I'm not from anything. It's literally Oblivion with guns. And a combat system that gives you a 2% percentage to hit if you're more than two inches from your target.
There's a neat modification for Jedi Academy called ModWooty, the lead programmer has two bots that seem to scrape users' conversations and frequently talk to each other. It's convincing enough that plenty of players end up believing they're human.
Karn : wtf how u so big mod? McWooty (Admin) : im big cause im level 100+ McWooty (Admin) : snake rejoin or face moot and slapspam Karn : lol im nooby i just got this game how do u reach 100 McWooty (Admin) : no you didnt Karn : ? McWooty (Admin) : uve hardely been on./ Karn : what McWooty (Admin) : he copies other peoples conversations McWooty (Admin) : lol Bride of Ms. Wooty : i frogot
Emerican : can i be admin??? ~Bride of Ms. Wooty : no Emerican : you just said yes though... =( McWooty (Admin) : But your saying ur on other games Emerican : wha?? Emerican : this is stupid Emerican : VERY stupid McWooty (Admin) : very very very Emerican : yes McWooty (Admin) : i told it to you your problem is the recover McWooty (Admin) : tha made no sense. Emerican : can you at least give me powers or something? McWooty (Admin) : ur like uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Emerican : ???????????????? ~Bride of Ms. Wooty : OWNED ~Bride of Ms. Wooty : once again Emerican : fine im leaving ~Bride of Ms. Wooty : lol
hadowK : are u serious hadowK : can we just play? McWooty (Admin) ::D hadowK : ??? McWooty (Admin) : nvm McWooty (Admin) : no 1 hadowK : um can u guys fight? McWooty (Admin) : don't know what you know hadowK : BYE N00BS hadowK : u dont know how to run a server McWooty (Admin) :...... Bride of Ms. Wooty : =)
That may be true but consider the likelihood of those predisposed to certain genetic disorders to reproduce - some of them will be committed to hospitals for the rest of their life, some will die young, some will simply be shunned by members of the opposite sex as having baggage or something. Many members of the given population may end up reproducing, but if the net rate is lower than average, the trait will eventually become more rare regardless.
I would submit that in fact more attractive people do end up having more children on average, for example. As long as that continues to happen, "natural selection" is still in play. It's just shifted from the unfit dying to the unfit not having as many children.
I knew this post would come up, the Mac fanboys always make at least one of these when anything vaguely referencing a new game is posted. The argument is always "it's gaining marketshare!" - yeah, call me when it has. If it would make them money, they would do it. Obviously the marketshare isn't there.
When Final Cut Pro and all the other Apple software runs on Windows, maybe that argument will have merit. When running a game that doesn't run on OSX means dual-booting a $100 OS, but running specialized Apple software means buying a $1000+ piece of hardware, it doesn't work so well.
"I HAVE BEEN A LOYAL USER OF BRAND X, BUT ALL OF BRAND X'S CHIPS SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTED WITHIN 24 HOURS. I BOUGHT A BRAND Y CHIP AND I HAVE BEEN RUNNING IT FOR AT LEAST 100 YEARS WITHOUT ANY PROBLEMS"
Do you realize how many people spout this exact same thing on both sides? It's a completely meaningless, stupid metric because 1. graphics cards don't usually just die and 2. changes between generations are so massive that even if one had a known failure due to heat or something it would be accounted for in the next generation.
These card brands mean absolutely nothing. I swear, we need to start some double blind testing on the population at large and just start marketing them under those who license and produce the design (Sapphire, Powercolor, etc). I'm tired of running into silicon fanboys.
An excuse to continually ignore usability, something which many in the software industry already do a pretty good job of doing. Maybe 2009 will be the year of the Linux desktop..or maybe not.
