I don't know why I'm bothering to reply, particularly so late in the discussion, but here goes...
Of course he still actually retains the rights, and of course the rights are being infringed.
However, what it boils down to is what fucking good is having the rights to your own works if a big corporation is blocking your ability to distribute said works? At that point, it's like you don't have the rights to your works at all (hence why I said He effectively has no rights).
The artist holds rights to his own works. A major label has laid claim to his works, saying they hold the rights to it. After getting hold of an actual lawyer with said major label, the artist is told "Sorry" and that it will be sorted, but after months it still isn't.
In trying to publish works that the artist owns the rights to, he is told he can't, nor can he apparently rectify the situation with the label causing the problems. He effectively has no rights to his own works at this point.
Warhammer doesn't seem to have much of a problem with gold spammers. When the game first came out, there was already a dedicated feedback button for "Report Gold Spammer." I have never seen more than 7 gold-spam mail messages in my box. And, plus, gold is easy to come by in that game anyway. There is just no market for the spammers to tap into.
A couple months ago when my wife and I still played WAR, she would receive up to 10 in-game mails a day from gold spammers. Not sure why she got so many and I didn't, but gold spam is still a problem in WAR, albeit not as much. Part of the reason why as you touched on to is that there is such a small market... both because gold is easy to come by, and because the game is hemorrhaging subscriptions (or at least it was, not sure how the recent changes particularly to the low level experience have affected things). Not much point in spending good money to advertise to a clientÃle that barely exists.
However, when WAR first came out and almost broke the "million mark", gold spam was an enormous problem, to the point that Mythic kept a counter on their realm war website counting up how many spammers were banned each day. They couldn't keep up.
A lot of people seem to forget or just not know that two of the major figures in WoW's development were Tigole (Legacy of Steel) and Furor (Fires of Heaven), guild leaders of possibly the most hardcore raiding guilds in EverQuest, and part of their "Vision" (yes I use that term on purpose for those that understand why) in the beginning was to make an MMO that offered gameplay that they were used to (raiding) to a broader audience. AKA make raiding more casual friendly.
I understand the ilevel of items and how it's affected/determined by the quality/rarity of the items. It's a good point to bring up, thank you. I feel it should have simply been done differently right from the start, however you're right in that it's probably too far developed to be changed at this point.
This is why I believe the item rarity system should never have been used to begin with. If item quality was based on comparing just the stats and benefits with no other measure (ie. name colour, level requirement) then I highly doubt so many people would have their panties in a knot over "casuals" getting similar quality gear.
I said it from the start, and I still believe it... Blizzard, and any other company that implemented similar, made a big mistake in classifying gear in a tier system, namely their grey white green blue purple orange system (EQ2 has similar with treasured legendary fabled mythical).
Would there be such a big uproar from raiding players if gear didn't have this classification? What if every piece of gear was all the same colour and the only way to determine what was better was to look at the actual stats on it and compare to what you were already wearing? As it was when I left WoW (around Arena Season 4) you could find any number of people wearing crappy gear just because the name of the item was purple, despite the fact that if they did a bit of looking around on websites they could find at least one piece of gear that was better for that slot but the name was blue instead. People are blinded by purple so to speak.
While I understand it makes it a bit easier for players to identify possible upgrades and also possibly allow easier classification for developers to determine what gear should drop from where with a tiering system, how much of this problem would go away without it? EverQuest 1 had no tiering system for gear (not sure if they do now, haven't played in years) or item colours to determine rarity, and you could find people raiding top end content still wearing gear obtained from mid-level content just because there was no item level or colour to compare. You looked at the stats and benefits of the item, and if what you had was better than what dropped, you didn't bother getting that new item even if what you had was something you looted 30 levels ago.
You spend months getting very powerful, and then suddenly people get just as powerful in only a few days. While you ruled PvP situations, and it took parties of 5 to kill you, now all of a sudden it only takes 1 or 2 people to kill you. This can ruin your fun if you PvP a lot.
