I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.
So.. what is it? He's getting free software because he works at Microsoft, so that's why he doesn't own a Mac? Or he's afraid to own a Mac because he's a Microsoft employee?
I mean, at least he could buy the Mac and say he wanted to stay familiar with the competition.. you knows.. friends close, enemies closer, and all that... When really he just wanted the Mac.
And if somebody that high up in Microsoft is going to not buy the computer they want because they save a little money using the computer they don't, when they're obviously plenty wealthy to own the one they want.. Well.. wtf.
Someone else already responded adequately but I'll give my $.02
The Barrens looks empty, boring and uninspired. The Horde portion of Eastern Continent isn't much better thanks to the undead inspired design.
You are seriously going to tell me a zone called THE BARRENS should look anything but empty and uninspired?? Wow... And it's Eastern Kingdoms btw. And the outdoors environments there look nice IMHO. As good as anything in V:SoH, and mostly better.
Which is only for use in the Outlands and high level players (read 60+).
I was already talking about the expansion. Also, only level 70 players can purchase and use a flying mount with the exception of the Druid class who gets a flight form at 68.
Last time I checked, the first 60 levels were still exp grinds
They are grinds if you want them to be. If you're totally focused on getting to the new cap of level 70 then yes, you're going to feel like it's a grind. If you are more into the RP side of things, and enjoy questing and grouping, you won't even notice the grind. Remember the part of the acronym RPG? Seems like a lot of people forget to do the RP part and then complain that it's a 'grind'. Wrong.
So Blizzard is giving the shaft to everyone who worked for the best gear just to be outdone because they couldn't balance end game instances in the first place, great.
Ever heard of mudflation? If you want the game to advance and last a long time you have to make bigger and better things for players to obtain and do. If you have an idea that can adequately feed the hunger of 8 million collective players, most of whom are casual and are already angry that raiders get so much better stuff, then by all means, start your own company and make your own MMORPG. Please.
I know everyone hates WoW.. it's slashdot, everyone here hates the 500lb gorillas. And who can blame them? But I have to say... The WoW expansion is a work of art, pure and simple. Not only are the outdoor envronments beautiful, and I mean staggeringly so, but now you have flying mounts and casual friendly avenues to advancement. And yet raiding will still yield you the best gear all around. Just not as much better as it was pre-expansion. But still, better. Probably enough to satiate the hardcore raiders.
It's just.. almost perfect. V: SoH is nowhere near that.
Maybe I'm just a fundamentalist, but children first need to learn basic skills like reading and writing.
You seem to think that a child is incapable of learning multiple things as they develop.
...they don't have this Montessori approach to education.
And what exactly is wrong with the Montessori approach to education? Especially if the children are very young? Do you even know the philosophy behind Montessori education? Look it up on Wikipedia. Here's an excerpt:
The Montessori method encourages independence and freedom with limits and responsibility. The youngest children are guided in "practical life" skills: domestic skills and manners. These skills are emphasized with the goal of increasing attention spans, hand-eye coordination, and tenacity.
So you'd rather try to cram wrote memorization into kids' heads instead of preparing them for learning later after they've properly developed their attitudes towards said learning and knowledge? And if that doesn't work are you one of the people who thinks we should just hop kids up on drugs like Ritalin?
I am all for literacy. Learning reading and writing are fundamental steps toward a successful adult life. But to force it on children before they're ready? Not a good idea IMHO.
Science is not optimistic. Maybe some scientists are, but Science itself is not. It is simply a methodology. You can be optimistic that the methodology works, but that does NOT make Science optimistic.
Science doesn't know anything. It doesn't feel anything. It doesn't predict anything. It is only a method. I dislike it when people attribute human emotions to it.
Just because I ask if someone is the political opposite of another party you read that I implied that there are only two parties? Give me a break. You obviously have another agenda, probably just trying to attack my post because it angered you. Do everyone a favor and think before you post.
