I have no idea why you were modded up. It is the sort of specious reasoning that sounds good to the hoi polloi but lacks any sort of intellectual discipline. To poke some holes in your very shallow assessment:
What skills do video games demand? Specifically what skills does Starcraft 2 demand? I do not think it at all obvious. We can qualify them, but not quantify, and the degree of accuracy in qualifying them seems very suspect, to me.
What video games train you to be a vegetable? Seems to feed into stereotypes. Its like saying programming leads you into being a vegetable because you're so often staring into space while you're "doing it".
Its not clear/obvious/thoroughly well understood how video game skills relate to skills considered valuable in other areas. The act of formalizing these thoughts and preparing to relate them to other cognitive activities was the point of the study.
I think the most valuable "meta" lesson of university was that formalizing the "obvious" can lead to a better appreciation of nuance and a discipline that leads to substantial discovery. This was as central to the study of art as it was in mathematics.
Sooooo... you were BM and surprised he became BM in response? This event apparently left an impression on you and you think its one worth sharing, so you're kind of taking it seriously, yourself. Moreover, the implication that 6 pooling is not a valid strategy is subjective. Your final sentence, that this proves that people take the game "extremely seriously", which I can only surmise means too seriously in your judgement, is belied by the rest of the tone of your post and I think in general a facile statement considering that people put a lot of effort and care into their hobbies/sports.
Try 6 pooling over and over again, btw, you'll quickly discover it takes some flair to actually be good at it.
Neither map gives you an accurate idea of how long it will take to get to some place, and sometimes the maps show stations as connected but there's a long walk underground, for instance. If you use google to plan your route you're more likely to get some place quickly. Worse, tourists frequently take expresses when they meant to take locals, etc, overshoot the mark, get the wrong station because it sounds similar, forget to change trains, and more. Minimizing distance traveled is probably someone's least concern when they first take the subway.
Thus NSA demonstrating, in the digital era, "quis custodiet ipsos custodes". A little bit scary because it raises the question, if the NSA empowers its people to such a degree, but there is not even a similar capacity within the organization to police itself, is there then a potential for abuses on an individual level? Have such individual abuses occured?
Goat wool sock types of Norway might say the same thing. But, their society with one of the lowest per capita incarcerations in the world and one of the lowest recidivism rates is not to be admired. O wait, this is also very true of the dutch, but not quite to the same degree. Still, their crime rates and their level of incarceration makes us look like the visigoths!
Frankly, when I see a society that has so well managed its crime and punishment that it has reached untold levels of safety and human freedom in all of history, I think we should listen to what they have to say, even when it sounds preposterous.
As to reasons to post the video, all sorts of people may learn things that could contribute in various ways to the advancement of society. Violence is no less part of the human character than charity, but we take great pains to fool ourselves about this fact. It is narrow minded in the extreme to believe that something which disgusts must, by virtue of the disgust that you are experiencing, hold no value.
I do not find it disturbing that people consider a grisly murder entertaining. I find it disturbing that people consider a trial about a woman who allegedly murdered her kids entertaining. The notion that observing violence is somehow more obscene than pure unadulterated schadenfreude is something I'll never find myself agreeing with.
What does it say about society that two boys who killed two people dominate the news for weeks but the deaths of 50-100 people a day to a cause we could easily help change are not remarked upon? That trial is getting more play than the school shooting, which again killed more people.
Frankly, I would suspect people watching someone else's murder is hardly even close to the sort of depravity and lack of good character required to be in a society where tabloid news has become de facto news. As to the mother's discomfort at possibly seeing the video or the notion that a video of her son being murdered was watched by the world, then I would counter there are many invasions to our privacy and we balance those against other interests. How come if I call into 911 any news organization can file a freedom of information act and get those tapes without my consent? How can any news organization publish that I am being charged with a crime? (I could be innocent!).
All of your arguments are designed to appeal the passions and prejudices of the reader, and thus I find it not persuasive.
In the case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition the supreme court struck down a provision in a law as unconstitutional that stated that simulated child pornography was illegal. In other words, CGI child porn is definitely considered free speech.