Then maybe you're not as good at PvP as you think you are and were just relying on gear the entire time.
In a PvP MMO, the "equation" should really be Numbers > Skill > Gear. Basically, a large number of enemy players should be able to take you down when you're alone, a much better skilled player in similar (or slightly worse) gear should be able to take you down 1 on 1, and when you have two equally skilled players the one with the better gear should come out on top.
Sadly, WoW fubared this right up from the beginning and gear trumped everything so that even the worst players imaginable could dominate in PvP simply because they were capable of raiding the top end content and anyone solely interested in PvP were left by the wayside. The Honor System attempted to fix that, but ended up being an even worse grind than any raiding ever was, so you were still better off tackling PvE content in order to PvP (unless you really had nothing else to do than PvP all day every day for weeks on end, or share your account). I quit WoW around Arena Season 4 because I was getting sick of lesser skilled players able to just crush me and some close friends just because their top end epics were far better than our mix of blues and "welfare" epics (just for the record, during the Honor Grind, I was able to get the blue Warrior set and was able to 1v1 almost anyone who wasn't decked out in 100% BWL gear).
Quite frankly, if you find that now suddenly people can get epic gear who previously were unable to and they're trouncing you in PvP I say "Good". You never deserved to be king of the heap, requiring "parties of 5 to kill you" because you relied on gear and now that the field is evened out a bit and skill is more a determining factor, your ego has taken a hit. Call me bitter, call me a troll, but I know a lot of people would agree.
I'm not trying to call BS or anything here, but I'd be interested to know how many schools you've actually seen these digital clocks in.
I ask simply because I have three kids that have been in 6 different schools over the past couple years, and every single one of them were using the "old" synchronized analog clocks. You know, the big round ones with the white face, black numbers, black hour and minute hands, and red second hand.
Quite honestly, it would be a shame for schools to upgrade to digital clocks, and my reasons are twofold:
1) The cost of upgrading the clocks, and potentially the synchronization system, is an expense that isn't needed and with the way public schools are funded that money could be better used elsewhere
2) While it's easier for children to read digital clocks, part of grade school education is actually learning how to read analog clocks! What better way than actually telling the correct time by looking up at a live example?
Ack, I should say by "youngster" I mean young teen (13 - 15). It's a matter of personal morality, and possibly even hypocritical to an extent, but I personally don't think younger is appropriate. I also don't mean that parents should go out and buy porn for their kids, but if they happen to come across it, curiosity is natural in those circumstances.
At 13 (agreed, it's not 12), my dad and I went on a fishing trip and on the beach one night I found an old Hustler magazine laying amongst some rocks. My dad allowed me to peruse through it so long as I didn't bring it home since he knew my mom wouldn't agree. He also allowed me to use "soft swears" such as "hell", "damn", and even "shit". However, the basic deal was if I was allowed to do this, I had to behave responsibly, as one old enough see and do such things as well. I found that out the minute I caught my finger on a fishing hook and started with the "owie owie" whining (it wasn't that bad, barely even bled)... he told me to suck it up, and if I couldn't then I wasn't able to have the other privileges he allowed me.
It's a memorable experience, and a good one in my opinion.
Personally, I had access to porn (my parents had a big satellite dish, back before DirecTV, etc, where you changed the channel and the damn thing turned on its base) as a youngster and I can't say it did any damage to me. I may be a bit crass at times, but all in all I lead a healthy life... married, 3 kids, good job, and a fairly healthy outlook in general. I know my kids are going to be curious about a great many things, I just hope we all as a family can be open and honest about it, and that they can have healthy discussions with my wife and I should they have any questions.
I never understood people who play games for the plot. I play games for entertaining gameplay.
And to a great many people, the plot is part of the "entertaining gameplay". While I know both Oblivion and Fallout 3 have been lambasted by some for various flaws in both story and the actual game, I find both very entertaining as do a great many others. I haven't come close to finishing Oblivion yet (partly because I don't have a lot of time) because I spend so much time when I am playing it going around doing side quests, exploring, and talking to NPCs to see what they have to say. I find the main plot, as well as all of the side stories, to be very entertaining. Same goes for Fallout 3.
