Although not the worst MMO I've ever played, I tired of WAR pretty quickly. Kept my subscription going for 1 month after the free one and found that I logged in only twice that month. I think I just got burned out on MMO's, went from WoW in 2004 to LoTRO, to EVE, to AOC and finally to WAR.
What killed the game for me were a few factors:
1) Everyone who came into the game came with at least a couple of friends/family, who then proceeded to grind quests and mobs at lightning pace all the while ignoring my attempts to join their group. A rude, flat answer I often got was: "This is a closed group". These people wouldn't even join a Public group if I started one and begged everyone on that PQ to join.
2) Pathetic communication, the chat system sucked pretty bad. Dunno if they have redone it but it was really bad compared to WoW's functionality and ease of use.
3) Major slowdown in experience at around level 13. Unable to find any open groups, I was forced to level solo in most areas and when I hit level 13 it slowed down to a crawl.
4) The influence grind, when I played WAR influence was the best way to get blue weapons and armor. The worst part about it was that every influence mob from level 1 to 40 gave 100 inf. on a kill but the influence requirements in each zone increased with level drastically. The infl. reward should have scaled with the requirement.
5) Near zero PvP outside scenarios. As someone stated earlier, open world RvR has objectives spread out over a large area and it does work cyclically. Order takes 1, destruction moves to 2.. rinse repeat. Anytime an encounter happened it was invariably skewed in numbers to favor one side. An exception was the Festenplatz thingie.. humans and chaos clashing. I had a lot of fun with the constant action, push backs, chases etc. there. That area had a very close spawn point for both parties and objectives were not too far, the rest of Open RvR should have been more like this one.
6) Fortress elite mobs can pretty much one shot you over weird angles that too. I managed to join two different attack groups but both ended pretty much the same way, somehow the mobs get drawn to the lip of the stairwell(they never come downstairs) and aoe the crap out of any group. Plus the lag, even with graphics turned down
7) Some classes are near invincible at certain levels. Tanks and healers, tanks especially take an insane amount of time to die and worse off they can finish you in 4-5 blows. I've held off a group of 6-7 order folks for a solid 10 mins at Ekrund as a black orc with a tiny shaman hiding and healing.
All in all, I couldn't really connect with the game at all, it got boring really fast.
Although not the worst MMO I've ever played, I tired of WAR pretty quickly. Kept my subscription going for 1 month after the free one and found that I logged in only twice that month.
I think I just got burned out on MMO's, went from WoW in 2004 to LoTRO, to EVE, to AOC and finally to WAR.
What killed the game for me were a few factors:
1) Everyone who came into the game came with at least a couple of friends/family, who then proceeded to grind quests and mobs at lightning pace all the while ignoring my attempts to join their group. A rude, flat answer I often got was: "This is a closed group".
These people wouldn't even join a Public group if I started one and begged everyone on that PQ to join.
2) Pathetic communication, the chat system sucked pretty bad. Dunno if they have redone it but it was really bad compared to WoW's functionality and ease of use.
3) Major slowdown in experience at around level 13. Unable to find any open groups, I was forced to level solo in most areas and when I hit level 13 it slowed down to a crawl.
4) The influence grind, when I played WAR influence was the best way to get blue weapons and armor. The worst part about it was that every influence mob from level 1 to 40 gave 100 inf. on a kill but the influence requirements in each zone increased with level drastically. The infl. reward should have scaled with the requirement.
5) Near zero PvP outside scenarios. As someone stated earlier, open world RvR has objectives spread out over a large area and it does work cyclically. Order takes 1, destruction moves to 2.. rinse repeat. Anytime an encounter happened it was invariably skewed in numbers to favor one side. An exception was the Festenplatz thingie.. humans and chaos clashing. I had a lot of fun with the constant action, push backs, chases etc. there. That area had a very close spawn point for both parties and objectives were not too far, the rest of Open RvR should have been more like this one.