10 WHY IS WIKIPEDIA SO INACCURATE 20 "Well, let me just delete all the unsourced material to leave it with a balanced summ-" 30 NO STOP DELETING STUFF KEEP IT IN I CANT BELIEVE YOU EVIL DELETIONISTS WANT TO DESTROY ALL MY HARD WORK 40 GOTO 10
I was an editor there for a while until I just couldn't deal with the constant rehashing of "these are the rules/guidelines, they are displayed prominently on all relevant pages" on every single AfD, as well as the stupid drama and the infinite patience the community had with clear vandals ("*USER* IS A FAGGOT NIGGER" = "Please do not make test edits outside of the sandbox"). Users whine about having their 5 page manuscript on their cat's behaviors deleted as a ten second destruction of all their hard work but show total disregard for the infinitely more people patrolling New Pages, AfD, PROD, etc's time being wasted. This is mostly because the system has been built up to have multiple levels of redundant band-aid processes. For example, there are three ways to delete an article:
If it meets certain criteria that apply to a lot of unsuitable pages, you can "speedy delete" it - since you're not supposed to tag anything if it doesn't clearly meet those criteria, deleting the tag itself is an act of vandalism, you're supposed to copy paste a {{hangon}} template and then justify your reasoning on the talk page. This never works: editors misapply the tag repeatedly, users don't bother to read the template or don't have enough time to write out anything detailed because the article will be deleted quickly.
Then you've got PROD, which is speedy-lite: you tag it, give a short justification, and if the thing isn't "challenged" by the article's creator or anyone else by removing it, it's deleted after a set period. If it is, you're supposed to always take it to AfD, but many people will just give up because nominating something for AfD is a 15 step process which involves collecting rare plants and taking them to seven pillars, then casting a spell and defeating a goblin in hand to hand combat. People don't browse the PROD queue, so the only people that end up taking off the tag are...surprise! The original creator of the article! PROD is essentially just a series of bets that the original creator won't delete the tag and take it to AfD before the time expires, and the admin isn't tired enough from deleting crap all day that they'll agree with the justification.
And then there's Articles for Deletion, which consists halfway of stuff that should be handled through either of the two above processes (if they worked properly), short vanity articles that end up having one or two "delete" comments and then are closed, or spiral into large debates in which each editor's opinion is supposed to not be a "vote", but if the closing admin rejects a pure tally, always seem to agree with toward the most simplified, spoon-fed argument. As mentioned above, nominating one is a rather tiring and complex set of edits which involves making three separate template changes on three separate pages, putting in a arbitrary "category" that is never useful to anyone, and writing a hopefully detailed summary of why it should go poof at the same time. This is "Web 2.0", right? Why can't I click a box or a dropdown? Is this a modified "security through obscurity" thing where deletionism is purposefully put through so many different steps that nominating a sequence of articles (never try to nominate more than once at a time, the syntax is a nightmare) is discouraged with the time-wasting complexity of it?
Plenty of this relies on templates and user-mediated process that would be made completely moot overnight if the MediaWiki developers got off their asses and started working on and implementing features that go beyond "flagged revisions" such as tagging articles for deletion via a tab and dropdown menu, then putting "speedy" articles in a queue where one or two other editors give it a check to make sure it's properly tagged and the article goes poof (without an administrator needin
but if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source
I've always wanted to cite a tertiary source in my papers! The licensing system is truly all that stood between me and improper usage of a collective summary, rather than following the Wikipedia summary to articles it references! Thank you!
Bennett, please remove head from ass. When you're discussing endlessly complex open licensing, the least you could do is understand the basics of how encyclopedias are designed to work.
Unless there is a massive reduction in CAS latency or something (much more than this), "fast" memory speeds mean absolutely nothing. This is nothing but a slashvertisement. Wake me up when it's $40.
I played WoW for about a month and got tired of the endless do-nothing quests, the generic storyline, and the shallow play.
WAR has its share of the same issues, but it has plenty of ways to ameliorate PvE grind - if you're sent to kill a certain amount of something, you don't have to loot the corpse and you won't randomly run into a "something" that doesn't have the item you're looking for, the "chapter" system makes quests feel like you're actually in a storyline rather than doing a bunch of odd jobs, and the classes feel significantly different. There are some leveling troughs but those are most likely because there were few players during the Head Start phase.
