Your posting history is hilarious. You have like 20 comments debating the differences between various types of single-player RPGs, and several posts mocking people for playing video games that actually involve social contact with other people.
"You might end up talking to someone at the gym, and at the very least you're among people. When you're playing WoW you're all by yourself."
Thanks for this wonderful insight. I had been confused, you see. I was under the impression that the characters that were talking back to me in WoW were people. Now that I know they're robots I guess I'll stop talking to them. It's weird though, 'cause I talk to a lot of them over Ventrilo. I guess speech synth has advanced a lot over the past few years.
"Contrary to what some nerds tell themselves, chatting online does nothing to improve your social skills."
Ummm, so? I don't want to be freakin' president, I just want to play fun games while chatting with friends. I'd say that chatting online with friends while playing games is pretty damn good practice for that.
"I can't remember ever doing any math in WoW, and the reading was mostly limited to finding out what I need to kill next."
Ok, so you're bad at the game. Grats? You need to HAVE math skills in order to apply them to the game.
"World of Warcraft is not productive or useful, and not a substitute for social interaction, intellectual stimulation and excercise."
Neither are any of the video games YOU play. I'm sure you've quit playing them all since the aforementioned in-depth posts you've made about them, right?
I'm sure the people that you spent all that time Skyping with would love to find out that they're meaningless. You should also make sure to tell them that they're just sad and pathetic people, and that nobody should talk to them. It's not a meaningful relationship to you anyways, so who cares right?
The only reason online communications could be considered less healthy than face to face communication is because of people like YOU. People who think that the person on the other end of the massive network isn't a real person, or that their relationship with their friend from afar is meaningless.
Is there any more 'meaning' in it when you go to the beach with your friends than when you go kill a dragon with your friends? If there is, could you please measure this 'meaning' in a scientific way and report back to me on exactly how much more of it you get from being able to touch your friends versus only being able to hear them?
With regards to the fake sense of accomplishment: you might want to go tell last years Superbowl winners to throw away their rings cause the whole thing is just a big charade. I'm sure they'll take it to heart when you inform them that it's really nothing special that they can put a freaking ball inside some chalk marks. While you're at it, go ahead and tell them that their relationships with their teammates were meaningless, because it was only to win a game.
At one point in time there was something in your life that gave you great joy. Someone else came along and convinced you it was a lie. Are you in the wrong for having enjoyed yourself, or are they in the wrong for telling you that what you'd accomplished was worthless and that the relationships you'd formed were meaningless?
Most of this addiction nonsense is just prejudice. Sure, there's a line where it does become harmful, but as long as you manage to feed yourself and hold a job, who cares what you do in your off time?
I hope you read this, though I doubt you will as AC. Enjoy being lonely when you could be shooting things in space while laughing with friends you'd never have the opportunity to know in meatspace.
This is only because there's no form of matchmaking in DotA. If you don't want to play with bad people, the only option is just to yell at them until they decide never to play again:)
Hopefully I can beta test this, and beg them to implement a skill-based matchmaking system (or maybe they already have one, who knows).
I have pictures from driving in the panhandle of pretty much nothing but dirt. The horizon is ridiculously flat and there's nothing taller than a bush for miles. It's about as ugly as land can get. Even deserts have those cool sand dunes, or ominous looking cracks in the ground. We just have dirt. Driving through a forest of windmills would be a huge improvement. Hell, driving through a forest of 100ft high dog turds would at least be more interesting. Wouldn't smell any worse either thanks to the cow and pig farms.
I think you wandered into the wrong topic. The embryos left over from IVF would be the children of the person getting the treatment. However, since they're LEFTOVERS, the person getting the treatment has already conceived and is on their way to bearing a child. Are you seriously proposing that we force other women to take on these embryos and carry them for 9 months until we get an extra 50 children, just so we wouldn't have to try and cure diseases with these extra cells?
I really hope you do understand the situation and just suck at analogies, 'cause that was way off.
End-game has gotten significantly better since the old 40-man days (not 60, as stated in your article... might want to fix that). I started raiding in BC (Burning Crusade, the first expansion) so I can't speak from experience about the differences, but I've done all the raids since then, so I should be able to give you a good picture of how it is currently. If I get one of the facts wrong I'm sure someone will be along to correct me shortly.
