Dying is not the issue, dealing enough damage to kill anything in less than 5 minutes is - at max level. In any case I considered 100% chameleon a bug and didn't want to use it. I guess my conclusion after playing the game long enough was that the leveling system itself was a bug too at high levels, even if it was working as intended by the developers.
What I think is awesome about these games is how they are what you make of them. Apparently, you decided to abuse the mechanics to gain any edge possible, and you blame the game for letting you.
No, I played it the way it made sense first, and then I found that the game was not fun at max level because nothing died in a reasonable time. Then I played to get any edge possible while still leveling, and yet the issue remained. So I concluded that leveling is the wrong thing to do because it makes the game not fun at max level. By the way you don't reach max level unless you play for a long time, so you probably never experienced this issue. Your experiences at lower levels are not relevant to problems that appear at higher levels. Your description also shows that you were lucky to pick combat abilities as your major abilities - if you had chosen mostly non-combat abilities the game would have become impossible after a while. You didn't have an issue because you were lucky and didn't play too long.
That is true, unless you are unlucky to focus on non-combat abilities as your major abilities and then level them. Then the game becomes impossible as the enemies becomes more powerful but you do not. "not impossible" is rather a low bar to set for a game, though, especially since the rest of the game is of a much higher quality.
It wasn't the only way, but I can say that if you managed your character perfectly (which is quite tricky and tedious to do) to be the most powerful character possible at max level, then... the game got incredibly tedious because while the enemies didn't have any chance to kill you, they also had so many HPs that it took a long time indeed for you to kill anything. Partly because at that level common bandits were running around with armor that would have been appropriate on a daedric prince. If you didn't manage your character perfectly and got to max level then it would be much worse than that. So I consider that the right way to play the game is to keep your level down - otherwise it's not fun. You do that by choosing your major skills to be skills you don't actually use. So for example specialize in only magic and then use no magic.
True. It was also ridiculous that common bandits had daedric armor when you got to a high level. Though there were issues in Morrowind as well. In Morrowind it was advantageous to jump at all times to increase your skills even when just traveling somewhere. In both games you have to keep a careful accounting system outside the game to time your skills-ups in your minor and major skills so as to get maximum stat increases on level up. Morrowind also allowed you to be nearly invincible at level 1 through the use of potions. The systems were a mess in both Morrowind and Oblivion. I can't say how they were like before that, since I don't remember how it worked in Daggerfall.
I just hope that they don't make it so that the way to victory is to play a mage and then only use fighter skills (what is used improves). The game scales to your power level in your main skills, so you can push your other skills to max and Oblivion will still throw enemies at you that are appropriate for level 1. Oh, and if you choose a non-combat skill as your main skill and then level that, such as alchemy, you are in for a world of hurt because of the same mechanic - your enemies will become overpowered. The systems in TES are just awful, but the games are nice enough.
Some people just could care exponentially less about what they are saying.:P That battle is lost; the only way to win is for you to care as little about them sounding like idiots as they do.
Many countries do and fees are much lower. VISA and Mastercard are international solutions only with insane fees - you are crazy to be using these as internal American systems.
You joke, but that wouldn't even work even if you include rectal and oral examinations for every passenger. Take out a kidney and surgically replace it with a bomb in the shape of a kidney - you won't be detecting that. Doing that isn't going very far for the terrorist seeing as he is going to be blowing himself up shortly anyway. Since we are not going to be able to detect something like that, any security measure we might institute is only going to stop a terrorist that cannot access a trained doctor within his organization. He doesn't have to be all that skilled since the patient only needs to live for a short while - infection? No problem! So all of this expense and inconvenience is for stopping the isolated crazy people with no backers. That is all we can ever accomplish through increased airplane security.
Is there no way for the jurors to have any input into what goes on in court? Have they no way to e.g. in some way cause a question to be asked of a witness by someone?
That money is for having any sort of connection in the first place. The first 1kb/s is worth much more than the next 1mb/s, as it enables you get to a message at all. So I don't think it's quite fair to take the monthly expense and divide by the data downloaded.
1$/GB is more expensive than a harddisk. I.e. it will in this case actually be less expensive to BUY a harddisk and send it in the mail as a mean of transporting information. 1$/GB is crazy expensive.
