information better than at least some minimal description?
Also I've had many nodes on various subjects removed becuase they were too obscure / colloquial.
I don't own one, but IIRC, the PS2 doesn't even take memory stick. There's tons of money to be made on a custom format for their console than for all the other products they make...
They buy up companies and run them into the ground. They leech off of sure money-makers and run them into the ground. They hire bright young programmers and run them into the ground, knowing there are more waiting in the queue.
Finally, I will never forgive them for destroying Maxis and Westwood Studios.
I'm sick of the incessant sports games; they bought up and buried so many of the creative companies who would actually innovate and pose real competition, instead of rubber-stamping the same thing every year with a new roster and only minor actual gaming innovation.
Blizzard just can't get the servers to stablize. In fact the situation is getting WORSE not better.
It has been getting worse up until yesterday when they finally capped all the problematic servers to 'Medium' load.
Sure, waiting in a login queue for 45 minutes to get in sucks, but wasting 4 hours when the game is lagged to hell or crashing every hour with a 30 minute rollback sucks a whole lot more.
I've never seen the game run so smoothly as it did last night. The only downside is if you crash out you have to wait in the queue again; but I think reducing the load has also eliminated crashes for most people.
I know this is only a temporary fix, but it seems like the best move to make until they can get the whole thing back on it's feet again. At least the 'estimated time' on the queue is fairly accurate, so you can find other things to do to fill that time while waiting.
Morrowind and Arcanum are two nice standalone RPGs. There may be more recent ones, but those are the last ones I played before making the MMO transition a couple years ago.
I'd like to see MMORPGs offer one or more premium shards (at 2x or 3x the subscription cost) which run on faster hardware, do not allow minors (as best as can be enforced), and have faster customer support response.
I like having a lot of people around, I just want an option to dilute the idiot concentration.
This started happening to me about two months ago as well. It hasn't stopped, and I can't find any fool-proof way of handling all the thousands of "Undeliverable", "User does not exist" and vacation email responses that come back.
I sent a few messages to administrative contacts, but nothing has happened -- and I don't expect anything to, since they are located in China.
Their website is such a con too, with friendly warm graphics to make them look professional. They mention secure and reliable transaction, but they don't even use SSL, or provide any contact information except a form-to-mail (which is probably what their order form does as well).
Anyone know of a tool to poison a form-to-mail gateway with enough well constructed bogus data they will have to wade through tons of crap to get their legitimiate orders? =)
Blizzard's WoW: Fun +10, Communication -5
on
World of Warcraft News
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· Score: 4, Insightful
WoW is a great, and addictive game. It has tied together a lot of great ideas that have developed over the years into a casual fantasy game that likes to make as much fun of itself as it provides fun to the player.
I think at the core, a lot of the annoyances of other MMORPGs have been removed or significantly reduced, while at the same time not making it too easy.
The holiday additions are nice, but I expect they will be short lived considering the effort they required to be implemented. I just hope they didn't spend too much effort on content that will probably only be fitting for a week or so, while so many other problems need addressing.
- Some basic powers (ie Arcane Missiles) have unpredictable bugs which can get you easily killed when they simply don't do anything. There are several others which don't do what the description says (Blink should free you from rooting).
- The Auction House and Mail systems have frequent lockups, even at slow times, such as early in the morning. They are often unpredictable too -- for example, you could conduct a series of actions which take only a second or two each, and then suddenly one takes a minute or two, during which everything queues up and happens at once.
- Blizzard's first response to a bot problem (with fishing) has resulted in a wild overreaction which not only took the fun out of playing the profession properly, but now it even *encourages* botting, since that's the only way you could get any use out of it anymore.
- Maintenance windows are inconsistent. Some mornings there's maintenance, some there aren't. And when there's not, it seems like everything is running very slowly.
- Yesterday's major downtime had *VERY* little feedback as to what was going on and when it was expected to be resolved. The nearly complete lack of communication on a downtime that significant is something which needs to be reviewed.
