But, if there are 5, 10, or 50 people with multiple accounts who sit all day watching for edits that they don't like, they will become apparent as their bot-like behaviour shifts to new IP's. And, they can be shut down again, and again, ad nauseum.
How is this any different than the Wikipedians doing what is essentially the same thing?
I'm no WoW expert and have only logged a few hours total before being turned off by the game, and it's exactly the things that turned me off that make the game addictive. It takes a long....long time to even be competent at it, let alone good. Then there's the sense of losing ground to other players if you stop playing, the constant chance of getting that next best loot on your next dungeon run. The whole experience is designed to keep you coming back both from expectations of advancement and fear of losing your status.
I think you should have stopped with the first four words. What do you know about dungeons if you only played "a few hours total"?
Oh and the rested XP bonus helps one keep up more than you think.
So a game that started out as a relatively casual game that I've seen people get their non-gamer wives and girlfriends to play, slowly turns into a commitment.
Nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to play on a PvP server. Things are a bit different on a normal server.
I know a guy whose only "management" experience was being a raid leader for a couple years. He interviewed for a management job, and got it, solely because he was able to organize and keep track of ~40 people on a regular basis.
The guy makes 6-figures, barely ever has free time, and instead of seeing the actual world, decides instead to play a video game about seeing the virtual world?
I play WoW, I make 6 figures. I've lived in three different countries and am about to move to a fourth. I've also had a passport so full of visa stamps, I had to get extra pages added to it.
Just how much of the world outside your mother's basement have you seen?
Either he's doing something illegal (purchasing multiple accounts)
That's not illegal, it's called the "Blizzard Family Plan". I had to buy a separate account for my wife. I'll have to buy separate accounts for my kids when they get old enough to play though one can play on each of our accounts while they're underage.
I'd expect him to be able to see and hear and use his limbs (arms at least), I'd expect him to have an IQ above 80, able to interact with the world and not be in a coma...
You have obviously turned off/trade in the capitol cities. Sheesh.
All it was was grinding away at tennis balls instead of sitting in front of a computer.
What's the matter with you guys? Do you just want to stand around outside throwing a ball around, or do you want to sit behind your computers and do something that matters?
I'm at 80 days, with 20 days at level 80. I suppose I'm an addict for logging in to WoW just to check that.
And it's not rediculous at all.
First of all, it's divided over two years. Second, probably more than half of it is just having the game open in the background as a chat client while I'm doing something else like coding, or something.
Of course! It's not "rediculous" at all, that isn't a word. It isn't ridiculous either.
First of all, it's divided over two years
Heh. "It's called denial, Jack"[1]. I've played longer than you and have fewer hours.
If, for some reason, I continue to play at this pace for another 5 years (highly unlikely), I may some day approach the amount of time I spent in IRC channels in college.
Not bloody likely. IRC eats up a hell of a lot more time than WoW.
But hey, believe whatever makes you happy.
[1] Did that quote appear in the movie, or just the book?
Nice wall of text, glad to see you do not believe in formatting...
It's my understanding that WoW now has a built-in system of "achievements".
Oh good! An expert.
on the other hand every little thing you do in the game pops up a shiny "congratulations" notice with a sound similar to the one played by slot machines when someone hits a jackpot.
No, but please continue...
what I am trying to argue here is that WoW is not just an outlet for people who can't achieve much outside of the game
If there was any argument in that wall of text, I guess I missed it.
Imagine that someone in your position were stupid enough to try heroine
Hey! My main is a level 80 female character and very much a heroine - almost all purples now, or so the factions she is exalted with say. Perhaps you meant a different word than what you spelled?
The difference, I guess, is that when you ask "what's next?" you exercise a choice. And addict doesn't have a choice.
An addict always has a choice. I choose when I when I wish to light up a cigarette, but maybe that means I'm not an addict then.
To clarify that last statement (because it come out a little too absolute), an addict only has a very narrow set of choices.
Draenei, Night Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Human. Seems like plenty of choices to me...
Non-MMOs like Disgaea are fun, addictive, and have plenty of grinding to keep you addicted so you can level up every item in the game to its highest level.
Ah, Disgaea[1]. Fun, but not really addicting in the sense that once I had leveled up high enough to go through all the game, have I ever wanted to go back to it. I spent maybe a month[2] or so with it.
I'm married with children, your mileage may vary.
[1] I am referring specifically to Afternoon of Darkness on the PSP.
[2] Calendar time between purchase and abandonment.
I'd be interested in hearing what the longest period of time you've played a game is in terms of months or years it's kept your interest.