Go back a number of years to the old TSR Gold Box RPG games. Simplistic game play for the most part, but I ate them up and probably played every single one that was released (oh to have the free time I used to have as a youngster). They were fun because of the story they told (and it was really neat reading the novels they corresponded to after). Hell, I currently play EQ2 not because it's perhaps the best MMO out there, but because I find the storylines to be quite entertaining (and the game community seems to be much more socially mature than other MMOs out there).
You may not understand people who play games for the plot, but to many people it's a way of "living a book" so to speak. Don't rag on something because you fail to understand it.
Or, assuming there's a "demonstration" version available at all.
There's a few games that have been released recently that I've been a bit leery about, yet interested in, simply because I couldn't download a demo on XBL.
Sacred 2 is one of them. I've heard great things about it all over the internet between great "professional" reviews to great reviews by players (blogs or forum posts). However, there was no demo I could download to verify gameplay myself (tweaked or not). I ended up buying it for my wife because she likes that sort of game (she ate up Fable 2 and played Diablo 2 forever and a day on the PC) and we can play it together. We ended up being a bit iffy about the camera, specifically the limited angles you could get, but otherwise it seems to be quite enjoyable.
Another game I've stayed away from buying is Warhammer: Battle March. I'm not much into strategy games, but this one interests me because it's the Warhammer Fantasy universe. However, again there's no demo available for download from XBL. I haven't gone into reading many reviews yet, but I do know it's based on Warhammer: Mark of Chaos for PC. However, RTS on PC and RTS on a console can be two very different beasts simply due to one having mouse/keyboard and the other does not.
Did I mention that both of these are also not available for rent and my local Blockbuster? So basically I have no options to try-before-buy on either of these and would have to take a giant leap of faith based on nothing more than reviews (a good "pro" review can be easily bought and blog/forum posts are very subjective).
My wife and I recently dropped $3,200 Canadian on a pair of new 3.2GHz Core2Duo, 4GB 1066 RAM computers specifically for gaming together. Not only do we have that, but we also each have our own XBox 360's; hers upstairs in the living room and mine in the basement den.
While we do enjoy going out sometimes, we're mostly homebodies. We have 3 kids so not only do we have to deal with the price of whatever we do when we go out, but we also have to pay babysitting fees, so we just use at-home entertainment (which I've come to find is far better than, say, paying exorbitant prices to see a movie in the theatre, or go out for dinner when I'm a pretty fine cook imo). We justify the cost of our systems with the savings of not going out all the time.
It's also fun when one of us goes "afk" in a raid to... erm... titillate the other.:)
I liken it to paying a quarter or a dollar for a shopping cart at the grocery store. Even though a quarter (most places I shop at have moved to a "loonie", Canadian dollar) isn't much, it still guarantees that most people will return the shopping cart to the stands to get their money back rather than steal it or leave it out in the middle of the parking lot.
Of course, there's a "project housing" complex near where I live currently and you see plenty of shopping carts laying around there. Seems the ones who can afford the quarter the most are more likely to return the cart for their money, while those who can seemingly least afford it find more value in the cart itself somehow.
Someone above mentioned, as a joke, that he expected to see a bunch of XO's up in eBay in the near future. Sadly, that's probably the case. The families that can more easily afford the dollar or two for the XO will probably respect the laptop and ensure their child uses it appropriately. Those who cannot may very well see it as a method of gaining a bit more cash than what they spent.
Nevermind the fact that even the "hardcore" content in WoW isn't even close to being actually "hardcore" compared to EQ.
In WoW, you can wipe in a raid dungeon to a boss, see that it's getting late, and call it a night with a small repair bill then try again another night.
