The idea of "grinding," or having a player repeat certain actions to reach a certain achievement in a game, has a generally unfavorable reputation. At best, grinding is relaxing or unnoticeable, but at worse, it is tedious, boring, or even addictive (in a very negative way).
When the selling point of a competitor's product, such as Warhammer Online, is the fact that it promises less grinding, I think something seriously strange is going on in the MMOG world.
My questions:
1. What has Blizzard learned about grinding through its previous products, like The Burning Crusade's diverse supply or reputation awards? Will this experience be reflected in future products, and if so, what ways?
2. Casual players, by and large, avoid grinding. Do you develop a game with two types of players in mind (casual and hardcore), or do you focus on one and provide concessions to the other?
3. Is the elimination of grinding a worthy goal for MMOGs? Is it even possible? If so, what forms would it take?
However, Diablo II doesn't recognize some of the additional buttons on my mouse; I find that a tad annoying.
Find a program like Logitech's SetPoint that will allow you to remap the mouse keys to some obscure keyboard command that the program recognizes but never uses, like CTRL+SHIFT+ScrollLock, or ALT+F11 instead of Mouse7. With SetPoint, at least, you can even have the mappings changed based on the specific application being run.
For instance, I use a thumb button on my mouse to activate the Ventrilo push-to-talk key. I found that the button (Mouse4 or something) also activates the "Web Page Forward" function in Firefox, so I would lose my place if I had to talk to someone in Ventrilo while surfing the web. (I couldn't figure out how to turn the hot-key off in Firefox without some unnecessary hacking around with config files or source code, I think).
My solution was to remap that key to Scroll Lock, a key that Ventrilo recognized, but nearly no other Windows application had anything to do with. Ditto for a few other buttons on my mouse.
There might be a simpler, less hacky solutions, but so far the only problem I've had is the green light on my keyboard for Scroll Lock distracting me while playing a game.:P
---
Anyway, I think it comes down to a problem with the communication between OS devs, peripheral devs, and app devs on a standard to use for the simple task of assigning keys. But it's not so simple when you realize how diverse of a selection of peripherals we have, and how as soon as we nail down one idea (Mouse with two buttons, plus mousewheel is the PERFECT mouse!), another more interesting one comes into being (Mouse with two buttons, plus mousewheel, plus you can CLICK that mousewheel for a third button!). It's the evolution of ideas that throws the whole "standards" thing into chaos.
As soon as someone says, "Well, let's just give the OS 99 buttons to play with, more than any mouse could possibly have...", you'll have a developer that co-opts the mouse functionality within an OS to create a cyber-glove with over 100 points of articulation. And these aren't just on/off states, but rather they're a series of pressure points, so the functionality you reached in previously-developed apps either have to be reclaimed with a patch or additional emulation. And so on.
I guess my whole point is that it's not just the devs of Diablo who are to blame for the gaming community's lack of standards for key and mouse button assignments.
The state of electronic voting in the last eight years has been a state of uncertainty. Amidst accusations of scandal and neglect, the American people have lost faith in the idea that their votes are being handled properly. The current administration has done little to ease these tensions, and current prospects are disappointing.
As president, what will you do to restore voters' confidence in the integrity, privacy, and accuracy of their votes?
Yep, as long as your foes are the vile, immoral, baby-eating minions of evil that you envision them to be, then clearly reasoned debate has no place here. Shades of gray have no sway in a monochromatic worldview. Someone has to be the good guy, and someone has to be the bad guy, just like they were in the cartoons of my youth.
Seriously, some of Deepak's later stuff has been a bit fluffy, but his earlier publishings were very informative to students of both New Age philosophy and energy work. He explained the chakras and personal energy fields very well. I have spoken to Reiki masters who cite his work, Wiccans(and other occultists) who have improved their magics from learning energy control, and Martial artists who have improved their skills through better visualization of their chi/ki just to name a few . All thanks to Deepak.
