A more idiotic group of complainers hasn't been found
You're new here, right?
Haha, touche'! But seriously, as bad as Slashdot may be, it has nothing on the WoW forum whiners.
Any time an incredibly minor rebalancing is introduced, the shrill cries of "OMG WTF, I can't play anymore!!! I'm canceling!!!! GG Blizzard! $@$#" fill page after page.. Q: "So.. with the slowest weapons in the game you'll now do 4% less damage, 5% at the most on an attack you can't exactly spam?" A: "SHUT UP!! They nerfed the whole class! FU. I should be able to p0wn all the other classes, that's what my class does, now this will make it harder!! Forget it! I'm quitting!"
When the server cluster I play on was having massive problems I really wanted to know why. I suppose there's no rational reason, it's not like it'd get fixed faster or I could help them or anything, but I had a need to be told what was wrong. I was mad that the response was just "we have a problem and are looking at it." Well ok, WHAT is the problem? Tell me, it'll make me feel better.
Consider yourself lucky that you got that much. A month ago the realm I was on developed serious problems (it would crash 3 or more times a week during primetime hours, dumping everyone connected for hours), and Blizzard would never acknowledge that there was even a problem. The problems were never mentioned at all. We saw announcements of other realm downtimes, but now ours. The players began to get the feeling that either Blizzard didn't know how flakey the server was (how could they not?) or they just didn't care.
Were the problems fixed? Eventually, as the realm (with one or two downtime exceptions) has been fairly stable for the last few weeks. But for several weeks the player base felt out of touch and abandoned, when only the occasional minor update would have gone a long way to dispel this feeling. I don't think Blizzard knows just how bad their support PR actually is.
More spoilers ahead, particularly for Final Fantasy 10.
As for Aeris dying if FF7, well, I don't know how I would have reacted if that hadn't been spoiled for me long before I had any interest in playing the game, but earlier Final Fantasy games were so full of characters sacrificing themselves for each other that I probably wouldn't have been very surprised. I think losing the twins in FF4 was harder, personally.
Losing the twins could have been considered hard, but I think perhaps the weepiest Final Fantasy moment would be at the end of 10 with the fading away of those neat aeons and with then, the fading away/death of the main character Tidus. Very emotionally affecting, and made a friend of mine rather misty-eyed, and he didn't seem like the type to do that sort of thing. Kindof a tough guy.. on the surface.;)
Well, my mistake. Seems the Ventrilo client for the Mac is also under development. So Ventrilo is windows-only at the moment, though they have servers that run on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOSX, Solaris..
You might want to check out Teamspeak if you want a free voice service with a Linux server and client available. My boyfriend used to use Ventrilo as well, but when we discovered Teamspeak, we and basically everyone else we wanted to talk to quickly switched over.
My guild is struggling over which voice chat client to use. Currently we're using Teamspeak but many people want to switch to Ventrillo since it has better voice quality and a Mac client.
Ventrillo: Windows & Macintosh.
Teamspeak: Windows & Linux.
Ventrillo's website says that a Linux client is "under development," though they don't list when it will be released. It would be nice to have a single client which supports all three platforms that you'll find in a large guild.
IMO, Instances are antethical to the entire idea of a persistent world (which -NOONE- has gotten right yet, IMO).
I feel instances are almost perfect as they are. There are a few cases where the perfect persistent world is in conflict with enjoyable gameplay, and instance dungeons help to reduce this. I don't want to have to fight with other factions or other parties who want to kill the same dungeon boss my party does; that just makes the game less fun.
You posted what I was about to say. I just love the irony of GPL becoming less free in order to encourage a behavior. The very idea is 180 out from what free software is fundamentally about.
I disagree.. the Free Software movement has always been about how the making and use of closed commercial software is immoral. This is just another step along that path.
The most obvious answer to those who haven't read comic books is the one that hasn't been mentioned here yet. Something that rarely occurs to us because we so like the character and plot that we've overlooked what's been staring us in the face:
The Silver SURFER? A guy who flies around on his intergalactic surfboard? How amazingly lame is that? Forget Galactus, the Fantastic Four, any other cool things that were involved. We're talking about a pacifist surfer dude here. What works in comic form often looks silly on the big screen. Hugh Jackman in a yellow and blue spandex Wolverine outfit? It's a good thing they went with black leather instead.
Not to mention that the look of the character would need an overhaul. It would have to be done with some sort of body paint. A full-body suit or CG would look too unconvincing, and you need to see his eyes..
I don't get it - I personally loved the movie (and hated it as a comic, go figure).
I think this is mostly why Hulk has been controversial and only somewhat successful -- because it was different in tone from the comics. So fans expecting one thing got something completely different.
