And all this is still entirely possible. You just wont be able to pay for one game copy and have multiple people playing.
If you suggest that you all have legit copies, then your argument goes out the window. Unless you're suggesting that you only have a 1-port router so only 1 computer can be on the internet at 1 time...
As someone else in this topic pointed out, they havent changed the difficulty at all. They've only reduced the time required to get through the leveling curve. All the encounters are the same. The gear is the same. The rewards (barring xp) are the same.
Another very important distinction is that they changed the leveling curve more to accomodate replayability moreso than ease the experience for a first time player. If you've never done the quests before, nor read the storylines, nor seen the gameworld, playing in and of itself should be enjoyable to you. It's the people who have already done it repeatedly that would be more and more discouraged to do so again. And again.. and again...
New players should not be discouraged to play. They have not just 60 levels of new experiences before them, but rather 85! While the replayabilty for people who've already done that is not as time-consuming.
And to touch on it again, there's never been some IQ minimum required to reach cap level in WoW. Compariatively it doesn't even require any exceptional commitment of time when set next to many (most) of the other MMO's on the market.
So... You know that Bliz has a history of delaying content (so that they are much more assured they don't release crap, like everyone else), and you still bank on every date that filters out?
Seems like it'd be far less frustrating to just assume no date for a release is accurate until you're holding the box.
Blizzard taking forever to accomplish things is frustrating, to be sure. But it's one of those universal truths you'd think everyone had reconciled themselves with by now. And the results are usually worth the wait so....
Its an assumption that the intent of easing the level curve is to entice new players. I happen to disagree.
One of the staying powers of WoW is and always has been it's replayability. Hitting cap level has never been some amazing feat. Once you do, you're pretty much required to either join a guild committed to instances/raiding in order to further advance, or concede that such activities are not right for you. In the latter case you either quit the game or start an alt.
WoW's numbers have begun to plateau. I doubt there are millions of people quitting and millions more signing up. Instead I'd guess that there are many people playing alts, as evidenced by the 5million DK's running everywhere (who can't exist unless the account owner has achieved 55 on another character at a bare minimum).
Blizzard recognizes that once you've done the same quests 5 times your ambition to do so again wanes. So they drop the difficulty curve. They ease people in. Add to that the increased level cap, making the mark for doing the 'fun end-game stuff' further out, and they might be helping those who want to try a new group role in the end-game get there with a little less investment early. Or maybe maybe ease the burden for those returning to the game from a break to start a new character and catch up to their friends.
In the end I don't see any of this as some catastrophy for the game. It is certainly financially sound for Blizzard to encourage past, present and future players to sign up. It seems to me that the only people really pissed about it are the people who have either no alts or very few of low level who feel that their advancement has somehow been cheapened. And I can see their case to a certain degree. But it's the old "In my day, I walked to school in the snow, uphill both ways" argument. Yeah? Sounds like that sucked. Why would I want to? More importantly, why would I want to again.
According to The Columbia Encyclopedia, coercion in the context of law is described as :
"...the unlawful act of compelling a person to do, or to abstain from doing, something by depriving him of the exercise of his free will, particularly by use or threat of physical or moral force. "
Fabricating a situation in which a person believes they will die if they don't confess is coercion by even the most simple-minded person's definition. Inherently, if the judge is at all 'capable' of applying the law, (s)he would have no choice but to exclude any confessions gained through coercive means.
I can't honestly see how you can find any assumption there. It's pretty black and white. If you meant to suggest that there are incompetent judges out there, sure, I buy that. But that's why I deliberately suggested that a remotely -capable- judge wouldn't stand for it.
There are a number of arguments both for and against cloud computing. Performance and cost aside, it just seems to be an introduction of more single points of failure in your infrastructure.
In a standard site infrastructure model if your mail server takes a dump, yeah, you're not getting mail. Same with routers, power, etc. We all get that.
