It's also completely unacceptable for them not to include a can of bear mace. What if you were attacked while playing Starcraft? What if a bear came through your window, attracted by the sounds of tasty Terrans? What if you decide to play at a zoo and a bear escapes? HUH? WHAT WOULD YOU DO?!?!!11
'Vital'? It's the 21st goddamn century. Even if I'm stuck in the middle of a desert with no phone jack in sight I can make my freaking cell phone into a wireless router and use its internet. Find me an incidence of two nerds crash landing on a deserted island with both their laptops intact and only a single LAN cable to connect them and I'll consider LAN play 'vital'.
Generally if you're a good player you can prove it to the raid leader and get into the raid without having exceptional gear. Most of the time though, people in bad gear have bad gear because they're bad at the game. It's prejudice in a way, yes, but if you don't have raid gear you likely don't raid experience and will also likely lack the practice required to not only keep up your DPS/HPS/TPS but also to not stand in fires and blow up the raid.
Also keep in mind that gear checks don't necessarily judge you solely on the gear you have equipped, but the quality of the enchants, gems, etc. on said equipment. Why should the raid leader bring his raid down with you and your crappy equipment if you haven't even bothered to make that equipment a little less crappy by researching and acquiring the best enchants for your class?
You should be able to find a guild around your play level fairly easily. It won't be that fun at first, as you probably ARE skilled enough to be in high end raids and your companions will fail over and over again bringing you down with them, but at the very least you will be able to leech gear and acquaint yourself with the basics of raiding.
Either you haven't played WotLK or you somehow fail to see the difference between 'wher is mankriks wife plz' and 'HOLY SHIT MY QUESTGIVER JUMPED OFF A CLIFF'. Not to mention the various 'here's a dragon to fly around on' quests. Which old world quest let you fight in and witness huge battles in a capital city? Seriously, which game were you playing?
It doesn't state it outright, but they got the 6000 number by adding up lifetimes in the various genealogies given. So, unless some of those people lived a few million years, then yes the bible does in fact imply that the Earth is 6000 years old.
So you were so bad that you were laughed out of several guilds, yet you can describe 'exactly how to play' in mere sentences? If you quit the game because you can't even make friends in a freaking video game then that's fine, but don't go saying it doesn't have deep gameplay when you likely went to one raid and undoubtedly performed horribly.
Standard DPS formulas and rotations mean little when, depending on the fight, your haste may be triple what it normally is or your crit may be through the roof because of the fight mechanics; they mean little when you're moving for half the fight and they mean VERY little when you don't actually know the theory behind the formulas and can't adapt your playstyle to maximize your dps no matter what the situation.
If you were healing and just 'waiting for bars to go down' then you were doing it WRONG and I'm sure your guild appreciates the many times you let your tank die because you waited until he got struck to 15% before starting a heal.
In Counterstrike you just have to shoot people with guns. Look at that, one sentence describing everything you can do in the game. Obviously Counterstrike has no deep gameplay, right?
But how much did they cost to develop? I'm gonna go ahead and guess that the Facebook guys didn't have $18m lying around when they developed it AS COLLEGE STUDENTS.
It's not currently a service, so you're point still isn't valid. Yes, they have ONE server up. It's a BETA. An INVITE ONLY beta. Where did you get the idea that someone is putting mission critical things there? Now that this reference implementation is out you can even have your own server running NOW, before Google's even hinted at running their own service.
Even if there wasn't a 'Save to Disk' button it's freaking OPEN SOURCE and you could just code your own. Or did you think this was magic data that turns into 0s when it arrives on computer that hasn't been enchanted by the Google wizards?
So you're just the extremely risk-averse type, then? One who wouldn't get laser eye surgery because there's no *proof* that your eyes would work afterward? And you don't get vaccines because there's no *proof* that they won't make you autistic or don't contain tracking chips?
While you're worrying about your 'soul' I'll be playing 3 video games at once while reading a novel and talking to 5 of my friends... with my robot brain:)
"Since you mentioned it, ANONYMOUS USER THAT COULDN'T POSSIBLY BE ME, I'm not sure what this development means for the future of my GV application [evancharlton.com]."