- In fact, there doesn't seem to be much PR presence on the forums, or anywhere for most issues. I don't get the feeling there is anyone listening to our concerns. I get the feeling there is a huge tall stone wall between the players and Blizzard, and occasionally they toss down a message written in blue ink, which has very little value content-wise to assure us of specific resolutions that are being made to the most pressing problems.
Don't get me wrong though. These are minor issues which I have faith will be ironed out with time, and there is still tones of fun to be had. It is still a *very* new game which has a long road ahead of it.
Obviously being this new, I expect there to be some problems. However, coming from a technical background, it can be frustrating when many of these problems seem very simple in nature to fix; and the poor communication makes it all the worse when there's noone to "absorb" our frustrations.
I quit reading at "It's time for anyone running a Windows PC to switch to Linux." printed in bold. This was enough to tell me the article would probably contain very little insightful content.
Couldn't they fix this problem by ensuring the "lag-o-port" is within a circle defined by the maximum distance possible given the running speed they are capable of? If they exceed this circle (by more than a small epsilon), rubber-band them back to the circle at next update.
1. Show goes until about 9:01 (with the occasional commercial "bug" in the corner) 2. End Credits (squished illegibly to the side to make room for some commercials) 3. New show begins (along with a commercial bug for another show, already advertised during the last show's credits) 4. Short beginning credits (theme song) 5. Cut to regular commercials 6. Show resumes (with yet another commercial bug in the bottom right corner)
I am curious, by what standard do you consider Second Life to have flopped? It still has a strong positive growth; moreso even than it did around this time a year ago.
I will admit it will probably never have the numbers like WoW or EQ, but it is not technically an MMORPG that will attract such large numbers. SL is a creative social environment without any real pre-set goals, levels, experience points, etc., and that kinda thing does not appeal to most gamers who like to run around and kill stuff to gain levels.
I have found SL to be a very effective online anchor community. I still play other MMORPGs and single and multiplayer games, but when I'm done with those at the end of the day or when done with them altogether, I go back into SL to catch up with friends, create things, and/or explore what's new; and there's always something new every day because the residents keep making new content.
I'll agree that TSO and B&W were flops. TSO is steadily declining (many defecting to SL). B&W was a revolutionary game design, but failed on the content department.
I think most MMORPGs lose subscriber interest eventually because they aren't capable of being dynamic enough or produce enough content to stay ahead of their subscriber's pace of exploration. This is why I think models like SL will endure; becuase they give the residents the tools and incentive to keep it interesting and dynamic.
You can allmost be certain that the Spammer will "retalliate"
And how.
I have an old email account which recieves a lot of spam (about 300 a day). It was already pretty hosed, so one day I thought I'd try an experiment to see what would happen if I sent a simple unsubscribe request to every spam I recieved that day (if they provided the option to unsubscribe). I was curious to see if the spam volume would increase or decrease from this activity.
Less than a week after doing this, a spammer started using my email address as the "From:" field in his spam. This has never happened to me before in the 8+ years I've had this email address, so it's almost certianly a result of my simple unsubscription request.
So now I'm getting thousands of bounced "Undeliverable" messages, out-of-the-office "vacation" messages, and even the occasional unsubscribe request to *me* or an angry message to tell me to stop spamming.
I sent an abuse email to the ISP that is hosting the website that all his spams point to (some "Canadian" Pharmacy), and haven't heard anything.
It seems to be hosted in China, so it's probably completely hopeless to get anything done...
These people are bastards and need to rot in hell.
One thing that keeps bugging me: 405nm is violet, not blue.
But I guess there's no fun marketoid way to abuse the word "violet", espeically without it sounding like "violent"
Even if they ignored that and called it Violet-Ray or something outright, they'd probably worry about losing sales to people who think it'll give them skin cancer.
I just want to know how long it'll be before mass production of these laser diodes make violet laser pointers easy to find and afford. =)
really, until we get a matrix style jack in the back of our head where movies can be pumped directly into our brain, there will always be some point at which the data is not encrypted.
Even then, what's to prevent you from tapping the electrical impulses that are output and recording them for later playback? =)
If this monitoring software goes in at the irc server network level, then denying the government access to a particular channel is moot.