What speech? Did he add a witty title or something. The video isn't his speech any more than me posting a torrent is my free speech. It is just copying some bits.
The counter to this argument is that you could be arrested for Seditious Gesturing while actually giving Seditious Speech (the former being considered illegal for not being 'speech' and the latter being considered legal). It should be hard to arrest someone for doing something expressive. It should be very hard.
Either way, this is really more freedom of the press (even though it wasn't pressed, are real newspapers still pressed?). And this definitely qualifies as press. The typical news source might have given images associated with victims or alleged perp, images of the crime scene (albeit more tasteful?), etc. etc. and why does what they do qualify as freedom of the press but not this site? For instance, it could be argued that publishing a video of a murder might aid law enforcement across the country by helping to educate people whose job it is to understand the nature of crime.
This is also a startlingly clear example of why strict constructionism is a stupid idea. Its quite clear Adams & Madison intended for "freedom of the press' to mean much more than the act of pressing ink into paper.
I hate +1 posts but I found yours very well expressed! Totally agree.
But, I think the crowd always saying use vi for this or that are the kinda people whose job is more about optimizing complex algorithms than it is about writing lots of business logic. There I can see that speed of code lookup is far less important than getting things exactly right, and while I still think an IDE would be helpful it would dramatically change the cost-benefit analysis for such a coder.
Maybe not in the sense of the game's creators interceding to create such events, but random events with an epic feeling driven by human creativity have happened in MMO's.
Moles infiltrating player corporations and disbanding them or weakening them from the inside
People getting together to have a virtual funeral for someone who died that played the game (Wow again).
Epic space battles where people lose months of work.
Not sure what you think is special about your story, but I think some of the ones above share the qualities that I found special about your story. I think anytime you have humans clustered together in a large system, special things will happen. If they *have* to involve one off events that require the intervention of the gamemasters then I think thats just too narrow a view.
There have been games I've played where griefers worked as a team to grief, were recognized by the general population as villains, and managed to drive a living narrative where they played the role of villains and the general population worked to survive them and build despite them. The closest MMO that comes to this sensation for me is EVE where certain corporations act in a griefing manner and cadres of cooperative people play the "good guys" and try to build systems. EVE certainly seems to encourage this with the nature of null sec and the ability to pirate other ships. I would say that this was sometimes intentional in muds that the various people running these games knew that the griefers were the central villain in the game's narrative and that whatever NPC villains were put in, were effectively just set pieces and not narrative focal points.
I've just seen so many games where the pursuit of realism managed to destroy any sense of fun. I love that in WoW a "scout" doesn't call the whole village on you. The point is a pretense for creating a moving system of parts where you apply logic to separate them out into manageable bits to accomplish a goal. Now, maybe a game can do this better, but WoW is not "wrong" or "egregious" for doing it, its intended design and it plays well to a certain gamer. It is extremely hard to create dynamic mellifluous worlds that still build stable, engaging systems. Even harder to do it such that it works within budget (of developer time and of the computing hardware it will run on). Finally, I don't think most gamers want this. Sandbox games do not give the same sense of narrative or accomplishment, shifting the reward to a player's own creativity without making the world too dynamic; there are still rules!
Ahh, Bartle is so pretentious, always inflating his worth. Starting his article with how hardly anyone will be able to understand him and peppering it with statements of how profound things are. He seems to be injecting his own narrative onto the zone while not acknowledging a core true, that many people approach the zone in different ways. There also seems to be something obnoxious about the way he ascribes the intent of the designers to the zone.
I will acknowledge that he highlights elements of the design, but they are not profound or revelatory. I feel like he is both simultaneously florid and ambiguous. There is a sensation that he knows something and that he's "trying" to communicate it to the reader. But, these ideas have been communicated much more clearly by others with much better formalization.
I also remember how he seemed to hold court on various forums, comporting himself as an elder statesman. I don't mean to diminish his accomplishments, but I find him grating and overly admired. The DIKU people arguably took a larger leap than MUD1 over zork and they make no pretensions to the same majesty. Bartle seems to be better at self promotion than either game design or communication in general.
Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that I meant the hard core end game. I meant LFR, dungeons, and the normal modes. Although, I admit that I fall under every reasonable definition of hard core raider. As to evidence, there was some graph that showed that less than five percent of active players were below the max level. I would say that pretty conclusively shows that people are playing the end game, where end game means what you do once you've hit the max level, no matter what it is you're doing. From my qualitative perspective, WoW does this so much better than every other MMO and the closest I've experienced was SWTOR which was still miles off of the quality and compelling nature of WoW's end game.
Using a word like infest is such invective and I believe that it weakens your ability to persuade others. So, to deal with your post hoc ergo propter hoc argument about the "collapse", not a word I'd choose for a 25% drop in population, being in line with the introduction of LFR, I will say that by the same line of specious reasoning, the population went up with the introduction of lower difficulty 10 mans in Wrath and the introduction of hard modes vs regular modes thereby creating a terraced difficulty system. Another graph I won't bother to find shows that the size of the population that actively raided went up considerably. As well, the number of people who raided Karazhan when it only required 10 men appeared to me to be quite quite common. There was many a guild that advertised its progression and status as a "Kara guild" in BC in much the same way that guilds would only raid the 20 man raids in vanilla. In other words, I think from very early on WoW was trying to increase the quality of the end game for all skill levels and demographics. It certainly appeared to have a very visible impact in BC, Wrath, Cata, and obviously now in MoP.
Finally, it can be argued that an obsessive minority going for truly hardcore raid status might be a required part of a vibrant community whose existence supplies a reason for more social players to login. I grant that this is mere speculation but it rings with plausibility to me.
The way I remember D2 and the way you remember it must be totally different, because I felt in D2 you ended up spending most of the time heavily talented towards a very small subset of your skills and the way I spent most of D3 was using every goddamn skill I had to stay alive while running around screaming my head off. Of course, it helps that you can just totally wtf pwn Baal at level 90 in D2 and teleport through the instance like nightcrawler. And, my fond memories of D3 come from before you could reliably and cheaply overgear all same level content via the AH such that you felt permanently undergeared. I'll give you one thing, D2 was just a lot harder for (in my view) stupid reasons, like 100% immunities to a school of damage which you could only use the god mode synergy spec against if you had this one very hard to acquire piece for your companion otherwise you were totally fubar.
Also, wow easily requires more buttons than ever for most specs, has far more variation in execution, and has much more complex rotations. They have increased the complexity of stats over TBC and vanilla (mastery, spellpower being split from int, expertise becomes spell hit) and itemization (you always have more than set to choose from, trinket choices are fight by fight), and we could have a long argument about whether the new talent system is better or not, but the game as a whole is more complicated, easily. As a hardcore raider, I really do suspect the loss of subscriptions is more due to the barrier to entry into the hard core raiding scene, the added complexity of the end game, the longer leveling time for new accounts and lack of communal interest in that activity, and the natural attrition as people lose time to making new families, starting time-consuming careers, or adopting new lifestyles that exclude WoW.
They are not reskins of WoW. Nobody has repeated the core end game. Everyone that I know that plays wow does so because of the instancing and the raids, and every MMO I've tried other than WoW has failed to deliver this epic experience. Leveling may be a solo endeavor, but slaying dragons in a team format is why I keep subbing. There is just so much depth to the way you play that end game and they've done a better and better job of making it easier to learn and nearly impossible to master. Many, many, many MMO's have rather faithfully copied the leveling and questing experience, but I think that misses the point entirely. On top of that, WoW is very convincingly its own universe and even LOTR managed to lose that feeling and dive into the most generic fantasy crap. Although, I give props to SWTOR for maintaining its sense of spirit, even if it royally screwed up the end game in the worst way.
To recap, these are the things people have failed to convincingly replicate: highly configurable programmable user interface, highly configurable default interface, fantastic team play at the end game, external services like JSON api, huge motivation to keep a guild together and stringent requirements for success as a team, well balanced need for solo play to support team play in the end game, convincing depth that is easy to learn the basics and nearly impossible to master. Show me an MMO that has copied these things well from wow...
