Which is why I always feel bad for the black guys out there with small dicks. On the flip side thanks to the reverse stereotype for Asian's I bet girls think "Wow not bad for an Asian" when they find an average weiner.
"Downloading - easy 20 mins not too long to wait, very convenient"
That 20 minute download was over a 100Mbps pipe connected to Internet2 not a typical home DSL or cable broadband connection. I wonder how long it would take before you could start playing it on a 3-5Mbps connection.
Except of course that WoW in Asia is not sold the same way. In most cases they are not paying for the boxed game. Usually payment is on a pay for play type of arrangement via a gaming cafe. Also they pay a lot less in places like China because it has to be affordable for the Chinese market. Distribution in Asian countries is not directly done through Blizzard/Vivendi but rather in conjunction with local MMO companies - so all of that cash doesn't flow straight back to Blizzard. I'm just saying your numbers are high, even considering the differences in market WoW pulls in an amazing amount of money.
"Bad: Making the new Skynet's first action the nuking of every major population center on Earth."
I thought this was hilarious. Skynet once becoming sentient trys to commit suicide by blowing the majority of itself up. Considering that even as a virus it would have blown out all of it's major interconnections through nuking the metropolitan exchanges. Personally I liked T3, but in the same was I liked Alien 4 as utterly silly and stupid sci-fi action flicks.
"But if I don't want to raid, I can jump into a BG and work my way through the ranks to get the nice PvP gear."
Good luck hitting top of the PVP ladder without epic gear, a crapload of free time and a static group ("preformed"). PVP is a lot more fun in the sub 60 category in my opinion. Although it's best to be using a twinked out alt - since almost everyone else is.
Yeah I realize that there is a technical reason but it does make me wonder that if DX 10 games are already in development, what are the developers using? Seeing as there are no DX10 cards on the market. I don't mind moving forward technically, but I have to say with Vista that Microsoft has really done a great job in making the whole thing so confusing. I get concerned when I read things like "700MB RAM utilization on boot" and the fact that the x64 edition is still apparently as bad as XP64. I just wanna play my games! (And don't give me that go buy a console thing. I have one. I prefer gaming on the PC.)
As a gamer I know they are going to force me to upgrade by not providing DirectX 10 for Windows XP. Hopefully it will be awhile before this really matters because I do not look forward to installing Vista prior to the eventual release of service pack 1.
And this is exactly the same as Apple and their DRM. So blame Apple/MS for splitting the market on digital downloads due to differing DRM. So because of something no consumer wants (DRM) our choices of where to go to purchase digital music and video and our choices of what to use for playback have been cut in half. Wheee. Thanks MS! Thanks Apple!
"And for the record, I think Apple should come out against DRM and simply say they have to do it becaues of the record/movie companies who are greedy brainless idiots."
You do realize that Steve Jobs is now a board member of Disney? What makes you think that he doesn't want DRM on his movies? I think if anything Apple's policy has been to have DRM that is fairly unobtrusive to the purchaser but prevents casual trading. That and like MS not license its DRM for use in other devices because it's the iPod and not iTunes that makes Apple the majority of their money.
And yet the story text still doesn't explain why when you have to collect 20 goblin ears you don't get two ears per goblin killed. In fact often times you don't get any.
"We have been plagued by raids from the neighboring goblin tribe. These goblins are a vicious folk. They chop the very ears off each other to indicate their sheer evil ness. I want you to go and claim the few remaining ears of these goblins and bring them back to me!"
I was responding to a complaint that there was no new content from Blizzard. Code changes to the game engine may add to stability or improve the system in other ways but they are NOT content. You will notice I didn't list weather effects in the list of content because while they are pretty you can't PLAY weather effects. They aren't CONTENT. Glad to see you got modded flamebait, you deserved it.