In EQ (at least, old school EQ), if you wipe on a raid mob in a dungeon you spend the next couple of hours either equipping your raid force with "backup gear" so you can go back in and recover everyone's corpses, or you beg another guild to clear the way in so you can get your stuff back, or you hope to god your Monk is as good as he thinks he is so he can feign flop some corpses back. All because your best gear is now laying on your corpse deep in that dungeon. There's no "calling it a night" on a wipe, because that's when the hard part begins.
I've raided in both games, and the only hard part about raiding in WoW is getting a large group of people who all want to do their own thing to work as a whole towards the common goal (herding lemmings can be easier).
I don't much enjoy WoW (hence why I don't play it anymore) but the one thing it did extremely well is make it possible for the casual player to have as much fun as the hardcore players, because even most of the hardcore content is designed to be done over a long period of time, rather than right away (think rep grinds, etc), with good rewards at the end.
I don't think anyone who doesn't already play Warcraft (or tried it and doesn't like it) know what dual-specs or what raids are.
Replace "Warcraft" with "any other MMO" and you may be on to something, but raids and dual-specs are nothing new. EverQuest 2 has had dual-specs for a long time now, and just about every MMO has had raids right from EverQuest 1.
To this day, I think possibly one of the coolest things I've done with a computer is piss around with the config.sys of my old 286AT with 2MB of RAM in order to get Wing Commander 3 with the speech pack running.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why I'm bothering to reply, particularly so late in the discussion, but here goes...
Of course he still actually retains the rights, and of course the rights are being infringed.
However, what it boils down to is what fucking good is having the rights to your own works if a big corporation is blocking your ability to distribute said works? At that point, it's like you don't have the rights to your works at all (hence why I said He effectively has no rights).
~jaraxle
Wow. You can't even read the quote?
Neither can you, apparently.
The artist holds rights to his own works. A major label has laid claim to his works, saying they hold the rights to it. After getting hold of an actual lawyer with said major label, the artist is told "Sorry" and that it will be sorted, but after months it still isn't.
In trying to publish works that the artist owns the rights to, he is told he can't, nor can he apparently rectify the situation with the label causing the problems. He effectively has no rights to his own works at this point.
~jaraxle
Warhammer doesn't seem to have much of a problem with gold spammers. When the game first came out, there was already a dedicated feedback button for "Report Gold Spammer." I have never seen more than 7 gold-spam mail messages in my box. And, plus, gold is easy to come by in that game anyway. There is just no market for the spammers to tap into.
A couple months ago when my wife and I still played WAR, she would receive up to 10 in-game mails a day from gold spammers. Not sure why she got so many and I didn't, but gold spam is still a problem in WAR, albeit not as much. Part of the reason why as you touched on to is that there is such a small market... both because gold is easy to come by, and because the game is hemorrhaging subscriptions (or at least it was, not sure how the recent changes particularly to the low level experience have affected things). Not much point in spending good money to advertise to a clientÃle that barely exists.
However, when WAR first came out and almost broke the "million mark", gold spam was an enormous problem, to the point that Mythic kept a counter on their realm war website counting up how many spammers were banned each day. They couldn't keep up.
~jaraxle
A lot of people seem to forget or just not know that two of the major figures in WoW's development were Tigole (Legacy of Steel) and Furor (Fires of Heaven), guild leaders of possibly the most hardcore raiding guilds in EverQuest, and part of their "Vision" (yes I use that term on purpose for those that understand why) in the beginning was to make an MMO that offered gameplay that they were used to (raiding) to a broader audience. AKA make raiding more casual friendly.
~jaraxle
I understand the ilevel of items and how it's affected/determined by the quality/rarity of the items. It's a good point to bring up, thank you. I feel it should have simply been done differently right from the start, however you're right in that it's probably too far developed to be changed at this point.
~jaraxle
This is why I believe the item rarity system should never have been used to begin with. If item quality was based on comparing just the stats and benefits with no other measure (ie. name colour, level requirement) then I highly doubt so many people would have their panties in a knot over "casuals" getting similar quality gear.
