Hm. To the grand-parent, I don't understand how you can be brought down to next-to-nothing by a mistake. Ships have insurance, and it is oft-repeated that you shouldn't fly what you can't afford to lose. (I.e., just because you collected 100 mil isk for a battleship doesn't mean you should run out and buy one.) You never lose skills from dying, if you keep your clone up to date. Really, if you end up with no friends, no money and nothing but the newbie ship, you made a lot of very poor decisions.
In Eve, playing more does not make you more powerful. Means you have more money, but skills accumulate over time (whether you're logged in or not.) So someone who plays 8 hours every day and someone who just logs in to switch skills will end up with equivalent abilities. (There's lots of paths to choose from, so they won't be identical.)
As well, the game is not balanced like most mmorpgs. Usually, the highest level, richest, best-geared person will just destroy everyone else with little difficulty. But pvp in Eve doesn't work like that. Your half-billion carrier is susceptible to a small battleship gang. Your battleship is susceptible to a frigate gang. (assuming you haven't equipped to blow up frigates... but then other battleships will own you.) Old players in big ships can and do die to new ones who band together.
Because it's refreshing to play in a world that has base rules set, and then you win or lose by your own cleverness or stupidity. Your reputation matters and you can get blown up for being a big-mouthed jackass.
In a real world where everyone sues everyone for every imagined injustice, where games are full of people whining about others robbing them and complaining to the GM, it's a relief to play a game where the response to a whine is 'you learned your lesson, don't be so stupid in the future.'
One of the interesting aspects is that the person who pulled the scam said so, publicly. And said who his main character is. One of the flaws in the game is that in theory, he could have transferred this money to another character he owned and been utterly untracable. But he came out and said 'I did it, these were the handful of characters I used, this is my main who I always play with'.
More interesting, he's set a bounty on himself of 1.2 bil and gone out looking for fights. (You collect the bounty if you blow up his ship, then catch his pod and blow that up too. A little tricky, but not impossible.) With 700bil in the bank, he can afford pimpin' ships and the best gear, and not worry about when he loses them. He's already been found and podded once (by some members of the Mercenary Coalition, if anyone's curious), not sure if he's going to keep bountying himself. Given his attitude, I suspect he will, since he's looking for a fight and pvp experience.
You know, plenty of generations of children have grown up without having cell phones. If I was going to be somewhere public and needed a ride, I took a dime. If I was at a friend's house, I used their phone. I can't remember once saying 'oh, if I only could call my parents, everything would be okay'.
They don't need cell phones. Frankly, you probably don't either. (You might... it's the same thing with pickup trucks or SUVs. 90% of people who drive them do _not_ need them. 10% actually do need them and use them.)
"Actually, considering that most players that play MMOs tend to pick PvE servers as opposed to PvP servers when both are offered, that we can easily poke holes in your assumption that "MMO gamers want balanced skill-based pvp"."
Your logic is faulty. The PvP servers that you say players avoid are _not_ balanced skill-based pvp. They are generally a ganker's paradise where someone 10 levels above you can kill you with no effort or risk.
Given the popularity of Counter Strike, Halo, Quake, etc, I think there _is_ a big market for balanced skill-based pvp. Neither you nor the grandparent know whether or not this intersects with the current set of MMO players though.
If McDonalds is such horrible food then why do millions of people eat it?...
That said, WoW _isn't_ a horrible game, it's probably has the most refined PvE gaming available. It's just that that sort of thing is necessarily limited by the devs, and as such runs out (or becomes predictable) and the whole thing gets boring.
You gotta be kidding me. No real interaction? That's the whole game, the interaction between players. And grouping up is how you survive. You don't do it with strangers because that's dangerous; you look around and join a corp. Especially in 0.0 and low-security systems, other players are the game. They're your friends and foes, not some static NPC handing out quests.
It's not everyone's cup of tea, for various reasons. But 'no interaction' is not one of them. (Courier missions sucking is, never do them.)
It did, but it's in space. Eve-online. Mouth off and your corp may receive a wardec, or you'll just be blown up and podded to get you out of local. Alliances, non-aggression-pacts, treachery, long term plans and bitter foes abound. PvP does depend on what equipment you go out with, but tactics and strategy do come into play as well.
