Ugh. The old days: All druids were resto. Feral and balance were a joke and had no place in raids. All priests were holy (or at least healers). Shadow was a joke and had no place in raids. (Almost) all warriors were prot. If you had generous raid leaders you could be a hybrid dps/prot warrior, like the old reliable 31/5/15 arms spec I had for a few years. Old raids needed a lot of tanks, and they were all warriors. (Almost) all hunters were total flakes. All paladins were Alliance and the Horde were totally jealous, as paladin buffs were far better than the shaman buffs, and the holy paladins were the best healers in the game. This led to a tremendous skewing of PvE favoring the alliance, so most people who really liked PvE rolled alliance. On my server (and later battlegroup) PvP initially favored the horde (the shamans did have the edge there) until the gear gap from high-end PvE gear tipped the scales towards the Alliance. Oh yes, all Paladins were Holy except for the occasional retardin.
The older combat mechanics required not only certain classes but certain group setups. Remember that shaman totems only affected the 5-man group that they were in, even in a 40-man raid. Same for battle shout, trueshot aura, and all the other combat-time buffs. I used to be an arms warrior, put in a group with two rogues, a hunter, and an enhancement shaman.
I completed all of those ( and every raid in tbc) and stopped playing before woltk, but I renewed the other week as they had a $10 expansion sale and I was curious. 5 mans are now basically a matter of going through the motions. Healing is never a problem and even if you "stand in the bad" you probably won't die. Tanks never ever lose aggro and can aoe tank everything. In the past every single pull was a reasonably big deal if you got it wrong. Tanks couldn't hold aggro on the entire world so cc and burning stuff fast was a big deal. Now it seems like you can do whatever you like and you will get through it fine.
From what I've heard the end game content is much the same.
End game content has varying degrees of difficulty. The "raid finder" raids are roughly the same as the 5-mans in difficulty. You only need to know the bare minimum on the encounters, and even then there's leeway. Regular-strength raids are a step up, pre-nerf I would say raids like Firelands and Dragon Soul were on par with Karazhan. Heroic-version raids are, IMO, comparable to Burning Crusade or Vanilla raids (where everything was heroic-strength).
One thing done now that wasn't done before in vanilla and BC -- progressive nerfs to raid instances. They're released at full strength and remain so for several months, and then every month all bosses get a reduction of 5% to their health and damage done, until those nerfs reach 30%. That way the hardcore guys get to strive for their world firsts, but even casuals can beat the instance... after some time and the nerfs bring the instance down to their level.
So why do current raids seem easier? A few factors:
First, the raids are smaller, and the 10-man versions are just as difficult and give the same quality gear as the 25-man versions. However, it's easier to put together a kickass 10-man group than it is a kick-ass 25-man group, and far easier to put either of those together than a kick-ass 40-man. In ye olden days, very few groups could ensure that everyone in the raid was a quality member. Instead you usually had a core group that excelled, surrounded by a number of decent raiders, then some so-so people you had to have because you needed to get 40 people and the raiding pool had dried up. Now, that core group can form a 10-man and rip through an instance better than the 40-man could.
Second, the biggest reason why so very few people saw Sunwell and Naxx 40 when they were new wasn't because they were hard. That contributed to it, but the other important factor was that at the endgame, raiding was the only way to get decent-quality raid gear (except for a short period when pvp weapons were good). But you would drag down your progression group if you weren't already geared up, so you had to start in earlier raids. You had to go through the MC -> BWL -> AQ40 treadmill if you wanted to be prepared for Naxx. Sure, a Naxx group could afford a couple undergeared people, or maybe they couldn't. Well-geared people might tire of the game or burn out on the group, leaving. The undergeared people would also start with no DKP, leaving them undergeared longer under most loot systems. But now? When a new raid instance comes out, it comes with 5-mans that drop gear equivalent to the previous raid instance. So there's still a curve towards the top, but easy ways to jump up close to the top quickly. That means when you recruit people they might be able to step right in to your harder encounters rather than farm the earlier instance. And that speeds things up for everybody.
So many things that made progression "slow" in the old world didn't have to do with the encounters so much as the coordination issues of putting together a high-quality raid.
Wow graphics were dated on day one. That didn't stop millions of people playing it.
Wow graphics were highly stylized -- they were meant to look comic-booky (or graphic novelish) and did not try to go for realism. While the graphics are still nicely stylized, the engine itself is technologically outdated.