In BC they changed the instance cap from 40 players in the largest raids to 25 players in the largest raids. This was, all in all, a good thing, as getting 40 people together for even an hour at a time via internet is horrendously difficult and should automatically reward you loot whether or not you do anything. However, the new instances were harder in the sense that they tended to require all 25 people to know what they're doing. This varies with gear, of course, but the impact of having to take an 11-year-old rogue (no offense, young'uns) who is likely to be swimming in the lava for fun while you're trying to kill a giant fire elemental is much smaller on the raid when you have 39 other people to carry him versus 24 in the new system.
While this helped, it still wasn't enough (apparently). As stated in your article (I'll trust these numbers, they're probably still the same - human groups in general seem to gravitate towards this number), the average guild size was between 11 and 18 players. This is pretty far from the 25 reliable people you need to raid, so with WotLK (Wrath of the Lich King, second expansion) Blizzard changed the instance cap to 10 players, and allowed 25 man raids if you changed the instance difficulty to 'heroic' (this setting had previously only been used in their 5 man dungeons, but it would only change the difficulty and not the player cap). 25 man raids still give the best loot and are generally more difficult, though there are exceptions at the extreme end where the encounters are tuned very tightly (for the same reason mentioned above regarding 40 man vs 25 man). This has made it easier for smaller guilds to experience the content that the developers worked hard on, and has, I believe, fixed the problems you bring up in your article.
There was another problem that arose in the midst of this, however: while more people were able to actually form a group and attempt the content, very few were able to clear all the way through it and see the 'final boss'. I don't care how hard you try rationalize away the fact that you suck at video games by saying that raiding takes no skill (not directed at parent), the experts at Blizzard know that it takes skill, and to them it's a problem. Having 25 warm bodies in front of their keyboards will not help you if the encounter is tuned so that one mistake can wipe the raid. Bad guilds would get through most of the content as long as that one idiot with poor pattern recognition skills didn't get the horrible debuff that could kill everyone, but when they got to the really 'hard' stuff that required everyone to do their part they would fail again and again, and eventually fall apart.
Blizzard has attempted to fix this in the latest expansion with the advent of 'hard modes'. Most of the encounters in the newest dungeon are fairly difficult, but most guilds have been able to beat them and see the new dungeon in it's entirety. However, most of the bosses also have an alternate, optional 'hard mode' in which you defeat the same boss, but you have to face new or stronger abilities. In return, you get better gear and, above all, bragging rights. This has generally satisfied both the hardcore raiders and the casual raiders, as the content is easy enough to experience it all, yet (in some areas) hard enough that there is still one hard mode that has yet to be beaten (some even say it's mathematically impossible - that's the kind of hard mode I like).
So, as of now, there are essentially 6 (yes, 6, I forgot to mention one) of your 'phases' to WoW. Leveling is the first and longest (and should be remove
"You rely on feelings and definitions like 'clunkier' rather then debate the actual merits."
I noticed this as well. Almost every iPhone fanboy's arguments boil down to how much more 'elegant' and 'polished' the iPhone is. I'm surprised that the fanboy (yes, you're a fanboy; you said so yourself) you're responding to was actually able to bring up examples of this elegance, such as shaking it to select a random song. But, how many people actually use this feature? If you're on a set playlist, and you shake it, does it select a random song from the playlist? From all your music? If the latter, what does it play after that? Another random song? Back to your playlist? If you're already playing a playlist set to random, then what's the point? Why not just click the 'next' button? What happens if you like to go jogging while listening to music? Will it pick a new song every step? If the phone has to be unlocked to use the feature, then why not just hit the next button, since it's already in your hands and you're looking at the screen? In what way is this feature elegant or intuitive? The album art appearing in landscape view is also a feature that, while seemingly cool, doesn't have much actual elegance or usefulness. Unless you bought all your music from Apple, you're not likely to have all the album art, and it's nowhere near the most efficient way to find the music you're looking for. Even if you do remember the album art to every song you like, you can only view full covers for something like three albums at a time.
Really, the only solid merits I could find him attributing to the iPhone were the auto-dimming (which actually IS elegant and well-designed) and the fact that he likes the feel of glass over plastic. Meanwhile, he admits that the iPhone lacks features that would be genuinely useful to him, like custom settings based on power source.
The reality distortion field truly is amazing.