Knowing IBM, it won't really, and they'll send out a dozen consultants to duct tape it together for you. It's hardly a surprise when a big consolidated software house says that big consolidated software is the way to go.
"Additionally, this notion that the "average" game must score 5 on a 10 point scale is retarded. If you have a 10 question quiz, your average person will probably get 7 right. That's why a 70% is usually a C (average). IGN, GameSpot, Game Informater, etc's scoring system may trend towards scoring 7 - 9, but that's simply in line with the way most people grade things on a 10 point scale. On a 5 point scale, you see a lot more threes, but so what? A 3 doesn't tell you any more than a 7 -- ultimately you need to actually read the review."
Right conclusion, wrong reasoning. Scores cluster around 70/80% because a lot of this stuff started in America, and Americans are used to the grading scale that says an A is 90+, B is 80+, C is 70+, and anything less is pretty poor. (It's a strange system, there's less distinction between who's good than between who's bad, but whatever.)
But giving a 10 question quiz will not result in 7 right answers on average. If it's true/false, average is 50%. Maybe if you tallied random school grades you'd get 70% as average, but that's because the quizzes are created to hit that average on purpose.
That said, yes. The numbers, in the end, aren't nearly as useful as a well-written review by someone who cares about the game/genre.
I'm kind of curious... I've never played a card game like this, but I have played both Eve and WoW. Is there really a market for this? Blizzard seems to be hedging its bets by giving in-game items for certain cards, thus pulling in potential customers who just want a pretty hat. (Which frankly, I see as a bigger market, but I'm not exactly an expert.) But that could conceivably backfire; I wouldn't be happy that I had to go pay even more money to access parts of a game I'm already shelling out for.
Seems to me that if you really like these games, you'd rather be playing the real thing than the card game. And if you don't, these wouldn't appeal at all.
Well... although you have a point in your rebuttal for the most part, they do too. The first two paragraphs make sense, can't argue with them. but...
"Beyond this, the best items in the game can not even be purchased with gold. All of it has to be done through working with other players to down interesting bosses that require teamwork and strategy. This is really where the game begins. Whacking a few bunnies at low level isn't going to show you anything.
It is more successful than other games because it is more accessible to people who don't have a lot of time. Other MMOs force you to group up and spend hours online just to level. With WoW, you can solo your way up to the highest level at your own pace."
Unfortunately, the game begins after you spend that time levelling... I think this is part of what they're saying. People buy gold to rip through that early part because it's tedious, because they want to get to the bit that you describe as needing teamwork and strategy.
Eve-online. No class, no job. You pick a race that affects a few traits that affect how fast you learn skills. Any character can learn any skill. You can learn every skill. You can fly any ship, if you've trained the skill for it. Use any weapon, if you've trained the skill for it.
"WoW 1-59 is totally 'directed'? Really? It seemed pretty open ended to me, you can get experence from doing almost anything. You want to quest? There are billions of them. Some are as simple as "go kill 10 of whatever" while others are long questlines. You can get experence from pvp'ing within battlegrounds. You can get experence from simply grinding. You can level any of a number of professions."
I dunno, one of my friends tried to advance the idea that WoW was open-ended and you could do what you wanted, but it didn't sit well then either.
Look at it this way: as you progress, there are 2, maybe 3 areas where things are balanced for you. There are 2-4 instances that you can go in and not overwhlem/die instantly. If you're level 18 Alliance, you go do the Deadmines. If you didn't know about instances and you hit level 25, the instance is sub-par for you. Sure, you can choose which 10 monsters you want to kill to get your reward, but it really is all the same in the end.
You can go to the battlegrounds, if you're at the upper levels of your tier, and your server isn't overly twinked out. Some people enjoy it nonetheless, so it's a valid option.
Or you can harvest and auction off your goods. But the economy is really limited, and your options for competition are 'lower your prices'.
That's about it. You're stuck in the role your character chose at the beginning. (DPS, Tank, Healer, or a jack-of-some-trades) That's not very open-ended in my book. It's more open ended than, say, Final Fantasy Whatever, but that's not saying much.
