i would LOVE to be in the room when you explain to your boss that his new x-hundred-thousand dollar web site doesn't work in Internet Explorer because "IE is not a web browser".
just to play devil's advocate here, you're suggesting a designer should code to standards, and let the page be broken for 80% of his visitors? i don't think many designers would keep that job very long.
yep these changes have been a major boon for me and my guild. we have been around since the game launched, but always approached it pretty casually and minimally-organized.
however, what with the recent changes, we have been able to go into dungeons and down bosses we never thought we'd ever get to see. we're downing bosses in Tempest Keep, Serpentshrine Cavern, Black Temple, and Mount Hyjal, and we're plowing through Zul'Aman picking up three of the timed chests on the way. it sure beats farming karazhan over and over and over!
anyway, we're having tons of fun seeing all this year-old content for the first time, and countless guilds across countless realms are probably having the same positive experience.
sure the hardcore will grumble, but so what. it makes absolutely perfect sense for Blizzard to allow the majority of its players in to see teh cotnent they spent the majority of their resources developing! doubly so now that the current expansion is reaching the end of its life cycle.
Wrath of the Lich King will be here soon, and tehn the hardcore will once again be on top by a wide margin.
And i am sure that towards the end of THAT expansion's life cycle, Blizzard will again make the highest-end stuff more attainable for the majority of the players, but not after the hardcore have had their fun in form of 6 months worth of lourding their accomplishments over us casuals.
i don't understand. are we actually concerned, in 2008, about consuming excess disk space and bandwidth because of simple text? sure, it adds up, but unless people are passing around big bulky attachements, i have a hard time believing over-quoted email text is a big corporate burden. it would seem to me worth the resources to have the entire conversation right there on the same page within scrolling distance.
(granted, gmail does it better, but not all of our employers are as enlightened in that regard.)
We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?
i disagree. the user isn't leavign his own house to enter another person's house. in fact, it's the other person's wireless signal that is invading the first person's private residence.
would the RIAA sue me for listening to my neighbor's stereo if they played it too loud? (probably, so that doesn't really help me...)
actually, i think you're on the right track, but a little off. it's not so much the popular guy's body they're attracted to, but their social ease and unawkwardness. their natural confidence in social situations. nerds spend a lot of time doing things that aren't social activities, and are thus far less developed at interacting in a fun way at a party or gathering or whatever. any ugly guy can get laid if he's charming, and most nerds just don't have enough practice.
or, another way to put it: the designs on the helmets don't make the NFL "art".
for the record, i am convinced some existing video games are great works of art, but pointing to great graphics or cutscenes is a dead-end argument. (these are just the helmets)
video games ascend when all the peices -- the art, the story, the mechanics, the interface, the potential actions offered and engaged in -- work towards the same compelling whole and remove the player from the chair he sits in, take him inside the game, and make him a real participant. when you ARE the architect of an epic civilization, or the lone hunted marine on a doomed space station, or a travel agent in the land of the dead, or spiky-haired mercenary, or mute colossus-killer.
honestly, i don't understand how a person can experience these things and NOT come out the other side with the same soul-warming appreciation that good art instills. it's just common sense to those who have.
building a globe-spanning empire is great and all, but what really made AC fun was embodying the wonderful characters they invented for the leaders. the philosophically zen but emotionally void chen-xi wang, and the ruthless fire and brimstone of miriam godwinson were the most fun for me to emulate. of course, the cyber hippie (diedre skye) was another favorite.
and yeah i know "wonder movies" are considered fluff, but damn AC had some brutal and brilliant ones! there was a ton of clever writing that went into that title.
go ahead, continue to alienate a large and growing segment of the voting public. more and more every day, gaming is a passtime engaged in by adults of voting age. when a politician calls a perfectly good game "trash", he just looks like an out of touch relic. i mean, we all played GTA. it was good clean ludicrous fun (if a bit monotonous by the fifth iteration or so). by the way, i'm an avid gamer... no, not an obnoxious pimply-faced 15 year old, as this politician probably assumes all gamers are, but a 30 year old married guy -- and i'm far from unusual. politicians going off like this remind me of strom thurmond types from the 50's railing against the black man's devil music, swearing that the evil jungle beats will corrupt the morality of our children.
WE are the children whose parents swore to us mario would rot our brain and corrupt our souls. we will reject that notion as wholeheartedly as our parents rejected the same assertion back when it was aimed at the Beatles and the Stones.