But I think the most important thing it's done is the Public Quests, which allow people to jump into events in groups and play as a team without joining guilds or queueing up. They're easy to enter and leave, they're fun, they're innately cooperative, and the random generator for loot as well as the influence rewards mean that if you spend a half hour playing them you're bound to get a ton of stuff.
For me, the PQs feel more like a typical online team-play game and much less like a MMO, especially with the fast hitting attack classes like Witch Elves. If I can have a bit of Counter-Strike in my MMORPG, that's always a nice change of pace. They have some issues, primarily with scaling (few players typically means really hard boss characters that are impossible to defeat in small groups, wasting a lot of time and effort), but so far I've had a great time.
But MMGW strikes me as entirely wasted effort when, in practice, we should be pushing to stabilise the population of our planet by strict birth-control enforcement globally. Do you not find it hypocritical that politicians in rich countries don't push for this?
Hmm, because rich countries have birth rates well below replacement rate and they're more in danger of underpopulation in the long run perhaps?
You're not getting what I'm arguing. If Stardock wants to do this instead of DRMing the game itself that's fine. The problem I have is when Stardock is held up as one of the "good guys" in the industry when they are doing the same thing as every other company is doing in a slightly different way. If they were, they would have none of this crap (i.e. the system they had pre-SOASE 1.1/Impulse): whether that's a legitimate business model is probably arguable, but it's what is being parroted nearly everywhere. "Oh, Stardock doesn't have any DRM and they don't think piracy is a big deal oh and they have the same view on this as the average informed user does!" is misleading.
It also forces everyone to install the bloated client, an issue in itself. This happened with Steam a while back: Valve gradually brought on new users through mandatory Steam installs. The merits of that can be debated, but I'm not fine with software X that wants to install unrelated software Y onto my machine (and it's against precedent: remember unchecking the "Install GameSpy Arcade!" boxes in setup?). That's quasi-adware and a hypothetical path for whatever the hell the company wants to shove in the client down the road.
As a corporation myself, I'll gladly pay for it. Boy, it's sure a good thing everyone signs their companies up for Slashdot accounts.
Or, you know, the fact that they offer an entire digital-download service that services thousands with games commonly over a gigabyte might provide a helpful clue into their ability to serve data commonly. Next on the white-knight brigade, lack of physical media option in new EA best-seller defended by Internet poster as "just a way for them not to have to pay the enormous shipping costs!", at 11.
Yes, because 10mb patches take so much bandwidth. I'm sure it wasn't piracy hurting them, just all those pirates downloading patches! How dare they.
If the unpatched game was functional, the argument might have merit. However, you and your roommates were the exception - plenty of paying customers had sync errors and crashes.
I don't give a shit if they want to implement whatever DRM they want. I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that white-knighting them as a savior of the gaming industry as they do that is stupid beyond belief.
I think we're talking more the 8600 esque chips. The only reason these older cards are performing well within spec to the newer ones is because app writers (esp. games) are focusing very heavily on optimization, counter to what the "PC GAMING IS DEAD" trolls might make you believe. Call of Duty 4 runs at an extremely high frame rate on a 6600GT, for christ's sake.
How about a working Check for Updates button? All my copies of 2.0.0.16 say that there are no updates available. Perhaps a one-click solution that actually worked correctly rather than a nag screen to piss off users that _don't_ want to upgrade might be a better solution.
Slashdot Mirror
A depressing The Killers cover about a cheating ex-girlfriend to the video of a cute little RC car? Talk about a buzz kill.
I'm not from anything. It's literally Oblivion with guns. And a combat system that gives you a 2% percentage to hit if you're more than two inches from your target.
Smells like a plot. Remember, neither really make any sense with respect to the version history of the two companies' products.