WoW provides a PvE environment that is second-to-none, in my experience. What it doesn't do is place you in a big dynamic world full of people and say 'alright tiger, here's your sword, here's your backpack, go out there and do what you want.'
Tbh, no. Blood Elf paladins may be a lazy balancing effort, an unfortunate pandering to whining, or just something Blizzard actually thought would be a good idea. They are not a thorough betrayal/reversing of the game that everyone's been playing all along. I don't even particularly like WoW anymore, but suggesting the expansion will make the game totally different is ridiculous.
It's hard to care about wasting a couple of cents when you're knowingly wasting 5 times as much on other things. Mobs aren't too bright, but I think it would appeal to people much more if you said something like (using a computer purely for illustration):
Your computer uses the most idle energy in your home. Most devices have a little wasted wattage, but this device is 10 times worse. That makes it the best place to start conserving, let's all pay attention and turn it off, or lobby for better energy efficiency.
See what I mean? If you tell someone 'you waste 50w a day, let's try to get that to 49w' everyone will shrug. Tell 'em they'll cut it to 35w and it might be worthwhile. I.e., focus on the biggest targets first, not the piddly bits.
"if you're on a server with even a SLIGHT imbalance, leveling becomes painful at about lvl 20, due to high level twinks running around ganking lowbies."
I fixed your typos for you. This is an inherent problem, not an alliance/horde issue. I have played both horde and alliance for hundreds of hours, on pvp and rp servers. There was a nice orc hunter once that just shooed me away, but otherwise...
In my opinion, the unfortunate thing is the laying down of a particular sequence of tactics to win a fight in the first place. This isn't a personal attack because I know you're not responsible for it;) But really, maybe the developers should have looked more at making encounters unpredicatable and doable with a variety of tactics than the One True Way.
"When was the last US-based Anime convention this guy went to? You could engrave the katakana for "Super Happy Fun Watermelon Millard Fillmore" on a bologna sandwich, leave it out on the dealers floor, and someone will buy it for $50."
In what way do you think anime fans represent American gamers? Even for the larger set of 'Yeah, Japanese gadgets are pretty cool' people, from Japan does not equate to good. What kind of numbnut goes out and buys a video game just because it came from a Japanese company? People will slavishly buy the next FF game, the next Metroid, the next Mario. All Japanese games. But not because they're Japanese, but because they have a history of making said people happy.
So did you tag this story as 'duh'? I swear, 9 out of 10 stories are tagged as duh because someone needs to feel smart. Who do these people think they're helping with those tags?
The article, in fact, had some interesting points about the fact that people actually watch silly/cheesy movies, even though they feel they 'should' watch something serious and important. At first they watch the 'should' movies but eventually they end up mouldering, because they'd rather not sit down and watch something sad. So there's a potential for a bottleneck around sad, complex movies. Because everyone when asked to list movies they want to watch in the future, puts down all the sad, complex ones, even though day to day, they don't want to see them.
I summarize this because you obviously didn't read the article, nor did the mods who marked you insightful.
While what you say is generally true, the grandparent's point is valid at the moment as well. The pro desktop line of macs at the moment is a joke, and I wouldn't buy or suggest buying one at the moment to anyone. I bought mine two years ago and then ones out now are barely better. The macbook dual-core laptops are more useful and perform similarly, if not better.
I love my mac, and Apples do have all the semi-hidden advantages you point out, but right now they are a poor buy even with the points you indicated. Until those intel dual-cores hit, you'd be a nut to buy a pro desktop mac.
It's a fair question, and in answer, it's not just WoW with lasers.
It is more balanced, and deeper. It's, as far as I know, unique amongst mmorpgs in the player-driven content area. The markets are all player-driven. You can build empires out in deep space, and have them shown as your territory. You can claim it from others. You can use strategy, instead of just tactics. Winning and losing matter, it's not just a respawn. Being there for your teammates matters. It's absurd to think of rescuing someone in WoW. Just have them die and respawn and run to join you. If someone suicides to save the team... most games, who cares. Just rez them. In Eve, they really gave something to help out their teammates.
