Fine! But hold on there, what's that you're doing, dumping chemicals? Sorry, buddy, you're hurting the local water table. That shit you're dumping doesn't respect property lines. We're going to have to tell you what you can and can't do when what you're doing has the potential of harming your neighbors.
Uh, that's more or less what we have right now. Largish companies have environmental control officers who make sure the company complies with law by watching what goes down its drains, etc.
Poor countries are much worse off for the environment than wealthy ones - do you see Gates chopping down his forest because his kids are hungry and he needs firewood? The best thing we could do for the planet would be to raise everyone up to middle class prosperity.
>>But oh yeah, that's all corporate and thus stupid, right?
To each his own, man. I went to Comicon instead, got to hang out next to Adama and Tigh for a couple hours at a BSG concert, found that a friend of mine is Felicia Day's personal assistant, got signatures from a lot of my favorite book authors, attended some interesting panels, talked with Stephen Martiniere for a while (who also sketched me a neat drawing for free), etc.
I have played canned demos by Blizzard before and don't trust them further than I can throw their bolted-to-the-ground kiosks.
But yeah, Ozzy's neat (even though he doesn't actually play WoW) and I'm all for meeting up with guildies, so I'm not disparaging you. I just think the entire idea of BlizzCon is such that Blizzard ought to be paying people to watch, not the other way around.
>>What happens to your civil liberties under a unified global nation? Which model are you going to use? The US model? The EU model? The Chinese one? The Singaporean one? How do you run such a unified nation?
You just average them all together. You get the civil freedom of Singapore, the freedom of business of China, the education system of America, and the clear-headed sensibilities of the European Union.
>>There's a strong tendency for both humans and bots to revert anonymous editors' edits, even if it's a good edit, with a good comment line pointing to discussion on the talk page.
Yep. I only make anon edits on any articles that have political significance (don't want my name associated, sorry). The anon edits I make have about a 1000% greater chance of being reverted out of hand than named edits.
>>Pirating was the main reason for bnetd. Period. If you can't come to terms with this, then you aren't living in reality.
Uh, no. I knew Mark Baysinger from the ACM club at UC San Diego, and I'm reasonably confident that the inspiration for bnetd was the absolute crap bnet was, especially when we'd do an ACM LAN party or the like.
>>If these bnetd guys were so fantastic, then maybe they should have created their own RTS. Instead, they chose to build off of proprietary software.
You don't know anything. Bnetd WAS a brilliant piece of software engineering. They reverse engineered a massive online system using bubblegum and shoestrings.
>>If they wanted to do this, they should have went to Blizzard and got written documents that said that they could.
Uh, yeah. And Blizzard would have said no.
Technically, what they were doing was perfectly legal, but Blizzard has the legal equivalent of a 330-ton gorilla. Which made it illegal. Mark, at the time, I think was sharing an apartment with someone. Our legal system isn't designed for fair fights between mega-corporations and individuals.
>>An example of their ineptitude: they forgot to put batteries in some of the meters, making it impossible to get the magic slip of paper, and then ticketed people for it.
If it makes you feel better, the government run socialist people's republic of UC Berkeley did the exact same thing. I had to take them to court to get the $50 from the ticket back.
I even had a digital camera with me at the time, so it wasn't like they couldn't see how they'd fucked up when I sent in the appeal on the ticket.
Well yes, but to be honest... I'm fairly sure the 42" TV I'm pulling the Wii up on consumes lots more power than the Wii itself, probably in the 100-150W range. In any case, for $/hour of entertainment isn't exactly breaking the bank anyway.
A Wii, no. A Wii won't break the bank. But a PS3 is an energy hog.
>>You don't get it. If there were perfect class mobility, then 20% of the top would stay in the top and 20% of the top would move to the very bottom.
No, you have it completely backwards. Our null hypothesis is that people will be making around the same amount of money in 10 years as they do today. The fact that 45% of people fall out of the top bracket in a mere 10 years is evidence of a huge amount of social mobility.
>>It is a class mobility that incorporates a heavy dose of birthright. Your NYTimes page proved my point. Thanks.
If you want to see what birthright actually looks at, read some studies of social mobility when Europe had a noble class, or even under socialist regimes like modern-day France. Socialist regimes are quite conservative when it comes to social change. They don't let their corporations fail, and crush up-and-coming competitors. So whereas a Mr. Facebook could make his millions in America, in a socialist regime the established company would crush it and stop him from rising in class.