"When you do something in the real world, you experience far more than you do in any computer game or simulation. When you communicate in person with a friend, the experience is far more 'real' than hearing a disembodied voice coming thru a speaker."
So basically you fail at abstraction? You're unable to piece together the fact that there is indeed a person on the other side of that speaker, and the fact that they are actually speaking to you? Even YOU are putting "real" in quotes, as if you know it's just as real, but that doesn't help support your point.
"For example, you're with a friend and somebody starts ranting about Internet addiction. You might catch your friend's eye, glance over at the ranter, and roll your eyes. It happens all the time, and it is far more expressive than anything you can type or say when you are having a 'virtual' experience."
Some of us have learned to use forms of communication other than body language. Is an eye rolling really necessary to get across the message? Is it even the best way? It could be interpreted as "Wow, this guy's an idiot", or "Not this again", or "This guy pisses me off". Each of those three sentences is more expressive and conveys more information. Therefore each one provides a better window as to what's going on in my head. One might even say that by expressing my thoughts in a verbal manner, I make them more "real". Even if you argue that eye rolling expresses perhaps all three, or if you argue that the interpretation of the ambiguity is part of the communication, well, to that I say: -_-
"I've done a fair amount of games where some form of 'crafting' was part of the game. Load up components, click a button. Maybe you have to click at just the right time or in just the right pattern to 'create' something. Well, recently I've been taking a pottery class, learning to hand build and throw pottery on the wheel. Getting the tactile feeling of the thickness, the moisture content, and the texture of the clay. Seeing how the parts of pottery are joined and smoothed together. The experience is infinitely richer than anything that can be had by sitting behind a screen."
Alright, now go kill a dragon. I'll be awaiting your response; I'm interested in just how rewarding it is in real life.
"If you truly think that the virtual dragon kill is as 'meaningful' as really hiking up a mountain, you are going out of your way to delude yourself."
I've hiked up mountains. Three of them, in fact. It was fun, but not as fun as my first Kael'Thas kill. And it was nowhere NEAR as fun as getting the Immortal title, which involved getting all the way through Naxx without me or any of my friends dying. I actually had to work harder for these than I worked to get to the top of the mountains (and no, I didn't start 100ft from the summit), and I achieved these things with people I liked a lot better than the ones I went up the mountain with. Who are you to say that this isn't meaningful? That working with my teammates to develop a superior strategy one attempt at a time isn't rewarding? That sharing jokes and stories while waiting for people to respawn isn't social? Making pottery is stupid. Oh wow, you can fold clay, I'm sure your friends and relatives really love their new, ugly vase/flowerpot/lump.
"This doesn't mean that games are bad or evil, they can be a fun way to pass some time. But if they are the centerpiece of your life, if your life consists of sitting at keyboard, you are experiencing a pale shadow of the real world, and I feel sorry for you."
And if you're limiting yourself to the "real world" out of prejudice, then I feel sorry for you.
You really didn't have to ask me the purpose of that point. If you'd finished reading the sentence you quoted it would have been obvious.
"What posts would those be?"
And naught but 10 inches across the screen we find: "People who do nothing but sit in their mom's basement and play WoW and masturbate to Night Elf/dance animations all day long aren't going to put up with that shit, no sir."
"The Internet is not a substitute for social interaction in real life. You're delusional."
Your only argument on this point has been 'no it's not'. It's like I'm arguing with a damn fourth grader. Let's try defining "social interaction":
Social: Of or related to society.
Society:
1. A long-standing group of people sharing cultural aspects such as language, dress, norms of behavior and artistic forms.
2. A group of people who meet from time to time to engage in a common interest.
3. The sum total of all voluntary interrelations between individuals.
4. The people of oneâ(TM)s country or community taken as a whole.
5. high society.
6. (law) A number of people joined by mutual consent to deliberate, determine and act a common goal.
So the dictionary doesn't seem to include "in real life" in any of it's definitions for society. What takes place over the internet is therefore most definitely social interaction. Your argument basically boils down to "what you do on the internet isn't real life", which once again makes me wonder why you seem to think I'm talking to imaginary people. It's not like they don't exist when I'm not in front of the computer talking to them. You're delusional for thinking what happens on the internet isn't "real life".
Please be thoughtful in your response. I'd love to be proven wrong, but so far all you've said is 'no'.