In Eve, things matter. I was involved in rescuing some miners trapped in unsafe space (where all the good minerals are, of course) the other day. We made backup plans for our carrier to escape, should the battle go wrong. In the end, we mustered enough force to intimidate the other fleet to back away, so we could escort our miners out.
It's funny, because the thought of getting ganked and losing exp/money/items in a game always seemed dumb to me. I wasn't there to waste my time and give other people free stuff. But in Eve, it's different somehow. Partially because you can use your brain to avoid death, instead of just grinding up to get the uber weapon. Partially because you can actually take revenge and stand a chance of winning, even if you didn't grind a dozen instances to get the best gear.
It is the closest thing to an alternate world out there, although to be fair I haven't tried second life. If that sounds appealing, try it out. But it's not for everyone.
You sound very bitter. I am part of a small corp, and I've been into 0.0 with them and solo repeatedly, without permission from the owners. It's really not that hard. I'm only a 6 month char. Maybe you played years ago on the older map that had more chokepoints, but things have changed.
And whining about people who've played longer than you... please. Eve is unique amongst MMORPGs in that even new characters are useful. How useful are you as a lvl 10 priest in a raid? You wouldn't be allowed in a million years. In Eve, you're told to stick on a scrambler and a webber and join the fleet, you're now a tackler. Or slap on a couple rocket launchers and autocannons and join a wolfpack of frigates. You can easily down battleships of characters two years older than you. The only thing preventing you from killing an older character is your own attitude.
I do think this is more like an alternate life than any other MMORPG out there. There's no plot or grind or specific goals, there's just a big world out there that you can actually affect and be affected by. There's more responsiblity for your actions. (Undercutting someone on the market? They might declare war and kill your haulers. etc, etc.)
On the other hand... I don't think you _have_ to invest all your life in it. If you wanted to be a CEO of a big company, or control the market, yeah. It takes time. If you just want to help out your friends or cherry pick deals as they come up, that works too. The 'levelling' system is time based and happens when you're not logged in, so really it's the most generous in terms of 'didn't play it for a week, am I behind now?' issues I've ever played.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm. To the grand-parent, I don't understand how you can be brought down to next-to-nothing by a mistake. Ships have insurance, and it is oft-repeated that you shouldn't fly what you can't afford to lose. (I.e., just because you collected 100 mil isk for a battleship doesn't mean you should run out and buy one.) You never lose skills from dying, if you keep your clone up to date. Really, if you end up with no friends, no money and nothing but the newbie ship, you made a lot of very poor decisions.
In Eve, playing more does not make you more powerful. Means you have more money, but skills accumulate over time (whether you're logged in or not.) So someone who plays 8 hours every day and someone who just logs in to switch skills will end up with equivalent abilities. (There's lots of paths to choose from, so they won't be identical.)
As well, the game is not balanced like most mmorpgs. Usually, the highest level, richest, best-geared person will just destroy everyone else with little difficulty. But pvp in Eve doesn't work like that. Your half-billion carrier is susceptible to a small battleship gang. Your battleship is susceptible to a frigate gang. (assuming you haven't equipped to blow up frigates... but then other battleships will own you.) Old players in big ships can and do die to new ones who band together.
Because it's refreshing to play in a world that has base rules set, and then you win or lose by your own cleverness or stupidity. Your reputation matters and you can get blown up for being a big-mouthed jackass.
In a real world where everyone sues everyone for every imagined injustice, where games are full of people whining about others robbing them and complaining to the GM, it's a relief to play a game where the response to a whine is 'you learned your lesson, don't be so stupid in the future.'
One of the interesting aspects is that the person who pulled the scam said so, publicly. And said who his main character is. One of the flaws in the game is that in theory, he could have transferred this money to another character he owned and been utterly untracable. But he came out and said 'I did it, these were the handful of characters I used, this is my main who I always play with'.
More interesting, he's set a bounty on himself of 1.2 bil and gone out looking for fights. (You collect the bounty if you blow up his ship, then catch his pod and blow that up too. A little tricky, but not impossible.) With 700bil in the bank, he can afford pimpin' ships and the best gear, and not worry about when he loses them. He's already been found and podded once (by some members of the Mercenary Coalition, if anyone's curious), not sure if he's going to keep bountying himself. Given his attitude, I suspect he will, since he's looking for a fight and pvp experience.