Re:Don't need to jailbreak for wallpaper/ring tone
on
iPhone 3GS Finally Hacked
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Any other phone?
On my G1, I just drag the music I like to anywhere on the SD card. Then I can use the app Ringdroid to cut it down to the length I want and set it as the active ringtone, or if I just want it to ring from the beginning I can select it right from the music app while listening to it (Menu button > Use as ringtone).
That hardly seems as much of a hassle as importing, transcoding, and renaming. Maybe I'm just too dumb to see Apple's brilliance on this matter.
So using information exactly 17 days out of date (and not even out of date for the majority of iPhone users) and calling it funny (which it is) is 'vicious stupidity'?
A) iPhones don't do MMS (which is hilarious) B) MMS is done over HTTP, with only the URL actually being sent over SMS, so nothing should ever really be executed (of course, you'd think the same would go for SMS...)
You are obviously familiar with some aspects of the internet, having posted on Slashdot, but you appear to struggle with the overall concept. You see, on this, the wonderful internet, knowledge is free and bountiful.
At the top of my post is a link to an article on a site called 'Wikipedia'; specifically: an article about one of the potential adverse reactions to aspirin. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, built by its users. If you do not trust the information in the article, look to the bottom for citations and references. If you'd like more information on aspirin, look for the first occurrence of the word within the article, and click it. Important words on Wikipedia are often made into hyperlinks which will take you directly to the related Wikipedia article.
I tell you these things hoping that, having been properly exposed to this wonderful resource, you will exert some effort on your part to do some research on the debated points. The burden of proof may be on those making the claims, but this most certainly does not prevent you from learning for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
So basically addiction is when they like their online friends better than they like you? That's pathetically jealous of you.
Your posting history is hilarious. You have like 20 comments debating the differences between various types of single-player RPGs, and several posts mocking people for playing video games that actually involve social contact with other people.
"You might end up talking to someone at the gym, and at the very least you're among people. When you're playing WoW you're all by yourself."
Thanks for this wonderful insight. I had been confused, you see. I was under the impression that the characters that were talking back to me in WoW were people. Now that I know they're robots I guess I'll stop talking to them. It's weird though, 'cause I talk to a lot of them over Ventrilo. I guess speech synth has advanced a lot over the past few years.
"Contrary to what some nerds tell themselves, chatting online does nothing to improve your social skills."
Ummm, so? I don't want to be freakin' president, I just want to play fun games while chatting with friends. I'd say that chatting online with friends while playing games is pretty damn good practice for that.
"I can't remember ever doing any math in WoW, and the reading was mostly limited to finding out what I need to kill next."
Ok, so you're bad at the game. Grats? You need to HAVE math skills in order to apply them to the game.
"World of Warcraft is not productive or useful, and not a substitute for social interaction, intellectual stimulation and excercise."
Neither are any of the video games YOU play. I'm sure you've quit playing them all since the aforementioned in-depth posts you've made about them, right?
I'm sure the people that you spent all that time Skyping with would love to find out that they're meaningless. You should also make sure to tell them that they're just sad and pathetic people, and that nobody should talk to them. It's not a meaningful relationship to you anyways, so who cares right?
The only reason online communications could be considered less healthy than face to face communication is because of people like YOU. People who think that the person on the other end of the massive network isn't a real person, or that their relationship with their friend from afar is meaningless.
Is there any more 'meaning' in it when you go to the beach with your friends than when you go kill a dragon with your friends? If there is, could you please measure this 'meaning' in a scientific way and report back to me on exactly how much more of it you get from being able to touch your friends versus only being able to hear them?
With regards to the fake sense of accomplishment: you might want to go tell last years Superbowl winners to throw away their rings cause the whole thing is just a big charade. I'm sure they'll take it to heart when you inform them that it's really nothing special that they can put a freaking ball inside some chalk marks. While you're at it, go ahead and tell them that their relationships with their teammates were meaningless, because it was only to win a game.
At one point in time there was something in your life that gave you great joy. Someone else came along and convinced you it was a lie. Are you in the wrong for having enjoyed yourself, or are they in the wrong for telling you that what you'd accomplished was worthless and that the relationships you'd formed were meaningless?
Most of this addiction nonsense is just prejudice. Sure, there's a line where it does become harmful, but as long as you manage to feed yourself and hold a job, who cares what you do in your off time?