"Why are you pretending as if you're the original poster?"
What? I'm not. Just thought I could defend his positions.
"WoW does not require any mathematics. I played it for years and cannot remember ever performing a single calculation."
Listen, the entire game is based around math. Probability, statistics, game theory, local minima/maxima, etc.; if you played it for years without doing a single calculation, you were undoubtedly a horrible player. Don't say that the game can't improve math skills when you never made the effort to understand the term "DPS". WoW requires math like playing soccer requires exercise.
Don't even try telling me that playing soccer isn't healthy.
"If you try to promote WoW as a substitute for real life, then I would expect it to be a useful and productive game."
What the hell is that even supposed to mean? "Substitute for a real life"? Who was promoting it as such? Has anyone ever said "You should quit your job to farm WoW gold"?
"Real life" is an idiotic term anyways. I'm going to call up my bank right now and tell them to shut down all their internet banking systems, 'cause that's not "real life". I'm also going to throw away my webcam, 'cause I only use it to talk to my grandparents living three states away. They'll understand when I tell them it's not "real life", and that they can just wait til Christmas to see my face.
I'm a level 80 blood elf. I'm also a programmer. Both of these are my "real life". When I stop playing WoW I'll pick up another video game, and, guess what, that will be my "real life" too.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also completely unacceptable for them not to include a can of bear mace. What if you were attacked while playing Starcraft? What if a bear came through your window, attracted by the sounds of tasty Terrans? What if you decide to play at a zoo and a bear escapes? HUH? WHAT WOULD YOU DO?!?!!11
Ah, Slashdot. Where the unreasonable, panicky, FUD post is +5, and the simple explanation as to why the parent is an idiot sits at +0.
Wow, I can't believe you went to a college that had network infrastructure and yet no internet connection. How strange.
'Vital'? It's the 21st goddamn century. Even if I'm stuck in the middle of a desert with no phone jack in sight I can make my freaking cell phone into a wireless router and use its internet. Find me an incidence of two nerds crash landing on a deserted island with both their laptops intact and only a single LAN cable to connect them and I'll consider LAN play 'vital'.
Generally if you're a good player you can prove it to the raid leader and get into the raid without having exceptional gear. Most of the time though, people in bad gear have bad gear because they're bad at the game. It's prejudice in a way, yes, but if you don't have raid gear you likely don't raid experience and will also likely lack the practice required to not only keep up your DPS/HPS/TPS but also to not stand in fires and blow up the raid.
Also keep in mind that gear checks don't necessarily judge you solely on the gear you have equipped, but the quality of the enchants, gems, etc. on said equipment. Why should the raid leader bring his raid down with you and your crappy equipment if you haven't even bothered to make that equipment a little less crappy by researching and acquiring the best enchants for your class?
You should be able to find a guild around your play level fairly easily. It won't be that fun at first, as you probably ARE skilled enough to be in high end raids and your companions will fail over and over again bringing you down with them, but at the very least you will be able to leech gear and acquaint yourself with the basics of raiding.
Either you haven't played WotLK or you somehow fail to see the difference between 'wher is mankriks wife plz' and 'HOLY SHIT MY QUESTGIVER JUMPED OFF A CLIFF'. Not to mention the various 'here's a dragon to fly around on' quests. Which old world quest let you fight in and witness huge battles in a capital city? Seriously, which game were you playing?
If you immediately associate 'men with big guns' with HALO and elves with WoW then please, please, gtfo my slashdot.
Not sure why 12 year olds would wanna hang out here anyways.
"then you took away the ability to play on my lan" ...but that's OK because...
"theres really no reason anyone would not want to be on battle.net"
It doesn't state it outright, but they got the 6000 number by adding up lifetimes in the various genealogies given. So, unless some of those people lived a few million years, then yes the bible does in fact imply that the Earth is 6000 years old.
So you were so bad that you were laughed out of several guilds, yet you can describe 'exactly how to play' in mere sentences? If you quit the game because you can't even make friends in a freaking video game then that's fine, but don't go saying it doesn't have deep gameplay when you likely went to one raid and undoubtedly performed horribly.