It's the same thing. With guns.
There's a neat modification for Jedi Academy called ModWooty, the lead programmer has two bots that seem to scrape users' conversations and frequently talk to each other. It's convincing enough that plenty of players end up believing they're human.
Karn : wtf how u so big mod?
McWooty (Admin) : im big cause im level 100+
McWooty (Admin) : snake rejoin or face moot and slapspam
Karn : lol im nooby i just got this game how do u reach 100
McWooty (Admin) : no you didnt
Karn : ?
McWooty (Admin) : uve hardely been on./
Karn : what
McWooty (Admin) : he copies other peoples conversations
McWooty (Admin) : lol
Bride of Ms. Wooty : i frogot
Emerican : can i be admin???
~Bride of Ms. Wooty : no
Emerican : you just said yes though... =(
McWooty (Admin) : But your saying ur on other games
Emerican : wha??
Emerican : this is stupid
Emerican : VERY stupid
McWooty (Admin) : very very very
Emerican : yes
McWooty (Admin) : i told it to you your problem is the recover
McWooty (Admin) : tha made no sense.
Emerican : can you at least give me powers or something?
McWooty (Admin) : ur like uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Emerican : ????????????????
~Bride of Ms. Wooty : OWNED
~Bride of Ms. Wooty : once again
Emerican : fine im leaving
~Bride of Ms. Wooty : lol
hadowK : are u serious :D ......
hadowK : can we just play?
McWooty (Admin) :
hadowK : ???
McWooty (Admin) : nvm
McWooty (Admin) : no 1
hadowK : um can u guys fight?
McWooty (Admin) : don't know what you know
hadowK : BYE N00BS
hadowK : u dont know how to run a server
McWooty (Admin) :
Bride of Ms. Wooty : =)
cool i really needed to know about your sexual fetishes in a discussion on slashdot about software thanks for sharing
That may be true but consider the likelihood of those predisposed to certain genetic disorders to reproduce - some of them will be committed to hospitals for the rest of their life, some will die young, some will simply be shunned by members of the opposite sex as having baggage or something. Many members of the given population may end up reproducing, but if the net rate is lower than average, the trait will eventually become more rare regardless.
I would submit that in fact more attractive people do end up having more children on average, for example. As long as that continues to happen, "natural selection" is still in play. It's just shifted from the unfit dying to the unfit not having as many children.
Hey, you shouldn't be so disrespectful. John McCain couldn't draw cave paintings of lions attacking his tribe for five years.
That phrase was spawned by Encyclopedia Dramatica. Even if 4chan was around back then (it wasn't), it wouldn't have mattered.
I knew this post would come up, the Mac fanboys always make at least one of these when anything vaguely referencing a new game is posted. The argument is always "it's gaining marketshare!" - yeah, call me when it has. If it would make them money, they would do it. Obviously the marketshare isn't there.
When Final Cut Pro and all the other Apple software runs on Windows, maybe that argument will have merit. When running a game that doesn't run on OSX means dual-booting a $100 OS, but running specialized Apple software means buying a $1000+ piece of hardware, it doesn't work so well.
Oh man, they should do this more often. Bring everyone who names their character something obscene to court too.
"I HAVE BEEN A LOYAL USER OF BRAND X, BUT ALL OF BRAND X'S CHIPS SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTED WITHIN 24 HOURS. I BOUGHT A BRAND Y CHIP AND I HAVE BEEN RUNNING IT FOR AT LEAST 100 YEARS WITHOUT ANY PROBLEMS"
Do you realize how many people spout this exact same thing on both sides? It's a completely meaningless, stupid metric because 1. graphics cards don't usually just die and 2. changes between generations are so massive that even if one had a known failure due to heat or something it would be accounted for in the next generation.
These card brands mean absolutely nothing. I swear, we need to start some double blind testing on the population at large and just start marketing them under those who license and produce the design (Sapphire, Powercolor, etc). I'm tired of running into silicon fanboys.