Whereas, male athletes don't seem to get this issue -- when was the last time a male athlete had to prove they were a man, as-opposed to some sort of super-human being?
Consider men being the "open" division.
I'm sure that nobody would complain about "XX Males" or whatever other combinations exist... if she/he was competing as a man.
The vast majority of the population will never be able to compete at the World Athletics Championship, no matter how much they train, it is in fact, a small portion of the population that are genetically fittest and able to be the best athletes.
Speak for yourself. I have a line on joining the Thailand Olympic Curling team.
>>So then do it. Create the test and give us the results, let us verify your test methodology and your data and your results. Until such a time, ID is merely conjecture and not a scientific hypothesis.
I've already posted such a method on my journal.
But I'd be willing to write a paper on it with more rigorous math. Which journal do you think would be most appropriate? It's especially timely with the announcement of (they say) us having artificial life within 6 months.
Barely more than half of the people in the top 20% of the income bracket were still there even 10 years later. Not even close to the 99% intergenerational figure you were trying to claim.
Where did this myth come from that you get to be a higher up if you can just take the risk? 99% are "higher ups" because of birth right. The other 1% are held out there as tokens of the philosophy "if only you work hard enough for us higher-ups, you can make it too".
What idiot communist twat drivel. Research social mobility some time and educate yourself. You remind me of one of those idiot children like James Loewen (author of Lies my Teacher Told Me), who claimed (in a book dedicated to revealing errors in history textbooks) that "all but one" of our presidents have come from priviledged backgrounds. Which sounded fishy to me, forcing me to research the backgrounds of every single damn president. I tallied which came from priviledged backgrounds, and which didn't. The split was about 50/50. Sure, being rich helps, but, hell, Nixon was so poor he couldn't go to Harvard even with a full ride, and several of our presidents have been orphans or from single parent families.
If you want to spew lies, at least try to make them a little more realistic first.
>>The Democrats may not be a whole lot better on this, but at least they *are* better, and one of Obama's promises was to punish companies which move jobs overseas.
Are you serial?
Obama's plan was to tax American corporations for outsourcing, which would have the effect of them moving overseas entirely. It's one of the most fucktarded ideas ever conceived.
Whenever I receive a communique from their headquarters, I know I can trust it fully without hesitation or rational thought process. This is the beauty of being inside the One, True Market, where no company has ever lied about their activities before.
Yeah, Apple also has some simultaneous bullshit going on with claiming that SOX mandates that companies charge for software updates. Regardless of the fact that all other major companies (Sony, Microsoft, etc.) seem blissfully unaware of this imaginary point.
But the Apple fanbois will trot that stinker out every time you criticize Apple for, say, charging for a trivial firmware update (3.0) for the Ipod Touch. "They have to! It's the law!" Pfft.
>>Intelligent Design has theories? What, if anything, does it predict? How could it be falsified?
Sure. You can restate ID so that it is scientific.
Essentially it's premise is that of the biased coin or rigged slot machine. Contrary to popular belief, it acknowledges evolution, but says that it exhibits the bias of some outside entity interfering with evolution.
A statistical test akin to testing for a biased coin would be sufficient to create an ID test.
Also contrary to the prevailing wisdom on Slashdot, such a test will need to be made anyway as we move into a bold new millenium with genetic engineering, and we want to know if something has interfered with the evolution of, say, Ebola, so we know whether or not we should nuke the shit out of some third world country.
>>Microsoft already took a big hit when they extended the warranty due to RRoD to 3 years, but the expected cost of the move was low enough that this doesn't make sense. >>Finally, if the failure rate is so high, wouldn't news of such be all over the place? The media would have a field day with it.
There was an article on here a month or so back stating that the RRoD had cost them one billion dollars to date.
This was a not insignificant amount of money, even for Microsoft.
If we do the math, assuming a $100 repair cost, $1,000,000,000 / $100 = 10 million repaired units. So the articles estimation that 50% of the 30 million made was defective actually sounds about right (since the extended warranty didn't cover everyone).
Yes, AFLAC gave my cousin a discount for joining a gym and sticking with it. She has to sign something saying how many hours a month she goes or something.
>>So you ended up with a 'skill based, classless' game system, where ironically everyone was nearly identical in powers, skills, and capabilities.