Diablo 3 was a fantastic game taken in a very narrow scope. What it failed at was to deliver longevity, but the actual act of leveling up the first time was wonderful. The core gameplay was very addictive the first week. I got my money's worth when compared to the average money in, enjoyment out ratio of other games purchased. What I didn't get was the same ratio I got with Diablo 2.
D3 is, in so many ways, a very polished experience with absolutely wonderful mechanics. It got some major things wrong in a meta design sense that will be talked about amongst game designers for quite awhile. Still, the actual gameplay is an unparalleled experience. The engine is so much smoother than D2 and less buggy, and its way more enjoyable than Torchlight 2. Yet, Torchlight 2 is a better game because it's meta design (how you acquire upgrades, the ability to play offline, the lack of a universal AH, and on and on) is better.
I still think D3 is quite an achievement and Blizzard still has an opportunity to fix what is wrong so that it can enjoy the ongoing success of D2. I am not confident that they will do this, but they are intending to release an expansion. D2: LOD also dramatically raised the bar on D2, so lets see if Blizzard's typical iteration will show improvement. I have some hope.
I often think the reason people "hate" on Blizzard so much is simply because of how successful they are and how much hype they have to live up to with each release. Yet, they still are putting out amazing games (with flaws) and that is what they released originally, too. This move by Blizzard causes me to believe they're still maintaining the Blizzard philosophy, not the activision philosophy. I hope that Titan is every bit the awesome MMO. Even if it fails to capture the magic of the design elements that make WoW so good, I have faith that I will take enough value from it to justify its initial purchase price and first few months of play because it is Blizzard and every game Blizzard has released was worth the money.
Most religious fanatics that I know are among the least happy people. The people that seem to me to be the most happy are those that are very blandly religious. I actually don't think I've met a religious fanatic I would consider a happy person. I've met many of them that worked indefatigably to convince others that they were happy people....
I have a feeling that the act of "dedicating" yourself to the Mormon church is equivalent to trying to serve two (three, four...many many) masters. That many humans running a political, social, and religious organization which intends to tell you what to do, what is right, and what isn't? Listening to yourself, as we all know with our own moral struggles and inner wrestling over difficult decisions, can be like serving two masters.
His point is really that homosexuality is so bad, so egregiously unfit to be practiced by a church member, that it would completely undermine his moral activities there. This is not a universally held viewpoint of Mormons, and it is a reprehensible statement written in the most bland way he could. So yes, I disagree with his point.
The most fascinating part of this, for me, is that I connected with Ender's Game more easily as a young adolescent precisely because I was gay and understood how harsh and how quickly a child has to grow up. I also understood empathizing with my enemy, my enemy not understanding the degree of harm he was doing to me, and not trusting adults or authorities.
I also keenly felt the idea of being tested in subtle ways, in manipulating adults and politics with their own fears, and deeply appreciated the affects of demagoguery before I even knew what it was called.
I felt like Orson Scott Card so deeply understood the plight of being a bright, homosexual child with more self-awareness and introspection than many an adult, that I was shocked to find out that he was so antagonistic to it. This was after I read Speaker of the Dead which seems to so perfectly capture that sensation of oppression.
Maybe my sense of connecting with the author and his general outlook on human emotion was so great, that to find out he is as homophobic as he is caused a deep-seated sensation of betrayal and cognitive dissonance. Also, I don't even want to separate my knowledge of the artist from the art, which is a topic worthy of an essay itself.
Also, I feel that while it seems a bit pushy and bitchy, and will evoke the typical "uppity homosexual" response, complaining about a popular person's homophobia and suggesting that they, and even their art, be considered as lesser because of it, still seems to me to be an effective way at showing strength and causing people to realize the tenuousness of their position.
No art or artist is held to account for all their crimes, and in the fullness of time people will forgive Card as a fuddy duddy for his homophobia, but in the here and now where it has extreme political relevance to my life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people on this globe, I say he is an ass for his views and I do not wish to patronize him. Let the future enjoy him unfettered by these concerns like I can enjoy Wagner now.