An excuse to continually ignore usability, something which many in the software industry already do a pretty good job of doing. Maybe 2009 will be the year of the Linux desktop..or maybe not.
I hope we don't get drawn into a conflict with the Confederacy of Independent Systems.
10 WHY IS WIKIPEDIA SO INACCURATE
20 "Well, let me just delete all the unsourced material to leave it with a balanced summ-"
30 NO STOP DELETING STUFF KEEP IT IN I CANT BELIEVE YOU EVIL DELETIONISTS WANT TO DESTROY ALL MY HARD WORK
40 GOTO 10
I was an editor there for a while until I just couldn't deal with the constant rehashing of "these are the rules/guidelines, they are displayed prominently on all relevant pages" on every single AfD, as well as the stupid drama and the infinite patience the community had with clear vandals ("*USER* IS A FAGGOT NIGGER" = "Please do not make test edits outside of the sandbox"). Users whine about having their 5 page manuscript on their cat's behaviors deleted as a ten second destruction of all their hard work but show total disregard for the infinitely more people patrolling New Pages, AfD, PROD, etc's time being wasted. This is mostly because the system has been built up to have multiple levels of redundant band-aid processes. For example, there are three ways to delete an article:
If it meets certain criteria that apply to a lot of unsuitable pages, you can "speedy delete" it - since you're not supposed to tag anything if it doesn't clearly meet those criteria, deleting the tag itself is an act of vandalism, you're supposed to copy paste a {{hangon}} template and then justify your reasoning on the talk page. This never works: editors misapply the tag repeatedly, users don't bother to read the template or don't have enough time to write out anything detailed because the article will be deleted quickly.
Then you've got PROD, which is speedy-lite: you tag it, give a short justification, and if the thing isn't "challenged" by the article's creator or anyone else by removing it, it's deleted after a set period. If it is, you're supposed to always take it to AfD, but many people will just give up because nominating something for AfD is a 15 step process which involves collecting rare plants and taking them to seven pillars, then casting a spell and defeating a goblin in hand to hand combat. People don't browse the PROD queue, so the only people that end up taking off the tag are...surprise! The original creator of the article! PROD is essentially just a series of bets that the original creator won't delete the tag and take it to AfD before the time expires, and the admin isn't tired enough from deleting crap all day that they'll agree with the justification.
And then there's Articles for Deletion, which consists halfway of stuff that should be handled through either of the two above processes (if they worked properly), short vanity articles that end up having one or two "delete" comments and then are closed, or spiral into large debates in which each editor's opinion is supposed to not be a "vote", but if the closing admin rejects a pure tally, always seem to agree with toward the most simplified, spoon-fed argument. As mentioned above, nominating one is a rather tiring and complex set of edits which involves making three separate template changes on three separate pages, putting in a arbitrary "category" that is never useful to anyone, and writing a hopefully detailed summary of why it should go poof at the same time. This is "Web 2.0", right? Why can't I click a box or a dropdown? Is this a modified "security through obscurity" thing where deletionism is purposefully put through so many different steps that nominating a sequence of articles (never try to nominate more than once at a time, the syntax is a nightmare) is discouraged with the time-wasting complexity of it?
Plenty of this relies on templates and user-mediated process that would be made completely moot overnight if the MediaWiki developers got off their asses and started working on and implementing features that go beyond "flagged revisions" such as tagging articles for deletion via a tab and dropdown menu, then putting "speedy" articles in a queue where one or two other editors give it a check to make sure it's properly tagged and the article goes poof (without an administrator needin
I've always wanted to cite a tertiary source in my papers! The licensing system is truly all that stood between me and improper usage of a collective summary, rather than following the Wikipedia summary to articles it references! Thank you!
Bennett, please remove head from ass. When you're discussing endlessly complex open licensing, the least you could do is understand the basics of how encyclopedias are designed to work.
...when I'm upping my FSB to 900mhz...oh wait.
