I do agree that the game was nowhere near ready to be released to stores. I know people at Blizzard must have groaned that they missed the valuable Christmas season, but it's good that they want to release a quality product worth getting. Now.. to address specific points:
1- Loot rolls being won, but the item doesn't go into your bag. The item was 'lost' since he couln't loot the body anymore.
:-(
2- Just clicking on a particular elite mob crashed wow to the desktop, twice.
I've never seen this and I've clicked just about everything in the beta. Not to say it won't happen... but sometimes game files get corrupt. Last night I needed to copy the patch.MPQ file from a backup that I had saved. The unix timestamp hadn't changed for several weeks, but the game repeatedly reported that it was corrupt and it crashed to desktop every time I entered a specific area. It makes me fear for the stability of my hard drive.
3- There were several mobs that didn't have any animation assigned to them. they were just these floating statues and you couldn't tell who they were attacking or if they were even dead yet.
I've seen that in the retail game from time to time. Around when Blizzard announced that Blood Elves would be an expansion race, they accidently broke all the animation for the high elves/blood elves that you can fight in the wild (ie, in Azshara). They didn't animate, they just stood there, and the two combatants would take damage until the fight was over. What's worse in the expansion is you'll be fighting a 9" blue and white checkered cube. It might be a sand worm, but on the screen all you see is a cube, which means that the artwork for that model hasn't been finalized or uploaded yet. I used to report that as a bug (I thought it was a problem with wine at first) until I figured.. if the model isn't there, the devs probably already know about it.
4- He has mostly tier 2.5 and 3 gear, and is a freakishly amazing pvper, yet he was easily killed by a rogue only 2 lvls higher. he used to be able to just laugh at rogues with his mail armor and shield, now it appears the lvls signify an overpowering leap in stats making it unfair.
Is he level 60? If so, that's.. unfortunate but not too surprising. If he was level.. say.. 63, then yes, I would expect him to lose. There are a few things going on here. First of all, for the expansion Blizzard has reduced the point cost of stamina, which means that an item that has the same ingame "value" would give much more health for the same cost. That's mostly why you can replace some of your epics with greens and blues come post-expansion, simple because a smaller number of points need to be spent to give an item the same stamina, and thus those item points can go into things like attack power, crit rating, spell damage, and so on. If the rogue is geared in good expansion gear, he probably has far more health than rogues in the regular WoW game do. It's like the 60s battlegrounds today with a Tier 2.5 warrior with a Dark Edge of Insanity axe fighting a warrior in Tier 0 blues with a Dreadforge Retaliator. The warrior in blues may be an awesome pvper, but he'll likely lose to the Tier 2.5 warrior just due to the gear differential.
Second, your friend may be a great pvper in the current game, but the new talents and skills change each class in critical, fundamental ways, and it will take time to relearn how to pvp against various classes.
5- I don't know about him, but if I had worked relentlessly, giving up my life to get the uber leet T3 armor, and then see GREEN everyday items drop in BC that are actually better the most sought after gear in the normal game......I'd get so bitter i would prolly logoff and uninstall right that second!
Here's a note that I wrote on my guild's discussion boards about this very issue:
The Naxx gear is really something you probably won't be replacing for quite some time. MC - level gear will drop off of trash mobs now. Upgrades
I assume you've never been a pally at Chrommie, or a mage at Luci???
That's 40 man content that isn't going away
Uhhh... yes, it certainly is going to be going away.
Seriously, when the expansion comes out, who will want to be going to the poorly-designed Molten Core? You'll have a hard time getting a single raid on a server to go. Blackwing Lair? There's a possibility. Naxx? That's something they will need to address.
Wow. 15 years ago, very few gamers would have thought Nintendo could become the hero of the games industry.
Amazing what a few years in underdog status will do for a company's outlook, isn't it? When you actually have to fight hard for customers.
you know, what it really comes down to is the fact that the Boy Scouts is a private organization that stands for certain things. If it seems that one of those things is that homosexuality is wrong, so be it. You don't have to like it. But you don't have the right to criticize those who choose to participate in the Boy Scouts.
Oh, actually, he does. Given to him by the very same right that allows Boy Scouts to gather as a private organization and exclude whomever they want.
It speaks very much to his competence as a president. The scandal completely undermined his relationship with Congress and left him essentially ineffective during the last half of his second term in promoting any kind of agenda.