6) Fortress elite mobs can pretty much one shot you over weird angles that too. I managed to join two different attack groups but both ended pretty much the same way, somehow the mobs get drawn to the lip of the stairwell(they never come downstairs) and aoe the crap out of any group. Plus the lag, even with graphics turned down
7) Some classes are near invincible at certain levels. Tanks and healers, tanks especially take an insane amount of time to die and worse off they can finish you in 4-5 blows. I've held off a group of 6-7 order folks for a solid 10 mins at Ekrund as a black orc with a tiny shaman hiding and healing.
All in all, I couldn't really connect with the game at all, it got boring really fast.
Software Advocacy has taken a religious form for a good reason.. there is another corporate religious entity that deems all 'free software users' to be demonic spawns of software-satan that'll reduce the computing world to a burning pool of bytes, blood, lava and wooden chairs.
For a long time, folks hadn't even heard of Linux. Those who had deemed it to be some unworkable voodoo that only smelly, greasy geeks could wrap their heads around. It was passed mostly by word-of-mouth at conferences, classes etc. At this point MS wasn't too concerned as it was still in a fledgling state and it required a considerable amount of user tech knowledge to be workable.
FF to the growth in internet bandwidth, fast downloads, more hardware compatibility and instant free forum/chat support and Linux popularity exploded exponentially. Now the balding boys at MS had something to be genuinely concerned about this hairy breed of open source free software hippies. Permanent Linux converts were talking about how fast and stable this system was, how they could do everything they did in Windows except faster and more reliably, how they got rid of the PC chopping axes, how their world is magically covered with flowers and pink ponies etc. etc..
Logically a corporate entity should have gone for aggressive price cuts and quality improvements but they decided to sink their moolah into an aggressive advertisement campaign that tagets all audience from hobos to CEOs.
Open source and free software advocates can stop being religious if the guys in the opposing camp stop brain washing everyone else.
Teachers are also incredibly incapable of 'learning' new stuff, especially technology.
We used to host a 2-week long technology crash course for middle-high school teachers in our university for which I used to be the tech. assistant, around 40 teachers from around the state used to attend to learn some computing basics like Windows, Word, Excel and Powerpoint (obviously this event was sponsored by MS, we even had to erect a Windows banner above the projector panel)
I assisted for 3 conferences and the classes were worse than an inner city high school. Most of the teachers were only there for the extra travel and pay raise that they got out of it. Most didn't bother to listen to the instructor, some didn't even turn their laptops on and the rest who knew 'browsers' were just browsing sports pages on yahoo. In all, out of the 40 I would say only 2-3 were actually paying any attention and the problems I solved for them were genuine problems like text formatting in word, slide timing in powerpoint etc. The rest of them asked me to solve stuff that the instructor had just explained 5 minutes ago in painstaking detail, like how do I create a new document in word?
We should host learning classes for teachers before teaching them any real stuff.
I found prey to be quite nice as a thrilling gateway to swarm theory and complex adaptive systems. I agree most of it was not technically accurate and vastly exaggerated to fit a more thrilling traditional antagonist like character.
However it piqued my interest in group behavior and adaptive systems, I took a few courses offered by a professor at my university who said at the beginning of the class: 'I'm as new to this subject as you, let's learn together', no exams.. just discussions and a project to model emergent behavior. I did one on crime and I was pleasantly surprised that real world models are even crazier than the ones presented in the book, things rarely work as intended. I still continue independent research into adaptive systems as time permits.
Even though it's a work of fiction, I'll dedicate all my future accomplishments(if any) in adaptive systems to Prey and MC.
For example, I'm Jewish. There's nothing to stop me from leaving my temple and joining another. (My wife and I have even discussed this very subject recently.) There's also nothing to stop me from leaving my temple, becoming Christian, and joining a church. (Beyond the fact that the Church's religious beliefs don't match with my own, of course.)
Oh really...
The Torah states:
Deuteronomy 13:6-10:
If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which [is] as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; [Namely], of the gods of the people which [are] round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the [one] end of the earth even unto the [other] end of the earth; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
True, 'Cults' are a term that popular religions use to derogate an uprising religion, just to maintain their own supremacy over the populace.