Then, no offense, they weren't doing it right. Even though there's always going to be global minima and maxima that you have to take a look at, there should be enough variety in the encounters the players are exposed to to make players select from as wide a variety of local maxima instead. You used DPS as an example, so consider the following: Build A: 100DPS melee, 0DPS ranged Build B: 0DPS melee, 200DPS ranged Builc C: 50DPS melee, 50DPS ranged
Build B dominates, because (unless you have a minimum range on your DPS), they will be able to completely outclass the other possible builds, in all situations. It does more damage, and can do so without having to move to get close to the target.
This is a completely dominant scenario, and so is against Shaka's Principle of Game Balance: All choices should be interesting, but none should be must-have or so weak people will be mocked for taking it. In other words, no choice should completely dominate another, in either direction. (In magic the gathering terms, there's no excuse for a grey ogre when there's uthden trolls available).
So a smart designer would do the following: Keep Build A as our baseline: 100DPS melee, 0 DPS ranged Lower Build B's DPS below that of melee to compensate for the fact it can kill at range: 0DPS melee, 85DPS ranged Boost Build C's DPS so that it doesn't completely suck: 75DPS melee, 70DPS ranged...and then add in enough uncertainty that players don't know if they'll always be in melee or in ranged during certain encounters.
That's the brilliance of D&D as opposed to existing MMORPGS: when you do an MMORPG raid (Onyxia, let's say), the players sit down and analyze the encounter like a choreographed ballet: ok, phase 1 is melee, followed by an AOE encounter with some whelps. Phase 2 is all ranged DPS, phase 3 is melee again, with a few more needs for AOE damage. They then can sit down and plot out exactly how many of each class they need, and can even assign certain builds to certain characters so that they are optimal.
In D&D, you have to build your character (and semi-permanently, too) against an *unknown* set of threats. You don't know when you go to some competitive D&D event (like the Gencon Delve) exactly what sorts of threats you'll be facing. Maybe there'll be traps. Maybe there'll be a dragon. Hmm, from the blurb, it sounds like maybe undead or were-creatures, so let's perhaps take several sources of radiant damage, and have a couple silvered weapons in reserve. Etc. My group got together over the course of several bull sessions and worked out a strong team that could deal with most threats - but it was impossible to have an "Optimal" team simply because we didn't know what we'd be dealing with. Sure, we had high DPS characters, but we had to balance that with all our other needs as well.
It would probably cause the WoW designers heads to explode to have monsters that behaved differently (at most, they sort of roll a die to see what combat you'll fight during a raid), but for games like City of Heroes or Champions Online, I think they'd be a lot more fun if you didn't know what you were getting yourself into before a fight.
>>The term "balance" is about balancing classes, not players. If everybody had your perspective, then everybody would play Death Knights or Paladins or whichever class is currently considered slightly overpowered, and it would be a very boring world indeed.
Funny. I'm leveling mining on my Death Knight (created at launch, of course, when it was quite overpowered - but since then they've fucked it sidewise about a thousand times) and all the new characters I see running around in the old zones are paladins, currently the overpowered class of choice. The last battleground I played in had two paladins at the top of the charts, with 4 times the kills of the third place character (a warlock), with the second place paladin having 0 deaths. They weren't in a premade either, just doing random battleground running-around-asshattery.
I also don't play WoW very much, since the game designers (as revealed through an enlightening series of "community interviews") have revealed they don't have the slightest idea of what they're doing. However, as long as the other MMORPGs fuck up more (and I'm looking at you, Warhammer, and you, Age of Conan) and can keep their momentum going without pissing off too many people, they'll do fine, doing what they do best: bumblefucking around.
There's a reason I don't play WoW much any more - about 40 hours since April. Well shy of the thousands of hours I have on/played on my mage, from back in the day. I enjoy the occasional BG, but most of the time playing the game feels like the developers are stabbing me in the eyeballs with a sharp stick.
>>That's what you enjoy; fine. However, there are many players out there who just want to build a character that they like, for whatever reason, and to enjoy the game as it was intended - a massively interactive RPG.
