Blizzard own copyright over things like Quest Text, art design, textures, logos, map designs, and sound/music independently of the game. If they rebuilt their servers without using any of those, the case would be in question, but it's not.
Yes, but all of that comes with the game CLIENT, it is not being sent by the server. Modern WoW servers are able to do some game content streaming, but Vanilla certainly did not. When you create a Vanilla server, the server is simply sending instructions for "display text for quest 14311. Display character with model 15451." That made it possible to (though against the ToS) replace the in-game character models with something else. The actual text and the models and the sound are not sent over the network; the game was originally built (and for the most part, still is) for the client to have basically all the IP, with communication between client and server being low-bandwidth. So the IP infringement here is on the installation of the vanilla client, and I suppose Blizzard could make some sort of DMCA claim on the access controls of the client.
Dear Sir/Madam, I forced the lock on your back door this morning to find this house abandoned.
This immediately falls apart in that there is no Blizzard server/property involved. Maybe if I could build a perfect duplicate of the house in my back yard and then forced ITS back door open, we'd have a more apt analogy.
You do realize that nearly all end game content: Dire Maul, Maraudon, Stratholme, Naxxramas, AQ 20/40, ZG, Blackwing Lair, Battlegrounds, et all were all patched into vanilla, right?
The only end game content in Vanilla WoW at release was MC40 and Ony.
We're also used to a game now where you can rush through the early levels, but when I started early in Vanilla, I think it took me about four months to reach level 60. The leveling system was a bit more of a grind, but I thought the zones and the quests were a little more interesting back then then they were after the Cataclysm revamp. Except for the Horde. The Barrens were boring. Back then, the game catered more to the Alliance; far more work was done on their earlier zones.
Lol, what crime? Breach of contract? Copyright infringement is hardly a "crime". Blizzard can sue for it in civil court, but no one is going to jail unless they also commit fraud or perjury or something.
They could probably make some sort of DMCA type of argument about access controls being broken, but I'm not sure about that since actual Blizzard servers aren't being used.
Preferring the way the community was back then is a respectable opinion. There's just two problems with it. First, no, the community never was that way, you just have your nostalgia goggles on extra tight
That's BS. Maybe that's the way it was on your server, but on mine the community was fairly tight. The people you saw on city chat were often people you knew, many of the big/progressed guilds knew each other, and it was that way because often you had to band together like that to get five-man groups. Once they added cross battlegroup random matchmaking partying, the in-server community faded away because game mechanics no longer forced a local server community. You could party elsewhere, more easily. That's good if you're looking to run dungeons easily, but it had the side effect of killing off server communities.
Basically, you're confirming that EQ was hardcore.
Was it "hardcore?" Or was it just annoying? Yes, there are a lot of things that you can do to make the game "harder," or more accurately, more tedious without being more fun. There are a ton of things in Warcraft vanilla that are long gone as well (like paying a shit-ton of gold to change specs, manually summoning mana-water two drinks at a time and handing out stacks of 20 of them to dozens of raiders) and the game is better when you're actually playing the game, not going through some unpleasant grunt work like the points I mentioned, or your points of 2,3,4,8,9,13... No one's actually mentioned crafting in EQ yet either, though actually I kindof liked that system. I know lots of people have complained about crafting in WoW Legion (it's harder, and the rewards don't really seem commensurate to the effort needed compared to other sections of the game), but I like a harder, rewarding crafting system.
Though I kindof like point 7 as well. I know that Blizzard has community MVP who are non-employees, and I never knew if they got any perks or what actually someone might get out of that besides a pat on the back.
There is no class balance, and death was penalized by having to spend a good 5 minutes or more walking back as a ghost to your body (in harder content areas).
There was class balance, but the devil is in the details. Like.. which patch from Vanilla will they settle on? The classes changed radically throughout alpha (you could claim that the classes were not finished on release), and my guess is that they'll settle on the Naxxramas release patch.
Now, I said classes were fairly balanced, but it's worth noting that not all specs for a class were equally viable. IE, in end-game PvE, if you were a priest, druid, shaman, or paladin, you were a healer**. Ret/shadow/feral/etc were not viable until Burning Crusade. So if you really liked playing a DPS druid, yes that's true, you were definitely not viable. And don't bother being a fire mage in Molten Core, etcetc.