What do you mean it undermined his relationship with Congress? At the time of the scandal, the Congress was controlled by a Republican Party hell-bent on getting Clinton removed from office. They very much saw him as an adversary to be removed and looked high and low for things to throw at him.
I find the whole Lying Under Oath thing to be despicable in itself, but if he had such a great relationship with Congress in the first place, it would never have reached that point. That's what saves our currently-seated president.
Yeah, wow, there is a differnece, one matters and the other doesn't. Seriously, upholding the constitution is presidential-job #1, and if he can't do it, acciedently or intentionally, he's unfit for office. Keeping your dick in your pants is presidential-job #403.
Actually, not lying to a grand jury has to be pretty high up there, much higher than #403. Keeping your dick in your pants doesn't register on my list.
For a president, lying.. not merely telling an untruth, but lying to the American people deserves an extremely harsh penalty. I wouldn't go as far as saying Clinton should have been kicked from office though. Bush, on the other hand..
Yeah. I can't wait for legal proceedings against him. As long as his party stacks Congress, though, don't count on anything substantial.
D&D requires that you have friends, sit down with them in person (yes, now you can play online, etc), and play for some set amount of time. Usually there's a point where the DM says something like 'I'm going to bed' and everyone stops. It requires that everyone gets together, schedules a time to meet, and that the DM put work in before you start playing.
Hmm. This is actually almost exactly like end-game raiding works in WoW. At least how it worked in my guild and the other endgame guild on my server. We meet up, we play for a specific amount of time. At 10pm, the raid is over. At almost no time is that hard cut-off exceeded, mostly for the mental health and ability to sleep. How far can we get in AQ40 before we reach that time period? Can we really get through the 5-hour Nef run in BWL? Over time you discover you are not only racing that artificial barrier, but also natural fatigue. The raid doesn't perform nearly as well at 10pm as it does at 6pm, so going late late into the night is almost never worth it. You don't advance any further and you're just banging your head against the wall.
The number of days/played does not measure how advanced your character is. I'm fairly well decked out in endgame gear, but there are folks in blues with a longer/played time than myself. Some guilds just move faster.
In the CA Bay Area, I was offered $60k for my first job out of college 7 years ago. Salary has increased nicely since then. Salaries are no longer crazy dot-com levels, but they're still respectible. $40k is barely subsistence-level in much of California.
I had to do that a few years back to prove to my ISP that when my mail transfers were getting aborted, it was because the server stopped sending them halfway as opposed to their claim that my client was locking up. The response was "Well, uh... have you tried upgrading your version of Netscape?" I felt like I was banging my head against a wall, but a few days later the problem was silently fixed.
3) If you can't do that, disable automatic macro execution in MSFT Word.
Does word still allow automatic macro execution? That's absolutely crazy. Have people forgotten about the nasty virus-via-word-macro years?
4) Do not use HTML email. HTML makes things PRETTIER, not more useful.
Specifically, your mail client should always always be set to never fetch anything off of a server. If the mail has a link for a picture, if the picture isn't specifically sent as an attachment to the mail, then it should only show as a broken link.
Anyone in favor of HTML mail is either a spammer or cares more for form than function.
Or, you know, you could acknowledge that there are a number of cases where your presentation is actually pretty important.
(Though I use mutt and prefer such mails be sent out with dual text-only and HTML versions. Good mail programs will show the text-only ones if it's a text client and an HTML one if it's an HTML client).
Install something like ZoneAlarm on your individual workstation and explicitly ban all MSFT Office products from accessing the Internet, without at least popping up a dialog box.
Very good suggestion. Never rely on a product (especially something like Word) to police itself.
If you must follow a questionable URL of dubious provenance, consider actually using an OLDER browser version. For example, Netscape v4.7 or older. It won't render many pretty things correctly, but who cares. More importantly, it also will simply ignore a lot of the more recent tags and syntax as being noise.
This is, strangely enough, one of the reasons I'm comfortable with Linux on my desktop at home and why I do all my web browsing under it using Firefox. I like not using the same thing that everyone else is using. It brings more security. Not only is my box not as much of a target, but given the way it's firewalled, there's no reason anyone would want to pay attention to it.
One of my guildmates in World of Warcraft just lost all his items ingame because someone got his password through a keylogger on his system. I thought.. "Boy, I'm glad I don't really have to worry about that sort of thing."
Actually, he really isn't on the fringe, what he is asking for is DRM-less music, and there's a lot more of that on the iPods of the world than there is music purchased from the iTunes Music Store.