Now introduce clouds for your services and add in firewalls, physical broadband pipes (T1, or whatever), broadband service provider and all their hardware/personel/etc, and any other broadband service providers that host traffic to your destination (and their hardware/service/personel/etc). There's a host of things that are added that, if broken, sever your business's ability to perform. And we havent even gotten to the company that has the hardware and services that actually host the cloud.
The bottom line is the argument between what is more efficient and cost effective. Unfortunately the accountants dont factor in downtime for every employee when things break. They only factor in the check they know with certainty that has to be written every month. Yeah, on paper you probably save a bunch of money to go with a cloud. In reality you're not making any money with all your employees sitting around with their thumbs in their asses a couple of times a week.
They can tell you that some criminal is out to kill you and the only way you'll survive is if you turn "state's evidence". They can tell you practically anything they want if they think it will make you talk.
They can lie to you. That's true. They can tell you that they found evidence implicating you. They could say they have a witness.
Misleading you to believe that you're caught is one thing. Presenting a situation in which you might confess to something you didn't do out of a fear for your safety is another entirely. That's coercion, its patently illegal, and any judge that's remotely capable would throw it out.
So your system relies on:
1) Assessments from other players - The potential for exploitation and griefing in any system in which you're rated by your fellow players is enormous. Piss off one person in a huge guild, accidently or not, and you suddenly have a couple hundred negative assessments. Conversely, make buddies with a massive and powerful guild and suddenly you have hundreds of favorabe and wholly inaccurate assessments.
2) Reliance on long-term averages to rank a player - One would hope that in the long-run, a player had achieved a level of friendship with at least a few other players. And that should have already blossomed into a reasonable network. If not, then a ranking and matching system is only marginally useful at best.
For example, just because someone has a 5 out of 10 in gear doesn't mean you should not take the player to a 40 man raid if he or she has a 9 out of 10 rating in playing skill.
Actually, yes it does. And it isn't elitist crap either.
Here are 39 people who've paid their dues. They've spent the time and the effort to build up their gear so that they're survivable in a raid environment. They've made the effort to 'get there' and have earned the right to attempt the encounter. Randomly they are 'matched' with a guy that is in gear half the quality (rated 5 out of 10). That guy will get killed in every fight.
Raid encounters regularly incorporate heavy Area of Effect damage and multiple creatures who are running around smacking people. You must be in gear that can mitigate the damage or resist it entirely or you die. Fast.
When you have a person (or multiples, as your system would make possible) who is seriously under-geared, the raid as a whole spends inequitable resources trying to keep that person alive at the expense of the rest of the raid. The alternative is to just let that under-geared person die in order to save the rest of the raid. In that case you have a person who is essentially a corpse being drug around to participate in the lottery rolls on loot against the people who lived to finish the fights.
Maybe this sounds like exaggeration. It's not. The encounters are designed to tax everyone in the raid, and you need every body working at peak effectiveness if you expect to survive. You are relying on controlling the environment to succeed. A weak link is a wild card that introduces absolute chaos to the equation, and it's very difficult to overcome.
No amount of player skill, or knowledge of the encounters, or just being a sweet guy is going to help. Your sweet, knowledgable, skilled player is going to be the proud owner of a charcoal briquette the first time a raid AOE goes off if they don't have the gear to handle it. And the other 39 people there shouldn't have to shoulder that burden because this one person doesn't want to pay his dues.
Level: Fails because two characters at equal level can have vastly different goals, gear, experience, and motivations.
Gear: Fails because even if the gear two characters are in roughly equal gear, one player can be vastly more skilled, and is just at a lower end of the progression curve for his playstyle. Again, goals, experience and motivations can vastly differ.
Player-defined: You rarely have 2 people agree on definitions of 'Casual', or 'Raider', or 'Hard-Core', or 'Core'. And even if you did, you're still looking at different games. Not just different groups of people playing. A server composed entirely of 'Casual' players is not likely to often have organized 40 person raids that can cohesively overcome the most challenging of encounters. It would be counterproductive to scale those encounters according to the populace because doing so would encourage the instant gratification raiders to just sign up for the casual servers instead. If you mean to group people under the above definitions and not actually seperate them among gameworlds... that's essentially what exists now. If you are very casual, you're most likely to be using the LFG tool (which could be more widely advertised as an option for those who are unaware). If you're a bit toward the more intense playstyle on the scale, you probably already have the social networking to do the things you're interested in doing. And like any classifications of people, nothing is concrete. There's overlap. And in that overlap are the oppurtunities to learn about others and what is required to find your niche. The overlap, the lack of clarity in classifying people and who they should or should not group with, is the gaurantee in eventually finding your best-suited groupmates.