** Last note about balance, there was one exception where the balance was waaaaaay out of whack -- paladins were much, much better than shaman were. If you wanted real end-game progression, you were Alliance, not Horde. Shaman had nothing, NOTHING on Paladin blessings. That was crazy, and I don't blame Blizzard for making all classes usable by both factions later on.
I'm not defending anyone, I'm just saying MS is, if anything, worse than Google when it comes to "innovation".
Microsoft certainly is not flashy, they don't have events where people get hyped about their products ala Steve Jobs's Apple. They don't take the world by storm, it's more of a sludge that ends up covering everything anyway.
It doesn't really matter if Google has a monopoly. This is a frequent mixup that people make in these sorts of arguments: having a monopoly is not necessarily bad. It does not mean a company needs to be broken up. You have to show that companies are using their monopoly position to force out competitors.
I don't see a way for Google to make people stop using Bing, or Duck Duck Go. There's nothing stopping anyone from releasing a competing mail client or map application either.
If anyone is even more fucked up about innovation, it's MS. How many times and how many products have they launched to great fanfare, only for it to die on the vine a few years later?
I'm not sure if you want to try that argument as a way of defending Google. They are pretty much THE poster child company for releasing a product, tinkering with it for a year or two, and then dumping it unceremoniously. Google Search, Maps, Mail, Chrome are pretty much the only things that they've been able to stick with (and maybe their ads, though those aren't consumer products). For each of those there are five Google Waves, Google Buzz, Google Plus, Google Chat, Picasa, Helpouts, Moderator, their search appliances, Google Glass (dead... but may be resurrected in the future), etc.
Plastic drinking straws are a meanace. What do you suggest we do about them? If we leave it up to individuals then the planet just fills up with shit.
I would use paper straws if they still made them, they were better anyway than these flimsy plastic ones.
They still make them, but they're kindof pricey, and only good for 10-15 minutes before they're too waterlogged to work anymore. Best way to enjoy a good Pina Colada though.
So you admit that this leak is a blatant attempt at PR for this program?
It is not an uncommon tactic, inside and outside the government, to 'leak' a proposal to gauge how the public will react to it. It gives you cover later on if the reaction was bad to say that it was just a theoretical draft that wouldn't have seen the light of day because it was a bad idea.
You don't need to sign that contract to be bound to it. You are bound as a Citizen of the United States at birth. You CAN opt out of it, but that means declining citizenship. You want to be a citizen of the United States? It comes with rights but it also comes with responsibilities.
Yup. Those coal mining jobs he was elected to bring back will be coming back any day now. Any day now.
Many of them have come back, but not so that we can burn the coal ourselves. That's what Trump's line of the US being an energy exporter came from. This horrible gunk that we're selling to developing countries instead.
Congratulations on your investment, Ivan! How are the capital gains tax is there in Russia?
He doesn't need to be Russian, and accusing every person who says something dickish as being a Russian troll kindof.. cheapens the Russian troll problem like the boy who cried wolf. US history is full of people who got ahead by investing in markets they thought would turn a profit, even if the market was morally questionable.
Lots of people are making sensorship comments, but with our knowing what the inappropriate content was it's hard to make any real determination about why Apple removed the app.
Apple and Telegram have been fighting publicly for quite some time about what to do about "adult channels." Not just one user sending another user adult content, but IRC-style chat channels.
This is why we need to use the open source Diaspora platform for all of our online communication needs. According to Wikipedia, Diaspora is "a distributed social networking service".
Is it possible to talk about naughty things with Diaspora? Because that's why Telegram was banned from the App Store -- users were able to set up adult-oriented chat channels. Open source, closed source, doesn't matter -- if you want on iOS devices, and everyone does, apparently, you have to concede to Apple's strong-arm tactics.
Skype is not super-popular in the home market as it once was. I used to have tons of friends on Skype, now the only people on it are a couple of die-hard holdouts. Everyone else, one by one, said they were sick of the Skype client being a resource hog, how finicky and buggy it was, and how "skype sucked" for the last several years. They pretty much all went to either Discord or Telegram.