Is Tetris a game, even though many versions are unwinable? Or Dungeon Raid, or any other game that just gets harder and faster until it's impossible for a human to keep up?
You realize the world isn't exactly static anymore, what with phased areas and actual progression through zones?
The problem is that all of that stuff was added for the old levels and the 80-85 leveling systems. Once you reach 85, the rep grinds are pretty fast and the only thing to do are a few 5-mans until you can get into raid finder. Unless you like pvping (which I don't). The big criticism of Cataclysm, which Blizzard admitted was a problem they're trying to fix for Mists, is that there's not a lot to do at level 85.
The only endgame time sinks I enjoy anymore are the more interesting achievement hunts (like Blood Rare and Frostbitten)
By dumbing down you obviously mean removed numerous time sinks that were in place to do nothing other than "waste your time". That's quality of life. If anything this game has become more complicated that in the past.
IE, the things that actually caused you to open up the game and play on times other than raid/pvp night.
There used to be a great sense of accomplishment in leading a 40-man raid to victory
Problem was, that was an unsustainable model. The 40-man raid leaders all burned out because the logistics of recruiting, organizing, and leading a 40-man really was like herding cats. It wasn't the game. It wasn't the encounters. It was the social bullshit that got in the way of actually playing well in the game. It just couldn't survive any longer, so Blizzard got rid of it. Tankspot has some excellent videos talking about the demise of the 40-man raids and how dumbing down content or catering to casuals had nothing to do with it. The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King transition? Now that was some major dumbing down/casuals.
Casuals are the primary driving force of that game now and have been since half way though Wrath of the Lich King.
Since half-way? I would argue that the exceptional ease of most of the 5-man dungeons as well as the 10/25 man Naxxramas was a catering to casuals. No heroic-mode raid encounters upon release, those only came out with the Ulduar patch.
What this also means is that if I want to develop an image editor for home users and sell it for a reasonable fee, then I will have problems doing that because everyone gets Photoshop for free.
I'd seen Slashdot articles before where free or open source software had difficulty finding adoption in areas where piracy was rampant (developing world, china, russia, etc). If you can get windows, photoshop, MS Office et all for free, then the "well I pay a higher price, but it might do what I need it to better" argument goes out the window.
You find the term "nerds" offensive? Then did you do the right thing and call out Slashdot for the "News for nerds" tagline? If not, then you and all those who modded you up are a bunch of fucking hypocrites.
This is a whole different topic, but I suppose context matters as to whether a term is offensive or not. When one black man called another "nigger," are they always offended? What if one person were white and one were black, would reactions change then? I'm not equating black history with nerd history or anything ridiculous like that, but there are parallels with how we use language. A term used in one context can be far more offensive than when it's used in another context.
When Slashdot says "news for nerds" it's not offensive. But the article writer was trying to be derogatory. As an insult, it's pretty damned mild, but that's what he was doing.
I'm guessing most of the full time developers reading/. also do some programming for fun.
I do a little, but not that much now.
Now that I actually do that sort of thing ALL THE TIME at work, when I'm away from work I want a little bit of a break. Perhaps I want to watch some TV. Or play a video game. Or I need to do a bit of housework. Or cook a nice meal.
If you code all day at work, then come home and spend the rest of the evening coding as well, that is a sad life, and I strongly suspect the people with more balance are happier at their jobs. They'll certainly last longer at it.
Still there is a chance that you would be able to do that under lucky circumstances. And that chance justifies permission to carry weapons.
And what is the probability to hit a perfect innocent in these circumstances?
If the guy is shooting a perfect innocent every five seconds and seems unlikely to stop, then the possibility of my hitting a single innocent trying to take him down is the lesser of the two evils.
The "news channels" get a lot of coverage (by other channels), but Fox News's viewership, while the largest of the news channels, pales compared to NBC/CBS/ABC/Fox.
Chess is probably the oldest war game ever made. It's an epic battle between the armies of the white and the armies of the black. If you have enough imagination you can even imagine what's really going on.
Really, it's just a way to take a decent-looking site and make it look like shit, like the various xmms and mplayer skins out there (or pretty much any program with "skin" support).
hmm, I realized belatedly the snark at the end was excessive for this thread, and I apologize. I had just received some hassle but that's no excuse to turn it over to you.