I will admit, there is an occasional breakout hit: The Matrix, Sin City were amazing, Spiderman was not as bad as it could have been.
Agreed there. I thought Spiderman was "pretty good," and Spiderman 2 was excellent.
But it hardly makes up for the disasters they wage in the process (Daredevil, Elektra, The Incredible Hulk, come on)...
It really is evident in the hollywood scheme of things that they have ran out of movie ideas because the corporation is stifling the idealists.... Hollywood hasn't matured at all. They're just remaking the same movies over and over, with different names for the characters, different actors, and in different cities.
Sure, Daredevil and Elektra weren't good, but I feel the Incredible Hulk was greatly underrated. It was a completely different type of movie from the others, given to a creative, non-action director. Audiences seemed to want a lot more "hulk smash" than was in the movie though (and I have to admit it meandered towards the end with a bit too much Nick Nolte) so it tanked. But to me that spells creativity that the audience wasn't interested in, not that the same movie was made over and over again.
I'll admit there's a general lack of creativity these days, and it doesn't help that the theater experience is often a bad one. I disagree firmly though with one of your main points, that the bad comic book movies recently have outweighed the good. If I have to stomach a Daredevil disaster to go with Spiderman 2 or X-men 2 or Batman Begins, then I think I've come out ahead.
Well, for Blue-Ray to be successful as a format, it needs content. If the entertainment cartel is insistant upon a media with content protection/control, then it's in Blue-Ray's financial interest to accomodate them.
..and Nintendo tends to ignore the fun for mature audiences only market, they also don't cater to the one-device-for-games-and-multimedia-on-the-go market either.
And boy, what a great market that is, too! Really, no really, I want to watch a movie on a tiny screen like that. As bad as cell phone movies.
Another time I went to see The Incredibles. The doors at the back of the theater were being kept open because kids were going to get snacks and then not wanting to miss out on the movie. The constant sound of their eating was just deafening. And yes, there were tons of kids screaming and phones ringing.
Unfortunately, animated movies suffer from out of control kids. The worst was when I saw Fantasia during it's 1990 rerelease. The Ave Maria sequence at the end practically demands silence.. and you know you're not going to get that from today's kids during a "boring" scene. It was a terrible moviegoing experience, primary because I love that movie so much.
And I know I'll have the joy of an "attendant" shining a torch in my eyes at least once during the movie.
Lucky you! Most theaters around here did away with attendants long ago. Now you're entirely on your own until the picture ends the crew comes to clean up and kick you out.
Perhaps when HD dvds come out this will be a true alternative, but no matter how good your home theater is, you are limited by the source material, and the source material a theater will get (film or digital) is of a far better quality than your DVD. Now, the theater needs to a good system to display it as well as something that's all too rare these days: a competent projectionist. For a number of crappy theaters, your home theater will probably come out ahead. But for an excellent theater with a good staff.. nothing else comes close.
In reality there is no _logical_ reason to actually bother gathering/buying/bartering all those reagents instead of just farming whatever instance is apropriate for your level. The time and effort to get something better are actually lower.
Unless, say, you don't have the time to grind away at instances. I get to play an hour here, an hour there. I rarely have uninterrupted time to go through an instance.
Plus selling my leatherworking products helped support me through about level 45 and helped me get my mount. They have some use!
At the moment, instances and PvP are the alpha and the omega, and that's that.
They are for level 60 players. There are a huge number of people who don't have level 60 characters, don't always have the time to grind to level 60, and aren't in any particular hurry to get to level 60 in the first place.
I just got out of Zul'Farrak.:) Wiped twice. I think you meant Zul'Gurub, the new 20-man raid dungeon. It sounds neat. Also they're adding a third battleground next patch, Arathi Basin. It should be interesting.
What about gold? The most credible claims for duping so far have come from people who managed to double their gold with an exploit. Much harder to give each gold/silver/bronze piece a UUID.
It used to be normal for most people not to go to college. Now it's pretty much a requirement if you want a decent paying job that won't be outsourced.
I'm not so sure about that. Seems these days, many of the most-likely-to-need-college jobs are the ones being outsourced.
1) Ideal: I have no privacy, and neither does anyone else. I have access to all information about anything and everything and use it to make better decisions, and so does everyone else. People are less likely to be prejudiced against me when they find out about my little eccentricities, because they know damned well that everyone has them.