Fluffy? Man... here I thought a friend of mine who claimed to see auras in badly-compressed JPEGs was... fluffy.
Meh... it's 2008. Who manually types in domain names anymore?
I'll admit, it took me a while to start omitting the "http://www..." part, but as soon as I switched to Firefox, I very quickly gave up on typing out full or even partial domain names. I fully abuse Firefox's "awesome bar" to get me where I want without having to remember whether the site I need used a.org,.cc,.com, or.net, whether there were deliberate misspellings or additional words in the domain name, or other such arbitrary designations.
Here's my point. If you type "Chicago 2016" into a search bar (Firefox uses Google by default), you will find relevant Olympic information *in context*, if not an official website! There is a much lower chance of stumbling onto a misleading page, designed by someone who managed to snag an arbitrary domain name first, because a search will show you a community consensus of what the "real" sites are ("Google bombs" and the like notwithstanding, though they remain an important counter-argument to my case).
Hopefully you already know this stuff, but show it to a non-techie friend or a family member sometime. It'll blow their minds ("Are you hungry? Why don't you type 'Pizza hut' into this bar here...). Plus it'll save you from having to clean all the adware and pornware they would have otherwise got by wandering onto onto the wrong page and clicking one too many false links (try pizzahut.net).
There's no reason to randomly try domain names when half the Internet is already indexed for you. Cybersquatting should be obsolete.
I mean this is a great world, it's fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, 'well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in' and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says 'So who made this then?' Who made this? - you can see why it's a treacherous question. Early man thinks, 'Well, because there's only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's probably male'. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , 'If he made it, what did he make it for?' Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, 'This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely' and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
Even a perfect optical cloak would still be detectable in many ways...
Very clever list of suggestions, but you forgot the most obvious one: a tachyon detection grid. If it worked for Geordi La Forge, it damn well works for me.
All these posts and not one (moderated) person mentions the new episodic Sam & Max games! I bought them all and absolutely adore them.
The story is ridiculous and over-the-top, and they have stylish graphics that don't need the latest hardware to run.
They're not very hard as far as adventure games go, but if you find a segment challenging, in Season 2 you can turn on an in-game hint function. If you do that, Max will usually spit out something like, "I'm bored. Let's go back to the office," which generally doesn't automatically spoil the next part of the mission, but points you in the right direction. Much better than alt+tabbing for GameFAQs.
Simple. Controller explodes, forcing the physical human to assume a new stance. Then he buys another controller and starts all over again. That'll teach that pesky human.
While it might be nice to ask everyone to text in their vote on every decision the government made, it wouldn't really be practical.
Nor is posting ideas on Slashdot stories, but somehow we all find the time to do it.
I'm tired of looking at politicians as "issue bundles," like a hamburger selection from a menu. You get a little of this, you like the taste of that, but you'd rather they left out the mayonnaise. So it devolves into red-state ketchup lovers battling blue-state mustard aficionados squared across the dinner table, but still nobody's too keen about that mayonnaise, and while we're on it, there's a bunch of mustard-lovers who are thinking about trying the third-party sandwich that wants to remove onions from the menu, but most of those disaffected mustard-lovers are still not so sure about his position on removing the pickles as well...
Let's just create our own sandwiches so we can Have It Your Way(tm).
And I would support any moves toward a techno-democracy, such as online voting and centralized discussion mediums, that put out more referendums and limit an elected representative's control on the whole process.
When does stopping spyware on your parents' computer become a means of encouraging solidarity rather than a personal privacy concern? (When) Will American companies realize that security vulnerabilities they introduce may impact the viability of the market that sustains them?
When will downloading pr0n become the patriot thing to do?
When can I start breaking tech equipment from Taiwan with a big AMERICAN baseball bat*?
When will flaming YouTube videos made by guys with Arab usernames become my national duty?