IRC encryption is far from ubiquitous (though I'm sure it is being done somewhere), and the expectation that a casually-oriented channel require encryption so that they can participate in discussion without fear of government monitoring is ridiculous.
It's a sad day when laws are passed to perpetuate outdated business models.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." --Robert Heinlein
It seems quite simple what's causing the stuttering, at least on my PC.
Remember the deja-vu scene in The Matrix? That's what it is.
No, I'm not joking. Whenever I hit an invisible trigger that causes the world to change (ie spawn bad guys, spawn helicopter), that's when it stutters for me. The majority of the stutters I get are immediately followed by some action happening.
It actually makes it easy for me to tell when I'm about to be ambushed. Unfortunately, this takes away the thrill of the surprise for me.
It doesn't even have to be "dirty". Read up on the Energy Amplifier.
Excerpt:
The energy amplifier uses a cyclotron accelerator to produce a beam of protons. These hit a Thorium target and produce neutrons by the process called spallation. Thorium nuclei absorb neutrons, forming fissile uranium-233. This isotope of uranium is not found in nature and is not the isotope used in nuclear weapons. Moderated neutrons stimulate U-233 fission, releasing energy.
If a beam energy of 7 Megawatts (7 mA protons produced by a 1 GeV cyclotron) is used, the energy amplifier would produce 280 MW of thermal energy, corresponding to about 100 MW of electrical power after steam production and turbine generation. As the power needed to operate the accelerator is about 20 MW, there would thus be a net production of over 80 MW. Larger designs could achieve higher energy gains in the range 30 to 60.
Pros: - Subcritical, cannot meltdown - Uses Thorium fuel (abundant, easier to process than Uranium) - 500 year halflife (instead of 10,000+) - Can break down existing nuclear waste - Does not produce by-products usable for weapons
Cons: - Requires a cyclotron to be built ($$$)
Why we don't invest in something like this seems quite irrational, although typical.
If you're lazy like me, you can even set up an automatically recurring donation, such as $25/month.
Indivudals no longer have a voice in this society. You have to make your voice heard by putting your efforts into a group which supports your cause. EFF is the cause for us.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad the moderators on e2 are obsessed with cancelling nodes.
I've on occasion filled in at least a minimal description of some orphaned nodes, only to have my writeup completely removed for insufficient information with the comment "You can do better", resulting in the node becoming completely empty again. How the hell is *NO* information better than at least some minimal description?
Also I've had many nodes on various subjects removed becuase they were too obscure / colloquial.
So much for "everything".
I wonder if Casey's Carry Out Pizza knows that they are the first hit for a "local" nationwide search for "pizza" =)
Maybe they're not regular 0-or-1 bits?
Ever heard of qubits?
I don't own one, but IIRC, the PS2 doesn't even take memory stick. There's tons of money to be made on a custom format for their console than for all the other products they make...
EA is the worst thing to happen to gaming.
They buy up companies and run them into the ground.
They leech off of sure money-makers and run them into the ground.
They hire bright young programmers and run them into the ground, knowing there are more waiting in the queue.
Finally, I will never forgive them for destroying Maxis and Westwood Studios.
I'm sick of the incessant sports games; they bought up and buried so many of the creative companies who would actually innovate and pose real competition, instead of rubber-stamping the same thing every year with a new roster and only minor actual gaming innovation.
That's a very interesting phenemenon. Thanks for the links!
It's neat to know we haven't quite figured everything out yet, even about simple things like this =)
Blizzard just can't get the servers to stablize. In fact the situation is getting WORSE not better.
It has been getting worse up until yesterday when they finally capped all the problematic servers to 'Medium' load.
Sure, waiting in a login queue for 45 minutes to get in sucks, but wasting 4 hours when the game is lagged to hell or crashing every hour with a 30 minute rollback sucks a whole lot more.
I've never seen the game run so smoothly as it did last night. The only downside is if you crash out you have to wait in the queue again; but I think reducing the load has also eliminated crashes for most people.
I know this is only a temporary fix, but it seems like the best move to make until they can get the whole thing back on it's feet again. At least the 'estimated time' on the queue is fairly accurate, so you can find other things to do to fill that time while waiting.