~jaraxle
I said it from the start, and I still believe it... Blizzard, and any other company that implemented similar, made a big mistake in classifying gear in a tier system, namely their grey white green blue purple orange system (EQ2 has similar with treasured legendary fabled mythical).
Would there be such a big uproar from raiding players if gear didn't have this classification? What if every piece of gear was all the same colour and the only way to determine what was better was to look at the actual stats on it and compare to what you were already wearing? As it was when I left WoW (around Arena Season 4) you could find any number of people wearing crappy gear just because the name of the item was purple, despite the fact that if they did a bit of looking around on websites they could find at least one piece of gear that was better for that slot but the name was blue instead. People are blinded by purple so to speak.
While I understand it makes it a bit easier for players to identify possible upgrades and also possibly allow easier classification for developers to determine what gear should drop from where with a tiering system, how much of this problem would go away without it? EverQuest 1 had no tiering system for gear (not sure if they do now, haven't played in years) or item colours to determine rarity, and you could find people raiding top end content still wearing gear obtained from mid-level content just because there was no item level or colour to compare. You looked at the stats and benefits of the item, and if what you had was better than what dropped, you didn't bother getting that new item even if what you had was something you looted 30 levels ago.
~jaraxle
It affects you in PvP.
You spend months getting very powerful, and then suddenly people get just as powerful in only a few days. While you ruled PvP situations, and it took parties of 5 to kill you, now all of a sudden it only takes 1 or 2 people to kill you. This can ruin your fun if you PvP a lot.
Then maybe you're not as good at PvP as you think you are and were just relying on gear the entire time.
In a PvP MMO, the "equation" should really be Numbers > Skill > Gear. Basically, a large number of enemy players should be able to take you down when you're alone, a much better skilled player in similar (or slightly worse) gear should be able to take you down 1 on 1, and when you have two equally skilled players the one with the better gear should come out on top.
Sadly, WoW fubared this right up from the beginning and gear trumped everything so that even the worst players imaginable could dominate in PvP simply because they were capable of raiding the top end content and anyone solely interested in PvP were left by the wayside. The Honor System attempted to fix that, but ended up being an even worse grind than any raiding ever was, so you were still better off tackling PvE content in order to PvP (unless you really had nothing else to do than PvP all day every day for weeks on end, or share your account). I quit WoW around Arena Season 4 because I was getting sick of lesser skilled players able to just crush me and some close friends just because their top end epics were far better than our mix of blues and "welfare" epics (just for the record, during the Honor Grind, I was able to get the blue Warrior set and was able to 1v1 almost anyone who wasn't decked out in 100% BWL gear).
Quite frankly, if you find that now suddenly people can get epic gear who previously were unable to and they're trouncing you in PvP I say "Good". You never deserved to be king of the heap, requiring "parties of 5 to kill you" because you relied on gear and now that the field is evened out a bit and skill is more a determining factor, your ego has taken a hit. Call me bitter, call me a troll, but I know a lot of people would agree.
~jaraxle
I'm not trying to call BS or anything here, but I'd be interested to know how many schools you've actually seen these digital clocks in.
I ask simply because I have three kids that have been in 6 different schools over the past couple years, and every single one of them were using the "old" synchronized analog clocks. You know, the big round ones with the white face, black numbers, black hour and minute hands, and red second hand.
Quite honestly, it would be a shame for schools to upgrade to digital clocks, and my reasons are twofold:
1) The cost of upgrading the clocks, and potentially the synchronization system, is an expense that isn't needed and with the way public schools are funded that money could be better used elsewhere
2) While it's easier for children to read digital clocks, part of grade school education is actually learning how to read analog clocks! What better way than actually telling the correct time by looking up at a live example?
~jaraxle
Ack, I should say by "youngster" I mean young teen (13 - 15). It's a matter of personal morality, and possibly even hypocritical to an extent, but I personally don't think younger is appropriate. I also don't mean that parents should go out and buy porn for their kids, but if they happen to come across it, curiosity is natural in those circumstances.
