I'd also like the government to adopt (for everyone) a law that states that the advertised price is the price.
They always find ways to weasel out of these and screw over the customer. Supermarkets in the UK now have nutritional information on the front cover of the packet in big letters to encourage healthy eating and supermarket honesty about the nutrition of the product. Sometimes you will pick up some food that has surprisingly low calories and once you get it home and your magnifying glass out you can see the surprisingly low calories per portion are only low if you accept that your portion is nothing more than quickly licking the food and putting it back.
All the reviews seem a bit premature to me. Its early days and most MMO's start of crippled by bugs. FFXIV seems to be buggered up by an amazingly counter-intuitive UI and extensive learning curve without any form of tutorial. It seems likely that these will be fixed after reading the feedback that really should have hit them in beta. The reviews of people who actually went to learn the game seem to be enthusiastically positive though those could well be from A&R or marketing of Enix Square.
what country in their right mind would respect the patents of China if they continued to disregard everyone elses'?
I see this claim being made repeatedly through the thread but so far these words have been backed up with nothing more than patriotism. Please feel free to cite your sources at any moment.
Please note, from what I've seen port folios count for a lot more than degrees in games development, which are usually either soft courses or badly written and usually using technology 5+ years out of date. There are some good ones out there but they are few and far between.
Depends what area they want to work as. If its the code monkeys then its a strict diet of c++, trigonometry, matrices and physics.
For a modeller they need to be making an awful lot of organic models, both low and high poly counts if they want to impress any companies. Blender is a great free tool to get them started on this and the alternatives such as Autodesk 3d max are generally only reachable by pirates, the rich and the corporates. Remind them that for a port folio to put their very most impressive work on the first frame or page because that's often all that is looked at.
For audio engineers get them coding in synths in c++ and editing / recording wavefiles and encourage them to learn a good lump of sound engineering as well, there are many books on the subject. Remind audio engineers that vacancies in this field are few and far between and sadly the jobs often go to some managements totally unqualified mate because he was once in a band and they smoked hash together in college.
Most importantly get them learning these skills by making mods or their own games which is essential if they want to have any decent work to wave under the nose of an employer or have a basic idea how to start up a company for themselves.
The solution is not censoring the internet. It is for PC users to ditch Windows and have a safe, modern operating system like Ubuntu installed.
Tried ditching windows for Ubuntu but couldn't make everything work and the installation was a nightmare with endless problems. Sure I'm only one among many but my own experiences said that Ubuntu was not really ready for all desktops, at least not mine.
They may be right this time, but who will
believe them? For those living under a rock,
I'm referring to the 3 American hikers who allegedly strayed
over the border from Kurdish Iraq, two of which are still
being held as spies.
Let me reuse your argument in a similar way.
The US may be right about the innocence of the 3 hikers, but who will believe them? For those living under a rock I'm referring to the fact that the US still wont even properly investigate into who really shot their own president 47 years ago!
You may be understimating just how long the grinding will take. 200 hours to get a random hat, of which there are 5, sound good to you? That's a lot of play time to get the one you want.
Unless I am mistaken you can trade them with other players. Besides if you are playing 200 hours a the game just to get a specific hat instead of just playing the game to have fun with your mates then perhaps your looking at it wrong. It's more just rare icing on the cake that overly greedy players can choose to fork out with real money for instead.
Well I guess I will not be playing TF2 again. Despite the 'it's optional defence' some of the items will give advantages. You can still get them all randomly, so it's a choice of grind or pay up. I think I'll do neither.
It's amazing how angry people can get over the idea of paying for new content. In my opinion this is a much better model than releasing expansions that prevent others playing with the majority population without purchasing it. I recently reinstalled the game and to be sure, everyone has weird hats etc but I cannot say I found any noticeable disadvantage in having none of these gimmicks, my scores are middling same as they were a year or more ago when I last played it and I'm grateful to be able to still play with everyone without having to fork out 10 or 20 for the new maps and gear etc.
And thinking about things you plan to do that day.
Yes the bigger problem is distracted drivers. I've seen people reading paperback books, newspapers and stapled together papers at the wheel. I've seen people eating serious sandwiches, combing their hair, applying make-up and changing clothes. And of course there are people that daydream at the wheel. I saw one woman having a midlife crisis in a mid-sized Chrysler.
Clearly driving is just too easy and minds wander too much. If we made roads more challenging like crazy golf courses we might fix the problem (and create new fun problems to solve).
You ever notice on Metacritic how the higher the marketing budget of the game, the greater the positive disparity between Metascore and user score? But in contrast small indie games or low budget releases are usually scored evenly. Of course it could just be a combination of hype backlash, bribery and reviewers suffering from an unusual vulnerability to marketing ploys.