Not really. If WoW was an actual "roleplaying" game, where people, you know, roleplayed, then this statement would be true. Certainly in D&D there are groups of people who will give their character a high charisma even though it has no game mechanic benefit, but in WoW people want to make their character the best at whatever their goal is. No Death Knight will wear cloth +spirit and +mana gear for "roleplaying" reasons. People might go about optimizing their characters in different ways, and some might be quite stupid at it, and some might just copy builds they find online, but the game essentially forces you into it by picking talents in a certain order: oh, okay, you're now a "Frost Mage", the game says. You can't just pick willy-nilly from the menu of options available.
When I heard about Warhammer Online, I really had this insane hope that it would be like the Warhammer pen and paper roleplaying game. Essentially, the RPG has a web of classes to pick from. Some are starting classes, and then others that connect to that class unlock as you level them up. So if you are (just making up terms here), say, a "warrior", when you hit level 5 in it, you then unlock the ability to start levelling a new class, which takes you into different directions, such as "Holy warrior" or "Guerilla", with some levels in holy warrior taking you deeper into Priest territory, and guerilla taking you deeper into roguish territory. So the best classes, like Witch Hunter, or Paladin, or whatever, could be reached via multiple paths (Witch Hunters, for example, could be started as rogues and work their way over through the web of classes that way). It's been ages since I played the game, and so the names are probably all wrong, but I think that would be an awesome design for an MMORPG. Instead of being completely freeform, like in UO or EVE, or completely class-based, like in WAR or WoW, you could sort of build your own class, with the individual smaller classes being given related abilities and balanced against each other that way. You can have good options (even very good options), as long as these principles are followed.
In short, though, I think TFA makes class balance sound harder than it i
Slashdot Mirror
Fine! But hold on there, what's that you're doing, dumping chemicals? Sorry, buddy, you're hurting the local water table. That shit you're dumping doesn't respect property lines. We're going to have to tell you what you can and can't do when what you're doing has the potential of harming your neighbors.
Uh, that's more or less what we have right now. Largish companies have environmental control officers who make sure the company complies with law by watching what goes down its drains, etc.
Poor countries are much worse off for the environment than wealthy ones - do you see Gates chopping down his forest because his kids are hungry and he needs firewood? The best thing we could do for the planet would be to raise everyone up to middle class prosperity.
>>But oh yeah, that's all corporate and thus stupid, right?
To each his own, man. I went to Comicon instead, got to hang out next to Adama and Tigh for a couple hours at a BSG concert, found that a friend of mine is Felicia Day's personal assistant, got signatures from a lot of my favorite book authors, attended some interesting panels, talked with Stephen Martiniere for a while (who also sketched me a neat drawing for free), etc.
I have played canned demos by Blizzard before and don't trust them further than I can throw their bolted-to-the-ground kiosks.
But yeah, Ozzy's neat (even though he doesn't actually play WoW) and I'm all for meeting up with guildies, so I'm not disparaging you. I just think the entire idea of BlizzCon is such that Blizzard ought to be paying people to watch, not the other way around.
>>What happens to your civil liberties under a unified global nation? Which model are you going to use? The US model? The EU model? The Chinese one? The Singaporean one? How do you run such a unified nation?
You just average them all together. You get the civil freedom of Singapore, the freedom of business of China, the education system of America, and the clear-headed sensibilities of the European Union.
It's win-win!
>>There's a strong tendency for both humans and bots to revert anonymous editors' edits, even if it's a good edit, with a good comment line pointing to discussion on the talk page.
Yep. I only make anon edits on any articles that have political significance (don't want my name associated, sorry). The anon edits I make have about a 1000% greater chance of being reverted out of hand than named edits.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark...
>>Pirating was the main reason for bnetd. Period. If you can't come to terms with this, then you aren't living in reality.
Uh, no. I knew Mark Baysinger from the ACM club at UC San Diego, and I'm reasonably confident that the inspiration for bnetd was the absolute crap bnet was, especially when we'd do an ACM LAN party or the like.
>>If these bnetd guys were so fantastic, then maybe they should have created their own RTS. Instead, they chose to build off of proprietary software.
You don't know anything. Bnetd WAS a brilliant piece of software engineering. They reverse engineered a massive online system using bubblegum and shoestrings.
>>If they wanted to do this, they should have went to Blizzard and got written documents that said that they could.
Uh, yeah. And Blizzard would have said no.