Ah yes, the Transparent Society ideal. One I dislike quite a bit because it ignores human nature, which is that we are often not rational, and we will often persecute those who are stranger/different from us or from the norm in general. If John has strange behavior/desire A and Tom has much stranger behavior/desire B, then Tom is at a disadvantage to John. It doesn't matter that John likes bondage while Tom has had fantasies of, say, bondage AND bestiality. This puts Tom up for persecution from any of the Johns of the world, not to mention the large number of people who don't have many, even any deviant fantasies or behaviors. The Transparent Society assumes that everyone has something that they currently wish to hide, and that's an incorrect assumption. There really are "holier than thou" people, and to say they wouldn't take advantage of that because, well.. everyone is a little eccentric, right? Doesn't matter. It is not ignorance which causes humans to judge each other harshly. The minority will easily fall under the folks with pitchforks, since they have no way to hide it.
And finally, the Transparent Society is just flat out impossible. Those with power will always have methods to prevent others from finding out as much about them as they can about others. Forget transparency, someone will always know how to get around that. The lives of the non-super-elite will be completely transparent, and the lives the super-elite would be.. partially transparent.
From the moment you swipe out, to the moment you swipe in the next morning, your employer has no power over you.
Except of course for the ability to fire you, if you work in an at-will state. Then the employer doesn't even need to really give a reason for the termination. Sure, you could try to sue for wrongful termination, but good luck with that.
Slashdot Mirror
You're new here, right?
Haha, touche'! But seriously, as bad as Slashdot may be, it has nothing on the WoW forum whiners.
Any time an incredibly minor rebalancing is introduced, the shrill cries of "OMG WTF, I can't play anymore!!! I'm canceling!!!! GG Blizzard! $@$#" fill page after page.. Q: "So.. with the slowest weapons in the game you'll now do 4% less damage, 5% at the most on an attack you can't exactly spam?" A: "SHUT UP!! They nerfed the whole class! FU. I should be able to p0wn all the other classes, that's what my class does, now this will make it harder!! Forget it! I'm quitting!"
Consider yourself lucky that you got that much. A month ago the realm I was on developed serious problems (it would crash 3 or more times a week during primetime hours, dumping everyone connected for hours), and Blizzard would never acknowledge that there was even a problem. The problems were never mentioned at all. We saw announcements of other realm downtimes, but now ours. The players began to get the feeling that either Blizzard didn't know how flakey the server was (how could they not?) or they just didn't care.
Were the problems fixed? Eventually, as the realm (with one or two downtime exceptions) has been fairly stable for the last few weeks. But for several weeks the player base felt out of touch and abandoned, when only the occasional minor update would have gone a long way to dispel this feeling. I don't think Blizzard knows just how bad their support PR actually is.
As for Aeris dying if FF7, well, I don't know how I would have reacted if that hadn't been spoiled for me long before I had any interest in playing the game, but earlier Final Fantasy games were so full of characters sacrificing themselves for each other that I probably wouldn't have been very surprised. I think losing the twins in FF4 was harder, personally.
Losing the twins could have been considered hard, but I think perhaps the weepiest Final Fantasy moment would be at the end of 10 with the fading away of those neat aeons and with then, the fading away/death of the main character Tidus. Very emotionally affecting, and made a friend of mine rather misty-eyed, and he didn't seem like the type to do that sort of thing. Kindof a tough guy.. on the surface. ;)
It was a cool idea, but deep down the purpose of the plague was to add a flat ~300 dps to a specific boss battle.
I wouldn't settle there.. mostly since I think it's a stupid idea to build a city that is mostly below sea-level in hurricane country.
My guild is struggling over which voice chat client to use. Currently we're using Teamspeak but many people want to switch to Ventrillo since it has better voice quality and a Mac client.
Ventrillo: Windows & Macintosh.
Teamspeak: Windows & Linux.
Ventrillo's website says that a Linux client is "under development," though they don't list when it will be released. It would be nice to have a single client which supports all three platforms that you'll find in a large guild.
I feel instances are almost perfect as they are. There are a few cases where the perfect persistent world is in conflict with enjoyable gameplay, and instance dungeons help to reduce this. I don't want to have to fight with other factions or other parties who want to kill the same dungeon boss my party does; that just makes the game less fun.
I disagree.. the Free Software movement has always been about how the making and use of closed commercial software is immoral. This is just another step along that path.
The most obvious answer to those who haven't read comic books is the one that hasn't been mentioned here yet. Something that rarely occurs to us because we so like the character and plot that we've overlooked what's been staring us in the face:
The Silver SURFER? A guy who flies around on his intergalactic surfboard? How amazingly lame is that? Forget Galactus, the Fantastic Four, any other cool things that were involved. We're talking about a pacifist surfer dude here. What works in comic form often looks silly on the big screen. Hugh Jackman in a yellow and blue spandex Wolverine outfit? It's a good thing they went with black leather instead.