The comparison has to be to a single player game because no one has done what Bioware claims they will do, so there is nothing to compare to. Of course WoW could have voice in the sense of some guy reading the quest text, what I'm talking about is the kind of cinematic story telling that you find in ME where voice is just one of the components. In fact, that sort of thing is exactly what you see Blizzard doing in Cataclysm. For the main story line they actually show you people doing things and saying things in front of you, instead of having you read about them doing those things. They did some of that in Wrath of the Lich King too and earlier WoW as well. It is there that the engine is showing its limitations. So it's not that an MMO can't do these things it's just that it is expensive to do and it is is both even more expensive and less effective if you have to do it with technology like WoW's that wasn't made with that primarily in mind. The difference between single player and MMO games that is relevant here is not the number of people in the game or the systems in these games, it is just the fact that single player games are much smaller than MMO's and so attaining a single player level of quality content in an MMO is fantastically expensive, which is why no one has done it. Perhaps Bioware will.
I specifically write about how MMO characters are faceless generic beings, so yes, I did notice that in ME the story centers around you. In ME the whole world is centered around you, which wouldn't be doable in quite the same way in an MMO, but that's not necessary either to attain a similar level of quality of story. In the new starter areas they are clearly trying to go for the vision of having the story center around you in a more meaningful way, and those areas are better for it. The problem is not just with the limitations of the engine, it is also that they still cannot give you any personal characteristics at all in the story, because that is not how WoW works. In WoW each character is generic and they can't change that too much without making a new game out of it. They also cannot give you any kind of meaningful choice-based interaction because that also is not how WoW works. It would be a different game. The closest they have come to meaningful story choice is the very coarse Aldor/Scryer and Oracles/Wolvar faction allegiance choices, and the content behind that is very limited. They seem to be trying to come as close as possible (which isn't very) to what Bioware are claiming to be doing with TOR while still staying with WoW being WoW - and they are getting great reviews for it.
Those are exactly equally despicable because they amount to the same thing just in relation to men instead of women. The difference is that feminists have been more effective lately - e.g. you have become unable to distinguish between a dislike for feminist activists and a dislike for all women. Clearly the feminist activists have been very effective at influencing you.
Cataclysm is by far the best World of Warcraft yet in terms of how you interact with the game, the game systems and the quests and story-telling and probably in every other way as well. It's very obvious that a lot of care by a lot of competent people have gone into this. The only problem is that the skeleton of what WoW is is being stretched in the direction of even higher quality, but the identity of WoW was set when it came out and they can't just make Cataclysm a new game. It still has to be WoW, and the formula inherent to WoW has e.g. storytelling issues. WoW is not voiced and it is not cinematic - you don't get to see facial expressions of anguish as Mankrik implores you to find out what happened to his wife. You get to read a short blurb about how he is imploring you. They can't change that because then it wouldn't be WoW, yet those non-classic-WoW elements are a main part of what lends Wrath of the Lich King and especially Cataclysm their superior story telling. So what they have to do is try to make these things work in an engine that isn't made for it without having players feel that they changed the nature of the game too much. They are doing an extraordinarily good job at that, it's just that it's a lousy task to be set and the outcome is not quite cohesive.
Most of WoW is not voiced or cinematic - indeed most of the story in wow is throw-away and transparent excuses for having you go kill mobs - sprinkled with lots of puns, pop references and crazy goblin engineering. So when a tiny bit of WoW becomes voiced, kind-of cinematic and has a deeper and cohesive story, it makes the rest of WoW look shabby in comparison. That's probably why they rebuilt the whole of the original game for Cataclysm, but they have to stay true to what WoW is and so they can only go so far. E.g. the attempt is frustrated by the fact that the player character in WoW has no significant identity of his own in the game. That let's you imagine whatever you want, which is probably the point of that, but it also means that the character you are playing is always the all-important cog in the machine that makes things work out all right. Yet he has no identity or place in the story of WoW. He is an important but faceless technician that fixes the world and is never talked about except in generic and interchangeable ways, and even often in plural form like "the great heroes of Azeroth fought off the scourge." You can still do great story telling with that, as Blizzard is showing us all without a doubt - perhaps in the same way that the special olympics participants can probably all run much faster than you or I because they are so good at using what they've got. Yet the special olympics are not the real olympics.
When you look at the successive expansions to WoW, it's clear that Blizzard is putting more and more of their resources into providing their game with an ever-better-told story. It's the only reason they put phasing into their game where the world changes progressively as the player goes through the story laid out in the various quest lines. Yet the kind of game they built 6 years ago will only support them in taking that story-telling ambition so far now.