Technically, what they were doing was perfectly legal, but Blizzard has the legal equivalent of a 330-ton gorilla. Which made it illegal. Mark, at the time, I think was sharing an apartment with someone. Our legal system isn't designed for fair fights between mega-corporations and individuals.
Oh, you mean dynamic radiosity.
Yeah, an engine I worked on for a 3D arcade game back in '95 had radiosity in it, but we had to precompute the values. It wasn't dynamic.
To be honest though, most people don't notice things like that in a game.
>>I mean, no fully dynamic shadows (not even thinking about dynamic global illumination) in 2010? wtf?
Are you talking about enabling the innate self-shadowing a lot of cards do?
Because innate self-shadowing looks like ass.
>>An example of their ineptitude: they forgot to put batteries in some of the meters, making it impossible to get the magic slip of paper, and then ticketed people for it.
If it makes you feel better, the government run socialist people's republic of UC Berkeley did the exact same thing. I had to take them to court to get the $50 from the ticket back.
I even had a digital camera with me at the time, so it wasn't like they couldn't see how they'd fucked up when I sent in the appeal on the ticket.
Well yes, but to be honest... I'm fairly sure the 42" TV I'm pulling the Wii up on consumes lots more power than the Wii itself, probably in the 100-150W range. In any case, for $/hour of entertainment isn't exactly breaking the bank anyway.
A Wii, no. A Wii won't break the bank. But a PS3 is an energy hog.
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.htm
About the same as my 46" TV, which draws 185W when on.
>>You don't get it. If there were perfect class mobility, then 20% of the top would stay in the top and 20% of the top would move to the very bottom.
No, you have it completely backwards. Our null hypothesis is that people will be making around the same amount of money in 10 years as they do today. The fact that 45% of people fall out of the top bracket in a mere 10 years is evidence of a huge amount of social mobility.
>>It is a class mobility that incorporates a heavy dose of birthright. Your NYTimes page proved my point. Thanks.
If you want to see what birthright actually looks at, read some studies of social mobility when Europe had a noble class, or even under socialist regimes like modern-day France. Socialist regimes are quite conservative when it comes to social change. They don't let their corporations fail, and crush up-and-coming competitors. So whereas a Mr. Facebook could make his millions in America, in a socialist regime the established company would crush it and stop him from rising in class.
>>Do you *honestly* and *truly* believe that Obama wants to tax, at 100%, all overseas profits? That doesn't even make any sense.
By "all" I mean in all countries, not at 100%.
And yeah, I do believe he wants to do that, since he's said so.
The net effect of double taxing profits made overseas will not have the effect our president thinks it will have...
Whereas, male athletes don't seem to get this issue -- when was the last time a male athlete had to prove they were a man, as-opposed to some sort of super-human being?
Consider men being the "open" division.
I'm sure that nobody would complain about "XX Males" or whatever other combinations exist... if she/he was competing as a man.
The vast majority of the population will never be able to compete at the World Athletics Championship, no matter how much they train, it is in fact, a small portion of the population that are genetically fittest and able to be the best athletes.
Speak for yourself. I have a line on joining the Thailand Olympic Curling team.
>>So then do it. Create the test and give us the results, let us verify your test methodology and your data and your results. Until such a time, ID is merely conjecture and not a scientific hypothesis.
I've already posted such a method on my journal.
But I'd be willing to write a paper on it with more rigorous math. Which journal do you think would be most appropriate? It's especially timely with the announcement of (they say) us having artificial life within 6 months.
>>Um, because that would be a 1/3 drop in revenue?
Not when Obama wants to tax them for all overseas profits.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_03.html
Barely more than half of the people in the top 20% of the income bracket were still there even 10 years later. Not even close to the 99% intergenerational figure you were trying to claim.
Where did this myth come from that you get to be a higher up if you can just take the risk? 99% are "higher ups" because of birth right. The other 1% are held out there as tokens of the philosophy "if only you work hard enough for us higher-ups, you can make it too".
What idiot communist twat drivel. Research social mobility some time and educate yourself. You remind me of one of those idiot children like James Loewen (author of Lies my Teacher Told Me), who claimed (in a book dedicated to revealing errors in history textbooks) that "all but one" of our presidents have come from priviledged backgrounds. Which sounded fishy to me, forcing me to research the backgrounds of every single damn president. I tallied which came from priviledged backgrounds, and which didn't. The split was about 50/50. Sure, being rich helps, but, hell, Nixon was so poor he couldn't go to Harvard even with a full ride, and several of our presidents have been orphans or from single parent families.