Not to mention that the look of the character would need an overhaul. It would have to be done with some sort of body paint. A full-body suit or CG would look too unconvincing, and you need to see his eyes..
I think this is mostly why Hulk has been controversial and only somewhat successful -- because it was different in tone from the comics. So fans expecting one thing got something completely different.
I liked the movie more than most, apparently.
Hey man, don't be hasslin' the Hoff
Agreed there. I thought Spiderman was "pretty good," and Spiderman 2 was excellent.
But it hardly makes up for the disasters they wage in the process (Daredevil, Elektra, The Incredible Hulk, come on) ...
It really is evident in the hollywood scheme of things that they have ran out of movie ideas because the corporation is stifling the idealists. ... Hollywood hasn't matured at all. They're just remaking the same movies over and over, with different names for the characters, different actors, and in different cities.
Sure, Daredevil and Elektra weren't good, but I feel the Incredible Hulk was greatly underrated. It was a completely different type of movie from the others, given to a creative, non-action director. Audiences seemed to want a lot more "hulk smash" than was in the movie though (and I have to admit it meandered towards the end with a bit too much Nick Nolte) so it tanked. But to me that spells creativity that the audience wasn't interested in, not that the same movie was made over and over again.
I'll admit there's a general lack of creativity these days, and it doesn't help that the theater experience is often a bad one. I disagree firmly though with one of your main points, that the bad comic book movies recently have outweighed the good. If I have to stomach a Daredevil disaster to go with Spiderman 2 or X-men 2 or Batman Begins, then I think I've come out ahead.
And boy, what a great market that is, too! Really, no really, I want to watch a movie on a tiny screen like that. As bad as cell phone movies.
Unfortunately, animated movies suffer from out of control kids. The worst was when I saw Fantasia during it's 1990 rerelease. The Ave Maria sequence at the end practically demands silence.. and you know you're not going to get that from today's kids during a "boring" scene. It was a terrible moviegoing experience, primary because I love that movie so much.
Lucky you! Most theaters around here did away with attendants long ago. Now you're entirely on your own until the picture ends the crew comes to clean up and kick you out.
Perhaps when HD dvds come out this will be a true alternative, but no matter how good your home theater is, you are limited by the source material, and the source material a theater will get (film or digital) is of a far better quality than your DVD. Now, the theater needs to a good system to display it as well as something that's all too rare these days: a competent projectionist. For a number of crappy theaters, your home theater will probably come out ahead. But for an excellent theater with a good staff.. nothing else comes close.
HDTV sure looks good in such a setup, though!
Unless, say, you don't have the time to grind away at instances. I get to play an hour here, an hour there. I rarely have uninterrupted time to go through an instance.
Plus selling my leatherworking products helped support me through about level 45 and helped me get my mount. They have some use!
At the moment, instances and PvP are the alpha and the omega, and that's that.
They are for level 60 players. There are a huge number of people who don't have level 60 characters, don't always have the time to grind to level 60, and aren't in any particular hurry to get to level 60 in the first place.
I just got out of Zul'Farrak. :) Wiped twice. I think you meant Zul'Gurub, the new 20-man raid dungeon. It sounds neat. Also they're adding a third battleground next patch, Arathi Basin. It should be interesting.
I'm not so sure about that. Seems these days, many of the most-likely-to-need-college jobs are the ones being outsourced.
Ah yes, the Transparent Society ideal. One I dislike quite a bit because it ignores human nature, which is that we are often not rational, and we will often persecute those who are stranger/different from us or from the norm in general. If John has strange behavior/desire A and Tom has much stranger behavior/desire B, then Tom is at a disadvantage to John. It doesn't matter that John likes bondage while Tom has had fantasies of, say, bondage AND bestiality. This puts Tom up for persecution from any of the Johns of the world, not to mention the large number of people who don't have many, even any deviant fantasies or behaviors. The Transparent Society assumes that everyone has something that they currently wish to hide, and that's an incorrect assumption. There really are "holier than thou" people, and to say they wouldn't take advantage of that because, well.. everyone is a little eccentric, right? Doesn't matter. It is not ignorance which causes humans to judge each other harshly. The minority will easily fall under the folks with pitchforks, since they have no way to hide it.
And finally, the Transparent Society is just flat out impossible. Those with power will always have methods to prevent others from finding out as much about them as they can about others. Forget transparency, someone will always know how to get around that. The lives of the non-super-elite will be completely transparent, and the lives the super-elite would be.. partially transparent.
Except of course for the ability to fire you, if you work in an at-will state. Then the employer doesn't even need to really give a reason for the termination. Sure, you could try to sue for wrongful termination, but good luck with that.