Every major religion now was a 'Cult' sometime in the past, It just takes a critical mass to convert it into a full-fledged religion.
This should make the Chinese government rethink building safety regulations and add tougher inspection rules before approving any high rises.
I used to live in India where quakes are very commonplace in the northern part of the country. Rampant corruption in the decades past allowed builders to get away with cheap materials and building more floors than their alloted quota. After a lot of collapsed buildings in quakes, the government had to throw in stricter regulations and even knocked down a few illegal high-rises.
It's very sad that China had to go through the same to learn their lesson.
Evolution is a good explanation of "accepted" evidence. One cannot test it, therefore it isn't science.
When you can take a bacteria, and make a mouse using only "natural selection", then I'll accept that you've "tested" evolution.
Now move along.
I suspect I'll be flamed for stating the obvious.
Notice how theists, ID supporters, crackpots and their ilk like to (over)use credibility adding phrases like :
...Now move along.
...I suspect I'll be flamed for stating the obvious.
...and you know it.
As if they have stated an absolute truth. Any attempt to debate or disprove these statements and you're automatically a heathen, moron, spawn of satan, the cause of all misery etc. etc.
The only folks who I've seen reject evolution outright are the ones who've never read it properly and don't want to ever learn about it.
This is science.. this is how it progresses. No one posts a conclusion right at the onset of the problem.
Every scientific 'law' starts out as a theory/hypothesis, scientists set out to prove the theory by means of laboratory experimentation, evidence gathering, consulting various scientists in different fields and then a conclusion may be drawn based on all findings. Even then the conclusion is up for debate/challenges/disproving.
NOTE: Pedophiles who've read just one book in their life are not good sources of information on any subject except youth rectums and the book itself.. Help yourself to a biology book from the local library.
As a long time Anime watcher, I've tried loads of streaming media websites but nothing beats the quality of stage6. I used to watch episodes on youtube, crunchyroll etc. in the worst quality possible until a stage6 turned up in a random search.. Now i only go to another website if stage6 doesn't have what I want.
I was very sad when they announced the site's going to die on thursday.
I looked for 'make a donation' or some similar link to send them money.. Does anyone know if they are taking donations to stay alive? Heck, I wouldn't mind even if they started charging a monthly fee for viewers.
The article didn't say much about storage except 'By separating the database from the rest of the application stack, the nodes remain stateless'. The internet is about data and information rather than applications, sure Web 2.0 bought online apps but a very minor segment of internet users actually access their apps over the internet. Most internet use is still for information.
Maximizing FLOPS in this system might give them extraordinary web server performance, like complex scripts that execute in 5ms but are they creating a potential bottleneck for the computing performance by not paying any attention to data retrieval?
That makes sense, the Earth is only 6000 years old.. which is equivalent to 60 man years.
At age 7000 the Earth will start spewing noxious fumes and it will need a giant catheter to pipe all fluids to outer space.
At age 8000 it will become extremely wobbly, driving off from it's orbit.. some biblical historians also speculate it might smash into mars at this time..
At 9000 light will become extremely dim and the Earth will only see daylight for 2 hrs in a day, the rotation and revolution speeds will slow down to a crawl.. At certain periods of time, it might start hallucinating that it's still 20.. people might see dinosaurs appear and disappear at intervals.
At 10,000, the Earth will stop moving.. it will need pipes from other planets in outer space to keep it moving, albeit very very slowly..
It's during the 10,000 - 11,000 age that the Earth will simply collapse and only leave behind a few remnants of it's internals.. these remnants will then be used by God to create the next earth..
The money-making portion of every religion seems almost the same.. except for the distribution methods each uses.