You know, plenty of generations of children have grown up without having cell phones. If I was going to be somewhere public and needed a ride, I took a dime. If I was at a friend's house, I used their phone. I can't remember once saying 'oh, if I only could call my parents, everything would be okay'.
They don't need cell phones. Frankly, you probably don't either. (You might... it's the same thing with pickup trucks or SUVs. 90% of people who drive them do _not_ need them. 10% actually do need them and use them.)
"Actually, considering that most players that play MMOs tend to pick PvE servers as opposed to PvP servers when both are offered, that we can easily poke holes in your assumption that "MMO gamers want balanced skill-based pvp"."
Your logic is faulty. The PvP servers that you say players avoid are _not_ balanced skill-based pvp. They are generally a ganker's paradise where someone 10 levels above you can kill you with no effort or risk.
Given the popularity of Counter Strike, Halo, Quake, etc, I think there _is_ a big market for balanced skill-based pvp. Neither you nor the grandparent know whether or not this intersects with the current set of MMO players though.
If McDonalds is such horrible food then why do millions of people eat it? ...
That said, WoW _isn't_ a horrible game, it's probably has the most refined PvE gaming available. It's just that that sort of thing is necessarily limited by the devs, and as such runs out (or becomes predictable) and the whole thing gets boring.
You gotta be kidding me. No real interaction? That's the whole game, the interaction between players. And grouping up is how you survive. You don't do it with strangers because that's dangerous; you look around and join a corp. Especially in 0.0 and low-security systems, other players are the game. They're your friends and foes, not some static NPC handing out quests.
It's not everyone's cup of tea, for various reasons. But 'no interaction' is not one of them. (Courier missions sucking is, never do them.)
It did, but it's in space. Eve-online. Mouth off and your corp may receive a wardec, or you'll just be blown up and podded to get you out of local. Alliances, non-aggression-pacts, treachery, long term plans and bitter foes abound. PvP does depend on what equipment you go out with, but tactics and strategy do come into play as well.
Knowing IBM, it won't really, and they'll send out a dozen consultants to duct tape it together for you. It's hardly a surprise when a big consolidated software house says that big consolidated software is the way to go.
"Additionally, this notion that the "average" game must score 5 on a 10 point scale is retarded. If you have a 10 question quiz, your average person will probably get 7 right. That's why a 70% is usually a C (average). IGN, GameSpot, Game Informater, etc's scoring system may trend towards scoring 7 - 9, but that's simply in line with the way most people grade things on a 10 point scale. On a 5 point scale, you see a lot more threes, but so what? A 3 doesn't tell you any more than a 7 -- ultimately you need to actually read the review."
Right conclusion, wrong reasoning. Scores cluster around 70/80% because a lot of this stuff started in America, and Americans are used to the grading scale that says an A is 90+, B is 80+, C is 70+, and anything less is pretty poor. (It's a strange system, there's less distinction between who's good than between who's bad, but whatever.)
But giving a 10 question quiz will not result in 7 right answers on average. If it's true/false, average is 50%. Maybe if you tallied random school grades you'd get 70% as average, but that's because the quizzes are created to hit that average on purpose.
That said, yes. The numbers, in the end, aren't nearly as useful as a well-written review by someone who cares about the game/genre.
I'm kind of curious... I've never played a card game like this, but I have played both Eve and WoW. Is there really a market for this? Blizzard seems to be hedging its bets by giving in-game items for certain cards, thus pulling in potential customers who just want a pretty hat. (Which frankly, I see as a bigger market, but I'm not exactly an expert.) But that could conceivably backfire; I wouldn't be happy that I had to go pay even more money to access parts of a game I'm already shelling out for.
Seems to me that if you really like these games, you'd rather be playing the real thing than the card game. And if you don't, these wouldn't appeal at all.
Are you going to buy one of these? Why?
Hah, since when has any nation learned a lesson from another nation's mistakes?
Well... although you have a point in your rebuttal for the most part, they do too. The first two paragraphs make sense, can't argue with them. but...