I agree that bringing up the issues is one way to get things moving -- though this is hardly the first news article to point out these atrocities. My reply to the Slant.. er I mean Slate, article was probably a little too charged with emotion. Obviously I have my own bias in the matter. So I am not surprised that so far the post has seen some -1 Troll mods.
The fact that we are "a nation of laws, not of men" is lost on you, Bush, and the rest of the die-hard Republicans.
First, I am not a die-hard Republican. Are you a die-hard Liberal?
Second, "a nation of laws, not of men" misses an important point about humankind. Humans won't follow laws if they don't believe in them. They won't blindly believe a law is to be followed. People evaluate laws on a personal level based on their own values. The collective of personal evaluations across the country is what leads to whether or not a law is accepted.
In case you haven't noticed, the Constituion doesn't describe laws. It describes freedoms.
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My responses to the Slate article.
on
2006's Bill of Wrongs
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· Score: 3, Insightful
From the top down.
10. Attempt to Get Death Penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui Long after it was clear the hapless Frenchman was neither the "20th hijacker" nor a key plotter in the attacks of 9/11, the government pressed to execute him as a "conspirator" in those attacks. Moussaoui's alleged participation? By failing to confess to what he may have known about the plot, which may have led the government to disrupt it, Moussaoui directly caused the deaths of thousands of people. This massive overreading of the federal conspiracy laws would be laughable were the stakes not so high. Thankfully, a jury rejected the notion that Moussaoui could be executed for the crime of merely wishing there had been a real connection between himself and 9/11.
Yes, "the government" tried to execute someone. Everyone in the entire government was in on it. They all wanted to slay him mercilessly. But wait.. The jury decided against it. Hrmm. And the jury is technically part of "the government". Remember, the three parts of the US government? Yeah, one of them being judicial? Apparently "the government" decided not to execute him after all. Because once you are selected for a jury you are in the government, being paid by the government, performing a government role. So, let's get a little more specific, shall we Slate? It wasn't "The Government" that tried to execute him. It was overzealous prosecutors riding a power-trip straight to hell.
9. Guantanamo Bay It takes a licking but it keeps on ticking. After the Supreme Court struck down the military tribunals planned to try hundreds of detainees moldering on the base, and after the president agreed that it might be a good idea to close it down, the worst public relations fiasco since the Japanese internment camps lives on. Prisoners once deemed "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth" are either quietly released (and usually set free) or still awaiting trial. The lucky 75 to be tried there will be cheered to hear that the Pentagon has just unveiled plans to build a $125 million legal complex for the hearings. The government has now officially put more thought into the design of Guantanamo's court bathrooms than the charges against its prisoners.
Way to misrepresent the facts. The prisoners were deemed potentially to be the so-called vicious killers. Given the attacks on the USA, can you really expect us not to be at least a little sensitive to the possibility? So we found out many of them weren't. That is why we released them. And, what do you expect, we should yell at the top of our lungs that they were innocent? Nobody really cares. The USA is out for blood after 9/11. If we find people to be innocent we release them. There's really no reason to go out of our way to release them any way *but* quietly.
8. Slagging the Media Whether the Bush administration is reclassifying previously declassified documents, sidestepping the FOIA, threatening journalists for leaks on dubious legal grounds, or, most recently, using its subpoena power to try to wring secret documents from the ACLU, the administration has continued its "secrets at any price" campaign. Is this a constitutional crisis? Probably not. Annoying as hell? Definitely.
This point at least has some reasonable balance to it. There's no doubt the Bush administration is having serious trouble with their information intelligence. Whether their motives are pure or not we cannot say. Do you have proof they are injuring civil liberties out of mere selfish political drive? I don't see it anywhere if you do.
7. Slagging the Courts It starts with the president's complaints about "activist judges," and evolves to Congressional threats to appoint an inspector general to oversee federal judges. As public distrust of the bench is fueled, the stripping of courts' authority to hear whole classes of cases--most rec
Yes, it is my business if they pay people to violate EULAs and break the market economy for their own gain. People play MMORPGs for their own entertainment, but that isn't by definition "selfish". Buying gold at the expense of other players' enjoyment of the game *is* selfish.