I can just imagine the email to marketting now
From : g.lucas@hotmail.com Subject : Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I have a great idea, we could re-release Star Wars!
Hey guys I have another idea to follow up the 3d release for star wars, this time we could replace Chewbacca with CGI similar to Jar Jar Binx! Then we could creature future releases that replace other characters and the space scenes, remember we also have over a thousand hours of unseen footage left to dribble into future releases; also you know the bit where Leia strangles Jabba? That seems a bit cruel and violent, maybe we should super impose a blaster into Jabbas hand and have him shoot at her first so it seems more like a defensive strangling?
Apple seem to believe their customer base would confuse the word podium with an Apple product, it really shows how much faith they have in their customers intelligence.
I thought I would check out DuckDuckGo and was going to try a few searches see what it was like. I hit the letter C and immediately 5 suggestions came up and the first three were as follows. "Child, "Child Porn", "Child sex"
Suddenly I'm not so convinced encrypted searches are such a great idea.
Nonsense, everything cool starts on 4chan, why they invented rickrolling, lolcats, fire, the wheel, penicillin, the theories of evolution and relativity and even putting videos up of your favourite songs along with shitty kids cartoons featuring stupefyingly wide swords. Youtube and the rest of the web just follow along centuries behind the times.
Before the trolltards come a-flaming me about the accuracy of my post or lack thereof, consider the tone of irony that many lack basic understanding off these days, the same awkward irony one might feel when their wife selects the iron in a game of monopoly.
If it is anything like in the UK, the money they get for air play (PRS royalties in the UK) is the only form of income a music artist can get that the record companies cant shit all over and hoover up for themselves. For most artists who are kept by their record deals in crippling debt this is sometimes their only source of income and most actually have to keep jobs on the side just to pay the bills. Very few bands actually make a living out of music, even reasonably famous ones you would have suspected otherwise.
Obviously its down to the big companies to then turn to the public with press releases like this and make it look like the big bad recording artists are greedy with their only source of income and that if they keep the pressure up and bend the truth a little, they can often cut out a huge percent of this unnecessary cost of paying the actual creators of the song and not just renting it from their owners, the record Label. Youtube managed this by putting public pressure on them by blocking music videos in the UK till they agreed to let them have it for almost free.
I must add that a friend of mine who is a professional recording artist is my source for this, and is therefore far from unbiased.
If you watch a late 80's or early 90's action film, it's likely it is riddled with constant swearing from start to finish and its almost surprising when your used to modern films which are largely devoid of swearing. That said if you play any MMO game that is simple enough for kids to play, you will likely read or hear the worst language you have ever had the misfortune to be exposed to.
A good laser has an infrared filter on it, but the cheap laser pointers have either inadequate filtering or none at all, which is what makes them dangerous.
I try not to read reviews as these days they're little more than advertising funded press releases
I have to agree, these days I find professional reviews to be less than worthless.
On Metacritic, Civ 5 is the only high profile release I have seen where the user score is similar to the Metascore so it must be genuinely really good. Normally the dishonesty of professional reviewers inflates directly in proportion to the marketing budget of the game. If you doubt this then go look up some of the most expensive games released recently and note their glowing Metascore compared to the vastly more honest user scores. Low budget and indie releases of course tend to gravitate towards accurate reviews but seemingly advertising revenue is not what lines the pockets of professional reviewers these days.
If I want to shop in a city without sales tax (and oh yes, you can bet I do) then staying in-state, it's a 300 mile drive, or 482km. As you might imagine, we're definitely fans of Internet shopping!
This is definately reflected by looking at the sizes of the UK vs USA. For example Texas is 268601 square miles, Great Britain is only 80823 square miles. So you could fit Great Britain 3.3 times inside Texas. The population of Texas is 24.7 million, of GBR it is 58 million. That by my rough calculations (unless I've made a numerical mistake), this makes the population density of the UK almost 8 times that of Texas.
On a side note I'm curious how the US postal service survives. The UK postal service is on the brink of financial collapse and is for privatisation. If at a rough estimation, the US postal service has to travel up to 8 times the distance per person (in some areas), how the hell do they manage to stay afloat? Clearly the UK postal service needs to hire some of the guys the Americans have running their postal service and get rid of the imbeciles that run the British Royal Mail.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd also like the government to adopt (for everyone) a law that states that the advertised price is the price.
They always find ways to weasel out of these and screw over the customer. Supermarkets in the UK now have nutritional information on the front cover of the packet in big letters to encourage healthy eating and supermarket honesty about the nutrition of the product. Sometimes you will pick up some food that has surprisingly low calories and once you get it home and your magnifying glass out you can see the surprisingly low calories per portion are only low if you accept that your portion is nothing more than quickly licking the food and putting it back.