Though it helps to remember that casino poker isn't zero sum. The house shaves off a few percentage points every pot, so in a game of equally skilled players iterated a million times, I would think only the house would be showing a substantial profit. Everyone else would be significantly less well off.
I don't know much about poker probabilities, but it seems to me that really good players would do best by staying away from other good players, unless a large jackpot exists to offset the house's gain (like you see on TV). I'm sure the house pulls in more money from advertising deals and publicity stunts, rather than from the high-rollers, in such cases.
What you're describing (advocating) is not evolution, but unfortunate mutations in the gene pool. Mother Nature, however, has other plans. If the process of natural selection doesn't take care of the problem, then my guess is that selective breeding (refusing to date retards, morons, and pathological illiterates) will.
I think somebody is kinda irked about losing, like, a spelling bee or something. I dunno.
Why does everybody always say this, hinting about the possibility of conspiracy theory cover-ups and withheld cures? Why is it so hard to believe that some people actually are searching for cures?
If a company develops a cure for AIDS, cancer, or the common cold, then it stands to reason that the company is going to make a lot of money. While other companies are bumbling around with "treatments" and "therapies," this company is going to make a lot of short-term profit, and with the help of a patent office (or whatever equivalent), AFAIK they'll retain that virtual monopoly for decades to come.
And if you can count on capitalism for anything, it's short-term gains.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of "grinding," or having a player repeat certain actions to reach a certain achievement in a game, has a generally unfavorable reputation. At best, grinding is relaxing or unnoticeable, but at worse, it is tedious, boring, or even addictive (in a very negative way).
When the selling point of a competitor's product, such as Warhammer Online, is the fact that it promises less grinding, I think something seriously strange is going on in the MMOG world.
My questions:
1. What has Blizzard learned about grinding through its previous products, like The Burning Crusade's diverse supply or reputation awards? Will this experience be reflected in future products, and if so, what ways?
2. Casual players, by and large, avoid grinding. Do you develop a game with two types of players in mind (casual and hardcore), or do you focus on one and provide concessions to the other?
3. Is the elimination of grinding a worthy goal for MMOGs? Is it even possible? If so, what forms would it take?
However, Diablo II doesn't recognize some of the additional buttons on my mouse; I find that a tad annoying.
Find a program like Logitech's SetPoint that will allow you to remap the mouse keys to some obscure keyboard command that the program recognizes but never uses, like CTRL+SHIFT+ScrollLock, or ALT+F11 instead of Mouse7. With SetPoint, at least, you can even have the mappings changed based on the specific application being run.
For instance, I use a thumb button on my mouse to activate the Ventrilo push-to-talk key. I found that the button (Mouse4 or something) also activates the "Web Page Forward" function in Firefox, so I would lose my place if I had to talk to someone in Ventrilo while surfing the web. (I couldn't figure out how to turn the hot-key off in Firefox without some unnecessary hacking around with config files or source code, I think).
My solution was to remap that key to Scroll Lock, a key that Ventrilo recognized, but nearly no other Windows application had anything to do with. Ditto for a few other buttons on my mouse.
There might be a simpler, less hacky solutions, but so far the only problem I've had is the green light on my keyboard for Scroll Lock distracting me while playing a game. :P
---
Anyway, I think it comes down to a problem with the communication between OS devs, peripheral devs, and app devs on a standard to use for the simple task of assigning keys. But it's not so simple when you realize how diverse of a selection of peripherals we have, and how as soon as we nail down one idea (Mouse with two buttons, plus mousewheel is the PERFECT mouse!), another more interesting one comes into being (Mouse with two buttons, plus mousewheel, plus you can CLICK that mousewheel for a third button!). It's the evolution of ideas that throws the whole "standards" thing into chaos.
As soon as someone says, "Well, let's just give the OS 99 buttons to play with, more than any mouse could possibly have...", you'll have a developer that co-opts the mouse functionality within an OS to create a cyber-glove with over 100 points of articulation. And these aren't just on/off states, but rather they're a series of pressure points, so the functionality you reached in previously-developed apps either have to be reclaimed with a patch or additional emulation. And so on.