It seems a bit like selling drugs.. Scientology brings a stash, shows you the goodies and asks for a ridiculous sum of money to get your hands on it.. Christianity on the other hand will distribute free books, dvd's etc. a.k.a 'A free hit' initially then surreptitiously slip in the message.. 'You like what you had, did you? well here's how you can get more.. Jesus camps, creation museums, church donations..'
Slashdot Mirror
Although not the worst MMO I've ever played, I tired of WAR pretty quickly. Kept my subscription going for 1 month after the free one and found that I logged in only twice that month. I think I just got burned out on MMO's, went from WoW in 2004 to LoTRO, to EVE, to AOC and finally to WAR.
What killed the game for me were a few factors:
1) Everyone who came into the game came with at least a couple of friends/family, who then proceeded to grind quests and mobs at lightning pace all the while ignoring my attempts to join their group. A rude, flat answer I often got was: "This is a closed group". These people wouldn't even join a Public group if I started one and begged everyone on that PQ to join.
2) Pathetic communication, the chat system sucked pretty bad. Dunno if they have redone it but it was really bad compared to WoW's functionality and ease of use.
3) Major slowdown in experience at around level 13. Unable to find any open groups, I was forced to level solo in most areas and when I hit level 13 it slowed down to a crawl.
4) The influence grind, when I played WAR influence was the best way to get blue weapons and armor. The worst part about it was that every influence mob from level 1 to 40 gave 100 inf. on a kill but the influence requirements in each zone increased with level drastically. The infl. reward should have scaled with the requirement.
5) Near zero PvP outside scenarios. As someone stated earlier, open world RvR has objectives spread out over a large area and it does work cyclically. Order takes 1, destruction moves to 2.. rinse repeat. Anytime an encounter happened it was invariably skewed in numbers to favor one side. An exception was the Festenplatz thingie.. humans and chaos clashing. I had a lot of fun with the constant action, push backs, chases etc. there. That area had a very close spawn point for both parties and objectives were not too far, the rest of Open RvR should have been more like this one.
6) Fortress elite mobs can pretty much one shot you over weird angles that too. I managed to join two different attack groups but both ended pretty much the same way, somehow the mobs get drawn to the lip of the stairwell(they never come downstairs) and aoe the crap out of any group. Plus the lag, even with graphics turned down
7) Some classes are near invincible at certain levels. Tanks and healers, tanks especially take an insane amount of time to die and worse off they can finish you in 4-5 blows. I've held off a group of 6-7 order folks for a solid 10 mins at Ekrund as a black orc with a tiny shaman hiding and healing.
All in all, I couldn't really connect with the game at all, it got boring really fast.
I sincerely hope it didn't try to hump the pathfinder too.
Great! Now the president can grab someone's boob in public and claim the suit propelled his arm.
Although not the worst MMO I've ever played, I tired of WAR pretty quickly. Kept my subscription going for 1 month after the free one and found that I logged in only twice that month. I think I just got burned out on MMO's, went from WoW in 2004 to LoTRO, to EVE, to AOC and finally to WAR.
What killed the game for me were a few factors:
1) Everyone who came into the game came with at least a couple of friends/family, who then proceeded to grind quests and mobs at lightning pace all the while ignoring my attempts to join their group. A rude, flat answer I often got was: "This is a closed group". These people wouldn't even join a Public group if I started one and begged everyone on that PQ to join.
2) Pathetic communication, the chat system sucked pretty bad. Dunno if they have redone it but it was really bad compared to WoW's functionality and ease of use.
3) Major slowdown in experience at around level 13. Unable to find any open groups, I was forced to level solo in most areas and when I hit level 13 it slowed down to a crawl.
4) The influence grind, when I played WAR influence was the best way to get blue weapons and armor. The worst part about it was that every influence mob from level 1 to 40 gave 100 inf. on a kill but the influence requirements in each zone increased with level drastically. The infl. reward should have scaled with the requirement.