Makes you think that science fiction writers should be suing technology companies the world over.
All the reviews seem a bit premature to me. Its early days and most MMO's start of crippled by bugs. FFXIV seems to be buggered up by an amazingly counter-intuitive UI and extensive learning curve without any form of tutorial. It seems likely that these will be fixed after reading the feedback that really should have hit them in beta. The reviews of people who actually went to learn the game seem to be enthusiastically positive though those could well be from A&R or marketing of Enix Square.
what country in their right mind would respect the patents of China if they continued to disregard everyone elses'?
I see this claim being made repeatedly through the thread but so far these words have been backed up with nothing more than patriotism. Please feel free to cite your sources at any moment.
Please note, from what I've seen port folios count for a lot more than degrees in games development, which are usually either soft courses or badly written and usually using technology 5+ years out of date. There are some good ones out there but they are few and far between.
Depends what area they want to work as. If its the code monkeys then its a strict diet of c++, trigonometry, matrices and physics.
For a modeller they need to be making an awful lot of organic models, both low and high poly counts if they want to impress any companies. Blender is a great free tool to get them started on this and the alternatives such as Autodesk 3d max are generally only reachable by pirates, the rich and the corporates. Remind them that for a port folio to put their very most impressive work on the first frame or page because that's often all that is looked at.
For audio engineers get them coding in synths in c++ and editing / recording wavefiles and encourage them to learn a good lump of sound engineering as well, there are many books on the subject. Remind audio engineers that vacancies in this field are few and far between and sadly the jobs often go to some managements totally unqualified mate because he was once in a band and they smoked hash together in college.
Most importantly get them learning these skills by making mods or their own games which is essential if they want to have any decent work to wave under the nose of an employer or have a basic idea how to start up a company for themselves.
The solution is not censoring the internet. It is for PC users to ditch Windows and have a safe, modern operating system like Ubuntu installed.
Tried ditching windows for Ubuntu but couldn't make everything work and the installation was a nightmare with endless problems. Sure I'm only one among many but my own experiences said that Ubuntu was not really ready for all desktops, at least not mine.
They may be right this time, but who will believe them? For those living under a rock, I'm referring to the 3 American hikers who allegedly strayed over the border from Kurdish Iraq, two of which are still being held as spies.
Let me reuse your argument in a similar way.
The US may be right about the innocence of the 3 hikers, but who will believe them? For those living under a rock I'm referring to the fact that the US still wont even properly investigate into who really shot their own president 47 years ago!
But the appeal of games is they're not like real life. A game that emulated real life would be pretty boring (see also: The Sims).
Are you accusing Team Fortress 2 of being too lifelike?
You may be understimating just how long the grinding will take. 200 hours to get a random hat, of which there are 5, sound good to you? That's a lot of play time to get the one you want.
Unless I am mistaken you can trade them with other players. Besides if you are playing 200 hours a the game just to get a specific hat instead of just playing the game to have fun with your mates then perhaps your looking at it wrong. It's more just rare icing on the cake that overly greedy players can choose to fork out with real money for instead.
Well I guess I will not be playing TF2 again. Despite the 'it's optional defence' some of the items will give advantages. You can still get them all randomly, so it's a choice of grind or pay up. I think I'll do neither.
It's amazing how angry people can get over the idea of paying for new content. In my opinion this is a much better model than releasing expansions that prevent others playing with the majority population without purchasing it. I recently reinstalled the game and to be sure, everyone has weird hats etc but I cannot say I found any noticeable disadvantage in having none of these gimmicks, my scores are middling same as they were a year or more ago when I last played it and I'm grateful to be able to still play with everyone without having to fork out 10 or 20 for the new maps and gear etc.
And thinking about things you plan to do that day.
Yes the bigger problem is distracted drivers. I've seen people reading paperback books, newspapers and stapled together papers at the wheel. I've seen people eating serious sandwiches, combing their hair, applying make-up and changing clothes. And of course there are people that daydream at the wheel. I saw one woman having a midlife crisis in a mid-sized Chrysler.
Clearly driving is just too easy and minds wander too much. If we made roads more challenging like crazy golf courses we might fix the problem (and create new fun problems to solve).
You ever notice on Metacritic how the higher the marketing budget of the game, the greater the positive disparity between Metascore and user score?
But in contrast small indie games or low budget releases are usually scored evenly.
Of course it could just be a combination of hype backlash, bribery and reviewers suffering from an unusual vulnerability to marketing ploys.
Some examples of high budget games with huge score disparities.