I never noticed too much; I always ran a skype plugin for Pidgin. I have no use for video calls, just messaging my friends, so all I ever needed was the instant messenger part of it. I added them with Discord and Telegram plugins for Pidgin, so I still chat with the same interface. But I noticed this trend over and over again. "ICQ sucks now, I'm switching to Yahoo Chat." "Yahoo blows, they fucked up their client, so I'm switching to AIM." "AIM is fucking up my computer, I'm moving to Skype, join me there!" "Skype blows since MS bought them. It slows down my computer. You can find me on Discord now." It sucks that everyone wants to use the official client from the chat networks. The client always sucks, does things that you don't want it to do (like refuse to support logging, spying on you, serving you ads, slows down your PC), and they just jump from network to network every 1-2 years. The networks should be open (like AIM and IRC were) to third-party clients, and should be multi-network as well so you don't have to fun five different clients to keep in touch with everyone.
I did the world of contracting for awhile, and my experience was... well, not dissimilar (when a company started to go tits-up, the contractors were the first to go), but I experienced the negative side of contracting a lot. I went to a number of companies with dysfunctional bureaucracies and worse, employees who were abusive (and not just to contractors). The good news, if I was placed at that company, I knew I wasn't stuck there. If things were really unmanageable, it wasn't hard for me to leave. The bad news -- if I found a place where I really enjoyed the work, and I really enjoyed my co-workers, well, I'd have to leave as well. Contractors are expensive, or my contracting company was. Once I got a taste of that, I couldn't go back to the shitty companies again.
Eventually I quit the contracting gig and was hired full time by the company I really enjoyed working at, and haven't looked back.
IT IS NOT A MIXED MESSAGE. You just don't understand the system, you are not trained on how the system works, and we really don't care that you don't understand. Just stop pretending your guesses as to how things ought to work are more important than decades of experience and practice.
Oh well, far be it for me to second guess the guy who claims so much incredible experience. I guess it's the perfect system that can't possibly be improved upon, and no one ever fucks up. Good to know.
Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard own copyright over things like Quest Text, art design, textures, logos, map designs, and sound/music independently of the game. If they rebuilt their servers without using any of those, the case would be in question, but it's not.
Yes, but all of that comes with the game CLIENT, it is not being sent by the server. Modern WoW servers are able to do some game content streaming, but Vanilla certainly did not. When you create a Vanilla server, the server is simply sending instructions for "display text for quest 14311. Display character with model 15451." That made it possible to (though against the ToS) replace the in-game character models with something else. The actual text and the models and the sound are not sent over the network; the game was originally built (and for the most part, still is) for the client to have basically all the IP, with communication between client and server being low-bandwidth. So the IP infringement here is on the installation of the vanilla client, and I suppose Blizzard could make some sort of DMCA claim on the access controls of the client.
Dear Sir/Madam, I forced the lock on your back door this morning to find this house abandoned.
This immediately falls apart in that there is no Blizzard server/property involved.
Maybe if I could build a perfect duplicate of the house in my back yard and then forced ITS back door open, we'd have a more apt analogy.
You do realize that nearly all end game content: Dire Maul, Maraudon, Stratholme, Naxxramas, AQ 20/40, ZG, Blackwing Lair, Battlegrounds, et all were all patched into vanilla, right?
The only end game content in Vanilla WoW at release was MC40 and Ony.
We're also used to a game now where you can rush through the early levels, but when I started early in Vanilla, I think it took me about four months to reach level 60. The leveling system was a bit more of a grind, but I thought the zones and the quests were a little more interesting back then then they were after the Cataclysm revamp. Except for the Horde. The Barrens were boring. Back then, the game catered more to the Alliance; far more work was done on their earlier zones.
Lol, what crime? Breach of contract? Copyright infringement is hardly a "crime". Blizzard can sue for it in civil court, but no one is going to jail unless they also commit fraud or perjury or something.
They could probably make some sort of DMCA type of argument about access controls being broken, but I'm not sure about that since actual Blizzard servers aren't being used.
Preferring the way the community was back then is a respectable opinion. There's just two problems with it. First, no, the community never was that way, you just have your nostalgia goggles on extra tight
That's BS. Maybe that's the way it was on your server, but on mine the community was fairly tight. The people you saw on city chat were often people you knew, many of the big/progressed guilds knew each other, and it was that way because often you had to band together like that to get five-man groups. Once they added cross battlegroup random matchmaking partying, the in-server community faded away because game mechanics no longer forced a local server community. You could party elsewhere, more easily. That's good if you're looking to run dungeons easily, but it had the side effect of killing off server communities.