Sorry, but that quote and that statistic is just plain misleading. It assumes that people aren't making a choice when they purchase a PC with Windows, that that isn't a choice in itself. If you used the same logic in the Macintosh area, you could say that Apple users are victims of the monopoly that Apple has over Macs since you can't buy a Mac that doesn't come with MacOS either.
The decision to buy a Mac with MacOS is a choice. The decision to buy a PC running Windows is similarly a choice. The author has a point about Linux users having to buy machines with Windows licenses, but saying that 80% of computer sales came from users who weren't offered a choice is a bit misleading.
Leno wasn't heard cracking 9/11 jokes in the first hours and days after the WTC towers collapsed. Letterman and SNL aren't broadcasting live from Iraq and to an Iraqi audience.
There's a huge difference in the scope of the two events too. With the Reiser case, no one was really affected outside of the close friends and family of the people involved.
I'm another person who would rather have a good snarky black humor comment than a completely stupid serious comment.
Remind me of this if ever we meet in a situation where you are drowning, and I could jump in and save you.
If I was actually capable of swimming to shore and you jumped in and ended up pushing me under the water quite a few times because you couldn't swim, then yes, I'd rather do without the help.
Mod me down, see if I care. If you can't stand the truth then use your modpoints
but it won't make the truth go away any time soon. You can't really argue with facts.
Oh god dammit. If I had mod points I would have modded your post up... until I got to this point. Every time I see someone get up on the cross and make themselves out as the pariah in their own post, it brings out such a temptation to mod the post down just out of spite for that attitude. I never have... but oh, the temptation is there.
Why you felt the need to make such a declaration in a post with a lot of good sense that most Slashdotters would probably agree with is a bit of a mystery. Hell, I would have cheered if a Congressman read just those few short paragraphs on the floor of the House.
I use the overrated mod from time to time, mostly for posts that are.. well, yes, overrated. They don't fit the Troll/Offtopic/etc categories, but might not be worth the high moderation they've gotten, especially if the information presented in the posts is wrong. If the original poster is wrong, they're not trolling or flaming, their post just doesn't deserve to be moderated all the way up. I wouldn't mind those mods being placed in the metamod system.
- Like a music only (matrix came close), or without drama music.
Amadeus comes with an excellent music-only track. Mozart wrote some fantastic stuff, and it's nice to just pop in the dvd and listen. Or even watch the movie only with the music to see how each piece was chosen to convey mood and suppliment emotion.
I actually want the menus, but I don't want a menu sequence. That is, when the menu comes up, I want to be able, at that very moment, to click on the options (usually sound and subtitle information). Forget the previews, forget the copyright notice. Just a responsive menu without some "oooh, sit back and look at what we whipped up" menu sequence.
Slashdot Mirror
A wedding with friends on the side of a volcano? Grilling steaks afterwards? Damn! Now that's what a wedding should be. A fun celebration for all.
1- Loot rolls being won, but the item doesn't go into your bag. The item was 'lost' since he couln't loot the body anymore.
2- Just clicking on a particular elite mob crashed wow to the desktop, twice.
I've never seen this and I've clicked just about everything in the beta. Not to say it won't happen... but sometimes game files get corrupt. Last night I needed to copy the patch.MPQ file from a backup that I had saved. The unix timestamp hadn't changed for several weeks, but the game repeatedly reported that it was corrupt and it crashed to desktop every time I entered a specific area. It makes me fear for the stability of my hard drive.
3- There were several mobs that didn't have any animation assigned to them. they were just these floating statues and you couldn't tell who they were attacking or if they were even dead yet.
I've seen that in the retail game from time to time. Around when Blizzard announced that Blood Elves would be an expansion race, they accidently broke all the animation for the high elves/blood elves that you can fight in the wild (ie, in Azshara). They didn't animate, they just stood there, and the two combatants would take damage until the fight was over. What's worse in the expansion is you'll be fighting a 9" blue and white checkered cube. It might be a sand worm, but on the screen all you see is a cube, which means that the artwork for that model hasn't been finalized or uploaded yet. I used to report that as a bug (I thought it was a problem with wine at first) until I figured.. if the model isn't there, the devs probably already know about it.
4- He has mostly tier 2.5 and 3 gear, and is a freakishly amazing pvper, yet he was easily killed by a rogue only 2 lvls higher. he used to be able to just laugh at rogues with his mail armor and shield, now it appears the lvls signify an overpowering leap in stats making it unfair.