I guess my whole point is that it's not just the devs of Diablo who are to blame for the gaming community's lack of standards for key and mouse button assignments.
I like Wikis.
Haven't used it in a while, but I used PBWiki to organize all of my online table-top RPGs.
To both:
The state of electronic voting in the last eight years has been a state of uncertainty. Amidst accusations of scandal and neglect, the American people have lost faith in the idea that their votes are being handled properly. The current administration has done little to ease these tensions, and current prospects are disappointing.
As president, what will you do to restore voters' confidence in the integrity, privacy, and accuracy of their votes?
Yep, as long as your foes are the vile, immoral, baby-eating minions of evil that you envision them to be, then clearly reasoned debate has no place here. Shades of gray have no sway in a monochromatic worldview. Someone has to be the good guy, and someone has to be the bad guy, just like they were in the cartoons of my youth.
You just made my day. Thank you.
Seriously, some of Deepak's later stuff has been a bit fluffy, but his earlier publishings were very informative to students of both New Age philosophy and energy work. He explained the chakras and personal energy fields very well. I have spoken to Reiki masters who cite his work, Wiccans(and other occultists) who have improved their magics from learning energy control, and Martial artists who have improved their skills through better visualization of their chi/ki just to name a few . All thanks to Deepak.
Fluffy? Man... here I thought a friend of mine who claimed to see auras in badly-compressed JPEGs was... fluffy.
Meh... it's 2008. Who manually types in domain names anymore?
I'll admit, it took me a while to start omitting the "http://www..." part, but as soon as I switched to Firefox, I very quickly gave up on typing out full or even partial domain names. I fully abuse Firefox's "awesome bar" to get me where I want without having to remember whether the site I need used a .org, .cc, .com, or .net, whether there were deliberate misspellings or additional words in the domain name, or other such arbitrary designations.
Here's my point. If you type "Chicago 2016" into a search bar (Firefox uses Google by default), you will find relevant Olympic information *in context*, if not an official website! There is a much lower chance of stumbling onto a misleading page, designed by someone who managed to snag an arbitrary domain name first, because a search will show you a community consensus of what the "real" sites are ("Google bombs" and the like notwithstanding, though they remain an important counter-argument to my case).
Hopefully you already know this stuff, but show it to a non-techie friend or a family member sometime. It'll blow their minds ("Are you hungry? Why don't you type 'Pizza hut' into this bar here...). Plus it'll save you from having to clean all the adware and pornware they would have otherwise got by wandering onto onto the wrong page and clicking one too many false links (try pizzahut.net).
There's no reason to randomly try domain names when half the Internet is already indexed for you. Cybersquatting should be obsolete.
Just like my momma always told me, and this goes doubly for the members of the multiverse...
"You're SPECIAL... you're UNIQUE...
Just like everybody else."
From Douglas Adams:
I mean this is a great world, it's fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, 'well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in' and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says 'So who made this then?' Who made this? - you can see why it's a treacherous question. Early man thinks, 'Well, because there's only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's probably male'. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , 'If he made it, what did he make it for?' Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, 'This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely' and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
Even a perfect optical cloak would still be detectable in many ways...
Very clever list of suggestions, but you forgot the most obvious one: a tachyon detection grid. If it worked for Geordi La Forge, it damn well works for me.
Why doesn't NASA brief someone who might actually do something about this potentially reality-altering news? Someone like, I dunno, Will Wright?
All these posts and not one (moderated) person mentions the new episodic Sam & Max games! I bought them all and absolutely adore them.
The story is ridiculous and over-the-top, and they have stylish graphics that don't need the latest hardware to run.