Basically, you're confirming that EQ was hardcore.
Was it "hardcore?" Or was it just annoying? Yes, there are a lot of things that you can do to make the game "harder," or more accurately, more tedious without being more fun. There are a ton of things in Warcraft vanilla that are long gone as well (like paying a shit-ton of gold to change specs, manually summoning mana-water two drinks at a time and handing out stacks of 20 of them to dozens of raiders) and the game is better when you're actually playing the game, not going through some unpleasant grunt work like the points I mentioned, or your points of 2,3,4,8,9,13... No one's actually mentioned crafting in EQ yet either, though actually I kindof liked that system. I know lots of people have complained about crafting in WoW Legion (it's harder, and the rewards don't really seem commensurate to the effort needed compared to other sections of the game), but I like a harder, rewarding crafting system.
Though I kindof like point 7 as well. I know that Blizzard has community MVP who are non-employees, and I never knew if they got any perks or what actually someone might get out of that besides a pat on the back.
There is no class balance, and death was penalized by having to spend a good 5 minutes or more walking back as a ghost to your body (in harder content areas).
There was class balance, but the devil is in the details. Like.. which patch from Vanilla will they settle on? The classes changed radically throughout alpha (you could claim that the classes were not finished on release), and my guess is that they'll settle on the Naxxramas release patch.
Now, I said classes were fairly balanced, but it's worth noting that not all specs for a class were equally viable. IE, in end-game PvE, if you were a priest, druid, shaman, or paladin, you were a healer**. Ret/shadow/feral/etc were not viable until Burning Crusade. So if you really liked playing a DPS druid, yes that's true, you were definitely not viable. And don't bother being a fire mage in Molten Core, etcetc.
** Last note about balance, there was one exception where the balance was waaaaaay out of whack -- paladins were much, much better than shaman were. If you wanted real end-game progression, you were Alliance, not Horde. Shaman had nothing, NOTHING on Paladin blessings. That was crazy, and I don't blame Blizzard for making all classes usable by both factions later on.
I'm not defending anyone, I'm just saying MS is, if anything, worse than Google when it comes to "innovation".
Microsoft certainly is not flashy, they don't have events where people get hyped about their products ala Steve Jobs's Apple. They don't take the world by storm, it's more of a sludge that ends up covering everything anyway.
It doesn't really matter if Google has a monopoly. This is a frequent mixup that people make in these sorts of arguments: having a monopoly is not necessarily bad. It does not mean a company needs to be broken up. You have to show that companies are using their monopoly position to force out competitors.
I don't see a way for Google to make people stop using Bing, or Duck Duck Go. There's nothing stopping anyone from releasing a competing mail client or map application either.
If anyone is even more fucked up about innovation, it's MS. How many times and how many products have they launched to great fanfare, only for it to die on the vine a few years later?
I'm not sure if you want to try that argument as a way of defending Google. They are pretty much THE poster child company for releasing a product, tinkering with it for a year or two, and then dumping it unceremoniously. Google Search, Maps, Mail, Chrome are pretty much the only things that they've been able to stick with (and maybe their ads, though those aren't consumer products). For each of those there are five Google Waves, Google Buzz, Google Plus, Google Chat, Picasa, Helpouts, Moderator, their search appliances, Google Glass (dead... but may be resurrected in the future), etc.
Plastic drinking straws are a meanace. What do you suggest we do about them? If we leave it up to individuals then the planet just fills up with shit.
I would use paper straws if they still made them, they were better anyway than these flimsy plastic ones.
They still make them, but they're kindof pricey, and only good for 10-15 minutes before they're too waterlogged to work anymore.
Best way to enjoy a good Pina Colada though.
Do you think Pence is less impeachable?
Certainly. He's also possibly MORE of an asshole than Trump, but we haven't seen him get his hands dirty with impeachable offenses.
So you admit that this leak is a blatant attempt at PR for this program?
It is not an uncommon tactic, inside and outside the government, to 'leak' a proposal to gauge how the public will react to it. It gives you cover later on if the reaction was bad to say that it was just a theoretical draft that wouldn't have seen the light of day because it was a bad idea.
That's working out real well for North Korea.
It has. No one has dared to invade or bomb them yet.