No problem. Half my replies on Slashdot are snarky anyway. >_>
The solution is to apply P2P to cars. Every automated car needs a send/receiver so that it convey its velocity and position to the few cars around it.
I think this would be too vulnerable to exploits. A car should have in itself everything it needs to drive through traffic and not rely on outside signals for anything other than GPS and directions.
That would have the benefit of forcing city planners to incorporate more parking, and automating parking spot locators.
It's not the case now where cities with far too little parking force city planners to incorporate more parking, I don't think automatic cars would change that. In many urban areas real estate is a little too pricey to "waste" on a parking structure so parking lots are few and far between. You're also more likely there to have a populace that encourages public transit over cars, and feel more parking would just encourage more cars on the road that they don't want anyway.
It's not "apathetic" to sit out an election where both of the choices are bad. It's called "not wasting your time". Of course, you can argue that they should vote in a third-party candidate instead, or a white-in candidate, even though there's roughly zero chance those candidates will be elected.
So there were no good candidates? No third-party candidates? No one you could have written in? Chance of electability means nothing, it at least shows what a certain percentage of the country actually wants. Not voting at all means "I don't care."
I'm pretty sure Paul's idea of internet freedom is to let ISPs do whatever the hell they want with no restrictions, including blocking sites that interfere with their core product (such as Comcast blocking Hulu and NetFlix).
And I would be fine even with that if people had several equivalent options to choose from, so that the ones with restrictive, unpopular policies would be weeded out by an educated populace. But we don't live in that world, we live in a physical world of wires, and right-of-ways, where the cable company is a monopoly and if you want broadband then it's them or nothing. Or a duopoly shared with an almost-as-restrictive DSL company. As long as ISPs own the lines, we'll have that situation.
The Libertarians are mostly for freedon of corporations to fuck you over, not so much about freedom for the common man.
Libertarian ideals only exist in a world where people are equally free to choose various options, and where corporations cannot exert leverage to alter those decisions. They would probably argue that it's the government gives the corporations that ability to exert such leverage.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. The old days:
All druids were resto. Feral and balance were a joke and had no place in raids.
All priests were holy (or at least healers). Shadow was a joke and had no place in raids.
(Almost) all warriors were prot. If you had generous raid leaders you could be a hybrid dps/prot warrior, like the old reliable 31/5/15 arms spec I had for a few years. Old raids needed a lot of tanks, and they were all warriors.
(Almost) all hunters were total flakes.
All paladins were Alliance and the Horde were totally jealous, as paladin buffs were far better than the shaman buffs, and the holy paladins were the best healers in the game. This led to a tremendous skewing of PvE favoring the alliance, so most people who really liked PvE rolled alliance. On my server (and later battlegroup) PvP initially favored the horde (the shamans did have the edge there) until the gear gap from high-end PvE gear tipped the scales towards the Alliance. Oh yes, all Paladins were Holy except for the occasional retardin.
The older combat mechanics required not only certain classes but certain group setups. Remember that shaman totems only affected the 5-man group that they were in, even in a 40-man raid. Same for battle shout, trueshot aura, and all the other combat-time buffs. I used to be an arms warrior, put in a group with two rogues, a hunter, and an enhancement shaman.
Yes, things are better. :-)
I completed all of those ( and every raid in tbc) and stopped playing before woltk, but I renewed the other week as they had a $10 expansion sale and I was curious. 5 mans are now basically a matter of going through the motions. Healing is never a problem and even if you "stand in the bad" you probably won't die. Tanks never ever lose aggro and can aoe tank everything. In the past every single pull was a reasonably big deal if you got it wrong. Tanks couldn't hold aggro on the entire world so cc and burning stuff fast was a big deal. Now it seems like you can do whatever you like and you will get through it fine.
From what I've heard the end game content is much the same.
End game content has varying degrees of difficulty. The "raid finder" raids are roughly the same as the 5-mans in difficulty. You only need to know the bare minimum on the encounters, and even then there's leeway. Regular-strength raids are a step up, pre-nerf I would say raids like Firelands and Dragon Soul were on par with Karazhan. Heroic-version raids are, IMO, comparable to Burning Crusade or Vanilla raids (where everything was heroic-strength).
One thing done now that wasn't done before in vanilla and BC -- progressive nerfs to raid instances. They're released at full strength and remain so for several months, and then every month all bosses get a reduction of 5% to their health and damage done, until those nerfs reach 30%. That way the hardcore guys get to strive for their world firsts, but even casuals can beat the instance... after some time and the nerfs bring the instance down to their level.