Commodore 64 disks are a pain in the rear to read on anything else due to the nature of the 1541 disk drive. There are however a number of ways to transfer data off of Commodore computers. After all, how do you think all those.d64 image files used with emulators got made? Once pulling the data off there are a number of great emulators such as Vice to run the software on. Or you could just buy one for less than $50 off of eBay.
at this point i think I'll focus on tier 0 and.5 items
Good luck with that. I played until I had 6/8 tier 0 and then just couldn't stomach logging in for another frickin UD Strath or UBRS run to try for the last two pieces. I did over 20 UD Stratholme raids alone. It just gets so mind numbing. The dungeons are great, the first 5 times but after that it becomes painful. Maybe it's better now that they are 5 man only, but of course now if your one healer drops you're done. I had more fun manipulating the AH to get cash for a couple epic items and my epic mount.
They do but only in the high end game. Basically unless you are a heavy raider almost nothing has been released since launch top extend your game. There are a few faction based options which are poorly thought out and boring as hell. And of course there are the battlegrounds which may or may not interest you. Of course the PVP ladder means that unless you are a hardcore player you won't ever get the shiny purples from PVPing. In terms of content added since launch at no extra cost the list I am aware of goes something like:
Mauradon (5 player instance) Dire Maul (3 5 player instances) Molten Core (40 player instance) Black Wing Lair (40 player instance) Zul Gurub (20 player instance) Ahn Quiraj (world event, 20 player instance, 40 player instance) Naxxramas (40 player instance) Various holiday event quests (Halloween, Xmas, Chinese New Year, Valentines day) 3 PVP Battlegrounds Revamped map, new quest lines and faction options in Silithus Several Dragons on the world map suitable for raid killing New world PVP options Darkmoon Faire Additional quests in Feralas, Hinterlands and Searing Gorge mid-level zones And a bunch of smaller tweaks, revamps etc.
All in all, compared to other MMOs it is a decent chunk of new content. Unfortunately for the last few patches the majority of additions have focused on the high end raider or PVP player.
"So now, I stick to classics and Mame. I will never pay a monthly fee for a game."
Keep in mind those MAME games you are playing used to cost $.25 a play. No matter whether you lost the game in 30 seconds or could keep it going for an hour. The $15 someone spends on WoW a month is equivalent to 60 quarter drops in an arcade machine. Back in the '80s I would definately spend upwards of $10 during a single night at the arcade. I love MAME too but in general unless you have a stack of arcade boards lying around keep in mind that you are violating copyright law to play most of those games. Your ride is only free because of this. You would spend a couple hundred dollars just to pick up all the latest console arcade collections and still only have a fraction of a total MAME collection.
I guess you missed the bits talking about conservation and the animal's lives in the wild. Yes he did some crazy stuff and yes I think that the craziness of it was played up in the show but he was very involved in conservation and did try to teach about it through his show.
Oddly enough the CGI snakes in Snakes on a Plane also look out of place and unnatural yet it somehow added to the atmosphere of the movie. Fastest anaconda eating person ever!
"I'll never hit the top of the ladder either, but the point for me isn't to hit the top of the ladder, It's to have fun! I have fun doing pvp. It's weird actually. When i get into the mode where i'm thinking "i gotta get xxx gear" then wow stops being fun."
Fair enough. I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't obsess on gear or xp but I like to feel progression of some sort. I think the issue I had with PVP was partially my class. As a lvl 60 Druid specc'd restoration (this was also before the talent revamp that made feral a real option) I was best at supporting other players yet most of the time the PVP group was too disorganized for me to effectively run support. PVP with my lvl 40ish Paladin was actually a lot more fun.
A good way to break the ice is to invite the coworker to lunch with a group of employees. This is certainly less likely to be seen as an attempt to hit on or pick up the woman. We have a female employee who works in web development and IT basically just invited her out to lunch to get to know her. Of course it helps that she's a bit of a geek herself - gives us stuff in common to talk about. Although it was the point when she played Gwar's "Fucking an Animal" on her playlist that I knew we would get along.