They're not very hard as far as adventure games go, but if you find a segment challenging, in Season 2 you can turn on an in-game hint function. If you do that, Max will usually spit out something like, "I'm bored. Let's go back to the office," which generally doesn't automatically spoil the next part of the mission, but points you in the right direction. Much better than alt+tabbing for GameFAQs.
Don't they call those "replicators"?
Simple. Controller explodes, forcing the physical human to assume a new stance. Then he buys another controller and starts all over again. That'll teach that pesky human.
Well, I for one welcome our snooty, buzz-killing overlords.
Change your name to something more unique (try to throw in a few numbers).
Leave the country. Try for one of those places without computers. Solitary islands work best.
Have some reconstructive surgery. It is important that your face is altered, but if other parts of your body need work, well, that's your call.
Buy a big fluffy white cat. Not optional.
Design a plan... to take over the world...
They had no problem getting the domains back. They just kept saying to themselves, "I think ICANN! I think ICANN!"
While it might be nice to ask everyone to text in their vote on every decision the government made, it wouldn't really be practical.
Nor is posting ideas on Slashdot stories, but somehow we all find the time to do it.
I'm tired of looking at politicians as "issue bundles," like a hamburger selection from a menu. You get a little of this, you like the taste of that, but you'd rather they left out the mayonnaise. So it devolves into red-state ketchup lovers battling blue-state mustard aficionados squared across the dinner table, but still nobody's too keen about that mayonnaise, and while we're on it, there's a bunch of mustard-lovers who are thinking about trying the third-party sandwich that wants to remove onions from the menu, but most of those disaffected mustard-lovers are still not so sure about his position on removing the pickles as well...
Let's just create our own sandwiches so we can Have It Your Way(tm).
And I would support any moves toward a techno-democracy, such as online voting and centralized discussion mediums, that put out more referendums and limit an elected representative's control on the whole process.
Man, I'm hungry all of a sudden.
When does stopping spyware on your parents' computer become a means of encouraging solidarity rather than a personal privacy concern? (When) Will American companies realize that security vulnerabilities they introduce may impact the viability of the market that sustains them?
When will downloading pr0n become the patriot thing to do?
When can I start breaking tech equipment from Taiwan with a big AMERICAN baseball bat*?
When will flaming YouTube videos made by guys with Arab usernames become my national duty?
*(Made in China.)
Though it helps to remember that casino poker isn't zero sum. The house shaves off a few percentage points every pot, so in a game of equally skilled players iterated a million times, I would think only the house would be showing a substantial profit. Everyone else would be significantly less well off.
I don't know much about poker probabilities, but it seems to me that really good players would do best by staying away from other good players, unless a large jackpot exists to offset the house's gain (like you see on TV). I'm sure the house pulls in more money from advertising deals and publicity stunts, rather than from the high-rollers, in such cases.
I'm so glad that I was too lazy to upgrade from 7.5, even though everytime I boot up it asks me to download 8.0.
Meh, is a virus scanner even worth worrying about anymore? I stopped downloading free cursor packs when I was in elementary school, anyway...
What you're describing (advocating) is not evolution, but unfortunate mutations in the gene pool. Mother Nature, however, has other plans. If the process of natural selection doesn't take care of the problem, then my guess is that selective breeding (refusing to date retards, morons, and pathological illiterates) will.
I think somebody is kinda irked about losing, like, a spelling bee or something. I dunno.
Hey, fuck you too.
What are we talking about again?
Why does everybody always say this, hinting about the possibility of conspiracy theory cover-ups and withheld cures? Why is it so hard to believe that some people actually are searching for cures?
If a company develops a cure for AIDS, cancer, or the common cold, then it stands to reason that the company is going to make a lot of money. While other companies are bumbling around with "treatments" and "therapies," this company is going to make a lot of short-term profit, and with the help of a patent office (or whatever equivalent), AFAIK they'll retain that virtual monopoly for decades to come.
And if you can count on capitalism for anything, it's short-term gains.