So why do current raids seem easier? A few factors:
First, the raids are smaller, and the 10-man versions are just as difficult and give the same quality gear as the 25-man versions. However, it's easier to put together a kickass 10-man group than it is a kick-ass 25-man group, and far easier to put either of those together than a kick-ass 40-man. In ye olden days, very few groups could ensure that everyone in the raid was a quality member. Instead you usually had a core group that excelled, surrounded by a number of decent raiders, then some so-so people you had to have because you needed to get 40 people and the raiding pool had dried up. Now, that core group can form a 10-man and rip through an instance better than the 40-man could.
Second, the biggest reason why so very few people saw Sunwell and Naxx 40 when they were new wasn't because they were hard. That contributed to it, but the other important factor was that at the endgame, raiding was the only way to get decent-quality raid gear (except for a short period when pvp weapons were good). But you would drag down your progression group if you weren't already geared up, so you had to start in earlier raids. You had to go through the MC -> BWL -> AQ40 treadmill if you wanted to be prepared for Naxx. Sure, a Naxx group could afford a couple undergeared people, or maybe they couldn't. Well-geared people might tire of the game or burn out on the group, leaving. The undergeared people would also start with no DKP, leaving them undergeared longer under most loot systems. But now? When a new raid instance comes out, it comes with 5-mans that drop gear equivalent to the previous raid instance. So there's still a curve towards the top, but easy ways to jump up close to the top quickly. That means when you recruit people they might be able to step right in to your harder encounters rather than farm the earlier instance. And that speeds things up for everybody.
So many things that made progression "slow" in the old world didn't have to do with the encounters so much as the coordination issues of putting together a high-quality raid.
Wow graphics were dated on day one. That didn't stop millions of people playing it.
Wow graphics were highly stylized -- they were meant to look comic-booky (or graphic novelish) and did not try to go for realism.
While the graphics are still nicely stylized, the engine itself is technologically outdated.
Is Tetris a game, even though many versions are unwinable? Or Dungeon Raid, or any other game that just gets harder and faster until it's impossible for a human to keep up?
You realize the world isn't exactly static anymore, what with phased areas and actual progression through zones?
The problem is that all of that stuff was added for the old levels and the 80-85 leveling systems. Once you reach 85, the rep grinds are pretty fast and the only thing to do are a few 5-mans until you can get into raid finder. Unless you like pvping (which I don't). The big criticism of Cataclysm, which Blizzard admitted was a problem they're trying to fix for Mists, is that there's not a lot to do at level 85.
The only endgame time sinks I enjoy anymore are the more interesting achievement hunts (like Blood Rare and Frostbitten)
By dumbing down you obviously mean removed numerous time sinks that were in place to do nothing other than "waste your time". That's quality of life.
If anything this game has become more complicated that in the past.
IE, the things that actually caused you to open up the game and play on times other than raid/pvp night.
There used to be a great sense of accomplishment in leading a 40-man raid to victory
Problem was, that was an unsustainable model. The 40-man raid leaders all burned out because the logistics of recruiting, organizing, and leading a 40-man really was like herding cats. It wasn't the game. It wasn't the encounters. It was the social bullshit that got in the way of actually playing well in the game. It just couldn't survive any longer, so Blizzard got rid of it. Tankspot has some excellent videos talking about the demise of the 40-man raids and how dumbing down content or catering to casuals had nothing to do with it. The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King transition? Now that was some major dumbing down/casuals.
Casuals are the primary driving force of that game now and have been since half way though Wrath of the Lich King.
Since half-way? I would argue that the exceptional ease of most of the 5-man dungeons as well as the 10/25 man Naxxramas was a catering to casuals. No heroic-mode raid encounters upon release, those only came out with the Ulduar patch.
What this also means is that if I want to develop an image editor for home users and sell it for a reasonable fee, then I will have problems doing that because everyone gets Photoshop for free.
I'd seen Slashdot articles before where free or open source software had difficulty finding adoption in areas where piracy was rampant (developing world, china, russia, etc). If you can get windows, photoshop, MS Office et all for free, then the "well I pay a higher price, but it might do what I need it to better" argument goes out the window.
You find the term "nerds" offensive? Then did you do the right thing and call out Slashdot for the "News for nerds" tagline? If not, then you and all those who modded you up are a bunch of fucking hypocrites.