Actually, no. If you had said "the end game in wow is raiding and pvp" you would be correct. There are plenty of people that enjoy small party questing and 5 instances but don't care for 40 man raids. The best times I had in the game were 5 man groups in Dire Maul. I also did raid extensively. My raid tracker logged somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 raids run. The prospect of having to do the runs over and over for the 40 man runs just didn't seem fun. My old guild has gone on to do BWL and start on AQ20. Whee. Nine months after I left and they've been running the same content over and over again constantly. Onyxia, MC, BWL over and over. When I left world PVP was limited to pointless bashing at the crossroads or south shore. I hope the new world pvp option works well, because that was just pointless. And if you wanted to play Battlegrounds you had to wait upwards of 45 minutes. Not my idea of fun. Hopefully thats fixed now. There was no way I could ever hit top of the ladder in PVP so there was very little point in doing it. I wouldn't be able to get the nice gear. From a pure gameplay standpoint I think WoW PVP (at least battlegrounds) is pretty weak compared to a proper FPS like Battlefield 2. There are also other things to do in WoW. For awhile I got into manipulating the AH. I needed money for my Epic mount. My character was an alchemist/herbalist. I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to corner the market on certain items and also what times large guilds were raiding so I could jack up prices on supplies they needed. It was really fun seeing how easily the AH could be manipulated once you had a thousand gold or so to play with. Considering I played WoW for almost a year and tried all the aspects of it from soloing to pvp to 40 man raids, I'm not sure how you can say that I wasn't "in to" WoW. Although it's true to say I didn't get into the high end game of WoW.
I tried to stop buying floppy drives in computers for the office. The very first one I put on a users desk led to a support call about "where is the floppy drive?" I guess some people still use them.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why I always feel bad for the black guys out there with small dicks. On the flip side thanks to the reverse stereotype for Asian's I bet girls think "Wow not bad for an Asian" when they find an average weiner.
And you're probably not aware that the suck continued with a television series.
"Downloading - easy 20 mins not too long to wait, very convenient"
That 20 minute download was over a 100Mbps pipe connected to Internet2 not a typical home DSL or cable broadband connection. I wonder how long it would take before you could start playing it on a 3-5Mbps connection.
"It's just the skin, dude."
If this is the case I would appreciate being able to set them all to a consistent "skin". Preferably with one setting at the operating system level.
Except of course that WoW in Asia is not sold the same way. In most cases they are not paying for the boxed game. Usually payment is on a pay for play type of arrangement via a gaming cafe. Also they pay a lot less in places like China because it has to be affordable for the Chinese market. Distribution in Asian countries is not directly done through Blizzard/Vivendi but rather in conjunction with local MMO companies - so all of that cash doesn't flow straight back to Blizzard.
I'm just saying your numbers are high, even considering the differences in market WoW pulls in an amazing amount of money.
"Bad: Making the new Skynet's first action the nuking of every major population center on Earth."
I thought this was hilarious. Skynet once becoming sentient trys to commit suicide by blowing the majority of itself up. Considering that even as a virus it would have blown out all of it's major interconnections through nuking the metropolitan exchanges.
Personally I liked T3, but in the same was I liked Alien 4 as utterly silly and stupid sci-fi action flicks.
"But if I don't want to raid, I can jump into a BG and work my way through the ranks to get the nice PvP gear."
Good luck hitting top of the PVP ladder without epic gear, a crapload of free time and a static group ("preformed").
PVP is a lot more fun in the sub 60 category in my opinion. Although it's best to be using a twinked out alt - since almost everyone else is.
Yeah I realize that there is a technical reason but it does make me wonder that if DX 10 games are already in development, what are the developers using? Seeing as there are no DX10 cards on the market.
I don't mind moving forward technically, but I have to say with Vista that Microsoft has really done a great job in making the whole thing so confusing. I get concerned when I read things like "700MB RAM utilization on boot" and the fact that the x64 edition is still apparently as bad as XP64.
I just wanna play my games!