In digital works, this assertion is absolutely true everywhere. If the public does not accept the laws protecting "intellectual property", those laws will be broken.
you know, i used to agree with this. after all, look at prohibition, right? but then i saw what the RIAA did to the Napster-using grandmothers and little girls of the world. there were 24 million Napster users at one point, and later even more who used the other various p2p systems that took its place. this did nothing to stop the RIAA and its hired legal guns from waging a war of propaganda and litigation, one that they have largely won at this point.
no laws sprung up to defend this huge chunk of the populace.
in fact, if you want to know what p2p users have accomplished so far... as the smoke clears, all i can see from here are newer, clearer, more restrictive laws with harsher penalties for the so-called thieves and pirates.
maybe back in the early 20th century politicians actually cared more about their constituants than their contributors? i don't know. but the whole "if enough of us do it, it will become legal" strategy doesn't seem to be working anymore.
by the way, that's the alliance version of the Ony key quest. the horde side doesn't have anything remotely approaching that level of coolness. it's just kill a, kill b, kill c, kill d, collect widget e. report to npc f. report to npc g. report to npc h. kill i. report back to j. collect 25 of mob drop k. report back to l. kill m, kill n, kill o, kill p. report back to q. kill r. report to s. report to t. kill mob u (which requires re-killing mob j. shouldn't he still be dead? oh well. report back to someone. report back to someone else. grats.
like the other commenters, i too had no trouble with Poodle Hat.
in addition, as for Al's supposed anti-downloading stance, it should be mentioned that he is in a somewhat unique position: literally hundreds of songs that AREN'T his are constantly attributed to him on file sharing systems, just because they're (ostensibly) "funny". Al maintains a relatively innocent, upbeat personna, but many of the songs misattributed to him are stupid, mean spirited, or far raunchier than anything Al would want to be associated with. it's a significant problem for the guy that goes much deeper than simple lost royalties.
that said, every time i've heard him asked about file sharing, that is how he has framed his response. he doesn't want people to think he wrote "smoke a bowla"
i don't think this is true. Blizzard gets exactly the same revenue from a casual player that they do from a hardcore, addicted, obsessed player. casinos, on the other hand.....
video game companies have less to gain by making their games crack-like and super addictive. in fact, blizzard would probably be more likely to retain a broader audience in the long run by tempering the most addictive qualities, and believe it or not i think they know this.
Shamans are almost useless in end-game raids, when you can have paladins instead!
Shamans for the alliance will be a nice novelty, but ultimately a white elephant in dungeons. they will be quite a nice addition for burst damage in pvp though.
on the horde side, the raiding shamans will see their roles marginalized by new paladins.
Slashdot Mirror
i would LOVE to be in the room when you explain to your boss that his new x-hundred-thousand dollar web site doesn't work in Internet Explorer because "IE is not a web browser".
just to play devil's advocate here, you're suggesting a designer should code to standards, and let the page be broken for 80% of his visitors? i don't think many designers would keep that job very long.
*not UNTIL after the hardcore have blah blah blah
yep these changes have been a major boon for me and my guild. we have been around since the game launched, but always approached it pretty casually and minimally-organized.
however, what with the recent changes, we have been able to go into dungeons and down bosses we never thought we'd ever get to see. we're downing bosses in Tempest Keep, Serpentshrine Cavern, Black Temple, and Mount Hyjal, and we're plowing through Zul'Aman picking up three of the timed chests on the way. it sure beats farming karazhan over and over and over!
anyway, we're having tons of fun seeing all this year-old content for the first time, and countless guilds across countless realms are probably having the same positive experience.
sure the hardcore will grumble, but so what. it makes absolutely perfect sense for Blizzard to allow the majority of its players in to see teh cotnent they spent the majority of their resources developing! doubly so now that the current expansion is reaching the end of its life cycle.
Wrath of the Lich King will be here soon, and tehn the hardcore will once again be on top by a wide margin.
And i am sure that towards the end of THAT expansion's life cycle, Blizzard will again make the highest-end stuff more attainable for the majority of the players, but not after the hardcore have had their fun in form of 6 months worth of lourding their accomplishments over us casuals.
aparently from the Bureau of Slowly and Painfully Working Out The Obivous.
meanwhile, making a post on slashdot making fun of nerds completely eludes you.
i don't understand. are we actually concerned, in 2008, about consuming excess disk space and bandwidth because of simple text? sure, it adds up, but unless people are passing around big bulky attachements, i have a hard time believing over-quoted email text is a big corporate burden. it would seem to me worth the resources to have the entire conversation right there on the same page within scrolling distance.
(granted, gmail does it better, but not all of our employers are as enlightened in that regard.)
We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?
- Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 (Subject termination advised)
i disagree. the user isn't leavign his own house to enter another person's house. in fact, it's the other person's wireless signal that is invading the first person's private residence.
would the RIAA sue me for listening to my neighbor's stereo if they played it too loud? (probably, so that doesn't really help me...)
i see our high IQs also allow us to invent quite plausible excuses for why we can't get laid!
actually, i think you're on the right track, but a little off. it's not so much the popular guy's body they're attracted to, but their social ease and unawkwardness. their natural confidence in social situations. nerds spend a lot of time doing things that aren't social activities, and are thus far less developed at interacting in a fun way at a party or gathering or whatever. any ugly guy can get laid if he's charming, and most nerds just don't have enough practice.
i was one of those high-IQ virgins and let me state, from first hand experience, the following: HA HA HA HA HA!
yeah, right, i didn't WANT any girls to pay attention to me! that's it!
you've got to be kidding me.
it's man as the thinkers vs. man as the toolmaker.
until we approach digital sentience that's all we're really doing, isn't it?
unless you can supply some kind of evidence that more people own more than one account than share an account with others, your statement is false.