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/call-of-duty-movdern-warfare-2
http://apps.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/spore
I can just imagine the email to marketting now From : g.lucas@hotmail.com
Subject : Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I have a great idea, we could re-release Star Wars!
Hey guys I have another idea to follow up the 3d release for star wars, this time we could replace Chewbacca with CGI similar to Jar Jar Binx! Then we could creature future releases that replace other characters and the space scenes, remember we also have over a thousand hours of unseen footage left to dribble into future releases; also you know the bit where Leia strangles Jabba? That seems a bit cruel and violent, maybe we should super impose a blaster into Jabbas hand and have him shoot at her first so it seems more like a defensive strangling?
Apple seem to believe their customer base would confuse the word podium with an Apple product, it really shows how much faith they have in their customers intelligence.
Are you sure about this? Because if so then that means someone has been looking for this on my Browser? Please be 100% certain in reply.
I thought I would check out DuckDuckGo and was going to try a few searches see what it was like. I hit the letter C and immediately 5 suggestions came up and the first three were as follows. "Child, "Child Porn", "Child sex"
Suddenly I'm not so convinced encrypted searches are such a great idea.
Nonsense, everything cool starts on 4chan, why they invented rickrolling, lolcats, fire, the wheel, penicillin, the theories of evolution and relativity and even putting videos up of your favourite songs along with shitty kids cartoons featuring stupefyingly wide swords. Youtube and the rest of the web just follow along centuries behind the times.
Before the trolltards come a-flaming me about the accuracy of my post or lack thereof, consider the tone of irony that many lack basic understanding off these days, the same awkward irony one might feel when their wife selects the iron in a game of monopoly.
If it is anything like in the UK, the money they get for air play (PRS royalties in the UK) is the only form of income a music artist can get that the record companies cant shit all over and hoover up for themselves. For most artists who are kept by their record deals in crippling debt this is sometimes their only source of income and most actually have to keep jobs on the side just to pay the bills. Very few bands actually make a living out of music, even reasonably famous ones you would have suspected otherwise.
Obviously its down to the big companies to then turn to the public with press releases like this and make it look like the big bad recording artists are greedy with their only source of income and that if they keep the pressure up and bend the truth a little, they can often cut out a huge percent of this unnecessary cost of paying the actual creators of the song and not just renting it from their owners, the record Label. Youtube managed this by putting public pressure on them by blocking music videos in the UK till they agreed to let them have it for almost free.
I must add that a friend of mine who is a professional recording artist is my source for this, and is therefore far from unbiased.
If you watch a late 80's or early 90's action film, it's likely it is riddled with constant swearing from start to finish and its almost surprising when your used to modern films which are largely devoid of swearing. That said if you play any MMO game that is simple enough for kids to play, you will likely read or hear the worst language you have ever had the misfortune to be exposed to.
A good laser has an infrared filter on it, but the cheap laser pointers have either inadequate filtering or none at all, which is what makes them dangerous.
It's nice to see that they didn't make another shit game like their latest Colonization attempt.
I found Colonization more enjoyable than Civ 4, but each to their own I guess.
I try not to read reviews as these days they're little more than advertising funded press releases
I have to agree, these days I find professional reviews to be less than worthless.
On Metacritic, Civ 5 is the only high profile release I have seen where the user score is similar to the Metascore so it must be genuinely really good. Normally the dishonesty of professional reviewers inflates directly in proportion to the marketing budget of the game. If you doubt this then go look up some of the most expensive games released recently and note their glowing Metascore compared to the vastly more honest user scores. Low budget and indie releases of course tend to gravitate towards accurate reviews but seemingly advertising revenue is not what lines the pockets of professional reviewers these days.
Something had been clawing our cat, so I was feeling pretty murderous - .
I trust you have since had your cat checked for rabies?
If I want to shop in a city without sales tax (and oh yes, you can bet I do) then staying in-state, it's a 300 mile drive, or 482km. As you might imagine, we're definitely fans of Internet shopping!
This is definately reflected by looking at the sizes of the UK vs USA. For example Texas is 268601 square miles, Great Britain is only 80823 square miles. So you could fit Great Britain 3.3 times inside Texas. The population of Texas is 24.7 million, of GBR it is 58 million. That by my rough calculations (unless I've made a numerical mistake), this makes the population density of the UK almost 8 times that of Texas.
On a side note I'm curious how the US postal service survives. The UK postal service is on the brink of financial collapse and is for privatisation. If at a rough estimation, the US postal service has to travel up to 8 times the distance per person (in some areas), how the hell do they manage to stay afloat? Clearly the UK postal service needs to hire some of the guys the Americans have running their postal service and get rid of the imbeciles that run the British Royal Mail.