So, farming thorium at rich thorium veins on a 24/7 basis, forcing all other players out of the area because you dominate it, that isn't selfish? I mean, even though you're just farming it for 'in game' money, that's not different than a gold farmer? It's the same thing. You cannot expect players to not be selfish in an MMO just as the same goes for life. Except in life people are selfish for themselves and their extended family which is an extension of themselves. And of course their friends and other social structures. You'll find players who aren't, but don't expect that to be the norm.
Bot farming is against most EULAs, and they are for a reason. An MMO economy is created and adjusted according to what the average player would get from going through the game at a normal pace. Bot farming yields gold in amounts several orders of magnitude above that. The game economy isn't tailored to handle that influx of money.
No, the economy is not tailored. It adapts. You are making a mistake if you think a game economy will ever be free of the same vices as a real economy. Artifical impositions on the economy by the company who runs the game will never work. They simply, logically, cannot do anything about it. So I guess all I am saying is get used to it, because it's here to stay. If you can't beat em, join em.
In a virtual world where money literally does grow on the trees, the economy needs to be carefully balanced.
Last I checked money grew on trees in the real world too. It's call agriculture.
Normal game state
-Player craftable item - 30g - Intended market value -Player lootable item - 20g - Intended market value -Player fixed price service - 200g - Cost related to predicted average income -Player high end item - 800g - Fair market value
Haha. "Intended market value". That's a good one. Really, come on, it's not even reasonable to assume it is possible for a company to control the market like that without, like I mentioned earlier, artificial impositions. Which would destroy the immersion factor. Across various WoW servers items go for different amounts, even though they aren't farmable by gold farmers. But wait, OH NOES, they aren't all at the "intended market value." You act like you have a grip on economical theory. I don't see it.
It's obvious that you like playing your games on the "easy" difficulty setting, and just coast right through, but MMOs aren't democratic by nature, and any behaviour causing the game to deviate from the intentions of the developers is really not something you can logically defend. If you don't like the pace of the game, find another one instead of messing it up for the rest of us.
This is why I play games like Doom 3 on Hardcore? Games like Halo on Legendary? Don't act like you know me.
As far as a game deviating from the intentions of the developers, I can easily logically defend that. An MMO is an amorphous dynamic entity. The developers pick a starting point and say "GO" and the game evolves. Aside from them fixing things which would abort the evolution and development of the game, such as rampant hacking and cheating, the game largely takes a course defined by the PLAYERS, not the developers. If the players don't like the game, it doesn't exist. The developers merely have to find a state that agrees with the playerbase and expound upon it, as they have done and continue to do with games like World of Warcraft.
You wanted a more detailed response, so here you go:
People pay subscription fees to keep the game running. There is no way of playing the game without paying these fees.
I mentioned guild wars, you said it wasn't an MMO....MMO vs. CO RPG.. Let's split some more hairs...
People who buy gold do so for selfish reasons.
People who play MMORPGS do so for selfish reasons.
They want the action without the effort that honest players go through.
They want to save themselves time because their time is more valuable to them than their money. This is none of your business.
This opens up a market for gold farms running bots 24/7 farming gold, driving down the market prices of commonly available goods, and driving up the prices of desirable items, and hurting the people who play the game ethically in the process.
Actually, you're wrong. Let's use WoW as an example, since it is the largest MMO in the world. In WoW bots get banned very quickly. So far, only real human farmers can pull off gold farming without getting banned. And these people are hardly hurt ethically. In the countries many of them live in the American dollar is still quite valuable. They manage to make some American money and probably do quite well for themselves. Secondly, you are wrong about the way this affects the in-game economy. Because everyone can sell their items equally nobody really loses out. Inflation does exist, but if anything it makes some parts of the game easier because there is more money in the game. Such as respecs. It costs 50g to respec once you hit the max amount. It used to be a lot of gold. Now it's not so bad. In some way we have the farmers to thank for that. Your points on the economical effects and their ethical impacts is largely irrelevant except for the respec factor. All the good gear is obtained through instance runs and raiding -- not through the AH. If you need materials you can farm them yourself, or as you have already said, buy them even cheaper now that someone else has taken it upon themselves to do it for you. If anything the gold farmers are making it easier for us.