"Beyond this, the best items in the game can not even be purchased with gold. All of it has to be done through working with other players to down interesting bosses that require teamwork and strategy. This is really where the game begins. Whacking a few bunnies at low level isn't going to show you anything.
It is more successful than other games because it is more accessible to people who don't have a lot of time. Other MMOs force you to group up and spend hours online just to level. With WoW, you can solo your way up to the highest level at your own pace."
Unfortunately, the game begins after you spend that time levelling... I think this is part of what they're saying. People buy gold to rip through that early part because it's tedious, because they want to get to the bit that you describe as needing teamwork and strategy.
Eve-online. No class, no job. You pick a race that affects a few traits that affect how fast you learn skills. Any character can learn any skill. You can learn every skill. You can fly any ship, if you've trained the skill for it. Use any weapon, if you've trained the skill for it.
Not free to play though.
"WoW 1-59 is totally 'directed'? Really? It seemed pretty open ended to me, you can get experence from doing almost anything. You want to quest? There are billions of them. Some are as simple as "go kill 10 of whatever" while others are long questlines. You can get experence from pvp'ing within battlegrounds. You can get experence from simply grinding. You can level any of a number of professions."
I dunno, one of my friends tried to advance the idea that WoW was open-ended and you could do what you wanted, but it didn't sit well then either.
Look at it this way: as you progress, there are 2, maybe 3 areas where things are balanced for you. There are 2-4 instances that you can go in and not overwhlem/die instantly. If you're level 18 Alliance, you go do the Deadmines. If you didn't know about instances and you hit level 25, the instance is sub-par for you. Sure, you can choose which 10 monsters you want to kill to get your reward, but it really is all the same in the end.
You can go to the battlegrounds, if you're at the upper levels of your tier, and your server isn't overly twinked out. Some people enjoy it nonetheless, so it's a valid option.
Or you can harvest and auction off your goods. But the economy is really limited, and your options for competition are 'lower your prices'.
That's about it. You're stuck in the role your character chose at the beginning. (DPS, Tank, Healer, or a jack-of-some-trades) That's not very open-ended in my book. It's more open ended than, say, Final Fantasy Whatever, but that's not saying much.
WoW provides a PvE environment that is second-to-none, in my experience. What it doesn't do is place you in a big dynamic world full of people and say 'alright tiger, here's your sword, here's your backpack, go out there and do what you want.'
Tbh, no. Blood Elf paladins may be a lazy balancing effort, an unfortunate pandering to whining, or just something Blizzard actually thought would be a good idea. They are not a thorough betrayal/reversing of the game that everyone's been playing all along. I don't even particularly like WoW anymore, but suggesting the expansion will make the game totally different is ridiculous.
It's hard to care about wasting a couple of cents when you're knowingly wasting 5 times as much on other things. Mobs aren't too bright, but I think it would appeal to people much more if you said something like (using a computer purely for illustration):
Your computer uses the most idle energy in your home. Most devices have a little wasted wattage, but this device is 10 times worse. That makes it the best place to start conserving, let's all pay attention and turn it off, or lobby for better energy efficiency.
See what I mean? If you tell someone 'you waste 50w a day, let's try to get that to 49w' everyone will shrug. Tell 'em they'll cut it to 35w and it might be worthwhile. I.e., focus on the biggest targets first, not the piddly bits.
"if you're on a server with even a SLIGHT imbalance, leveling becomes painful at about lvl 20, due to high level twinks running around ganking lowbies."
I fixed your typos for you. This is an inherent problem, not an alliance/horde issue. I have played both horde and alliance for hundreds of hours, on pvp and rp servers. There was a nice orc hunter once that just shooed me away, but otherwise...
In my opinion, the unfortunate thing is the laying down of a particular sequence of tactics to win a fight in the first place. This isn't a personal attack because I know you're not responsible for it ;) But really, maybe the developers should have looked more at making encounters unpredicatable and doable with a variety of tactics than the One True Way.
"When was the last US-based Anime convention this guy went to? You could engrave the katakana for "Super Happy Fun Watermelon Millard Fillmore" on a bologna sandwich, leave it out on the dealers floor, and someone will buy it for $50."