Unless there is a massive reduction in CAS latency or something (much more than this), "fast" memory speeds mean absolutely nothing. This is nothing but a slashvertisement. Wake me up when it's $40.
I played WoW for about a month and got tired of the endless do-nothing quests, the generic storyline, and the shallow play.
WAR has its share of the same issues, but it has plenty of ways to ameliorate PvE grind - if you're sent to kill a certain amount of something, you don't have to loot the corpse and you won't randomly run into a "something" that doesn't have the item you're looking for, the "chapter" system makes quests feel like you're actually in a storyline rather than doing a bunch of odd jobs, and the classes feel significantly different. There are some leveling troughs but those are most likely because there were few players during the Head Start phase.
But I think the most important thing it's done is the Public Quests, which allow people to jump into events in groups and play as a team without joining guilds or queueing up. They're easy to enter and leave, they're fun, they're innately cooperative, and the random generator for loot as well as the influence rewards mean that if you spend a half hour playing them you're bound to get a ton of stuff.
For me, the PQs feel more like a typical online team-play game and much less like a MMO, especially with the fast hitting attack classes like Witch Elves. If I can have a bit of Counter-Strike in my MMORPG, that's always a nice change of pace. They have some issues, primarily with scaling (few players typically means really hard boss characters that are impossible to defeat in small groups, wasting a lot of time and effort), but so far I've had a great time.
Hmm, because rich countries have birth rates well below replacement rate and they're more in danger of underpopulation in the long run perhaps?
You're not getting what I'm arguing. If Stardock wants to do this instead of DRMing the game itself that's fine. The problem I have is when Stardock is held up as one of the "good guys" in the industry when they are doing the same thing as every other company is doing in a slightly different way. If they were, they would have none of this crap (i.e. the system they had pre-SOASE 1.1/Impulse): whether that's a legitimate business model is probably arguable, but it's what is being parroted nearly everywhere. "Oh, Stardock doesn't have any DRM and they don't think piracy is a big deal oh and they have the same view on this as the average informed user does!" is misleading.
It also forces everyone to install the bloated client, an issue in itself. This happened with Steam a while back: Valve gradually brought on new users through mandatory Steam installs. The merits of that can be debated, but I'm not fine with software X that wants to install unrelated software Y onto my machine (and it's against precedent: remember unchecking the "Install GameSpy Arcade!" boxes in setup?). That's quasi-adware and a hypothetical path for whatever the hell the company wants to shove in the client down the road.
As a corporation myself, I'll gladly pay for it. Boy, it's sure a good thing everyone signs their companies up for Slashdot accounts.
Or, you know, the fact that they offer an entire digital-download service that services thousands with games commonly over a gigabyte might provide a helpful clue into their ability to serve data commonly. Next on the white-knight brigade, lack of physical media option in new EA best-seller defended by Internet poster as "just a way for them not to have to pay the enormous shipping costs!", at 11.
Yes, because 10mb patches take so much bandwidth. I'm sure it wasn't piracy hurting them, just all those pirates downloading patches! How dare they.
If the unpatched game was functional, the argument might have merit. However, you and your roommates were the exception - plenty of paying customers had sync errors and crashes.
I don't give a shit if they want to implement whatever DRM they want. I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that white-knighting them as a savior of the gaming industry as they do that is stupid beyond belief.
Not locking your customers into proprietary software just to update their game.
Oh wait.
I think we're talking more the 8600 esque chips. The only reason these older cards are performing well within spec to the newer ones is because app writers (esp. games) are focusing very heavily on optimization, counter to what the "PC GAMING IS DEAD" trolls might make you believe. Call of Duty 4 runs at an extremely high frame rate on a 6600GT, for christ's sake.
How about a working Check for Updates button? All my copies of 2.0.0.16 say that there are no updates available. Perhaps a one-click solution that actually worked correctly rather than a nag screen to piss off users that _don't_ want to upgrade might be a better solution.