Is he level 60? If so, that's.. unfortunate but not too surprising. If he was level.. say.. 63, then yes, I would expect him to lose. There are a few things going on here. First of all, for the expansion Blizzard has reduced the point cost of stamina, which means that an item that has the same ingame "value" would give much more health for the same cost. That's mostly why you can replace some of your epics with greens and blues come post-expansion, simple because a smaller number of points need to be spent to give an item the same stamina, and thus those item points can go into things like attack power, crit rating, spell damage, and so on. If the rogue is geared in good expansion gear, he probably has far more health than rogues in the regular WoW game do. It's like the 60s battlegrounds today with a Tier 2.5 warrior with a Dark Edge of Insanity axe fighting a warrior in Tier 0 blues with a Dreadforge Retaliator. The warrior in blues may be an awesome pvper, but he'll likely lose to the Tier 2.5 warrior just due to the gear differential.
Second, your friend may be a great pvper in the current game, but the new talents and skills change each class in critical, fundamental ways, and it will take time to relearn how to pvp against various classes.
5- I don't know about him, but if I had worked relentlessly, giving up my life to get the uber leet T3 armor, and then see GREEN everyday items drop in BC that are actually better the most sought after gear in the normal game......I'd get so bitter i would prolly logoff and uninstall right that second!
Here's a note that I wrote on my guild's discussion boards about this very issue:
The Naxx gear is really something you probably won't be replacing for quite some time. MC - level gear will drop off of trash mobs now. Upgrades
That's 40 man content that isn't going away
Uhhh... yes, it certainly is going to be going away.
Seriously, when the expansion comes out, who will want to be going to the poorly-designed Molten Core? You'll have a hard time getting a single raid on a server to go. Blackwing Lair? There's a possibility. Naxx? That's something they will need to address.
Bah! Just when I have no mod points.
You win this round, jamar0303. *shakes fist*
This court decision was an example of the government screwing around with the free market.
Lik-Sang was the free market. Now the court system has shut them down. That is what the grandparent meant by interference and preferential treatment.
Wow. 15 years ago, very few gamers would have thought Nintendo could become the hero of the games industry. Amazing what a few years in underdog status will do for a company's outlook, isn't it? When you actually have to fight hard for customers.
Oh, actually, he does. Given to him by the very same right that allows Boy Scouts to gather as a private organization and exclude whomever they want.
What about agnosticism? How would atheism somehow be more acceptible?
What do you mean it undermined his relationship with Congress? At the time of the scandal, the Congress was controlled by a Republican Party hell-bent on getting Clinton removed from office. They very much saw him as an adversary to be removed and looked high and low for things to throw at him.
I find the whole Lying Under Oath thing to be despicable in itself, but if he had such a great relationship with Congress in the first place, it would never have reached that point. That's what saves our currently-seated president.
Actually, not lying to a grand jury has to be pretty high up there, much higher than #403. Keeping your dick in your pants doesn't register on my list. For a president, lying.. not merely telling an untruth, but lying to the American people deserves an extremely harsh penalty. I wouldn't go as far as saying Clinton should have been kicked from office though. Bush, on the other hand..
Yeah. I can't wait for legal proceedings against him. As long as his party stacks Congress, though, don't count on anything substantial.
Hmm. This is actually almost exactly like end-game raiding works in WoW. At least how it worked in my guild and the other endgame guild on my server. We meet up, we play for a specific amount of time. At 10pm, the raid is over. At almost no time is that hard cut-off exceeded, mostly for the mental health and ability to sleep. How far can we get in AQ40 before we reach that time period? Can we really get through the 5-hour Nef run in BWL? Over time you discover you are not only racing that artificial barrier, but also natural fatigue. The raid doesn't perform nearly as well at 10pm as it does at 6pm, so going late late into the night is almost never worth it. You don't advance any further and you're just banging your head against the wall.
The number of days /played does not measure how advanced your character is. I'm fairly well decked out in endgame gear, but there are folks in blues with a longer /played time than myself. Some guilds just move faster.
Except it was her fault.
Coffee to go? Yes, the coffee SHOULD be served hotter than is safe to drink, so by the time you get a chance to drink it it won't be tepid.
Now McDonalds serves lukewarm coffee. What a triumph of consumer safety.
In the CA Bay Area, I was offered $60k for my first job out of college 7 years ago. Salary has increased nicely since then. Salaries are no longer crazy dot-com levels, but they're still respectible. $40k is barely subsistence-level in much of California.