If you want to spew lies, at least try to make them a little more realistic first.
>>The Democrats may not be a whole lot better on this, but at least they *are* better, and one of Obama's promises was to punish companies which move jobs overseas.
Are you serial?
Obama's plan was to tax American corporations for outsourcing, which would have the effect of them moving overseas entirely. It's one of the most fucktarded ideas ever conceived.
Whenever I receive a communique from their headquarters, I know I can trust it fully without hesitation or rational thought process. This is the beauty of being inside the One, True Market, where no company has ever lied about their activities before.
Yeah, Apple also has some simultaneous bullshit going on with claiming that SOX mandates that companies charge for software updates. Regardless of the fact that all other major companies (Sony, Microsoft, etc.) seem blissfully unaware of this imaginary point.
But the Apple fanbois will trot that stinker out every time you criticize Apple for, say, charging for a trivial firmware update (3.0) for the Ipod Touch. "They have to! It's the law!" Pfft.
>>Does a biased coin require a Maker?
No, I guess it could just be Saddam Hussein.
I love the thousands of people cheering on the ads that they paid hundreds of dollars to get to BlizzCon to see.
It's stuff like that that confirms my faith in the intelligence of humanity.
>>Intelligent Design has theories? What, if anything, does it predict? How could it be falsified?
Sure. You can restate ID so that it is scientific.
Essentially it's premise is that of the biased coin or rigged slot machine. Contrary to popular belief, it acknowledges evolution, but says that it exhibits the bias of some outside entity interfering with evolution.
A statistical test akin to testing for a biased coin would be sufficient to create an ID test.
Also contrary to the prevailing wisdom on Slashdot, such a test will need to be made anyway as we move into a bold new millenium with genetic engineering, and we want to know if something has interfered with the evolution of, say, Ebola, so we know whether or not we should nuke the shit out of some third world country.
>>Microsoft already took a big hit when they extended the warranty due to RRoD to 3 years, but the expected cost of the move was low enough that this doesn't make sense.
>>Finally, if the failure rate is so high, wouldn't news of such be all over the place? The media would have a field day with it.
There was an article on here a month or so back stating that the RRoD had cost them one billion dollars to date.
This was a not insignificant amount of money, even for Microsoft.
If we do the math, assuming a $100 repair cost, $1,000,000,000 / $100 = 10 million repaired units. So the articles estimation that 50% of the 30 million made was defective actually sounds about right (since the extended warranty didn't cover everyone).
>>Any insurance companies out there doing this?
Yes, AFLAC gave my cousin a discount for joining a gym and sticking with it. She has to sign something saying how many hours a month she goes or something.
>>So you ended up with a 'skill based, classless' game system, where ironically everyone was nearly identical in powers, skills, and capabilities.
Then, no offense, they weren't doing it right. Even though there's always going to be global minima and maxima that you have to take a look at, there should be enough variety in the encounters the players are exposed to to make players select from as wide a variety of local maxima instead. You used DPS as an example, so consider the following:
Build A: 100DPS melee, 0DPS ranged
Build B: 0DPS melee, 200DPS ranged
Builc C: 50DPS melee, 50DPS ranged
Build B dominates, because (unless you have a minimum range on your DPS), they will be able to completely outclass the other possible builds, in all situations. It does more damage, and can do so without having to move to get close to the target.
This is a completely dominant scenario, and so is against Shaka's Principle of Game Balance: All choices should be interesting, but none should be must-have or so weak people will be mocked for taking it. In other words, no choice should completely dominate another, in either direction. (In magic the gathering terms, there's no excuse for a grey ogre when there's uthden trolls available).
So a smart designer would do the following: ...and then add in enough uncertainty that players don't know if they'll always be in melee or in ranged during certain encounters.
Keep Build A as our baseline: 100DPS melee, 0 DPS ranged
Lower Build B's DPS below that of melee to compensate for the fact it can kill at range: 0DPS melee, 85DPS ranged
Boost Build C's DPS so that it doesn't completely suck: 75DPS melee, 70DPS ranged
That's the brilliance of D&D as opposed to existing MMORPGS: when you do an MMORPG raid (Onyxia, let's say), the players sit down and analyze the encounter like a choreographed ballet: ok, phase 1 is melee, followed by an AOE encounter with some whelps. Phase 2 is all ranged DPS, phase 3 is melee again, with a few more needs for AOE damage. They then can sit down and plot out exactly how many of each class they need, and can even assign certain builds to certain characters so that they are optimal.