There are still newbs at level 60-70 that leveled up themselves. And when they ask questions or make mistakes there are often those that will ridicule them. But there's a line as well.
I am happy to answer a simple question. I'm happy to show someone where something is. I'm happy to explain a process in a dungeon so that the fight goes smoothly. What I'm not willing to do is spend a night answering every freakin question from someone who isn't willing to go investigate on their own.
Perfect example was someone just the other night who wanted to know what armor blacksmiths could make. I sent a link of my 450skill smithing recipes. Then he asked me how much the most expensive weapon I could make was. I gave him a link to the item and a quote. He (a warrior) said "I can't use 2h maces". I said yes you can, you just have to train. He asks where he trains. I say in 1 of the cap cities. He asks, which city. I say, I can't remember off-hand which one has 2h mace training, but that he could look it up on wowhead.com. So an hour later he says he trained and wants me to make the weapon. I tell him I don't have the components. He asks where he can get them. I suggest he look that up on wowhead.com as well. At this point he gets all pissed about the fact that I'm not willing to help someone pretty new to the game...
Now a lot of people would have suggested he go get the information for himself after the 1st question or 2. But I tried. At some point if you really want to succeed in anything you have to take the responsibilty for figuring it out yourself. If you expect people to hold your hand through it all, you're going to get ridiculed eventually by even the most patient of people.
In other news, Alcoholics Anonymous will begin meeting in bars during Happy Hour. Their latest positive reward program allows you a tequilla body shot for every step you complete.
... it could generate data on how the average user goes about finding a particular setting, how long it takes them to perform a given action, etc.
How do you catalog how long it takes a user to do something without a definitive start of the clock? Does the user click on the "I'm going to clear my browser cache" button before going to perform the action so that it can be timed?
I suppose you could start the clock when the user first began going through the file menus. But that assumes that they completed their time in the menus by doing what they actually intended to do. As you pointed out, users are clueless.
So if knowledge of the game is power, then obviously you would be able to jump into your friends place in CoD4 and replicate his apparent ability to shoot through walls in exactly the places he did it. And he could just as easily log in your rogue and stunlock kill my paladin in epics with PVP trinkets and bubbles. Right?
Wrong.
Just because you know it exists and where it is, or know the method by which it can be done, does not necesarily mean that you can execute it. Therein, knowledge alone is not what defines one as skilled.
Does it really take that much effort to read the ****ing quest? Seriously?
In the real world you don't cut your boss off before he's finished making his request and then go onto the internet and look up the weight of a 747. You listen to what he's asking. Maybe he just wants to know if you've completed the TPS reports. A simple Yes or No will suffice.
The quests in these games are generally no more than 300 words. They almost all say something along the lines of "Go kill abc at xyz." or "Go pick up abc at xyz." And they often elborate on the location; "You'll find the tribe of soandso east of the river of Blahblah, in the shadow of Mnt Wannahockalugi." Its too difficult to read 300 words? Yes! Go to a website that will tell you in 30! But thats not even good enough. Now people use addons that just put a big ass arrow on the screen in front of you that you follow like a lobotomized monkey and wait till it tells you to pick something up.
That seems simplistic. But it's realistic. The only way you'd be able to avoid that as a truth is to have AI that could identify intent of the players. And if you can do that you'll be rich beyond imagination in realms that have nothing to do with video games.
Everybody would max out eventually and then the game would have balance amongst EVERYBODY
And everyone ended up the same. Battle Mage anyone? If that's the goal we can all just play Tekken and circumvent all the cumbersome skillup/levelup stuff entirely.