Standard DPS formulas and rotations mean little when, depending on the fight, your haste may be triple what it normally is or your crit may be through the roof because of the fight mechanics; they mean little when you're moving for half the fight and they mean VERY little when you don't actually know the theory behind the formulas and can't adapt your playstyle to maximize your dps no matter what the situation.
If you were healing and just 'waiting for bars to go down' then you were doing it WRONG and I'm sure your guild appreciates the many times you let your tank die because you waited until he got struck to 15% before starting a heal.
In Counterstrike you just have to shoot people with guns. Look at that, one sentence describing everything you can do in the game. Obviously Counterstrike has no deep gameplay, right?
But how much did they cost to develop? I'm gonna go ahead and guess that the Facebook guys didn't have $18m lying around when they developed it AS COLLEGE STUDENTS.
Hell yes. Only clicked on this article to post SPACE QUEST in all caps. ...welllll cya later.
It's not currently a service, so you're point still isn't valid. Yes, they have ONE server up. It's a BETA. An INVITE ONLY beta. Where did you get the idea that someone is putting mission critical things there? Now that this reference implementation is out you can even have your own server running NOW, before Google's even hinted at running their own service.
Troll harder please.
Really? You have to ask?
Even if there wasn't a 'Save to Disk' button it's freaking OPEN SOURCE and you could just code your own. Or did you think this was magic data that turns into 0s when it arrives on computer that hasn't been enchanted by the Google wizards?
That's the scientific method, eh? Where was his control?
"Furthermore, if you read the Bible at least, it never asks someone to believe in God without evidence or reason."
Define 'faith', please.
So you're just the extremely risk-averse type, then? One who wouldn't get laser eye surgery because there's no *proof* that your eyes would work afterward? And you don't get vaccines because there's no *proof* that they won't make you autistic or don't contain tracking chips?
While you're worrying about your 'soul' I'll be playing 3 video games at once while reading a novel and talking to 5 of my friends... with my robot brain :)
If it depends on the context then it wouldn't really be the ZIP code ALONE, now then would it?
"Why join a discussion if you're not going to listen?
OK, back to ignoring AC posts..."
Why join a discussion if you're going to ignore half the participants?
I'm 20 and I have to touch COBOL every day. :(
"Since you mentioned it, ANONYMOUS USER THAT COULDN'T POSSIBLY BE ME, I'm not sure what this development means for the future of my GV application [evancharlton.com]."
Fix'd! :D
"Plus it'll be the one's who reject the 'fashionable' MMO for one they like despite the critics, who I'll game with."
You shop at Hot Topic too, don't you?
Millions upon millions of players in WoW and you couldn't find ANY you liked?
Yeah, good luck in Aion. I'm sure their players are from Mars, or somewhere else where they might be up to your standards.
You're not even making an effort to try and understand my points. It's like you read two sentences and your brain shorts out. Have fun being stupid.
"When you do something in the real world, you experience far more than you do in any computer game or simulation. When you communicate in person with a friend, the experience is far more 'real' than hearing a disembodied voice coming thru a speaker."
So basically you fail at abstraction? You're unable to piece together the fact that there is indeed a person on the other side of that speaker, and the fact that they are actually speaking to you? Even YOU are putting "real" in quotes, as if you know it's just as real, but that doesn't help support your point.
"For example, you're with a friend and somebody starts ranting about Internet addiction. You might catch your friend's eye, glance over at the ranter, and roll your eyes. It happens all the time, and it is far more expressive than anything you can type or say when you are having a 'virtual' experience."
Some of us have learned to use forms of communication other than body language. Is an eye rolling really necessary to get across the message? Is it even the best way? It could be interpreted as "Wow, this guy's an idiot", or "Not this again", or "This guy pisses me off". Each of those three sentences is more expressive and conveys more information. Therefore each one provides a better window as to what's going on in my head. One might even say that by expressing my thoughts in a verbal manner, I make them more "real". Even if you argue that eye rolling expresses perhaps all three, or if you argue that the interpretation of the ambiguity is part of the communication, well, to that I say: -_-
"I've done a fair amount of games where some form of 'crafting' was part of the game. Load up components, click a button. Maybe you have to click at just the right time or in just the right pattern to 'create' something. Well, recently I've been taking a pottery class, learning to hand build and throw pottery on the wheel. Getting the tactile feeling of the thickness, the moisture content, and the texture of the clay. Seeing how the parts of pottery are joined and smoothed together. The experience is infinitely richer than anything that can be had by sitting behind a screen."