(And don't give me that go buy a console thing. I have one. I prefer gaming on the PC.)
As a gamer I know they are going to force me to upgrade by not providing DirectX 10 for Windows XP. Hopefully it will be awhile before this really matters because I do not look forward to installing Vista prior to the eventual release of service pack 1.
"that is if Microsoft would port their DRM"
And this is exactly the same as Apple and their DRM. So blame Apple/MS for splitting the market on digital downloads due to differing DRM. So because of something no consumer wants (DRM) our choices of where to go to purchase digital music and video and our choices of what to use for playback have been cut in half. Wheee. Thanks MS! Thanks Apple!
"And for the record, I think Apple should come out against DRM and simply say they have to do it becaues of the record/movie companies who are greedy brainless idiots."
You do realize that Steve Jobs is now a board member of Disney? What makes you think that he doesn't want DRM on his movies? I think if anything Apple's policy has been to have DRM that is fairly unobtrusive to the purchaser but prevents casual trading. That and like MS not license its DRM for use in other devices because it's the iPod and not iTunes that makes Apple the majority of their money.
And yet the story text still doesn't explain why when you have to collect 20 goblin ears you don't get two ears per goblin killed. In fact often times you don't get any.
"We have been plagued by raids from the neighboring goblin tribe. These goblins are a vicious folk. They chop the very ears off each other to indicate their sheer evil ness. I want you to go and claim the few remaining ears of these goblins and bring them back to me!"
I was responding to a complaint that there was no new content from Blizzard. Code changes to the game engine may add to stability or improve the system in other ways but they are NOT content. You will notice I didn't list weather effects in the list of content because while they are pretty you can't PLAY weather effects. They aren't CONTENT.
Glad to see you got modded flamebait, you deserved it.
True but they were a hell of a lot better than a tape drive. I remember waiting 20 minutes or so to load Temple of Apshai off tape.
Commodore 64 disks are a pain in the rear to read on anything else due to the nature of the 1541 disk drive. There are however a number of ways to transfer data off of Commodore computers. After all, how do you think all those .d64 image files used with emulators got made?
Once pulling the data off there are a number of great emulators such as Vice to run the software on. Or you could just buy one for less than $50 off of eBay.
at this point i think I'll focus on tier 0 and .5 items
Good luck with that. I played until I had 6/8 tier 0 and then just couldn't stomach logging in for another frickin UD Strath or UBRS run to try for the last two pieces. I did over 20 UD Stratholme raids alone. It just gets so mind numbing. The dungeons are great, the first 5 times but after that it becomes painful. Maybe it's better now that they are 5 man only, but of course now if your one healer drops you're done.
I had more fun manipulating the AH to get cash for a couple epic items and my epic mount.
They do but only in the high end game. Basically unless you are a heavy raider almost nothing has been released since launch top extend your game. There are a few faction based options which are poorly thought out and boring as hell. And of course there are the battlegrounds which may or may not interest you. Of course the PVP ladder means that unless you are a hardcore player you won't ever get the shiny purples from PVPing.
In terms of content added since launch at no extra cost the list I am aware of goes something like:
Mauradon (5 player instance)
Dire Maul (3 5 player instances)
Molten Core (40 player instance)
Black Wing Lair (40 player instance)
Zul Gurub (20 player instance)
Ahn Quiraj (world event, 20 player instance, 40 player instance)
Naxxramas (40 player instance)
Various holiday event quests (Halloween, Xmas, Chinese New Year, Valentines day)
3 PVP Battlegrounds
Revamped map, new quest lines and faction options in Silithus
Several Dragons on the world map suitable for raid killing
New world PVP options
Darkmoon Faire
Additional quests in Feralas, Hinterlands and Searing Gorge mid-level zones
And a bunch of smaller tweaks, revamps etc.
All in all, compared to other MMOs it is a decent chunk of new content. Unfortunately for the last few patches the majority of additions have focused on the high end raider or PVP player.