In what way do you think anime fans represent American gamers? Even for the larger set of 'Yeah, Japanese gadgets are pretty cool' people, from Japan does not equate to good. What kind of numbnut goes out and buys a video game just because it came from a Japanese company? People will slavishly buy the next FF game, the next Metroid, the next Mario. All Japanese games. But not because they're Japanese, but because they have a history of making said people happy.
So did you tag this story as 'duh'? I swear, 9 out of 10 stories are tagged as duh because someone needs to feel smart. Who do these people think they're helping with those tags?
The article, in fact, had some interesting points about the fact that people actually watch silly/cheesy movies, even though they feel they 'should' watch something serious and important. At first they watch the 'should' movies but eventually they end up mouldering, because they'd rather not sit down and watch something sad. So there's a potential for a bottleneck around sad, complex movies. Because everyone when asked to list movies they want to watch in the future, puts down all the sad, complex ones, even though day to day, they don't want to see them.
I summarize this because you obviously didn't read the article, nor did the mods who marked you insightful.
While what you say is generally true, the grandparent's point is valid at the moment as well. The pro desktop line of macs at the moment is a joke, and I wouldn't buy or suggest buying one at the moment to anyone. I bought mine two years ago and then ones out now are barely better. The macbook dual-core laptops are more useful and perform similarly, if not better.
I love my mac, and Apples do have all the semi-hidden advantages you point out, but right now they are a poor buy even with the points you indicated. Until those intel dual-cores hit, you'd be a nut to buy a pro desktop mac.
It's a fair question, and in answer, it's not just WoW with lasers.
... most games, who cares. Just rez them. In Eve, they really gave something to help out their teammates.
It is more balanced, and deeper. It's, as far as I know, unique amongst mmorpgs in the player-driven content area. The markets are all player-driven. You can build empires out in deep space, and have them shown as your territory. You can claim it from others. You can use strategy, instead of just tactics. Winning and losing matter, it's not just a respawn. Being there for your teammates matters. It's absurd to think of rescuing someone in WoW. Just have them die and respawn and run to join you. If someone suicides to save the team
In Eve, things matter. I was involved in rescuing some miners trapped in unsafe space (where all the good minerals are, of course) the other day. We made backup plans for our carrier to escape, should the battle go wrong. In the end, we mustered enough force to intimidate the other fleet to back away, so we could escort our miners out.
It's funny, because the thought of getting ganked and losing exp/money/items in a game always seemed dumb to me. I wasn't there to waste my time and give other people free stuff. But in Eve, it's different somehow. Partially because you can use your brain to avoid death, instead of just grinding up to get the uber weapon. Partially because you can actually take revenge and stand a chance of winning, even if you didn't grind a dozen instances to get the best gear.
It is the closest thing to an alternate world out there, although to be fair I haven't tried second life. If that sounds appealing, try it out. But it's not for everyone.
You sound very bitter. I am part of a small corp, and I've been into 0.0 with them and solo repeatedly, without permission from the owners. It's really not that hard. I'm only a 6 month char. Maybe you played years ago on the older map that had more chokepoints, but things have changed.
And whining about people who've played longer than you... please. Eve is unique amongst MMORPGs in that even new characters are useful. How useful are you as a lvl 10 priest in a raid? You wouldn't be allowed in a million years. In Eve, you're told to stick on a scrambler and a webber and join the fleet, you're now a tackler. Or slap on a couple rocket launchers and autocannons and join a wolfpack of frigates. You can easily down battleships of characters two years older than you. The only thing preventing you from killing an older character is your own attitude.
I agree, but... I don't.
... I don't think you _have_ to invest all your life in it. If you wanted to be a CEO of a big company, or control the market, yeah. It takes time. If you just want to help out your friends or cherry pick deals as they come up, that works too. The 'levelling' system is time based and happens when you're not logged in, so really it's the most generous in terms of 'didn't play it for a week, am I behind now?' issues I've ever played.
I do think this is more like an alternate life than any other MMORPG out there. There's no plot or grind or specific goals, there's just a big world out there that you can actually affect and be affected by. There's more responsiblity for your actions. (Undercutting someone on the market? They might declare war and kill your haulers. etc, etc.)
On the other hand