This is the fatal flaw in most (if not all) skill-based systems. Someone does an analytical analysis of the absolute most powerful min/max skill combination, and then you have an overwhelming majority of the population moving in that direction. The variety of the game is lost, and with it the personality.
People that are intimately knowledgable of WoW's mechanics often can't play worth a crap. Particularly in PVP. The same can be said of BF2142, or SC, or C&C, or... you name it. They may be completely aware of which skill is most appropriate to use in the situation they currently find themselves in. But their ability to execute it quickly and efficiently while keeping their adrenaline in check is a totally different story.
Knowledge does not equate to skill. Ability to practically apply exceptional knowledge will not remotely gaurantee an exceptional result.
I know the NHL rulebook front to back. I know how to explain position, cycles, focus, strategy, etc. I know what a player should or should not do in any number of situations. I know the high-percentage shot or play from pretty much anywhere on the ice. I can discuss plays and performance with the best of em (and have). But if you tie skates on me and shoved me onto the ice with pro's, I'd be lucky to come out with broken bones numbering in only the single-digits.
Edit his hosts file and redirect his favorite cheat sites to bogus IPs:)
My boys know that if I caught them using cheat sites or hacks or something I'd lock the computer down completely for a while. I'm a firm believer in earning advancement, and the greater appreciation it gives in success. I have no evidence, but to me cheat sites (and any get-it-now shortcuts for kids) are the beginnings of a pattern of behavior that will lead to compromises in principles for the sake of instant gratification. And that is a recipe for disaster in later life. I would feel uncomfortable with allowing that type of behavior, personaly.
If they were to actually translate XWing and/or Tie fighter to the iPhone using the motion sensing controls, I might actualy have to jump on the bandwagon. I havent really enjoyed a flight sim since those days.
Slashdot Mirror
And all this is still entirely possible. You just wont be able to pay for one game copy and have multiple people playing.
If you suggest that you all have legit copies, then your argument goes out the window. Unless you're suggesting that you only have a 1-port router so only 1 computer can be on the internet at 1 time...
So your argument is essentially that you and your friend shouldn't both have to buy the game to enjoy it at the same time?
As someone else in this topic pointed out, they havent changed the difficulty at all. They've only reduced the time required to get through the leveling curve. All the encounters are the same. The gear is the same. The rewards (barring xp) are the same.
Another very important distinction is that they changed the leveling curve more to accomodate replayability moreso than ease the experience for a first time player. If you've never done the quests before, nor read the storylines, nor seen the gameworld, playing in and of itself should be enjoyable to you. It's the people who have already done it repeatedly that would be more and more discouraged to do so again. And again.. and again...
New players should not be discouraged to play. They have not just 60 levels of new experiences before them, but rather 85! While the replayabilty for people who've already done that is not as time-consuming.
And to touch on it again, there's never been some IQ minimum required to reach cap level in WoW. Compariatively it doesn't even require any exceptional commitment of time when set next to many (most) of the other MMO's on the market.
So... You know that Bliz has a history of delaying content (so that they are much more assured they don't release crap, like everyone else), and you still bank on every date that filters out?
Seems like it'd be far less frustrating to just assume no date for a release is accurate until you're holding the box.
Blizzard taking forever to accomplish things is frustrating, to be sure. But it's one of those universal truths you'd think everyone had reconciled themselves with by now. And the results are usually worth the wait so....
Its an assumption that the intent of easing the level curve is to entice new players. I happen to disagree.
One of the staying powers of WoW is and always has been it's replayability. Hitting cap level has never been some amazing feat. Once you do, you're pretty much required to either join a guild committed to instances/raiding in order to further advance, or concede that such activities are not right for you. In the latter case you either quit the game or start an alt.
WoW's numbers have begun to plateau. I doubt there are millions of people quitting and millions more signing up. Instead I'd guess that there are many people playing alts, as evidenced by the 5million DK's running everywhere (who can't exist unless the account owner has achieved 55 on another character at a bare minimum).