Probably the longest was rogue/hack/nethack at about 20 years. Though that was with considerable off & on time.
I used to buy games every 2-6 weeks
Been there done that.
I've been subscribed to World of Warcraft for 2 1/2 ysars now. I'm a loooooooooong ways away from spending more money on that with the subscription than I spent on GBA games that I don't want to play any more.
I'm far more of a fan of handhelds than consoles or computers. The only console I've owned was a PS2 which didn't work - I bought it in Japan and thanks to region coding wouldn't play any English language games. I also bought a PSP. I haven't ever completed a game on it thanks to EA sloppy coding (the game crashes either in the middle or as I'm trying to win) or the game sucks.
GBA was a winner. No matter where in the world I bought games they just worked and for the most part, I enjoyed them for a brief amount of time. I've ended up finishing almost all of the GBA games I've bought. I spent a lot of money, but I got a lot of entertainment - fair trade.
(the following is directed at the article, not the poster I'm responding to)
I like to play games. I do not buy new games any more. I have the 6-month subscription plan with Blizzard. Is it really a problem that I can enjoy World of Warcraft *cheaper* than anything (die Sony die!) else?
You call it addiction, I call it pragmatic. And besides, I play less WoW than most people watch television and I don't hear any cries about that being addictive.
the idea behind it would require an interesting variant of regexp that examines not the full pattern, but POTENTIAL patterns. That is, "this string doesn't match this regexp... YET. But it might in the future -or- it never will and here's why." That doesn't seem too trivial to me.
And throw localization into the mix. No, it's not trivial, but...
It sounds as if they are describing similar technology to the emacs command `isearch-forward-regexp' and related functions. That's where I would start looking for prior art.
Just like it's appropriate to refer to "GNU Emacs" to distinguish it from other Emacsen such as XEmacs.
Actually, it isn't. XEmacs has just as much claim to the name "GNU Emacs". Similarly, it makes more sense to use the name GNU XEmacs than GNU/Linux because you cannot take the GNU out of XEmacs.
FSF/GNU has hindered the development of Linux more than it has helped. It's basically a rewrite of a bunch of command line utilities that few people really care about now. The two critical portions (the C compiler and the C library) have a checkered past. At one time, the "standard" GNU GCC could not compile the Linux kernel correctly. So, it was forked and eventually the fork (EGCS) replaced the GNU version. The same thing occurred with the C library except that it was the fork that was retired once glibc became stable.
The vast majority of code that people see and use (X11 and KDE/GNOME/etc.) are not GNU.
You can find Lisp dialects that efficiently use native machine types and have little runtime cost due to having weak type systems (just like C) where casting is easy and the responsibility for crazy results lives with the programmer and the limited ability of the compiler to check some static cases.
Sigh. That's just plain ignorant. The checking has to be done somewhere, else you have a Microsoft Windows that's open to all kinds of holes. The compiler (with strong, static typing) can do it faster than the programmer no matter what architecture is running the code.
You can either build that typing into the language itself or hand code it. It's a lot more efficient to build it into the language. That way experts get to decide the actual code. I can and have written hand optimized assembly language. I have not written assembly language for every underlying architecture that my code has run on. A higher level language than C can optimize the concept.
I will prove that anything written in a higher-level language will not be as fast as my implementation of it in C. I leave this challenge out to anyone to take. (*)
Seriously, I'm sick of this crap. Bring it on.
That's what programmers said 50 years ago s/C/Assembly/. IBM proved them wrong with a FORTRAN compiler.
I think I could do the same thing you described[1]. I have every doubt that the folks sitting around me in adjacent cubicles could do so. That's kind of the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Wonder if Postcript and PDF would also be infringing.
Postscript has been around since the 80's, so it would be prior art, not infringing.
But, if there are 5, 10, or 50 people with multiple accounts who sit all day watching for edits that they don't like, they will become apparent as their bot-like behaviour shifts to new IP's. And, they can be shut down again, and again, ad nauseum.
How is this any different than the Wikipedians doing what is essentially the same thing?
Just asking.
I'm no WoW expert and have only logged a few hours total before being turned off by the game, and it's exactly the things that turned me off that make the game addictive. It takes a long....long time to even be competent at it, let alone good. Then there's the sense of losing ground to other players if you stop playing, the constant chance of getting that next best loot on your next dungeon run. The whole experience is designed to keep you coming back both from expectations of advancement and fear of losing your status.
I think you should have stopped with the first four words. What do you know about dungeons if you only played "a few hours total"?
Oh and the rested XP bonus helps one keep up more than you think.