I had to do that a few years back to prove to my ISP that when my mail transfers were getting aborted, it was because the server stopped sending them halfway as opposed to their claim that my client was locking up. The response was "Well, uh... have you tried upgrading your version of Netscape?" I felt like I was banging my head against a wall, but a few days later the problem was silently fixed.
Does word still allow automatic macro execution? That's absolutely crazy. Have people forgotten about the nasty virus-via-word-macro years?
4) Do not use HTML email. HTML makes things PRETTIER, not more useful.
Specifically, your mail client should always always be set to never fetch anything off of a server. If the mail has a link for a picture, if the picture isn't specifically sent as an attachment to the mail, then it should only show as a broken link.
Anyone in favor of HTML mail is either a spammer or cares more for form than function.
Or, you know, you could acknowledge that there are a number of cases where your presentation is actually pretty important.
(Though I use mutt and prefer such mails be sent out with dual text-only and HTML versions. Good mail programs will show the text-only ones if it's a text client and an HTML one if it's an HTML client).
Install something like ZoneAlarm on your individual workstation and explicitly ban all MSFT Office products from accessing the Internet, without at least popping up a dialog box.
Very good suggestion. Never rely on a product (especially something like Word) to police itself.
If you must follow a questionable URL of dubious provenance, consider actually using an OLDER browser version. For example, Netscape v4.7 or older. It won't render many pretty things correctly, but who cares. More importantly, it also will simply ignore a lot of the more recent tags and syntax as being noise.
This is, strangely enough, one of the reasons I'm comfortable with Linux on my desktop at home and why I do all my web browsing under it using Firefox. I like not using the same thing that everyone else is using. It brings more security. Not only is my box not as much of a target, but given the way it's firewalled, there's no reason anyone would want to pay attention to it. One of my guildmates in World of Warcraft just lost all his items ingame because someone got his password through a keylogger on his system. I thought.. "Boy, I'm glad I don't really have to worry about that sort of thing."
Actually, he really isn't on the fringe, what he is asking for is DRM-less music, and there's a lot more of that on the iPods of the world than there is music purchased from the iTunes Music Store.
Sorry, but that quote and that statistic is just plain misleading. It assumes that people aren't making a choice when they purchase a PC with Windows, that that isn't a choice in itself. If you used the same logic in the Macintosh area, you could say that Apple users are victims of the monopoly that Apple has over Macs since you can't buy a Mac that doesn't come with MacOS either. The decision to buy a Mac with MacOS is a choice. The decision to buy a PC running Windows is similarly a choice. The author has a point about Linux users having to buy machines with Windows licenses, but saying that 80% of computer sales came from users who weren't offered a choice is a bit misleading.
There's a huge difference in the scope of the two events too. With the Reiser case, no one was really affected outside of the close friends and family of the people involved.
I'm another person who would rather have a good snarky black humor comment than a completely stupid serious comment.
If I was actually capable of swimming to shore and you jumped in and ended up pushing me under the water quite a few times because you couldn't swim, then yes, I'd rather do without the help.
Oh god dammit. If I had mod points I would have modded your post up... until I got to this point. Every time I see someone get up on the cross and make themselves out as the pariah in their own post, it brings out such a temptation to mod the post down just out of spite for that attitude. I never have... but oh, the temptation is there.
Why you felt the need to make such a declaration in a post with a lot of good sense that most Slashdotters would probably agree with is a bit of a mystery. Hell, I would have cheered if a Congressman read just those few short paragraphs on the floor of the House.
Oh God! Worst use of the term "hot spares" ever.
I use the overrated mod from time to time, mostly for posts that are.. well, yes, overrated. They don't fit the Troll/Offtopic/etc categories, but might not be worth the high moderation they've gotten, especially if the information presented in the posts is wrong. If the original poster is wrong, they're not trolling or flaming, their post just doesn't deserve to be moderated all the way up. I wouldn't mind those mods being placed in the metamod system.
Amadeus comes with an excellent music-only track. Mozart wrote some fantastic stuff, and it's nice to just pop in the dvd and listen. Or even watch the movie only with the music to see how each piece was chosen to convey mood and suppliment emotion.
I actually want the menus, but I don't want a menu sequence. That is, when the menu comes up, I want to be able, at that very moment, to click on the options (usually sound and subtitle information). Forget the previews, forget the copyright notice. Just a responsive menu without some "oooh, sit back and look at what we whipped up" menu sequence.