"So now, I stick to classics and Mame. I will never pay a monthly fee for a game."
Keep in mind those MAME games you are playing used to cost $.25 a play. No matter whether you lost the game in 30 seconds or could keep it going for an hour. The $15 someone spends on WoW a month is equivalent to 60 quarter drops in an arcade machine. Back in the '80s I would definately spend upwards of $10 during a single night at the arcade.
I love MAME too but in general unless you have a stack of arcade boards lying around keep in mind that you are violating copyright law to play most of those games. Your ride is only free because of this. You would spend a couple hundred dollars just to pick up all the latest console arcade collections and still only have a fraction of a total MAME collection.
I guess you missed the bits talking about conservation and the animal's lives in the wild. Yes he did some crazy stuff and yes I think that the craziness of it was played up in the show but he was very involved in conservation and did try to teach about it through his show.
Well all the Aussies I know appreciated his work in conservation even if his show was a bit over the top.
Oddly enough the CGI snakes in Snakes on a Plane also look out of place and unnatural yet it somehow added to the atmosphere of the movie.
Fastest anaconda eating person ever!
"I'll never hit the top of the ladder either, but the point for me isn't to hit the top of the ladder, It's to have fun! I have fun doing pvp. It's weird actually. When i get into the mode where i'm thinking "i gotta get xxx gear" then wow stops being fun."
Fair enough. I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't obsess on gear or xp but I like to feel progression of some sort. I think the issue I had with PVP was partially my class. As a lvl 60 Druid specc'd restoration (this was also before the talent revamp that made feral a real option) I was best at supporting other players yet most of the time the PVP group was too disorganized for me to effectively run support. PVP with my lvl 40ish Paladin was actually a lot more fun.
Were she single and were I single - and were I not management subject to insta-firing for hitting on workers - hell yeah!
A good way to break the ice is to invite the coworker to lunch with a group of employees. This is certainly less likely to be seen as an attempt to hit on or pick up the woman.
We have a female employee who works in web development and IT basically just invited her out to lunch to get to know her. Of course it helps that she's a bit of a geek herself - gives us stuff in common to talk about.
Although it was the point when she played Gwar's "Fucking an Animal" on her playlist that I knew we would get along.
"wow is raiding and pvp"
Actually, no. If you had said "the end game in wow is raiding and pvp" you would be correct.
There are plenty of people that enjoy small party questing and 5 instances but don't care for 40 man raids. The best times I had in the game were 5 man groups in Dire Maul.
I also did raid extensively. My raid tracker logged somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 raids run. The prospect of having to do the runs over and over for the 40 man runs just didn't seem fun. My old guild has gone on to do BWL and start on AQ20. Whee. Nine months after I left and they've been running the same content over and over again constantly. Onyxia, MC, BWL over and over.
When I left world PVP was limited to pointless bashing at the crossroads or south shore. I hope the new world pvp option works well, because that was just pointless. And if you wanted to play Battlegrounds you had to wait upwards of 45 minutes. Not my idea of fun. Hopefully thats fixed now. There was no way I could ever hit top of the ladder in PVP so there was very little point in doing it. I wouldn't be able to get the nice gear. From a pure gameplay standpoint I think WoW PVP (at least battlegrounds) is pretty weak compared to a proper FPS like Battlefield 2.
There are also other things to do in WoW. For awhile I got into manipulating the AH. I needed money for my Epic mount. My character was an alchemist/herbalist. I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to corner the market on certain items and also what times large guilds were raiding so I could jack up prices on supplies they needed. It was really fun seeing how easily the AH could be manipulated once you had a thousand gold or so to play with.
Considering I played WoW for almost a year and tried all the aspects of it from soloing to pvp to 40 man raids, I'm not sure how you can say that I wasn't "in to" WoW. Although it's true to say I didn't get into the high end game of WoW.
I tried to stop buying floppy drives in computers for the office. The very first one I put on a users desk led to a support call about "where is the floppy drive?" I guess some people still use them.