I think of that crowd as weekend gamers, and they can spend more on it than teenagers and unemployed or poorly employed twenty somethings! I'm really in the metamorphosis stage from the first group to the second. I can increasingly afford more, increasingly spend more, and yet have less time to play.
And yet, it is a job to be TSA agent where you are supposed to be professional. Picking on the "funny" guys or even the guys who say something like "no, you may not." is not polite, its not professional, and I think it violates the spirit of what it means to be an American. Toe the line or get harassed/punished... what? It is sort of understandable to give it a bit more to someone who is being rude, but as a person who served tables, you still have to maintain some professionalism even in that situation. Also, your last comment is just horrible
Slashdot Mirror
I have no idea why you were modded up. It is the sort of specious reasoning that sounds good to the hoi polloi but lacks any sort of intellectual discipline. To poke some holes in your very shallow assessment:
I think the most valuable "meta" lesson of university was that formalizing the "obvious" can lead to a better appreciation of nuance and a discipline that leads to substantial discovery. This was as central to the study of art as it was in mathematics.
Sooooo... you were BM and surprised he became BM in response? This event apparently left an impression on you and you think its one worth sharing, so you're kind of taking it seriously, yourself. Moreover, the implication that 6 pooling is not a valid strategy is subjective. Your final sentence, that this proves that people take the game "extremely seriously", which I can only surmise means too seriously in your judgement, is belied by the rest of the tone of your post and I think in general a facile statement considering that people put a lot of effort and care into their hobbies/sports.
Try 6 pooling over and over again, btw, you'll quickly discover it takes some flair to actually be good at it.
Neither map gives you an accurate idea of how long it will take to get to some place, and sometimes the maps show stations as connected but there's a long walk underground, for instance. If you use google to plan your route you're more likely to get some place quickly. Worse, tourists frequently take expresses when they meant to take locals, etc, overshoot the mark, get the wrong station because it sounds similar, forget to change trains, and more. Minimizing distance traveled is probably someone's least concern when they first take the subway.
Thus NSA demonstrating, in the digital era, "quis custodiet ipsos custodes". A little bit scary because it raises the question, if the NSA empowers its people to such a degree, but there is not even a similar capacity within the organization to police itself, is there then a potential for abuses on an individual level? Have such individual abuses occured?
Goat wool sock types of Norway might say the same thing. But, their society with one of the lowest per capita incarcerations in the world and one of the lowest recidivism rates is not to be admired. O wait, this is also very true of the dutch, but not quite to the same degree. Still, their crime rates and their level of incarceration makes us look like the visigoths!
Frankly, when I see a society that has so well managed its crime and punishment that it has reached untold levels of safety and human freedom in all of history, I think we should listen to what they have to say, even when it sounds preposterous.
As to reasons to post the video, all sorts of people may learn things that could contribute in various ways to the advancement of society. Violence is no less part of the human character than charity, but we take great pains to fool ourselves about this fact. It is narrow minded in the extreme to believe that something which disgusts must, by virtue of the disgust that you are experiencing, hold no value.
I do not find it disturbing that people consider a grisly murder entertaining. I find it disturbing that people consider a trial about a woman who allegedly murdered her kids entertaining. The notion that observing violence is somehow more obscene than pure unadulterated schadenfreude is something I'll never find myself agreeing with.
What does it say about society that two boys who killed two people dominate the news for weeks but the deaths of 50-100 people a day to a cause we could easily help change are not remarked upon? That trial is getting more play than the school shooting, which again killed more people.
Frankly, I would suspect people watching someone else's murder is hardly even close to the sort of depravity and lack of good character required to be in a society where tabloid news has become de facto news. As to the mother's discomfort at possibly seeing the video or the notion that a video of her son being murdered was watched by the world, then I would counter there are many invasions to our privacy and we balance those against other interests. How come if I call into 911 any news organization can file a freedom of information act and get those tapes without my consent? How can any news organization publish that I am being charged with a crime? (I could be innocent!).
All of your arguments are designed to appeal the passions and prejudices of the reader, and thus I find it not persuasive.