In D&D, you have to build your character (and semi-permanently, too) against an *unknown* set of threats. You don't know when you go to some competitive D&D event (like the Gencon Delve) exactly what sorts of threats you'll be facing. Maybe there'll be traps. Maybe there'll be a dragon. Hmm, from the blurb, it sounds like maybe undead or were-creatures, so let's perhaps take several sources of radiant damage, and have a couple silvered weapons in reserve. Etc. My group got together over the course of several bull sessions and worked out a strong team that could deal with most threats - but it was impossible to have an "Optimal" team simply because we didn't know what we'd be dealing with. Sure, we had high DPS characters, but we had to balance that with all our other needs as well.
It would probably cause the WoW designers heads to explode to have monsters that behaved differently (at most, they sort of roll a die to see what combat you'll fight during a raid), but for games like City of Heroes or Champions Online, I think they'd be a lot more fun if you didn't know what you were getting yourself into before a fight.
>>The term "balance" is about balancing classes, not players. If everybody had your perspective, then everybody would play Death Knights or Paladins or whichever class is currently considered slightly overpowered, and it would be a very boring world indeed.
Funny. I'm leveling mining on my Death Knight (created at launch, of course, when it was quite overpowered - but since then they've fucked it sidewise about a thousand times) and all the new characters I see running around in the old zones are paladins, currently the overpowered class of choice. The last battleground I played in had two paladins at the top of the charts, with 4 times the kills of the third place character (a warlock), with the second place paladin having 0 deaths. They weren't in a premade either, just doing random battleground running-around-asshattery.
I also don't play WoW very much, since the game designers (as revealed through an enlightening series of "community interviews") have revealed they don't have the slightest idea of what they're doing. However, as long as the other MMORPGs fuck up more (and I'm looking at you, Warhammer, and you, Age of Conan) and can keep their momentum going without pissing off too many people, they'll do fine, doing what they do best: bumblefucking around.
There's a reason I don't play WoW much any more - about 40 hours since April. Well shy of the thousands of hours I have on /played on my mage, from back in the day. I enjoy the occasional BG, but most of the time playing the game feels like the developers are stabbing me in the eyeballs with a sharp stick.
>>That's what you enjoy; fine. However, there are many players out there who just want to build a character that they like, for whatever reason, and to enjoy the game as it was intended - a massively interactive RPG.
Not really. If WoW was an actual "roleplaying" game, where people, you know, roleplayed, then this statement would be true. Certainly in D&D there are groups of people who will give their character a high charisma even though it has no game mechanic benefit, but in WoW people want to make their character the best at whatever their goal is. No Death Knight will wear cloth +spirit and +mana gear for "roleplaying" reasons. People might go about optimizing their characters in different ways, and some might be quite stupid at it, and some might just copy builds they find online, but the game essentially forces you into it by picking talents in a certain order: oh, okay, you're now a "Frost Mage", the game says. You can't just pick willy-nilly from the menu of options available.
When I heard about Warhammer Online, I really had this insane hope that it would be like the Warhammer pen and paper roleplaying game. Essentially, the RPG has a web of classes to pick from. Some are starting classes, and then others that connect to that class unlock as you level them up. So if you are (just making up terms here), say, a "warrior", when you hit level 5 in it, you then unlock the ability to start levelling a new class, which takes you into different directions, such as "Holy warrior" or "Guerilla", with some levels in holy warrior taking you deeper into Priest territory, and guerilla taking you deeper into roguish territory. So the best classes, like Witch Hunter, or Paladin, or whatever, could be reached via multiple paths (Witch Hunters, for example, could be started as rogues and work their way over through the web of classes that way). It's been ages since I played the game, and so the names are probably all wrong, but I think that would be an awesome design for an MMORPG. Instead of being completely freeform, like in UO or EVE, or completely class-based, like in WAR or WoW, you could sort of build your own class, with the individual smaller classes being given related abilities and balanced against each other that way. You can have good options (even very good options), as long as these principles are followed.
In short, though, I think TFA makes class balance sound harder than it i