I hope you read this, though I doubt you will as AC. Enjoy being lonely when you could be shooting things in space while laughing with friends you'd never have the opportunity to know in meatspace.
This is only because there's no form of matchmaking in DotA. If you don't want to play with bad people, the only option is just to yell at them until they decide never to play again :)
Hopefully I can beta test this, and beg them to implement a skill-based matchmaking system (or maybe they already have one, who knows).
I have pictures from driving in the panhandle of pretty much nothing but dirt. The horizon is ridiculously flat and there's nothing taller than a bush for miles. It's about as ugly as land can get. Even deserts have those cool sand dunes, or ominous looking cracks in the ground. We just have dirt. Driving through a forest of windmills would be a huge improvement. Hell, driving through a forest of 100ft high dog turds would at least be more interesting. Wouldn't smell any worse either thanks to the cow and pig farms.
Blasphemy. Shamwow was Vince the hooker-puncher.
I think you wandered into the wrong topic. The embryos left over from IVF would be the children of the person getting the treatment. However, since they're LEFTOVERS, the person getting the treatment has already conceived and is on their way to bearing a child. Are you seriously proposing that we force other women to take on these embryos and carry them for 9 months until we get an extra 50 children, just so we wouldn't have to try and cure diseases with these extra cells?
I really hope you do understand the situation and just suck at analogies, 'cause that was way off.
Yeah, they were awesome when they came out -- if you were a death knight. They were overpowered and you know it.
OK so I can't count to 7. Sue me.
End-game has gotten significantly better since the old 40-man days (not 60, as stated in your article... might want to fix that). I started raiding in BC (Burning Crusade, the first expansion) so I can't speak from experience about the differences, but I've done all the raids since then, so I should be able to give you a good picture of how it is currently. If I get one of the facts wrong I'm sure someone will be along to correct me shortly.
In BC they changed the instance cap from 40 players in the largest raids to 25 players in the largest raids. This was, all in all, a good thing, as getting 40 people together for even an hour at a time via internet is horrendously difficult and should automatically reward you loot whether or not you do anything. However, the new instances were harder in the sense that they tended to require all 25 people to know what they're doing. This varies with gear, of course, but the impact of having to take an 11-year-old rogue (no offense, young'uns) who is likely to be swimming in the lava for fun while you're trying to kill a giant fire elemental is much smaller on the raid when you have 39 other people to carry him versus 24 in the new system.
While this helped, it still wasn't enough (apparently). As stated in your article (I'll trust these numbers, they're probably still the same - human groups in general seem to gravitate towards this number), the average guild size was between 11 and 18 players. This is pretty far from the 25 reliable people you need to raid, so with WotLK (Wrath of the Lich King, second expansion) Blizzard changed the instance cap to 10 players, and allowed 25 man raids if you changed the instance difficulty to 'heroic' (this setting had previously only been used in their 5 man dungeons, but it would only change the difficulty and not the player cap). 25 man raids still give the best loot and are generally more difficult, though there are exceptions at the extreme end where the encounters are tuned very tightly (for the same reason mentioned above regarding 40 man vs 25 man). This has made it easier for smaller guilds to experience the content that the developers worked hard on, and has, I believe, fixed the problems you bring up in your article.
There was another problem that arose in the midst of this, however: while more people were able to actually form a group and attempt the content, very few were able to clear all the way through it and see the 'final boss'. I don't care how hard you try rationalize away the fact that you suck at video games by saying that raiding takes no skill (not directed at parent), the experts at Blizzard know that it takes skill, and to them it's a problem. Having 25 warm bodies in front of their keyboards will not help you if the encounter is tuned so that one mistake can wipe the raid. Bad guilds would get through most of the content as long as that one idiot with poor pattern recognition skills didn't get the horrible debuff that could kill everyone, but when they got to the really 'hard' stuff that required everyone to do their part they would fail again and again, and eventually fall apart.
Blizzard has attempted to fix this in the latest expansion with the advent of 'hard modes'. Most of the encounters in the newest dungeon are fairly difficult, but most guilds have been able to beat them and see the new dungeon in it's entirety. However, most of the bosses also have an alternate, optional 'hard mode' in which you defeat the same boss, but you have to face new or stronger abilities. In return, you get better gear and, above all, bragging rights. This has generally satisfied both the hardcore raiders and the casual raiders, as the content is easy enough to experience it all, yet (in some areas) hard enough that there is still one hard mode that has yet to be beaten (some even say it's mathematically impossible - that's the kind of hard mode I like).