Blizzard recognizes that once you've done the same quests 5 times your ambition to do so again wanes. So they drop the difficulty curve. They ease people in. Add to that the increased level cap, making the mark for doing the 'fun end-game stuff' further out, and they might be helping those who want to try a new group role in the end-game get there with a little less investment early. Or maybe maybe ease the burden for those returning to the game from a break to start a new character and catch up to their friends.
In the end I don't see any of this as some catastrophy for the game. It is certainly financially sound for Blizzard to encourage past, present and future players to sign up. It seems to me that the only people really pissed about it are the people who have either no alts or very few of low level who feel that their advancement has somehow been cheapened. And I can see their case to a certain degree. But it's the old "In my day, I walked to school in the snow, uphill both ways" argument. Yeah? Sounds like that sucked. Why would I want to? More importantly, why would I want to again.
There's no assumption in it.
According to The Columbia Encyclopedia, coercion in the context of law is described as : "...the unlawful act of compelling a person to do, or to abstain from doing, something by depriving him of the exercise of his free will, particularly by use or threat of physical or moral force. "
Fabricating a situation in which a person believes they will die if they don't confess is coercion by even the most simple-minded person's definition. Inherently, if the judge is at all 'capable' of applying the law, (s)he would have no choice but to exclude any confessions gained through coercive means.
I can't honestly see how you can find any assumption there. It's pretty black and white. If you meant to suggest that there are incompetent judges out there, sure, I buy that. But that's why I deliberately suggested that a remotely -capable- judge wouldn't stand for it.
There are a number of arguments both for and against cloud computing. Performance and cost aside, it just seems to be an introduction of more single points of failure in your infrastructure.
In a standard site infrastructure model if your mail server takes a dump, yeah, you're not getting mail. Same with routers, power, etc. We all get that.
Now introduce clouds for your services and add in firewalls, physical broadband pipes (T1, or whatever), broadband service provider and all their hardware/personel/etc, and any other broadband service providers that host traffic to your destination (and their hardware/service/personel/etc). There's a host of things that are added that, if broken, sever your business's ability to perform. And we havent even gotten to the company that has the hardware and services that actually host the cloud.
The bottom line is the argument between what is more efficient and cost effective. Unfortunately the accountants dont factor in downtime for every employee when things break. They only factor in the check they know with certainty that has to be written every month. Yeah, on paper you probably save a bunch of money to go with a cloud. In reality you're not making any money with all your employees sitting around with their thumbs in their asses a couple of times a week.
The cool thing is that its so true and you have the right to say so.
Wait...
They can tell you that some criminal is out to kill you and the only way you'll survive is if you turn "state's evidence". They can tell you practically anything they want if they think it will make you talk.
They can lie to you. That's true. They can tell you that they found evidence implicating you. They could say they have a witness.
Misleading you to believe that you're caught is one thing. Presenting a situation in which you might confess to something you didn't do out of a fear for your safety is another entirely. That's coercion, its patently illegal, and any judge that's remotely capable would throw it out.
2) Reliance on long-term averages to rank a player - One would hope that in the long-run, a player had achieved a level of friendship with at least a few other players. And that should have already blossomed into a reasonable network. If not, then a ranking and matching system is only marginally useful at best.
For example, just because someone has a 5 out of 10 in gear doesn't mean you should not take the player to a 40 man raid if he or she has a 9 out of 10 rating in playing skill.
Actually, yes it does. And it isn't elitist crap either.
Here are 39 people who've paid their dues. They've spent the time and the effort to build up their gear so that they're survivable in a raid environment. They've made the effort to 'get there' and have earned the right to attempt the encounter. Randomly they are 'matched' with a guy that is in gear half the quality (rated 5 out of 10). That guy will get killed in every fight.
Raid encounters regularly incorporate heavy Area of Effect damage and multiple creatures who are running around smacking people. You must be in gear that can mitigate the damage or resist it entirely or you die. Fast.