In the case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition the supreme court struck down a provision in a law as unconstitutional that stated that simulated child pornography was illegal. In other words, CGI child porn is definitely considered free speech.
What speech? Did he add a witty title or something. The video isn't his speech any more than me posting a torrent is my free speech. It is just copying some bits.
The counter to this argument is that you could be arrested for Seditious Gesturing while actually giving Seditious Speech (the former being considered illegal for not being 'speech' and the latter being considered legal). It should be hard to arrest someone for doing something expressive. It should be very hard.
Either way, this is really more freedom of the press (even though it wasn't pressed, are real newspapers still pressed?). And this definitely qualifies as press. The typical news source might have given images associated with victims or alleged perp, images of the crime scene (albeit more tasteful?), etc. etc. and why does what they do qualify as freedom of the press but not this site? For instance, it could be argued that publishing a video of a murder might aid law enforcement across the country by helping to educate people whose job it is to understand the nature of crime.
This is also a startlingly clear example of why strict constructionism is a stupid idea. Its quite clear Adams & Madison intended for "freedom of the press' to mean much more than the act of pressing ink into paper.
cross compile
But, I think the crowd always saying use vi for this or that are the kinda people whose job is more about optimizing complex algorithms than it is about writing lots of business logic. There I can see that speed of code lookup is far less important than getting things exactly right, and while I still think an IDE would be helpful it would dramatically change the cost-benefit analysis for such a coder.
Otherwise, bravo!
I always bit-check the output of my compiler, because hey you never know!
Maybe not in the sense of the game's creators interceding to create such events, but random events with an epic feeling driven by human creativity have happened in MMO's.
Not sure what you think is special about your story, but I think some of the ones above share the qualities that I found special about your story. I think anytime you have humans clustered together in a large system, special things will happen. If they *have* to involve one off events that require the intervention of the gamemasters then I think thats just too narrow a view.
There have been games I've played where griefers worked as a team to grief, were recognized by the general population as villains, and managed to drive a living narrative where they played the role of villains and the general population worked to survive them and build despite them. The closest MMO that comes to this sensation for me is EVE where certain corporations act in a griefing manner and cadres of cooperative people play the "good guys" and try to build systems. EVE certainly seems to encourage this with the nature of null sec and the ability to pirate other ships. I would say that this was sometimes intentional in muds that the various people running these games knew that the griefers were the central villain in the game's narrative and that whatever NPC villains were put in, were effectively just set pieces and not narrative focal points.
I've just seen so many games where the pursuit of realism managed to destroy any sense of fun. I love that in WoW a "scout" doesn't call the whole village on you. The point is a pretense for creating a moving system of parts where you apply logic to separate them out into manageable bits to accomplish a goal. Now, maybe a game can do this better, but WoW is not "wrong" or "egregious" for doing it, its intended design and it plays well to a certain gamer. It is extremely hard to create dynamic mellifluous worlds that still build stable, engaging systems. Even harder to do it such that it works within budget (of developer time and of the computing hardware it will run on). Finally, I don't think most gamers want this. Sandbox games do not give the same sense of narrative or accomplishment, shifting the reward to a player's own creativity without making the world too dynamic; there are still rules!
Ahh, Bartle is so pretentious, always inflating his worth. Starting his article with how hardly anyone will be able to understand him and peppering it with statements of how profound things are. He seems to be injecting his own narrative onto the zone while not acknowledging a core true, that many people approach the zone in different ways. There also seems to be something obnoxious about the way he ascribes the intent of the designers to the zone.
I will acknowledge that he highlights elements of the design, but they are not profound or revelatory. I feel like he is both simultaneously florid and ambiguous. There is a sensation that he knows something and that he's "trying" to communicate it to the reader. But, these ideas have been communicated much more clearly by others with much better formalization.
I also remember how he seemed to hold court on various forums, comporting himself as an elder statesman. I don't mean to diminish his accomplishments, but I find him grating and overly admired. The DIKU people arguably took a larger leap than MUD1 over zork and they make no pretensions to the same majesty. Bartle seems to be better at self promotion than either game design or communication in general.
Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that I meant the hard core end game. I meant LFR, dungeons, and the normal modes. Although, I admit that I fall under every reasonable definition of hard core raider. As to evidence, there was some graph that showed that less than five percent of active players were below the max level. I would say that pretty conclusively shows that people are playing the end game, where end game means what you do once you've hit the max level, no matter what it is you're doing. From my qualitative perspective, WoW does this so much better than every other MMO and the closest I've experienced was SWTOR which was still miles off of the quality and compelling nature of WoW's end game.
Using a word like infest is such invective and I believe that it weakens your ability to persuade others. So, to deal with your post hoc ergo propter hoc argument about the "collapse", not a word I'd choose for a 25% drop in population, being in line with the introduction of LFR, I will say that by the same line of specious reasoning, the population went up with the introduction of lower difficulty 10 mans in Wrath and the introduction of hard modes vs regular modes thereby creating a terraced difficulty system. Another graph I won't bother to find shows that the size of the population that actively raided went up considerably. As well, the number of people who raided Karazhan when it only required 10 men appeared to me to be quite quite common. There was many a guild that advertised its progression and status as a "Kara guild" in BC in much the same way that guilds would only raid the 20 man raids in vanilla. In other words, I think from very early on WoW was trying to increase the quality of the end game for all skill levels and demographics. It certainly appeared to have a very visible impact in BC, Wrath, Cata, and obviously now in MoP.
Finally, it can be argued that an obsessive minority going for truly hardcore raid status might be a required part of a vibrant community whose existence supplies a reason for more social players to login. I grant that this is mere speculation but it rings with plausibility to me.
The way I remember D2 and the way you remember it must be totally different, because I felt in D2 you ended up spending most of the time heavily talented towards a very small subset of your skills and the way I spent most of D3 was using every goddamn skill I had to stay alive while running around screaming my head off. Of course, it helps that you can just totally wtf pwn Baal at level 90 in D2 and teleport through the instance like nightcrawler. And, my fond memories of D3 come from before you could reliably and cheaply overgear all same level content via the AH such that you felt permanently undergeared. I'll give you one thing, D2 was just a lot harder for (in my view) stupid reasons, like 100% immunities to a school of damage which you could only use the god mode synergy spec against if you had this one very hard to acquire piece for your companion otherwise you were totally fubar.
Also, wow easily requires more buttons than ever for most specs, has far more variation in execution, and has much more complex rotations. They have increased the complexity of stats over TBC and vanilla (mastery, spellpower being split from int, expertise becomes spell hit) and itemization (you always have more than set to choose from, trinket choices are fight by fight), and we could have a long argument about whether the new talent system is better or not, but the game as a whole is more complicated, easily. As a hardcore raider, I really do suspect the loss of subscriptions is more due to the barrier to entry into the hard core raiding scene, the added complexity of the end game, the longer leveling time for new accounts and lack of communal interest in that activity, and the natural attrition as people lose time to making new families, starting time-consuming careers, or adopting new lifestyles that exclude WoW.
They are not reskins of WoW. Nobody has repeated the core end game. Everyone that I know that plays wow does so because of the instancing and the raids, and every MMO I've tried other than WoW has failed to deliver this epic experience. Leveling may be a solo endeavor, but slaying dragons in a team format is why I keep subbing. There is just so much depth to the way you play that end game and they've done a better and better job of making it easier to learn and nearly impossible to master. Many, many, many MMO's have rather faithfully copied the leveling and questing experience, but I think that misses the point entirely. On top of that, WoW is very convincingly its own universe and even LOTR managed to lose that feeling and dive into the most generic fantasy crap. Although, I give props to SWTOR for maintaining its sense of spirit, even if it royally screwed up the end game in the worst way.
To recap, these are the things people have failed to convincingly replicate: highly configurable programmable user interface, highly configurable default interface, fantastic team play at the end game, external services like JSON api, huge motivation to keep a guild together and stringent requirements for success as a team, well balanced need for solo play to support team play in the end game, convincing depth that is easy to learn the basics and nearly impossible to master. Show me an MMO that has copied these things well from wow...