5) Near zero PvP outside scenarios. As someone stated earlier, open world RvR has objectives spread out over a large area and it does work cyclically. Order takes 1, destruction moves to 2.. rinse repeat. Anytime an encounter happened it was invariably skewed in numbers to favor one side. An exception was the Festenplatz thingie.. humans and chaos clashing. I had a lot of fun with the constant action, push backs, chases etc. there. That area had a very close spawn point for both parties and objectives were not too far, the rest of Open RvR should have been more like this one.
6) Fortress elite mobs can pretty much one shot you over weird angles that too. I managed to join two different attack groups but both ended pretty much the same way, somehow the mobs get drawn to the lip of the stairwell(they never come downstairs) and aoe the crap out of any group. Plus the lag, even with graphics turned down
7) Some classes are near invincible at certain levels. Tanks and healers, tanks especially take an insane amount of time to die and worse off they can finish you in 4-5 blows. I've held off a group of 6-7 order folks for a solid 10 mins at Ekrund as a black orc with a tiny shaman hiding and healing.
All in all, I couldn't really connect with the game at all, it got boring really fast.
I'm just too internet shellshocked to believe anything any more,
That is so politically incorrect, the correct term is 'Blogopathic PTSD'
Software Advocacy has taken a religious form for a good reason.. there is another corporate religious entity that deems all 'free software users' to be demonic spawns of software-satan that'll reduce the computing world to a burning pool of bytes, blood, lava and wooden chairs.
For a long time, folks hadn't even heard of Linux. Those who had deemed it to be some unworkable voodoo that only smelly, greasy geeks could wrap their heads around. It was passed mostly by word-of-mouth at conferences, classes etc. At this point MS wasn't too concerned as it was still in a fledgling state and it required a considerable amount of user tech knowledge to be workable.
FF to the growth in internet bandwidth, fast downloads, more hardware compatibility and instant free forum/chat support and Linux popularity exploded exponentially. Now the balding boys at MS had something to be genuinely concerned about this hairy breed of open source free software hippies. Permanent Linux converts were talking about how fast and stable this system was, how they could do everything they did in Windows except faster and more reliably, how they got rid of the PC chopping axes, how their world is magically covered with flowers and pink ponies etc. etc..
Logically a corporate entity should have gone for aggressive price cuts and quality improvements but they decided to sink their moolah into an aggressive advertisement campaign that tagets all audience from hobos to CEOs.
Open source and free software advocates can stop being religious if the guys in the opposing camp stop brain washing everyone else.
Teachers are also incredibly incapable of 'learning' new stuff, especially technology.
We used to host a 2-week long technology crash course for middle-high school teachers in our university for which I used to be the tech. assistant, around 40 teachers from around the state used to attend to learn some computing basics like Windows, Word, Excel and Powerpoint (obviously this event was sponsored by MS, we even had to erect a Windows banner above the projector panel)
I assisted for 3 conferences and the classes were worse than an inner city high school. Most of the teachers were only there for the extra travel and pay raise that they got out of it. Most didn't bother to listen to the instructor, some didn't even turn their laptops on and the rest who knew 'browsers' were just browsing sports pages on yahoo. In all, out of the 40 I would say only 2-3 were actually paying any attention and the problems I solved for them were genuine problems like text formatting in word, slide timing in powerpoint etc. The rest of them asked me to solve stuff that the instructor had just explained 5 minutes ago in painstaking detail, like how do I create a new document in word?
We should host learning classes for teachers before teaching them any real stuff.
I found prey to be quite nice as a thrilling gateway to swarm theory and complex adaptive systems. I agree most of it was not technically accurate and vastly exaggerated to fit a more thrilling traditional antagonist like character. .. just discussions and a project to model emergent behavior. I did one on crime and I was pleasantly surprised that real world models are even crazier than the ones presented in the book, things rarely work as intended. I still continue independent research into adaptive systems as time permits.
However it piqued my interest in group behavior and adaptive systems, I took a few courses offered by a professor at my university who said at the beginning of the class: 'I'm as new to this subject as you, let's learn together', no exams
Even though it's a work of fiction, I'll dedicate all my future accomplishments(if any) in adaptive systems to Prey and MC.