These people have to sell the items they can craft and loot at lowered prices, and buy their gear at hugely inflated prices.
Explain to me why it makes sense that you can sell gear at lowered prices or buy your gear at hugely inflated prices? It sounds like you're saying the same gear sells low for one person and high for another, merely because the other person is a gold farmer. Absurd.
These inflated prices don't exactly hurt the gold farming community, either.
Nope, they don't. They don't exactly hurt any community except other gold farmers, which I imagine you wouldn't be against.
I'm all for rewarding time spent in a game, and if you spend 12 hours a day farming gold - go you.
Indeed.
If you have bots running chars around in machine farms with the sole purpose of making profit for yourself at the expense of the health of the game economy that *people pay subscription fees to have access to*, you deserve absolutely no sympathy.
Why would you? You know who else deserves no sympathy? The company who allows it to happen. Again, using WoW as an example: Blizzard has banned hundreds of thousands of accounts for using bots. I can't remember the last time I saw an actual farming bot in WoW. I see plenty of bots advertising their sales on the chat channels, and they get banned almost immediately. Poof, another free trial account is banned. There is only one thing Blizzard needs to do IMHO, and that's restrict free trial accounts from using the general chat function until their free trial expires. That should solve a good deal of the advertising problems.
While it's evident from your post that you enjoy having e
Maybe the entire idea of a "different world", set apart from the influence of RL wealth is just a fantasy anyway, but I like the concept, and I hope that gaming communities can find a way to preserve it.
It is complete fantasy. RL wealth provides you time to play more often than people who have to go to work. Someone who can be at the computer 24/7 will always have an advantage over us poor schmucks who have to work. These games are inexplicably tied to real life, no matter how much you want them not to be.
So as far as gaming communities finding a way to preserve it, I don't see that any multiplayer online game in the history of games has ever preserved it. That concept becomes null and void the moment players can play in a persistent universe. Only in single player games does it remain preserved because there is no need to compare your own achievements to those of others. You can get lost completely in a single player game, as the ultimate hero or villain, because when you're in that world there is nobody else to compare yourself against as there are in MMORPGS. In a MMO there's always someone better, and you will almost certainly either run into them or hear about them somehow.
That much has been understood since the dawn of MMORPGs.
Until.. the Nightfall? Right now Guild Wars: Nightfall is out. You don't have to pay a subscription to play it. And people buy the currency. Hrmm. And don't give me the whole "yea but with Guild Wars you don't buy monthly fees, you buy expansions" bit. You don't HAVE to buy the expansions to play -- and plenty of subscription based MMORPGS release expansions as often as Guild Wars -- EQ2 for example.
Well Blizzard definitely sees it as cheating. Though I imagine Blizz makes a pretty penny on the accounts these gold farmers buy. Each time a farmer advertises on the two realms I play on they get reported by the players. Blizzard then bans that account for good. Bang, Blizz sells another copy of WoW.
Seems pretty good for Blizz doesn't it? Seems like maybe that's the only reason it's not legal to do. It's good business for Blizzard to make it illegal. There are numerous other games where it is not illegal and in some is in fact supported. Hmm.
I find it hypocritical to criticize people who buy gold when you are shelling out money every month to play the game. You're already spending real money for in-game items through just paying the monthly subscription. So if I choose to spend a little more, because I can and it's not that big of a deal to me, then who are you to sit up there on that high horse and say anything about it? People like you probably ought to check why you feel that way. Is it because you can't afford to buy gold yourself? That's what I think. I think you're jealous. And I also think if you were a millionaire fifty bucks for WoW gold would feel a lot better than spending hours upon hours to FARM IT YOURSELF.
However, algae are self-manufacturing, solar cell[s] must be produced in a factory from a number of different machines and raw materials.