Alright, now go kill a dragon. I'll be awaiting your response; I'm interested in just how rewarding it is in real life.
"If you truly think that the virtual dragon kill is as 'meaningful' as really hiking up a mountain, you are going out of your way to delude yourself."
I've hiked up mountains. Three of them, in fact. It was fun, but not as fun as my first Kael'Thas kill. And it was nowhere NEAR as fun as getting the Immortal title, which involved getting all the way through Naxx without me or any of my friends dying. I actually had to work harder for these than I worked to get to the top of the mountains (and no, I didn't start 100ft from the summit), and I achieved these things with people I liked a lot better than the ones I went up the mountain with. Who are you to say that this isn't meaningful? That working with my teammates to develop a superior strategy one attempt at a time isn't rewarding? That sharing jokes and stories while waiting for people to respawn isn't social? Making pottery is stupid. Oh wow, you can fold clay, I'm sure your friends and relatives really love their new, ugly vase/flowerpot/lump.
"This doesn't mean that games are bad or evil, they can be a fun way to pass some time. But if they are the centerpiece of your life, if your life consists of sitting at keyboard, you are experiencing a pale shadow of the real world, and I feel sorry for you."
And if you're limiting yourself to the "real world" out of prejudice, then I feel sorry for you.
"So?"
You really didn't have to ask me the purpose of that point. If you'd finished reading the sentence you quoted it would have been obvious.
"What posts would those be?"
And naught but 10 inches across the screen we find: /dance animations all day long aren't going to put up with that shit, no sir."
"People who do nothing but sit in their mom's basement and play WoW and masturbate to Night Elf
"The Internet is not a substitute for social interaction in real life. You're delusional."
Your only argument on this point has been 'no it's not'. It's like I'm arguing with a damn fourth grader. Let's try defining "social interaction":
Social: Of or related to society.
Society:
1. A long-standing group of people sharing cultural aspects such as language, dress, norms of behavior and artistic forms.
2. A group of people who meet from time to time to engage in a common interest.
3. The sum total of all voluntary interrelations between individuals.
4. The people of oneâ(TM)s country or community taken as a whole.
5. high society.
6. (law) A number of people joined by mutual consent to deliberate, determine and act a common goal.
So the dictionary doesn't seem to include "in real life" in any of it's definitions for society. What takes place over the internet is therefore most definitely social interaction. Your argument basically boils down to "what you do on the internet isn't real life", which once again makes me wonder why you seem to think I'm talking to imaginary people. It's not like they don't exist when I'm not in front of the computer talking to them. You're delusional for thinking what happens on the internet isn't "real life".
Please be thoughtful in your response. I'd love to be proven wrong, but so far all you've said is 'no'.
"Why are you pretending as if you're the original poster?"
What? I'm not. Just thought I could defend his positions.
"WoW does not require any mathematics. I played it for years and cannot remember ever performing a single calculation."
Listen, the entire game is based around math. Probability, statistics, game theory, local minima/maxima, etc.; if you played it for years without doing a single calculation, you were undoubtedly a horrible player. Don't say that the game can't improve math skills when you never made the effort to understand the term "DPS". WoW requires math like playing soccer requires exercise.
Don't even try telling me that playing soccer isn't healthy.
"If you try to promote WoW as a substitute for real life, then I would expect it to be a useful and productive game."
What the hell is that even supposed to mean? "Substitute for a real life"? Who was promoting it as such? Has anyone ever said "You should quit your job to farm WoW gold"?
"Real life" is an idiotic term anyways. I'm going to call up my bank right now and tell them to shut down all their internet banking systems, 'cause that's not "real life". I'm also going to throw away my webcam, 'cause I only use it to talk to my grandparents living three states away. They'll understand when I tell them it's not "real life", and that they can just wait til Christmas to see my face.
I'm a level 80 blood elf. I'm also a programmer. Both of these are my "real life". When I stop playing WoW I'll pick up another video game, and, guess what, that will be my "real life" too.