~jaraxle
*shrug*
At 13 (agreed, it's not 12), my dad and I went on a fishing trip and on the beach one night I found an old Hustler magazine laying amongst some rocks. My dad allowed me to peruse through it so long as I didn't bring it home since he knew my mom wouldn't agree. He also allowed me to use "soft swears" such as "hell", "damn", and even "shit". However, the basic deal was if I was allowed to do this, I had to behave responsibly, as one old enough see and do such things as well. I found that out the minute I caught my finger on a fishing hook and started with the "owie owie" whining (it wasn't that bad, barely even bled)... he told me to suck it up, and if I couldn't then I wasn't able to have the other privileges he allowed me.
It's a memorable experience, and a good one in my opinion.
Personally, I had access to porn (my parents had a big satellite dish, back before DirecTV, etc, where you changed the channel and the damn thing turned on its base) as a youngster and I can't say it did any damage to me. I may be a bit crass at times, but all in all I lead a healthy life... married, 3 kids, good job, and a fairly healthy outlook in general. I know my kids are going to be curious about a great many things, I just hope we all as a family can be open and honest about it, and that they can have healthy discussions with my wife and I should they have any questions.
~jaraxle
I never understood people who play games for the plot. I play games for entertaining gameplay.
And to a great many people, the plot is part of the "entertaining gameplay". While I know both Oblivion and Fallout 3 have been lambasted by some for various flaws in both story and the actual game, I find both very entertaining as do a great many others. I haven't come close to finishing Oblivion yet (partly because I don't have a lot of time) because I spend so much time when I am playing it going around doing side quests, exploring, and talking to NPCs to see what they have to say. I find the main plot, as well as all of the side stories, to be very entertaining. Same goes for Fallout 3.
Go back a number of years to the old TSR Gold Box RPG games. Simplistic game play for the most part, but I ate them up and probably played every single one that was released (oh to have the free time I used to have as a youngster). They were fun because of the story they told (and it was really neat reading the novels they corresponded to after). Hell, I currently play EQ2 not because it's perhaps the best MMO out there, but because I find the storylines to be quite entertaining (and the game community seems to be much more socially mature than other MMOs out there).
You may not understand people who play games for the plot, but to many people it's a way of "living a book" so to speak. Don't rag on something because you fail to understand it.
~jaraxle
*BANG*
(sorry)
Wow...
Only on Slashdot would an article about pornography (ethical or not) turn into an argument about mathematics.
~jaraxle
I think I will follow you on Twitter so I can make sure I get updated on the progress of this ground breaking idea of yours.
Or perhaps I will just go and Bing Flibubu...
~jaraxle
Even for the XBox? I have a feeling it's not possible except for PC...
~jaraxle
Or, assuming there's a "demonstration" version available at all.
There's a few games that have been released recently that I've been a bit leery about, yet interested in, simply because I couldn't download a demo on XBL.
Sacred 2 is one of them. I've heard great things about it all over the internet between great "professional" reviews to great reviews by players (blogs or forum posts). However, there was no demo I could download to verify gameplay myself (tweaked or not). I ended up buying it for my wife because she likes that sort of game (she ate up Fable 2 and played Diablo 2 forever and a day on the PC) and we can play it together. We ended up being a bit iffy about the camera, specifically the limited angles you could get, but otherwise it seems to be quite enjoyable.
Another game I've stayed away from buying is Warhammer: Battle March. I'm not much into strategy games, but this one interests me because it's the Warhammer Fantasy universe. However, again there's no demo available for download from XBL. I haven't gone into reading many reviews yet, but I do know it's based on Warhammer: Mark of Chaos for PC. However, RTS on PC and RTS on a console can be two very different beasts simply due to one having mouse/keyboard and the other does not.