Why can't solar cells be self-manufacturing too? I read an article in Scientific American detailing an operation in the deep desert that basically started as a Seed.. a bunch of solar cells whose energy went to the automated production and operation of an army of self-replicating solar-cell-producing robots who would eventually cover a huge portion of the desert with solar cells...you know what the desert is made up of? Mainly raw materials for solar cells (silicon). Arguably you couldn't make the new higher efficiency cells, but when you're covering a million square miles I somehow don't think that's so important anymore.
And yes other raw materials would be needed, but mainly only metal. Some kind of production delivery method could be implemented to take care of delivery. The most important part of the operation is energy and it would run on its own.
Seem far fetched? Ok well maybe with today's technology. But petroleum isn't going to run out for at least two to three decades. By then I really hope we have the technology to pull off such a feat. I'll be sorely disappointed in humanity if we can't do it, to put it bluntly.
All in all, I'm pretty sure algae would be cheaper in our current technology level.
And more expensive than petroleum except in niche markets. This technology needs to be future-proof to be worth huge (worldwide scale) investment. Right now it doesn't appear to be... Thus I think it will always be a niche. Not to say niche markets don't have their place. But what I am concerned about is worldwide energy supply. This will not achieve that IMHO.
Uhm, batteries? Ultra-Capacitors? Motors that lift huge weights up really high thus storing the energy as a gravitational potential? Using the electricity to create the biodiesel (the refineries don't just creat biodiesel without adding SOME energy to get to the point of actualy biodiesel production you know...)?
Why your comment was modded interesting baffles me.
The article talks pretty high of this algae. Acres upon acres of biodiesel creating algae for all!
It seems pretty biased to me. No mention of the energy required to run the biodiesel plants. No mention of exactly how long each yield cycle takes. I mean, great, 10k gallons of biodiesel (even up to 20k) per acre.. per how long? It's a measure of time I thought? So why are you giving me these one-dimensional 'rates'. Sounds pretty skim on the details.
And let's talk about acres. I'd rather cover an acre of desert with solar panels than an acre of land in more moderate climates. And now I get led into the question of solar vs. algae. The algae gets its energy from photosynthesis. Great. But can an acre of algae really compete with an acre of the highest efficiency solar cells -- again, over time? Which one wins in the end?
Look, I'm not saying I disagree, I think it's great people are pursuing alternate forms of fuel. But if you're going to write an article and call it news the least you could do is play devil's advocate along side fanboy. Give me some compare and contrast, some pros and cons. That's all I want!
Far as I know, the amount of water on the surface of the Earth is vital to life as we know it. The water keeps the temperature relatively even across the entire globe. This is especially important because it keeps the day side cool and the night side warm.
So say we find Earth sized planets? What's the next step? See how warm they are? If they are a certain temperature (where water is a liquid, a small temperature range in the grand scheme of things) then look a little closer?
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, at least he could buy the Mac and say he wanted to stay familiar with the competition.. you knows.. friends close, enemies closer, and all that... When really he just wanted the Mac.
And if somebody that high up in Microsoft is going to not buy the computer they want because they save a little money using the computer they don't, when they're obviously plenty wealthy to own the one they want.. Well.. wtf.
In short, this guy pisses me off.
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I know everyone hates WoW.. it's slashdot, everyone here hates the 500lb gorillas. And who can blame them? But I have to say ... The WoW expansion is a work of art, pure and simple. Not only are the outdoor envronments beautiful, and I mean staggeringly so, but now you have flying mounts and casual friendly avenues to advancement. And yet raiding will still yield you the best gear all around. Just not as much better as it was pre-expansion. But still, better. Probably enough to satiate the hardcore raiders.
It's just.. almost perfect. V: SoH is nowhere near that.
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No it doesn't. You may have went to a school claiming to be practicing the Montessori approach, but they weren't. Not if that's all they did.
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You seem to think that a child is incapable of learning multiple things as they develop.