Compare this to the story telling style of BioWare's Mass Effect 1 and especially 2. I don't think Bioware has better writers than Blizzard does, it's just that WoW has not been constructed from the beginning to support excellent stories and they can only do so much to change that now - which is a lot but still there is a limit. With the resources Blizzard is increasingly with each expansion pouring into specifically story and narration, I think it's pretty clear that Blizzard themselves see this as something they must take as far as they can within their game's limitations. Bioware is coming out with The Old Republic in 2011, which is an MMO built from the beginning to support excellent and varied stories. If Bioware can approach the quality Blizzard has put into the rest of World of Warcraft outside of the story, then they will eventually supplant World
This is a good thing. The previous security theater was just as ridiculous, but people put up with it because not enough were willing to actually consider that it is necessary to allow a small risk of something bad happening to get on with our lives. That allows the crazies to implement things like this. The only way the crazies can be countered is if enough people who aren't insane get in on the issue. The only way to have that happen is if the situation becomes so bad that people start caring. So I welcome these intrusions - the worse the better and the sooner the better. It's the only way to have a return to sanity.
You can be proud of whatever you yourself are doing, and for consequences of that. You cannot be proud of something that happened before you were born, or where you connection to it is tenuous. It is true that many people are proud of things from history - I don't disagree that that is going on all over, I'm just saying it doesn't make sense. A player on a sports team that wins can be proud of that since he probably did concrete and significant things to make that happen. Usually not so with a citizen in a country that does something great. What you can do instead is appreciate, support and value the good points of the place you live. If you do something significant to further that, you can reasonably feel proud of yourself for your specific part in making that happen. On the flip side, this also frees you from being continuously ashamed of all the bad stuff the stupid or evil people in whatever country do. Strangely, lots of people seem to (incorrectly) want the good parts to rub off on them yet (correctly) dismiss the bad parts as nothing to do with them.
No, implemented succesful ideas are worth something. Unimplemented ideas are risky stuff that might as well take you for every penny you've got as make you a profit. Telling good ideas from bad is usually harder than coming up with ideas in the first place.
To the people who responded to my post as if I actually had made the argument in the first half: I was saying that the argument was being made in a particularly inane form. Given that I think that, and was trying to show that, I was not actually myself trying to make an argument in that same form.
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Dying is not the issue, dealing enough damage to kill anything in less than 5 minutes is - at max level. In any case I considered 100% chameleon a bug and didn't want to use it. I guess my conclusion after playing the game long enough was that the leveling system itself was a bug too at high levels, even if it was working as intended by the developers.
What I think is awesome about these games is how they are what you make of them. Apparently, you decided to abuse the mechanics to gain any edge possible, and you blame the game for letting you.
No, I played it the way it made sense first, and then I found that the game was not fun at max level because nothing died in a reasonable time. Then I played to get any edge possible while still leveling, and yet the issue remained. So I concluded that leveling is the wrong thing to do because it makes the game not fun at max level. By the way you don't reach max level unless you play for a long time, so you probably never experienced this issue. Your experiences at lower levels are not relevant to problems that appear at higher levels. Your description also shows that you were lucky to pick combat abilities as your major abilities - if you had chosen mostly non-combat abilities the game would have become impossible after a while. You didn't have an issue because you were lucky and didn't play too long.
That is true, unless you are unlucky to focus on non-combat abilities as your major abilities and then level them. Then the game becomes impossible as the enemies becomes more powerful but you do not. "not impossible" is rather a low bar to set for a game, though, especially since the rest of the game is of a much higher quality.
It wasn't the only way, but I can say that if you managed your character perfectly (which is quite tricky and tedious to do) to be the most powerful character possible at max level, then... the game got incredibly tedious because while the enemies didn't have any chance to kill you, they also had so many HPs that it took a long time indeed for you to kill anything. Partly because at that level common bandits were running around with armor that would have been appropriate on a daedric prince. If you didn't manage your character perfectly and got to max level then it would be much worse than that. So I consider that the right way to play the game is to keep your level down - otherwise it's not fun. You do that by choosing your major skills to be skills you don't actually use. So for example specialize in only magic and then use no magic.
True. It was also ridiculous that common bandits had daedric armor when you got to a high level. Though there were issues in Morrowind as well. In Morrowind it was advantageous to jump at all times to increase your skills even when just traveling somewhere. In both games you have to keep a careful accounting system outside the game to time your skills-ups in your minor and major skills so as to get maximum stat increases on level up. Morrowind also allowed you to be nearly invincible at level 1 through the use of potions. The systems were a mess in both Morrowind and Oblivion. I can't say how they were like before that, since I don't remember how it worked in Daggerfall.
You are clearly very smart.