or, another way to put it: the designs on the helmets don't make the NFL "art".
for the record, i am convinced some existing video games are great works of art, but pointing to great graphics or cutscenes is a dead-end argument. (these are just the helmets)
video games ascend when all the peices -- the art, the story, the mechanics, the interface, the potential actions offered and engaged in -- work towards the same compelling whole and remove the player from the chair he sits in, take him inside the game, and make him a real participant. when you ARE the architect of an epic civilization, or the lone hunted marine on a doomed space station, or a travel agent in the land of the dead, or spiky-haired mercenary, or mute colossus-killer.
honestly, i don't understand how a person can experience these things and NOT come out the other side with the same soul-warming appreciation that good art instills. it's just common sense to those who have.
i agree!
building a globe-spanning empire is great and all, but what really made AC fun was embodying the wonderful characters they invented for the leaders. the philosophically zen but emotionally void chen-xi wang, and the ruthless fire and brimstone of miriam godwinson were the most fun for me to emulate. of course, the cyber hippie (diedre skye) was another favorite.
and yeah i know "wonder movies" are considered fluff, but damn AC had some brutal and brilliant ones! there was a ton of clever writing that went into that title.
go ahead, continue to alienate a large and growing segment of the voting public. more and more every day, gaming is a passtime engaged in by adults of voting age. when a politician calls a perfectly good game "trash", he just looks like an out of touch relic. i mean, we all played GTA. it was good clean ludicrous fun (if a bit monotonous by the fifth iteration or so). by the way, i'm an avid gamer ... no, not an obnoxious pimply-faced 15 year old, as this politician probably assumes all gamers are, but a 30 year old married guy -- and i'm far from unusual. politicians going off like this remind me of strom thurmond types from the 50's railing against the black man's devil music, swearing that the evil jungle beats will corrupt the morality of our children.
WE are the children whose parents swore to us mario would rot our brain and corrupt our souls. we will reject that notion as wholeheartedly as our parents rejected the same assertion back when it was aimed at the Beatles and the Stones.
Many religious people have attempted to reconcile the Big Bang with Judeo-Christian beliefs by having God be responsible for the Big Bang.
well, not really -- the "Big Bang" theory was first proposed by a Creationist to reconcile the universe with the Bible.
In digital works, this assertion is absolutely true everywhere. If the public does not accept the laws protecting "intellectual property", those laws will be broken.
... as the smoke clears, all i can see from here are newer, clearer, more restrictive laws with harsher penalties for the so-called thieves and pirates.
you know, i used to agree with this. after all, look at prohibition, right? but then i saw what the RIAA did to the Napster-using grandmothers and little girls of the world. there were 24 million Napster users at one point, and later even more who used the other various p2p systems that took its place. this did nothing to stop the RIAA and its hired legal guns from waging a war of propaganda and litigation, one that they have largely won at this point.
no laws sprung up to defend this huge chunk of the populace.
in fact, if you want to know what p2p users have accomplished so far
maybe back in the early 20th century politicians actually cared more about their constituants than their contributors? i don't know. but the whole "if enough of us do it, it will become legal" strategy doesn't seem to be working anymore.
have you played shadow of the colossus?
grim fandango?
katamari damaci?
drowned god?
by the way, that's the alliance version of the Ony key quest. the horde side doesn't have anything remotely approaching that level of coolness. it's just kill a, kill b, kill c, kill d, collect widget e. report to npc f. report to npc g. report to npc h. kill i. report back to j. collect 25 of mob drop k. report back to l. kill m, kill n, kill o, kill p. report back to q. kill r. report to s. report to t. kill mob u (which requires re-killing mob j. shouldn't he still be dead? oh well. report back to someone. report back to someone else. grats.
like the other commenters, i too had no trouble with Poodle Hat.
in addition, as for Al's supposed anti-downloading stance, it should be mentioned that he is in a somewhat unique position: literally hundreds of songs that AREN'T his are constantly attributed to him on file sharing systems, just because they're (ostensibly) "funny". Al maintains a relatively innocent, upbeat personna, but many of the songs misattributed to him are stupid, mean spirited, or far raunchier than anything Al would want to be associated with. it's a significant problem for the guy that goes much deeper than simple lost royalties.
that said, every time i've heard him asked about file sharing, that is how he has framed his response. he doesn't want people to think he wrote "smoke a bowla"
i don't think this is true. Blizzard gets exactly the same revenue from a casual player that they do from a hardcore, addicted, obsessed player. casinos, on the other hand .....
video game companies have less to gain by making their games crack-like and super addictive. in fact, blizzard would probably be more likely to retain a broader audience in the long run by tempering the most addictive qualities, and believe it or not i think they know this.
totems don't stack with other buffs, there's no reason to think they'll stack with blessings.
Shamans are almost useless in end-game raids, when you can have paladins instead!
Shamans for the alliance will be a nice novelty, but ultimately a white elephant in dungeons. they will be quite a nice addition for burst damage in pvp though.
on the horde side, the raiding shamans will see their roles marginalized by new paladins.