And what exactly is wrong with the Montessori approach to education? Especially if the children are very young? Do you even know the philosophy behind Montessori education? Look it up on Wikipedia. Here's an excerpt:
So you'd rather try to cram wrote memorization into kids' heads instead of preparing them for learning later after they've properly developed their attitudes towards said learning and knowledge? And if that doesn't work are you one of the people who thinks we should just hop kids up on drugs like Ritalin?
I am all for literacy. Learning reading and writing are fundamental steps toward a successful adult life. But to force it on children before they're ready? Not a good idea IMHO.
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Science is not optimistic. Maybe some scientists are, but Science itself is not. It is simply a methodology. You can be optimistic that the methodology works, but that does NOT make Science optimistic.
Science doesn't know anything. It doesn't feel anything. It doesn't predict anything. It is only a method. I dislike it when people attribute human emotions to it.
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Just because I ask if someone is the political opposite of another party you read that I implied that there are only two parties? Give me a break. You obviously have another agenda, probably just trying to attack my post because it angered you. Do everyone a favor and think before you post.
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I agree that bringing up the issues is one way to get things moving -- though this is hardly the first news article to point out these atrocities. My reply to the Slant.. er I mean Slate, article was probably a little too charged with emotion. Obviously I have my own bias in the matter. So I am not surprised that so far the post has seen some -1 Troll mods.
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First, I am not a die-hard Republican. Are you a die-hard Liberal?
Second, "a nation of laws, not of men" misses an important point about humankind. Humans won't follow laws if they don't believe in them. They won't blindly believe a law is to be followed. People evaluate laws on a personal level based on their own values. The collective of personal evaluations across the country is what leads to whether or not a law is accepted.
In case you haven't noticed, the Constituion doesn't describe laws. It describes freedoms.
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Yes, "the government" tried to execute someone. Everyone in the entire government was in on it. They all wanted to slay him mercilessly. But wait.. The jury decided against it. Hrmm. And the jury is technically part of "the government". Remember, the three parts of the US government? Yeah, one of them being judicial? Apparently "the government" decided not to execute him after all. Because once you are selected for a jury you are in the government, being paid by the government, performing a government role. So, let's get a little more specific, shall we Slate? It wasn't "The Government" that tried to execute him. It was overzealous prosecutors riding a power-trip straight to hell.
Way to misrepresent the facts. The prisoners were deemed potentially to be the so-called vicious killers. Given the attacks on the USA, can you really expect us not to be at least a little sensitive to the possibility? So we found out many of them weren't. That is why we released them. And, what do you expect, we should yell at the top of our lungs that they were innocent? Nobody really cares. The USA is out for blood after 9/11. If we find people to be innocent we release them. There's really no reason to go out of our way to release them any way *but* quietly.
This point at least has some reasonable balance to it. There's no doubt the Bush administration is having serious trouble with their information intelligence. Whether their motives are pure or not we cannot say. Do you have proof they are injuring civil liberties out of mere selfish political drive? I don't see it anywhere if you do.
So, farming thorium at rich thorium veins on a 24/7 basis, forcing all other players out of the area because you dominate it, that isn't selfish? I mean, even though you're just farming it for 'in game' money, that's not different than a gold farmer? It's the same thing. You cannot expect players to not be selfish in an MMO just as the same goes for life. Except in life people are selfish for themselves and their extended family which is an extension of themselves. And of course their friends and other social structures. You'll find players who aren't, but don't expect that to be the norm.
No, the economy is not tailored. It adapts. You are making a mistake if you think a game economy will ever be free of the same vices as a real economy. Artifical impositions on the economy by the company who runs the game will never work. They simply, logically, cannot do anything about it. So I guess all I am saying is get used to it, because it's here to stay. If you can't beat em, join em.
Last I checked money grew on trees in the real world too. It's call agriculture.
Haha. "Intended market value". That's a good one. Really, come on, it's not even reasonable to assume it is possible for a company to control the market like that without, like I mentioned earlier, artificial impositions. Which would destroy the immersion factor. Across various WoW servers items go for different amounts, even though they aren't farmable by gold farmers. But wait, OH NOES, they aren't all at the "intended market value." You act like you have a grip on economical theory. I don't see it.