I just hope that they don't make it so that the way to victory is to play a mage and then only use fighter skills (what is used improves). The game scales to your power level in your main skills, so you can push your other skills to max and Oblivion will still throw enemies at you that are appropriate for level 1. Oh, and if you choose a non-combat skill as your main skill and then level that, such as alchemy, you are in for a world of hurt because of the same mechanic - your enemies will become overpowered. The systems in TES are just awful, but the games are nice enough.
Some people just could care exponentially less about what they are saying. :P That battle is lost; the only way to win is for you to care as little about them sounding like idiots as they do.
You seem to believe that failing to understand clear writing makes you seem smart. It makes you seem like an idiot. Good day sir.
Claiming people who disagree with you are burning kittens and hate freedom is not an argument.
On the contrary, in politics it seems to be the only argument.
Many countries do and fees are much lower. VISA and Mastercard are international solutions only with insane fees - you are crazy to be using these as internal American systems.
You joke, but that wouldn't even work even if you include rectal and oral examinations for every passenger. Take out a kidney and surgically replace it with a bomb in the shape of a kidney - you won't be detecting that. Doing that isn't going very far for the terrorist seeing as he is going to be blowing himself up shortly anyway. Since we are not going to be able to detect something like that, any security measure we might institute is only going to stop a terrorist that cannot access a trained doctor within his organization. He doesn't have to be all that skilled since the patient only needs to live for a short while - infection? No problem! So all of this expense and inconvenience is for stopping the isolated crazy people with no backers. That is all we can ever accomplish through increased airplane security.
Is there no way for the jurors to have any input into what goes on in court? Have they no way to e.g. in some way cause a question to be asked of a witness by someone?
That money is for having any sort of connection in the first place. The first 1kb/s is worth much more than the next 1mb/s, as it enables you get to a message at all. So I don't think it's quite fair to take the monthly expense and divide by the data downloaded.
You brave you, standing up for the man and traditional status quo values like that!
1$/GB is more expensive than a harddisk. I.e. it will in this case actually be less expensive to BUY a harddisk and send it in the mail as a mean of transporting information. 1$/GB is crazy expensive.
The comparison has to be to a single player game because no one has done what Bioware claims they will do, so there is nothing to compare to. Of course WoW could have voice in the sense of some guy reading the quest text, what I'm talking about is the kind of cinematic story telling that you find in ME where voice is just one of the components. In fact, that sort of thing is exactly what you see Blizzard doing in Cataclysm. For the main story line they actually show you people doing things and saying things in front of you, instead of having you read about them doing those things. They did some of that in Wrath of the Lich King too and earlier WoW as well. It is there that the engine is showing its limitations. So it's not that an MMO can't do these things it's just that it is expensive to do and it is is both even more expensive and less effective if you have to do it with technology like WoW's that wasn't made with that primarily in mind. The difference between single player and MMO games that is relevant here is not the number of people in the game or the systems in these games, it is just the fact that single player games are much smaller than MMO's and so attaining a single player level of quality content in an MMO is fantastically expensive, which is why no one has done it. Perhaps Bioware will.
I specifically write about how MMO characters are faceless generic beings, so yes, I did notice that in ME the story centers around you. In ME the whole world is centered around you, which wouldn't be doable in quite the same way in an MMO, but that's not necessary either to attain a similar level of quality of story. In the new starter areas they are clearly trying to go for the vision of having the story center around you in a more meaningful way, and those areas are better for it. The problem is not just with the limitations of the engine, it is also that they still cannot give you any personal characteristics at all in the story, because that is not how WoW works. In WoW each character is generic and they can't change that too much without making a new game out of it. They also cannot give you any kind of meaningful choice-based interaction because that also is not how WoW works. It would be a different game. The closest they have come to meaningful story choice is the very coarse Aldor/Scryer and Oracles/Wolvar faction allegiance choices, and the content behind that is very limited. They seem to be trying to come as close as possible (which isn't very) to what Bioware are claiming to be doing with TOR while still staying with WoW being WoW - and they are getting great reviews for it.
Those are exactly equally despicable because they amount to the same thing just in relation to men instead of women. The difference is that feminists have been more effective lately - e.g. you have become unable to distinguish between a dislike for feminist activists and a dislike for all women. Clearly the feminist activists have been very effective at influencing you.