So a game that started out as a relatively casual game that I've seen people get their non-gamer wives and girlfriends to play, slowly turns into a commitment.
Nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to play on a PvP server. Things are a bit different on a normal server.
It's as if in real life, when you were sick of playing football with your friends, you could go home and chop wood
Hmmmm. http://thottbot.com/q13627
Does the achievement system actually help with that? Or is there something else?
The achievement system helps a lot. I'm a carebear not a raider type and I find that collecting titles is fun.
I know a guy whose only "management" experience was being a raid leader for a couple years. He interviewed for a management job, and got it, solely because he was able to organize and keep track of ~40 people on a regular basis.
I'll bet he made a good manager too ...
The guy makes 6-figures, barely ever has free time, and instead of seeing the actual world, decides instead to play a video game about seeing the virtual world?
I play WoW, I make 6 figures. I've lived in three different countries and am about to move to a fourth. I've also had a passport so full of visa stamps, I had to get extra pages added to it.
Just how much of the world outside your mother's basement have you seen?
Either he's doing something illegal (purchasing multiple accounts)
That's not illegal, it's called the "Blizzard Family Plan". I had to buy a separate account for my wife. I'll have to buy separate accounts for my kids when they get old enough to play though one can play on each of our accounts while they're underage.
Osama bin Laden might play WoW, though.
He's a troll who mostly hangs out in Orgrimmar in front of the bank begging for gold from high level players. But, sssh, don't tell anyone.
if Paris Hilton played WoW
Paris Hilton is in WoW, Lower City, Shattrath selling ridiculously priced designer goods. Or is that Haris Pilton?
I'd expect him to be able to see and hear and use his limbs (arms at least), I'd expect him to have an IQ above 80, able to interact with the world and not be in a coma...
You have obviously turned off /trade in the capitol cities. Sheesh.
All it was was grinding away at tennis balls instead of sitting in front of a computer.
What's the matter with you guys? Do you just want to stand around outside throwing a ball around, or do you want to sit behind your computers and do something that matters?
troll, tauren, Orc, undead and blood elf are horde.
There are more trolls on /. than in World of Warcraft.
I'm approaching 99 days "/played"...
I'm at 80 days, with 20 days at level 80. I suppose I'm an addict for logging in to WoW just to check that.
And it's not rediculous at all.
First of all, it's divided over two years. Second, probably more than half of it is just having the game open in the background as a chat client while I'm doing something else like coding, or something.
Of course! It's not "rediculous" at all, that isn't a word. It isn't ridiculous either.
First of all, it's divided over two years
Heh. "It's called denial, Jack"[1]. I've played longer than you and have fewer hours.
If, for some reason, I continue to play at this pace for another 5 years (highly unlikely), I may some day approach the amount of time I spent in IRC channels in college.
Not bloody likely. IRC eats up a hell of a lot more time than WoW.
But hey, believe whatever makes you happy.
[1] Did that quote appear in the movie, or just the book?
Nice wall of text, glad to see you do not believe in formatting ...
It's my understanding that WoW now has a built-in system of "achievements".
Oh good! An expert.
on the other hand every little thing you do in the game pops up a shiny "congratulations" notice with a sound similar to the one played by slot machines when someone hits a jackpot.
No, but please continue ...
what I am trying to argue here is that WoW is not just an outlet for people who can't achieve much outside of the game
If there was any argument in that wall of text, I guess I missed it.
Imagine that someone in your position were stupid enough to try heroine
Hey! My main is a level 80 female character and very much a heroine - almost all purples now, or so the factions she is exalted with say. Perhaps you meant a different word than what you spelled?
The difference, I guess, is that when you ask "what's next?" you exercise a choice. And addict doesn't have a choice.
An addict always has a choice. I choose when I when I wish to light up a cigarette, but maybe that means I'm not an addict then.
To clarify that last statement (because it come out a little too absolute), an addict only has a very narrow set of choices.
Draenei, Night Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Human. Seems like plenty of choices to me ...
Getting out of an addictive behavior requires about as much effort as a vow of celibacy.
This is Slashdot. Vows of celibacy are taken for granted when you sign up for your user id.
I would say the two are very different.
It begs the question though, has anybody been taken to domestic court for ninja'ing purples from their spouse?
That's not "begging the question".
It's still an interesting question though. I've had my spouse get angry at me for not giving her gold for mount money.
Sooner or later, something like that is going to happen.
I played a couple of characters, I got one to level 17, and one to level 9 or 10. I honestly found WoW boring, repetitive and basically not very fun.
You didn't get very far into it. Levels 10 and under are training levels designed to be gone through very quickly.