When you have a person (or multiples, as your system would make possible) who is seriously under-geared, the raid as a whole spends inequitable resources trying to keep that person alive at the expense of the rest of the raid. The alternative is to just let that under-geared person die in order to save the rest of the raid. In that case you have a person who is essentially a corpse being drug around to participate in the lottery rolls on loot against the people who lived to finish the fights.
Maybe this sounds like exaggeration. It's not. The encounters are designed to tax everyone in the raid, and you need every body working at peak effectiveness if you expect to survive. You are relying on controlling the environment to succeed. A weak link is a wild card that introduces absolute chaos to the equation, and it's very difficult to overcome.
No amount of player skill, or knowledge of the encounters, or just being a sweet guy is going to help. Your sweet, knowledgable, skilled player is going to be the proud owner of a charcoal briquette the first time a raid AOE goes off if they don't have the gear to handle it. And the other 39 people there shouldn't have to shoulder that burden because this one person doesn't want to pay his dues.
In that case, I offer the following:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Where+can+I+get+information+about+World+of+Warcraft%3F
The point being, if you need information, go look for it.
And how do you match them?
... that's essentially what exists now. If you are very casual, you're most likely to be using the LFG tool (which could be more widely advertised as an option for those who are unaware). If you're a bit toward the more intense playstyle on the scale, you probably already have the social networking to do the things you're interested in doing. And like any classifications of people, nothing is concrete. There's overlap. And in that overlap are the oppurtunities to learn about others and what is required to find your niche. The overlap, the lack of clarity in classifying people and who they should or should not group with, is the gaurantee in eventually finding your best-suited groupmates.
Level: Fails because two characters at equal level can have vastly different goals, gear, experience, and motivations.
Gear: Fails because even if the gear two characters are in roughly equal gear, one player can be vastly more skilled, and is just at a lower end of the progression curve for his playstyle. Again, goals, experience and motivations can vastly differ.
Player-defined: You rarely have 2 people agree on definitions of 'Casual', or 'Raider', or 'Hard-Core', or 'Core'. And even if you did, you're still looking at different games. Not just different groups of people playing. A server composed entirely of 'Casual' players is not likely to often have organized 40 person raids that can cohesively overcome the most challenging of encounters. It would be counterproductive to scale those encounters according to the populace because doing so would encourage the instant gratification raiders to just sign up for the casual servers instead. If you mean to group people under the above definitions and not actually seperate them among gameworlds
There are still newbs at level 60-70 that leveled up themselves. And when they ask questions or make mistakes there are often those that will ridicule them. But there's a line as well.
I am happy to answer a simple question. I'm happy to show someone where something is. I'm happy to explain a process in a dungeon so that the fight goes smoothly. What I'm not willing to do is spend a night answering every freakin question from someone who isn't willing to go investigate on their own.
Perfect example was someone just the other night who wanted to know what armor blacksmiths could make. I sent a link of my 450skill smithing recipes. Then he asked me how much the most expensive weapon I could make was. I gave him a link to the item and a quote. He (a warrior) said "I can't use 2h maces". I said yes you can, you just have to train. He asks where he trains. I say in 1 of the cap cities. He asks, which city. I say, I can't remember off-hand which one has 2h mace training, but that he could look it up on wowhead.com. So an hour later he says he trained and wants me to make the weapon. I tell him I don't have the components. He asks where he can get them. I suggest he look that up on wowhead.com as well. At this point he gets all pissed about the fact that I'm not willing to help someone pretty new to the game...
Now a lot of people would have suggested he go get the information for himself after the 1st question or 2. But I tried. At some point if you really want to succeed in anything you have to take the responsibilty for figuring it out yourself. If you expect people to hold your hand through it all, you're going to get ridiculed eventually by even the most patient of people.
In other news, Alcoholics Anonymous will begin meeting in bars during Happy Hour. Their latest positive reward program allows you a tequilla body shot for every step you complete.
... /emote holds up his sarcasm sign.
... it could generate data on how the average user goes about finding a particular setting, how long it takes them to perform a given action, etc.
How do you catalog how long it takes a user to do something without a definitive start of the clock? Does the user click on the "I'm going to clear my browser cache" button before going to perform the action so that it can be timed?