Oh really...
The Torah states:
Deuteronomy 13:6-10:
If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which [is] as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; [Namely], of the gods of the people which [are] round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the [one] end of the earth even unto the [other] end of the earth; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
True, 'Cults' are a term that popular religions use to derogate an uprising religion, just to maintain their own supremacy over the populace.
Every major religion now was a 'Cult' sometime in the past, It just takes a critical mass to convert it into a full-fledged religion.
This should make the Chinese government rethink building safety regulations and add tougher inspection rules before approving any high rises.
I used to live in India where quakes are very commonplace in the northern part of the country. Rampant corruption in the decades past allowed builders to get away with cheap materials and building more floors than their alloted quota. After a lot of collapsed buildings in quakes, the government had to throw in stricter regulations and even knocked down a few illegal high-rises.
It's very sad that China had to go through the same to learn their lesson.
Notice how theists, ID supporters, crackpots and their ilk like to (over)use credibility adding phrases like :
As if they have stated an absolute truth. Any attempt to debate or disprove these statements and you're automatically a heathen, moron, spawn of satan, the cause of all misery etc. etc.
The only folks who I've seen reject evolution outright are the ones who've never read it properly and don't want to ever learn about it.
This is science.. this is how it progresses. No one posts a conclusion right at the onset of the problem. Every scientific 'law' starts out as a theory/hypothesis, scientists set out to prove the theory by means of laboratory experimentation, evidence gathering, consulting various scientists in different fields and then a conclusion may be drawn based on all findings. Even then the conclusion is up for debate/challenges/disproving.
NOTE: Pedophiles who've read just one book in their life are not good sources of information on any subject except youth rectums and the book itself.. Help yourself to a biology book from the local library.
As a long time Anime watcher, I've tried loads of streaming media websites but nothing beats the quality of stage6. I used to watch episodes on youtube, crunchyroll etc. in the worst quality possible until a stage6 turned up in a random search.. Now i only go to another website if stage6 doesn't have what I want. .. Does anyone know if they are taking donations to stay alive? Heck, I wouldn't mind even if they started charging a monthly fee for viewers.
I was very sad when they announced the site's going to die on thursday. I looked for 'make a donation' or some similar link to send them money
The article didn't say much about storage except 'By separating the database from the rest of the application stack, the nodes remain stateless'. The internet is about data and information rather than applications, sure Web 2.0 bought online apps but a very minor segment of internet users actually access their apps over the internet. Most internet use is still for information.
Maximizing FLOPS in this system might give them extraordinary web server performance, like complex scripts that execute in 5ms but are they creating a potential bottleneck for the computing performance by not paying any attention to data retrieval?
That makes sense, the Earth is only 6000 years old.. which is equivalent to 60 man years. .. people might see dinosaurs appear and disappear at intervals.
At age 7000 the Earth will start spewing noxious fumes and it will need a giant catheter to pipe all fluids to outer space.
At age 8000 it will become extremely wobbly, driving off from it's orbit.. some biblical historians also speculate it might smash into mars at this time..
At 9000 light will become extremely dim and the Earth will only see daylight for 2 hrs in a day, the rotation and revolution speeds will slow down to a crawl.. At certain periods of time, it might start hallucinating that it's still 20
At 10,000, the Earth will stop moving.. it will need pipes from other planets in outer space to keep it moving, albeit very very slowly..
It's during the 10,000 - 11,000 age that the Earth will simply collapse and only leave behind a few remnants of it's internals.. these remnants will then be used by God to create the next earth..
The money-making portion of every religion seems almost the same.. except for the distribution methods each uses. It seems a bit like selling drugs.. Scientology brings a stash, shows you the goodies and asks for a ridiculous sum of money to get your hands on it.. Christianity on the other hand will distribute free books, dvd's etc. a.k.a 'A free hit' initially then surreptitiously slip in the message .. 'You like what you had, did you? well here's how you can get more.. Jesus camps, creation museums, church donations..'