Did I mention that both of these are also not available for rent and my local Blockbuster? So basically I have no options to try-before-buy on either of these and would have to take a giant leap of faith based on nothing more than reviews (a good "pro" review can be easily bought and blog/forum posts are very subjective).
~jaraxle
And for vitally important stuff they use the Spanish Inquisition.
Somehow, I expected that response...
~jaraxle
Ah, beg your pardon then, didn't mean to "call you out" or anything. At least you intended to. :)
Yes, it's awesome. I've had that comic saved on my hard drive since I first read it.
~jaraxle
The least you could do is give credit where credit is due for that quote.
~jaraxle
Yeah, I know that was posted to be funny, but...
My wife and I recently dropped $3,200 Canadian on a pair of new 3.2GHz Core2Duo, 4GB 1066 RAM computers specifically for gaming together. Not only do we have that, but we also each have our own XBox 360's; hers upstairs in the living room and mine in the basement den.
While we do enjoy going out sometimes, we're mostly homebodies. We have 3 kids so not only do we have to deal with the price of whatever we do when we go out, but we also have to pay babysitting fees, so we just use at-home entertainment (which I've come to find is far better than, say, paying exorbitant prices to see a movie in the theatre, or go out for dinner when I'm a pretty fine cook imo). We justify the cost of our systems with the savings of not going out all the time.
It's also fun when one of us goes "afk" in a raid to... erm... titillate the other. :)
~jaraxle
I liken it to paying a quarter or a dollar for a shopping cart at the grocery store. Even though a quarter (most places I shop at have moved to a "loonie", Canadian dollar) isn't much, it still guarantees that most people will return the shopping cart to the stands to get their money back rather than steal it or leave it out in the middle of the parking lot.
Of course, there's a "project housing" complex near where I live currently and you see plenty of shopping carts laying around there. Seems the ones who can afford the quarter the most are more likely to return the cart for their money, while those who can seemingly least afford it find more value in the cart itself somehow.
Someone above mentioned, as a joke, that he expected to see a bunch of XO's up in eBay in the near future. Sadly, that's probably the case. The families that can more easily afford the dollar or two for the XO will probably respect the laptop and ensure their child uses it appropriately. Those who cannot may very well see it as a method of gaining a bit more cash than what they spent.
~jaraxle
Nevermind the fact that even the "hardcore" content in WoW isn't even close to being actually "hardcore" compared to EQ.
In WoW, you can wipe in a raid dungeon to a boss, see that it's getting late, and call it a night with a small repair bill then try again another night.
In EQ (at least, old school EQ), if you wipe on a raid mob in a dungeon you spend the next couple of hours either equipping your raid force with "backup gear" so you can go back in and recover everyone's corpses, or you beg another guild to clear the way in so you can get your stuff back, or you hope to god your Monk is as good as he thinks he is so he can feign flop some corpses back. All because your best gear is now laying on your corpse deep in that dungeon. There's no "calling it a night" on a wipe, because that's when the hard part begins.
I've raided in both games, and the only hard part about raiding in WoW is getting a large group of people who all want to do their own thing to work as a whole towards the common goal (herding lemmings can be easier).
I don't much enjoy WoW (hence why I don't play it anymore) but the one thing it did extremely well is make it possible for the casual player to have as much fun as the hardcore players, because even most of the hardcore content is designed to be done over a long period of time, rather than right away (think rep grinds, etc), with good rewards at the end.
~jaraxle
I don't think anyone who doesn't already play Warcraft (or tried it and doesn't like it) know what dual-specs or what raids are.
Replace "Warcraft" with "any other MMO" and you may be on to something, but raids and dual-specs are nothing new. EverQuest 2 has had dual-specs for a long time now, and just about every MMO has had raids right from EverQuest 1.
Unless I misunderstood your double negative...
~jaraxle
To this day, I think possibly one of the coolest things I've done with a computer is piss around with the config.sys of my old 286AT with 2MB of RAM in order to get Wing Commander 3 with the speech pack running.
It required 4MB of RAM.
~jaraxle