So, as of now, there are essentially 6 (yes, 6, I forgot to mention one) of your 'phases' to WoW. Leveling is the first and longest (and should be remove
O YAH WELL IF U THINK SOLAR POWER IS CLEAN THEN HOW ABOUT U GO 2 THA SUN!?!?
See how easy it is to be retarded?
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
And that makes you a jerk.
(...me too)
"You rely on feelings and definitions like 'clunkier' rather then debate the actual merits."
I noticed this as well. Almost every iPhone fanboy's arguments boil down to how much more 'elegant' and 'polished' the iPhone is. I'm surprised that the fanboy (yes, you're a fanboy; you said so yourself) you're responding to was actually able to bring up examples of this elegance, such as shaking it to select a random song. But, how many people actually use this feature? If you're on a set playlist, and you shake it, does it select a random song from the playlist? From all your music? If the latter, what does it play after that? Another random song? Back to your playlist? If you're already playing a playlist set to random, then what's the point? Why not just click the 'next' button? What happens if you like to go jogging while listening to music? Will it pick a new song every step? If the phone has to be unlocked to use the feature, then why not just hit the next button, since it's already in your hands and you're looking at the screen? In what way is this feature elegant or intuitive? The album art appearing in landscape view is also a feature that, while seemingly cool, doesn't have much actual elegance or usefulness. Unless you bought all your music from Apple, you're not likely to have all the album art, and it's nowhere near the most efficient way to find the music you're looking for. Even if you do remember the album art to every song you like, you can only view full covers for something like three albums at a time.
Really, the only solid merits I could find him attributing to the iPhone were the auto-dimming (which actually IS elegant and well-designed) and the fact that he likes the feel of glass over plastic. Meanwhile, he admits that the iPhone lacks features that would be genuinely useful to him, like custom settings based on power source.
The reality distortion field truly is amazing.
Any other phone?
On my G1, I just drag the music I like to anywhere on the SD card. Then I can use the app Ringdroid to cut it down to the length I want and set it as the active ringtone, or if I just want it to ring from the beginning I can select it right from the music app while listening to it (Menu button > Use as ringtone).
That hardly seems as much of a hassle as importing, transcoding, and renaming. Maybe I'm just too dumb to see Apple's brilliance on this matter.
So using information exactly 17 days out of date (and not even out of date for the majority of iPhone users) and calling it funny (which it is) is 'vicious stupidity'?
Get some perspective, zealots.
Also IJII instead of IJIT.
No need to thank me for pointing out your error to the thousands of people viewing this page. Unless you really want to, of course.
OK, so people (not in the US (who've upgraded to 3.0)) can MMS.
Still hilarious that it didn't come stock.
Apple fanboys are awfully rabid today aren't they, putting words in my mouth and all...
Yeah, once you hack it and fool AT&T into thinking you don't actually have an iPhone.
But I wouldn't expect you to admit that.
No.
A) iPhones don't do MMS (which is hilarious)
B) MMS is done over HTTP, with only the URL actually being sent over SMS, so nothing should ever really be executed (of course, you'd think the same would go for SMS...)
Keep your eye on http://www.openpandora.org/
OMG so THAT'S what an egg is?
"you could be poped under this current state law."
NOOOO! Not the funny hat!!!!
I priced my i7 system at ~$700. Must be a miiighty small bucket you got if one drop fills it a third of the way.
Cool story, grandpa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reye's_syndrome
You are obviously familiar with some aspects of the internet, having posted on Slashdot, but you appear to struggle with the overall concept. You see, on this, the wonderful internet, knowledge is free and bountiful.
At the top of my post is a link to an article on a site called 'Wikipedia'; specifically: an article about one of the potential adverse reactions to aspirin. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, built by its users. If you do not trust the information in the article, look to the bottom for citations and references. If you'd like more information on aspirin, look for the first occurrence of the word within the article, and click it. Important words on Wikipedia are often made into hyperlinks which will take you directly to the related Wikipedia article.
I tell you these things hoping that, having been properly exposed to this wonderful resource, you will exert some effort on your part to do some research on the debated points. The burden of proof may be on those making the claims, but this most certainly does not prevent you from learning for yourself.