This is why I play games like Doom 3 on Hardcore? Games like Halo on Legendary? Don't act like you know me.
As far as a game deviating from the intentions of the developers, I can easily logically defend that. An MMO is an amorphous dynamic entity. The developers pick a starting point and say "GO" and the game evolves. Aside from them fixing things which would abort the evolution and development of the game, such as rampant hacking and cheating, the game largely takes a course defined by the PLAYERS, not the developers. If the players don't like the game, it doesn't exist. The developers merely have to find a state that agrees with the playerbase and expound upon it, as they have done and continue to do with games like World of Warcraft.
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I guess it's just a saying, but I take it you have never really hit the lottery? :)
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I mentioned guild wars, you said it wasn't an MMO....MMO vs. CO RPG.. Let's split some more hairs...
People who play MMORPGS do so for selfish reasons.
They want to save themselves time because their time is more valuable to them than their money. This is none of your business.
Actually, you're wrong. Let's use WoW as an example, since it is the largest MMO in the world. In WoW bots get banned very quickly. So far, only real human farmers can pull off gold farming without getting banned. And these people are hardly hurt ethically. In the countries many of them live in the American dollar is still quite valuable. They manage to make some American money and probably do quite well for themselves. Secondly, you are wrong about the way this affects the in-game economy. Because everyone can sell their items equally nobody really loses out. Inflation does exist, but if anything it makes some parts of the game easier because there is more money in the game. Such as respecs. It costs 50g to respec once you hit the max amount. It used to be a lot of gold. Now it's not so bad. In some way we have the farmers to thank for that. Your points on the economical effects and their ethical impacts is largely irrelevant except for the respec factor. All the good gear is obtained through instance runs and raiding -- not through the AH. If you need materials you can farm them yourself, or as you have already said, buy them even cheaper now that someone else has taken it upon themselves to do it for you. If anything the gold farmers are making it easier for us.
Explain to me why it makes sense that you can sell gear at lowered prices or buy your gear at hugely inflated prices? It sounds like you're saying the same gear sells low for one person and high for another, merely because the other person is a gold farmer. Absurd.
Nope, they don't. They don't exactly hurt any community except other gold farmers, which I imagine you wouldn't be against.
Indeed.
Why would you? You know who else deserves no sympathy? The company who allows it to happen. Again, using WoW as an example: Blizzard has banned hundreds of thousands of accounts for using bots. I can't remember the last time I saw an actual farming bot in WoW. I see plenty of bots advertising their sales on the chat channels, and they get banned almost immediately. Poof, another free trial account is banned. There is only one thing Blizzard needs to do IMHO, and that's restrict free trial accounts from using the general chat function until their free trial expires. That should solve a good deal of the advertising problems.
It is complete fantasy. RL wealth provides you time to play more often than people who have to go to work. Someone who can be at the computer 24/7 will always have an advantage over us poor schmucks who have to work. These games are inexplicably tied to real life, no matter how much you want them not to be.
So as far as gaming communities finding a way to preserve it, I don't see that any multiplayer online game in the history of games has ever preserved it. That concept becomes null and void the moment players can play in a persistent universe. Only in single player games does it remain preserved because there is no need to compare your own achievements to those of others. You can get lost completely in a single player game, as the ultimate hero or villain, because when you're in that world there is nobody else to compare yourself against as there are in MMORPGS. In a MMO there's always someone better, and you will almost certainly either run into them or hear about them somehow.
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Until.. the Nightfall? Right now Guild Wars: Nightfall is out. You don't have to pay a subscription to play it. And people buy the currency. Hrmm. And don't give me the whole "yea but with Guild Wars you don't buy monthly fees, you buy expansions" bit. You don't HAVE to buy the expansions to play -- and plenty of subscription based MMORPGS release expansions as often as Guild Wars -- EQ2 for example.