Cataclysm is by far the best World of Warcraft yet in terms of how you interact with the game, the game systems and the quests and story-telling and probably in every other way as well. It's very obvious that a lot of care by a lot of competent people have gone into this. The only problem is that the skeleton of what WoW is is being stretched in the direction of even higher quality, but the identity of WoW was set when it came out and they can't just make Cataclysm a new game. It still has to be WoW, and the formula inherent to WoW has e.g. storytelling issues. WoW is not voiced and it is not cinematic - you don't get to see facial expressions of anguish as Mankrik implores you to find out what happened to his wife. You get to read a short blurb about how he is imploring you. They can't change that because then it wouldn't be WoW, yet those non-classic-WoW elements are a main part of what lends Wrath of the Lich King and especially Cataclysm their superior story telling. So what they have to do is try to make these things work in an engine that isn't made for it without having players feel that they changed the nature of the game too much. They are doing an extraordinarily good job at that, it's just that it's a lousy task to be set and the outcome is not quite cohesive.
Most of WoW is not voiced or cinematic - indeed most of the story in wow is throw-away and transparent excuses for having you go kill mobs - sprinkled with lots of puns, pop references and crazy goblin engineering. So when a tiny bit of WoW becomes voiced, kind-of cinematic and has a deeper and cohesive story, it makes the rest of WoW look shabby in comparison. That's probably why they rebuilt the whole of the original game for Cataclysm, but they have to stay true to what WoW is and so they can only go so far. E.g. the attempt is frustrated by the fact that the player character in WoW has no significant identity of his own in the game. That let's you imagine whatever you want, which is probably the point of that, but it also means that the character you are playing is always the all-important cog in the machine that makes things work out all right. Yet he has no identity or place in the story of WoW. He is an important but faceless technician that fixes the world and is never talked about except in generic and interchangeable ways, and even often in plural form like "the great heroes of Azeroth fought off the scourge." You can still do great story telling with that, as Blizzard is showing us all without a doubt - perhaps in the same way that the special olympics participants can probably all run much faster than you or I because they are so good at using what they've got. Yet the special olympics are not the real olympics.
When you look at the successive expansions to WoW, it's clear that Blizzard is putting more and more of their resources into providing their game with an ever-better-told story. It's the only reason they put phasing into their game where the world changes progressively as the player goes through the story laid out in the various quest lines. Yet the kind of game they built 6 years ago will only support them in taking that story-telling ambition so far now.
Compare this to the story telling style of BioWare's Mass Effect 1 and especially 2. I don't think Bioware has better writers than Blizzard does, it's just that WoW has not been constructed from the beginning to support excellent stories and they can only do so much to change that now - which is a lot but still there is a limit. With the resources Blizzard is increasingly with each expansion pouring into specifically story and narration, I think it's pretty clear that Blizzard themselves see this as something they must take as far as they can within their game's limitations. Bioware is coming out with The Old Republic in 2011, which is an MMO built from the beginning to support excellent and varied stories. If Bioware can approach the quality Blizzard has put into the rest of World of Warcraft outside of the story, then they will eventually supplant World
This is a good thing. The previous security theater was just as ridiculous, but people put up with it because not enough were willing to actually consider that it is necessary to allow a small risk of something bad happening to get on with our lives. That allows the crazies to implement things like this. The only way the crazies can be countered is if enough people who aren't insane get in on the issue. The only way to have that happen is if the situation becomes so bad that people start caring. So I welcome these intrusions - the worse the better and the sooner the better. It's the only way to have a return to sanity.
The US is supposed to be THE paragon of freedom of speech.
Just so you know, that is an internal American perception, not something the rest of the world thinks.
You can be proud of whatever you yourself are doing, and for consequences of that. You cannot be proud of something that happened before you were born, or where you connection to it is tenuous. It is true that many people are proud of things from history - I don't disagree that that is going on all over, I'm just saying it doesn't make sense. A player on a sports team that wins can be proud of that since he probably did concrete and significant things to make that happen. Usually not so with a citizen in a country that does something great. What you can do instead is appreciate, support and value the good points of the place you live. If you do something significant to further that, you can reasonably feel proud of yourself for your specific part in making that happen. On the flip side, this also frees you from being continuously ashamed of all the bad stuff the stupid or evil people in whatever country do. Strangely, lots of people seem to (incorrectly) want the good parts to rub off on them yet (correctly) dismiss the bad parts as nothing to do with them.
Must suck to work for people that unknowledgeable.
No, implemented succesful ideas are worth something. Unimplemented ideas are risky stuff that might as well take you for every penny you've got as make you a profit. Telling good ideas from bad is usually harder than coming up with ideas in the first place.
To the people who responded to my post as if I actually had made the argument in the first half: I was saying that the argument was being made in a particularly inane form. Given that I think that, and was trying to show that, I was not actually myself trying to make an argument in that same form.