My (soon to be ex) wife however has basically chosen WoW over our marriage.
I feel your pain (over the divorce). Good luck in court.
My guildmaster plays with her husband and children. WoW really isn't all bad and it sure beats sitting in front of a television set.
Non-MMOs like Disgaea are fun, addictive, and have plenty of grinding to keep you addicted so you can level up every item in the game to its highest level.
Ah, Disgaea[1]. Fun, but not really addicting in the sense that once I had leveled up high enough to go through all the game, have I ever wanted to go back to it. I spent maybe a month[2] or so with it.
I'm married with children, your mileage may vary.
[1] I am referring specifically to Afternoon of Darkness on the PSP.
[2] Calendar time between purchase and abandonment.
I'd be interested in hearing what the longest period of time you've played a game is in terms of months or years it's kept your interest.
Probably the longest was rogue/hack/nethack at about 20 years. Though that was with considerable off & on time.
I used to buy games every 2-6 weeks
Been there done that.
I've been subscribed to World of Warcraft for 2 1/2 ysars now. I'm a loooooooooong ways away from spending more money on that with the subscription than I spent on GBA games that I don't want to play any more.
I'm far more of a fan of handhelds than consoles or computers. The only console I've owned was a PS2 which didn't work - I bought it in Japan and thanks to region coding wouldn't play any English language games. I also bought a PSP. I haven't ever completed a game on it thanks to EA sloppy coding (the game crashes either in the middle or as I'm trying to win) or the game sucks.
GBA was a winner. No matter where in the world I bought games they just worked and for the most part, I enjoyed them for a brief amount of time. I've ended up finishing almost all of the GBA games I've bought. I spent a lot of money, but I got a lot of entertainment - fair trade.
(the following is directed at the article, not the poster I'm responding to)
I like to play games. I do not buy new games any more. I have the 6-month subscription plan with Blizzard. Is it really a problem that I can enjoy World of Warcraft *cheaper* than anything (die Sony die!) else?
You call it addiction, I call it pragmatic. And besides, I play less WoW than most people watch television and I don't hear any cries about that being addictive.
the idea behind it would require an interesting variant of regexp that examines not the full pattern, but POTENTIAL patterns. That is, "this string doesn't match this regexp... YET. But it might in the future -or- it never will and here's why." That doesn't seem too trivial to me.
And throw localization into the mix. No, it's not trivial, but ...
It sounds as if they are describing similar technology to the emacs command `isearch-forward-regexp' and related functions. That's where I would start looking for prior art.
Ob xkcd: http://xkcd.com/378/
Just like it's appropriate to refer to "GNU Emacs" to distinguish it from other Emacsen such as XEmacs.
Actually, it isn't. XEmacs has just as much claim to the name "GNU Emacs". Similarly, it makes more sense to use the name GNU XEmacs than GNU/Linux because you cannot take the GNU out of XEmacs.
FSF/GNU has hindered the development of Linux more than it has helped. It's basically a rewrite of a bunch of command line utilities that few people really care about now. The two critical portions (the C compiler and the C library) have a checkered past. At one time, the "standard" GNU GCC could not compile the Linux kernel correctly. So, it was forked and eventually the fork (EGCS) replaced the GNU version. The same thing occurred with the C library except that it was the fork that was retired once glibc became stable.
The vast majority of code that people see and use (X11 and KDE/GNOME/etc.) are not GNU.
You can find Lisp dialects that efficiently use native machine types and have little runtime cost due to having weak type systems (just like C) where casting is easy and the responsibility for crazy results lives with the programmer and the limited ability of the compiler to check some static cases.
Sigh. That's just plain ignorant. The checking has to be done somewhere, else you have a Microsoft Windows that's open to all kinds of holes. The compiler (with strong, static typing) can do it faster than the programmer no matter what architecture is running the code.
You can either build that typing into the language itself or hand code it. It's a lot more efficient to build it into the language. That way experts get to decide the actual code. I can and have written hand optimized assembly language. I have not written assembly language for every underlying architecture that my code has run on. A higher level language than C can optimize the concept.
I will prove that anything written in a higher-level language will not be as fast as my implementation of it in C. I leave this challenge out to anyone to take. (*)
Seriously, I'm sick of this crap. Bring it on.
That's what programmers said 50 years ago s/C/Assembly/. IBM proved them wrong with a FORTRAN compiler.
I think I could do the same thing you described[1]. I have every doubt that the folks sitting around me in adjacent cubicles could do so. That's kind of the point.
[1] Things aren't so simple now with the way CPU manufacturers are designing chips - http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/