This is a whole different topic, but I suppose context matters as to whether a term is offensive or not. When one black man called another "nigger," are they always offended? What if one person were white and one were black, would reactions change then? I'm not equating black history with nerd history or anything ridiculous like that, but there are parallels with how we use language. A term used in one context can be far more offensive than when it's used in another context.
When Slashdot says "news for nerds" it's not offensive. But the article writer was trying to be derogatory. As an insult, it's pretty damned mild, but that's what he was doing.
I'm guessing most of the full time developers reading /. also do some programming for fun.
I do a little, but not that much now.
Now that I actually do that sort of thing ALL THE TIME at work, when I'm away from work I want a little bit of a break. Perhaps I want to watch some TV. Or play a video game. Or I need to do a bit of housework. Or cook a nice meal.
If you code all day at work, then come home and spend the rest of the evening coding as well, that is a sad life, and I strongly suspect the people with more balance are happier at their jobs. They'll certainly last longer at it.
"Guns don't kill people, I do."
Still there is a chance that you would be able to do that under lucky circumstances. And that chance justifies permission to carry weapons.
And what is the probability to hit a perfect innocent in these circumstances?
If the guy is shooting a perfect innocent every five seconds and seems unlikely to stop, then the possibility of my hitting a single innocent trying to take him down is the lesser of the two evils.
The "news channels" get a lot of coverage (by other channels), but Fox News's viewership, while the largest of the news channels, pales compared to NBC/CBS/ABC/Fox.
Yes, I eat vegan and 0xDEADBEEF is my favorite constant,
I always wondered. Does eating vegan really give you superpowers?
Chess is probably the oldest war game ever made. It's an epic battle between the armies of the white and the armies of the black. If you have enough imagination you can even imagine what's really going on.
Not sure about checkers though.
IE, the plot of even the barest FPS.
Really, it's just a way to take a decent-looking site and make it look like shit, like the various xmms and mplayer skins out there (or pretty much any program with "skin" support).
hmm, I realized belatedly the snark at the end was excessive for this thread, and I apologize. I had just received some hassle but that's no excuse to turn it over to you.
No problem. Half my replies on Slashdot are snarky anyway. >_>
Well some day I guess ;-P
It's great to have something to aspire to!
The solution is to apply P2P to cars. Every automated car needs a send/receiver so that it convey its velocity and position to the few cars around it.
I think this would be too vulnerable to exploits. A car should have in itself everything it needs to drive through traffic and not rely on outside signals for anything other than GPS and directions.
That would have the benefit of forcing city planners to incorporate more parking, and automating parking spot locators.
It's not the case now where cities with far too little parking force city planners to incorporate more parking, I don't think automatic cars would change that.
In many urban areas real estate is a little too pricey to "waste" on a parking structure so parking lots are few and far between. You're also more likely there to have a populace that encourages public transit over cars, and feel more parking would just encourage more cars on the road that they don't want anyway.
Does that mean it's open season on dicks? If so, Donald Trump is first on my list.
I don't think anyone here has a problem with that.
no...a community is deciding that they're communal rules are more important than yours
Sounds like government to me!
It's not "apathetic" to sit out an election where both of the choices are bad. It's called "not wasting your time". Of course, you can argue that they should vote in a third-party candidate instead, or a white-in candidate, even though there's roughly zero chance those candidates will be elected.
So there were no good candidates? No third-party candidates? No one you could have written in? Chance of electability means nothing, it at least shows what a certain percentage of the country actually wants. Not voting at all means "I don't care."
I'm pretty sure Paul's idea of internet freedom is to let ISPs do whatever the hell they want with no restrictions, including blocking sites that interfere with their core product (such as Comcast blocking Hulu and NetFlix).
And I would be fine even with that if people had several equivalent options to choose from, so that the ones with restrictive, unpopular policies would be weeded out by an educated populace. But we don't live in that world, we live in a physical world of wires, and right-of-ways, where the cable company is a monopoly and if you want broadband then it's them or nothing. Or a duopoly shared with an almost-as-restrictive DSL company. As long as ISPs own the lines, we'll have that situation.
The Libertarians are mostly for freedon of corporations to fuck you over, not so much about freedom for the common man.
Libertarian ideals only exist in a world where people are equally free to choose various options, and where corporations cannot exert leverage to alter those decisions. They would probably argue that it's the government gives the corporations that ability to exert such leverage.