You really believe that shit, broham? We don't have two parties in America. We have one party, the Financialist Party, with two faces.
The natural statement that comes from taking one issue and elevating it so that it's far more important than every other issue combined.
You don't need to sign that contract to be bound to it. You are bound as a Citizen of the United States at birth. You CAN opt out of it, but that means declining citizenship. You want to be a citizen of the United States? It comes with rights but it also comes with responsibilities.
Yup. Those coal mining jobs he was elected to bring back will be coming back any day now. Any day now.
Many of them have come back, but not so that we can burn the coal ourselves. That's what Trump's line of the US being an energy exporter came from. This horrible gunk that we're selling to developing countries instead.
Congratulations on your investment, Ivan! How are the capital gains tax is there in Russia?
He doesn't need to be Russian, and accusing every person who says something dickish as being a Russian troll kindof.. cheapens the Russian troll problem like the boy who cried wolf. US history is full of people who got ahead by investing in markets they thought would turn a profit, even if the market was morally questionable.
Of course you have to jailbreak it, which comes with a whole huge swarm of other problems. Good luck with that.
Lots of people are making sensorship comments, but with our knowing what the inappropriate content was it's hard to make any real determination about why Apple removed the app.
Apple and Telegram have been fighting publicly for quite some time about what to do about "adult channels." Not just one user sending another user adult content, but IRC-style chat channels.
This is why we need to use the open source Diaspora platform for all of our online communication needs. According to Wikipedia, Diaspora is "a distributed social networking service".
Is it possible to talk about naughty things with Diaspora? Because that's why Telegram was banned from the App Store -- users were able to set up adult-oriented chat channels.
Open source, closed source, doesn't matter -- if you want on iOS devices, and everyone does, apparently, you have to concede to Apple's strong-arm tactics.
Skype is not super-popular in the home market as it once was.
I used to have tons of friends on Skype, now the only people on it are a couple of die-hard holdouts. Everyone else, one by one, said they were sick of the Skype client being a resource hog, how finicky and buggy it was, and how "skype sucked" for the last several years. They pretty much all went to either Discord or Telegram.
I never noticed too much; I always ran a skype plugin for Pidgin. I have no use for video calls, just messaging my friends, so all I ever needed was the instant messenger part of it. I added them with Discord and Telegram plugins for Pidgin, so I still chat with the same interface. But I noticed this trend over and over again. "ICQ sucks now, I'm switching to Yahoo Chat." "Yahoo blows, they fucked up their client, so I'm switching to AIM." "AIM is fucking up my computer, I'm moving to Skype, join me there!" "Skype blows since MS bought them. It slows down my computer. You can find me on Discord now." It sucks that everyone wants to use the official client from the chat networks. The client always sucks, does things that you don't want it to do (like refuse to support logging, spying on you, serving you ads, slows down your PC), and they just jump from network to network every 1-2 years. The networks should be open (like AIM and IRC were) to third-party clients, and should be multi-network as well so you don't have to fun five different clients to keep in touch with everyone.
I did the world of contracting for awhile, and my experience was... well, not dissimilar (when a company started to go tits-up, the contractors were the first to go), but I experienced the negative side of contracting a lot. I went to a number of companies with dysfunctional bureaucracies and worse, employees who were abusive (and not just to contractors). The good news, if I was placed at that company, I knew I wasn't stuck there. If things were really unmanageable, it wasn't hard for me to leave. The bad news -- if I found a place where I really enjoyed the work, and I really enjoyed my co-workers, well, I'd have to leave as well. Contractors are expensive, or my contracting company was. Once I got a taste of that, I couldn't go back to the shitty companies again.
Eventually I quit the contracting gig and was hired full time by the company I really enjoyed working at, and haven't looked back.
IT IS NOT A MIXED MESSAGE. You just don't understand the system, you are not trained on how the system works, and we really don't care that you don't understand. Just stop pretending your guesses as to how things ought to work are more important than decades of experience and practice.
Oh well, far be it for me to second guess the guy who claims so much incredible experience.
I guess it's the perfect system that can't possibly be improved upon, and no one ever fucks up. Good to know.
I know you'd say that. Others like myself read through your samples and would say it's crystal clear they never explicitly claimed to be American.
While the rest of us know you're splitting hairs incredibly finely to torpedo the discussion.