Morrowind and Arcanum are two nice standalone RPGs. There may be more recent ones, but those are the last ones I played before making the MMO transition a couple years ago.
I'd like to see MMORPGs offer one or more premium shards (at 2x or 3x the subscription cost) which run on faster hardware, do not allow minors (as best as can be enforced), and have faster customer support response.
I like having a lot of people around, I just want an option to dilute the idiot concentration.
blurriness is free antialiasing =)
Does Adobe get royalties for postscript printers?
If so, that might be another reason they are not ubiquitous.
This started happening to me about two months ago as well. It hasn't stopped, and I can't find any fool-proof way of handling all the thousands of "Undeliverable", "User does not exist" and vacation email responses that come back.
I sent a few messages to administrative contacts, but nothing has happened -- and I don't expect anything to, since they are located in China.
Their website is such a con too, with friendly warm graphics to make them look professional. They mention secure and reliable transaction, but they don't even use SSL, or provide any contact information except a form-to-mail (which is probably what their order form does as well).
Anyone know of a tool to poison a form-to-mail gateway with enough well constructed bogus data they will have to wade through tons of crap to get their legitimiate orders? =)
WoW is a great, and addictive game. It has tied together a lot of great ideas that have developed over the years into a casual fantasy game that likes to make as much fun of itself as it provides fun to the player.
I think at the core, a lot of the annoyances of other MMORPGs have been removed or significantly reduced, while at the same time not making it too easy.
The holiday additions are nice, but I expect they will be short lived considering the effort they required to be implemented. I just hope they didn't spend too much effort on content that will probably only be fitting for a week or so, while so many other problems need addressing.
- Some basic powers (ie Arcane Missiles) have unpredictable bugs which can get you easily killed when they simply don't do anything. There are several others which don't do what the description says (Blink should free you from rooting).
- The Auction House and Mail systems have frequent lockups, even at slow times, such as early in the morning. They are often unpredictable too -- for example, you could conduct a series of actions which take only a second or two each, and then suddenly one takes a minute or two, during which everything queues up and happens at once.
- Blizzard's first response to a bot problem (with fishing) has resulted in a wild overreaction which not only took the fun out of playing the profession properly, but now it even *encourages* botting, since that's the only way you could get any use out of it anymore.
- Maintenance windows are inconsistent. Some mornings there's maintenance, some there aren't. And when there's not, it seems like everything is running very slowly.
- Yesterday's major downtime had *VERY* little feedback as to what was going on and when it was expected to be resolved. The nearly complete lack of communication on a downtime that significant is something which needs to be reviewed.
- In fact, there doesn't seem to be much PR presence on the forums, or anywhere for most issues. I don't get the feeling there is anyone listening to our concerns. I get the feeling there is a huge tall stone wall between the players and Blizzard, and occasionally they toss down a message written in blue ink, which has very little value content-wise to assure us of specific resolutions that are being made to the most pressing problems.
Don't get me wrong though. These are minor issues which I have faith will be ironed out with time, and there is still tones of fun to be had. It is still a *very* new game which has a long road ahead of it.
Obviously being this new, I expect there to be some problems. However, coming from a technical background, it can be frustrating when many of these problems seem very simple in nature to fix; and the poor communication makes it all the worse when there's noone to "absorb" our frustrations.
I quit reading at "It's time for anyone running a Windows PC to switch to Linux." printed in bold. This was enough to tell me the article would probably contain very little insightful content.
Couldn't they fix this problem by ensuring the "lag-o-port" is within a circle defined by the maximum distance possible given the running speed they are capable of? If they exceed this circle (by more than a small epsilon), rubber-band them back to the circle at next update.
There's nothing worse than missing the last couple of minutes of a show.
- war
- genocide
- disease
- natural disasters
- famine
- neocon leadership
Now it's:
1. Show goes until about 9:01 (with the occasional commercial "bug" in the corner)
2. End Credits (squished illegibly to the side to make room for some commercials)
3. New show begins (along with a commercial bug for another show, already advertised during the last show's credits)
4. Short beginning credits (theme song)
5. Cut to regular commercials
6. Show resumes (with yet another commercial bug in the bottom right corner)
I am curious, by what standard do you consider Second Life to have flopped? It still has a strong positive growth; moreso even than it did around this time a year ago.