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Well Blizzard definitely sees it as cheating. Though I imagine Blizz makes a pretty penny on the accounts these gold farmers buy. Each time a farmer advertises on the two realms I play on they get reported by the players. Blizzard then bans that account for good. Bang, Blizz sells another copy of WoW.
Seems pretty good for Blizz doesn't it? Seems like maybe that's the only reason it's not legal to do. It's good business for Blizzard to make it illegal. There are numerous other games where it is not illegal and in some is in fact supported. Hmm.
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Guild Wars. Enough said.
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I find it hypocritical to criticize people who buy gold when you are shelling out money every month to play the game. You're already spending real money for in-game items through just paying the monthly subscription. So if I choose to spend a little more, because I can and it's not that big of a deal to me, then who are you to sit up there on that high horse and say anything about it? People like you probably ought to check why you feel that way. Is it because you can't afford to buy gold yourself? That's what I think. I think you're jealous. And I also think if you were a millionaire fifty bucks for WoW gold would feel a lot better than spending hours upon hours to FARM IT YOURSELF.
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Why can't solar cells be self-manufacturing too? I read an article in Scientific American detailing an operation in the deep desert that basically started as a Seed.. a bunch of solar cells whose energy went to the automated production and operation of an army of self-replicating solar-cell-producing robots who would eventually cover a huge portion of the desert with solar cells...you know what the desert is made up of? Mainly raw materials for solar cells (silicon). Arguably you couldn't make the new higher efficiency cells, but when you're covering a million square miles I somehow don't think that's so important anymore.
And yes other raw materials would be needed, but mainly only metal. Some kind of production delivery method could be implemented to take care of delivery. The most important part of the operation is energy and it would run on its own.
Seem far fetched? Ok well maybe with today's technology. But petroleum isn't going to run out for at least two to three decades. By then I really hope we have the technology to pull off such a feat. I'll be sorely disappointed in humanity if we can't do it, to put it bluntly.
And more expensive than petroleum except in niche markets. This technology needs to be future-proof to be worth huge (worldwide scale) investment. Right now it doesn't appear to be... Thus I think it will always be a niche. Not to say niche markets don't have their place. But what I am concerned about is worldwide energy supply. This will not achieve that IMHO.
Uhm, batteries? Ultra-Capacitors? Motors that lift huge weights up really high thus storing the energy as a gravitational potential? Using the electricity to create the biodiesel (the refineries don't just creat biodiesel without adding SOME energy to get to the point of actualy biodiesel production you know...)?
Why your comment was modded interesting baffles me.
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The article talks pretty high of this algae. Acres upon acres of biodiesel creating algae for all!
It seems pretty biased to me. No mention of the energy required to run the biodiesel plants. No mention of exactly how long each yield cycle takes. I mean, great, 10k gallons of biodiesel (even up to 20k) per acre.. per how long? It's a measure of time I thought? So why are you giving me these one-dimensional 'rates'. Sounds pretty skim on the details.
And let's talk about acres. I'd rather cover an acre of desert with solar panels than an acre of land in more moderate climates. And now I get led into the question of solar vs. algae. The algae gets its energy from photosynthesis. Great. But can an acre of algae really compete with an acre of the highest efficiency solar cells -- again, over time? Which one wins in the end?
Look, I'm not saying I disagree, I think it's great people are pursuing alternate forms of fuel. But if you're going to write an article and call it news the least you could do is play devil's advocate along side fanboy. Give me some compare and contrast, some pros and cons. That's all I want!
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Far as I know, the amount of water on the surface of the Earth is vital to life as we know it. The water keeps the temperature relatively even across the entire globe. This is especially important because it keeps the day side cool and the night side warm.
So say we find Earth sized planets? What's the next step? See how warm they are? If they are a certain temperature (where water is a liquid, a small temperature range in the grand scheme of things) then look a little closer?
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I think the developers of DNF have been using these maybe a little too much.
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Ahh the /. AC, such a mysterious beast.
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/signed
Mod parent up.
Mod story -1 redundant.
Mod me -1 offtopic.
Mod yourself Merry Christmas.
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