I suppose you could start the clock when the user first began going through the file menus. But that assumes that they completed their time in the menus by doing what they actually intended to do. As you pointed out, users are clueless.
So if knowledge of the game is power, then obviously you would be able to jump into your friends place in CoD4 and replicate his apparent ability to shoot through walls in exactly the places he did it. And he could just as easily log in your rogue and stunlock kill my paladin in epics with PVP trinkets and bubbles. Right?
Wrong.
Just because you know it exists and where it is, or know the method by which it can be done, does not necesarily mean that you can execute it. Therein, knowledge alone is not what defines one as skilled.
Does it really take that much effort to read the ****ing quest? Seriously?
In the real world you don't cut your boss off before he's finished making his request and then go onto the internet and look up the weight of a 747. You listen to what he's asking. Maybe he just wants to know if you've completed the TPS reports. A simple Yes or No will suffice.
The quests in these games are generally no more than 300 words. They almost all say something along the lines of "Go kill abc at xyz." or "Go pick up abc at xyz." And they often elborate on the location; "You'll find the tribe of soandso east of the river of Blahblah, in the shadow of Mnt Wannahockalugi." Its too difficult to read 300 words? Yes! Go to a website that will tell you in 30! But thats not even good enough. Now people use addons that just put a big ass arrow on the screen in front of you that you follow like a lobotomized monkey and wait till it tells you to pick something up.
If it can be rewarded, someone can automate it.
That seems simplistic. But it's realistic. The only way you'd be able to avoid that as a truth is to have AI that could identify intent of the players. And if you can do that you'll be rich beyond imagination in realms that have nothing to do with video games.
Everybody would max out eventually and then the game would have balance amongst EVERYBODY
And everyone ended up the same. Battle Mage anyone? If that's the goal we can all just play Tekken and circumvent all the cumbersome skillup/levelup stuff entirely.
This is the fatal flaw in most (if not all) skill-based systems. Someone does an analytical analysis of the absolute most powerful min/max skill combination, and then you have an overwhelming majority of the population moving in that direction. The variety of the game is lost, and with it the personality.
The editor understood. Which is why he started his statement with "Relatedly..."
People that are intimately knowledgable of WoW's mechanics often can't play worth a crap. Particularly in PVP. The same can be said of BF2142, or SC, or C&C, or ... you name it. They may be completely aware of which skill is most appropriate to use in the situation they currently find themselves in. But their ability to execute it quickly and efficiently while keeping their adrenaline in check is a totally different story.
Knowledge does not equate to skill. Ability to practically apply exceptional knowledge will not remotely gaurantee an exceptional result.
I know the NHL rulebook front to back. I know how to explain position, cycles, focus, strategy, etc. I know what a player should or should not do in any number of situations. I know the high-percentage shot or play from pretty much anywhere on the ice. I can discuss plays and performance with the best of em (and have). But if you tie skates on me and shoved me onto the ice with pro's, I'd be lucky to come out with broken bones numbering in only the single-digits.
Edit his hosts file and redirect his favorite cheat sites to bogus IPs :)
My boys know that if I caught them using cheat sites or hacks or something I'd lock the computer down completely for a while. I'm a firm believer in earning advancement, and the greater appreciation it gives in success. I have no evidence, but to me cheat sites (and any get-it-now shortcuts for kids) are the beginnings of a pattern of behavior that will lead to compromises in principles for the sake of instant gratification. And that is a recipe for disaster in later life. I would feel uncomfortable with allowing that type of behavior, personaly.
If they were to actually translate XWing and/or Tie fighter to the iPhone using the motion sensing controls, I might actualy have to jump on the bandwagon. I havent really enjoyed a flight sim since those days.
Correction: that was meant to read 63, not 63 pages.
Regardless, it just goes to show that we can't possibly take a publication like Yellowpages.com seriously if they actually list Schindlers.
Yellowpages.com shows 63 PAGES of Schindlers in New York city alone. Round em all up! They must all be mass murderers!