I will admit it will probably never have the numbers like WoW or EQ, but it is not technically an MMORPG that will attract such large numbers. SL is a creative social environment without any real pre-set goals, levels, experience points, etc., and that kinda thing does not appeal to most gamers who like to run around and kill stuff to gain levels.
I have found SL to be a very effective online anchor community. I still play other MMORPGs and single and multiplayer games, but when I'm done with those at the end of the day or when done with them altogether, I go back into SL to catch up with friends, create things, and/or explore what's new; and there's always something new every day because the residents keep making new content.
I'll agree that TSO and B&W were flops. TSO is steadily declining (many defecting to SL). B&W was a revolutionary game design, but failed on the content department.
I think most MMORPGs lose subscriber interest eventually because they aren't capable of being dynamic enough or produce enough content to stay ahead of their subscriber's pace of exploration. This is why I think models like SL will endure; becuase they give the residents the tools and incentive to keep it interesting and dynamic.
You can allmost be certain that the Spammer will "retalliate"
And how.
I have an old email account which recieves a lot of spam (about 300 a day). It was already pretty hosed, so one day I thought I'd try an experiment to see what would happen if I sent a simple unsubscribe request to every spam I recieved that day (if they provided the option to unsubscribe). I was curious to see if the spam volume would increase or decrease from this activity.
Less than a week after doing this, a spammer started using my email address as the "From:" field in his spam. This has never happened to me before in the 8+ years I've had this email address, so it's almost certianly a result of my simple unsubscription request.
So now I'm getting thousands of bounced "Undeliverable" messages, out-of-the-office "vacation" messages, and even the occasional unsubscribe request to *me* or an angry message to tell me to stop spamming.
I sent an abuse email to the ISP that is hosting the website that all his spams point to (some "Canadian" Pharmacy), and haven't heard anything.
It seems to be hosted in China, so it's probably completely hopeless to get anything done...
These people are bastards and need to rot in hell.
One thing that keeps bugging me: 405nm is violet, not blue.
But I guess there's no fun marketoid way to abuse the word "violet", espeically without it sounding like "violent"
Even if they ignored that and called it Violet-Ray or something outright, they'd probably worry about losing sales to people who think it'll give them skin cancer.
I just want to know how long it'll be before mass production of these laser diodes make violet laser pointers easy to find and afford. =)
really, until we get a matrix style jack in the back of our head where movies can be pumped directly into our brain, there will always be some point at which the data is not encrypted.
Even then, what's to prevent you from tapping the electrical impulses that are output and recording them for later playback? =)
If this monitoring software goes in at the irc server network level, then denying the government access to a particular channel is moot.
IRC encryption is far from ubiquitous (though I'm sure it is being done somewhere), and the expectation that a casually-oriented channel require encryption so that they can participate in discussion without fear of government monitoring is ridiculous.
It seems quite simple what's causing the stuttering, at least on my PC.
Remember the deja-vu scene in The Matrix? That's what it is.
No, I'm not joking. Whenever I hit an invisible trigger that causes the world to change (ie spawn bad guys, spawn helicopter), that's when it stutters for me. The majority of the stutters I get are immediately followed by some action happening.
It actually makes it easy for me to tell when I'm about to be ambushed. Unfortunately, this takes away the thrill of the surprise for me.
Excerpt:
Pros:
- Subcritical, cannot meltdown
- Uses Thorium fuel (abundant, easier to process than Uranium)
- 500 year halflife (instead of 10,000+)
- Can break down existing nuclear waste
- Does not produce by-products usable for weapons
Cons:
- Requires a cyclotron to be built ($$$)
Why we don't invest in something like this seems quite irrational, although typical.
If you haven't done so already, join the EFF.
If you're lazy like me, you can even set up an automatically recurring donation, such as $25/month.
Indivudals no longer have a voice in this society. You have to make your voice heard by putting your efforts into a group which supports your cause. EFF is the cause for us.