Bullshit,
Diablo 3 was a fantastic game taken in a very narrow scope. What it failed at was to deliver longevity, but the actual act of leveling up the first time was wonderful. The core gameplay was very addictive the first week. I got my money's worth when compared to the average money in, enjoyment out ratio of other games purchased. What I didn't get was the same ratio I got with Diablo 2.
D3 is, in so many ways, a very polished experience with absolutely wonderful mechanics. It got some major things wrong in a meta design sense that will be talked about amongst game designers for quite awhile. Still, the actual gameplay is an unparalleled experience. The engine is so much smoother than D2 and less buggy, and its way more enjoyable than Torchlight 2. Yet, Torchlight 2 is a better game because it's meta design (how you acquire upgrades, the ability to play offline, the lack of a universal AH, and on and on) is better.
I still think D3 is quite an achievement and Blizzard still has an opportunity to fix what is wrong so that it can enjoy the ongoing success of D2. I am not confident that they will do this, but they are intending to release an expansion. D2: LOD also dramatically raised the bar on D2, so lets see if Blizzard's typical iteration will show improvement. I have some hope.
I often think the reason people "hate" on Blizzard so much is simply because of how successful they are and how much hype they have to live up to with each release. Yet, they still are putting out amazing games (with flaws) and that is what they released originally, too. This move by Blizzard causes me to believe they're still maintaining the Blizzard philosophy, not the activision philosophy. I hope that Titan is every bit the awesome MMO. Even if it fails to capture the magic of the design elements that make WoW so good, I have faith that I will take enough value from it to justify its initial purchase price and first few months of play because it is Blizzard and every game Blizzard has released was worth the money.
Out of some thousands of posts I read last month, yours was the very best. If I had mod points... well... you know.
To be specific, you were clear, logical, well-spoken, persuasive, and there was not a drop of invective!
It really was a pleasure and has made my day.
Most religious fanatics that I know are among the least happy people. The people that seem to me to be the most happy are those that are very blandly religious. I actually don't think I've met a religious fanatic I would consider a happy person. I've met many of them that worked indefatigably to convince others that they were happy people....
There are mormons who would disagree./
I have a feeling that the act of "dedicating" yourself to the Mormon church is equivalent to trying to serve two (three, four...many many) masters. That many humans running a political, social, and religious organization which intends to tell you what to do, what is right, and what isn't? Listening to yourself, as we all know with our own moral struggles and inner wrestling over difficult decisions, can be like serving two masters.
His point is really that homosexuality is so bad, so egregiously unfit to be practiced by a church member, that it would completely undermine his moral activities there. This is not a universally held viewpoint of Mormons, and it is a reprehensible statement written in the most bland way he could. So yes, I disagree with his point.
The most fascinating part of this, for me, is that I connected with Ender's Game more easily as a young adolescent precisely because I was gay and understood how harsh and how quickly a child has to grow up. I also understood empathizing with my enemy, my enemy not understanding the degree of harm he was doing to me, and not trusting adults or authorities.
I also keenly felt the idea of being tested in subtle ways, in manipulating adults and politics with their own fears, and deeply appreciated the affects of demagoguery before I even knew what it was called.
I felt like Orson Scott Card so deeply understood the plight of being a bright, homosexual child with more self-awareness and introspection than many an adult, that I was shocked to find out that he was so antagonistic to it. This was after I read Speaker of the Dead which seems to so perfectly capture that sensation of oppression.
Maybe my sense of connecting with the author and his general outlook on human emotion was so great, that to find out he is as homophobic as he is caused a deep-seated sensation of betrayal and cognitive dissonance. Also, I don't even want to separate my knowledge of the artist from the art, which is a topic worthy of an essay itself.
Also, I feel that while it seems a bit pushy and bitchy, and will evoke the typical "uppity homosexual" response, complaining about a popular person's homophobia and suggesting that they, and even their art, be considered as lesser because of it, still seems to me to be an effective way at showing strength and causing people to realize the tenuousness of their position.
No art or artist is held to account for all their crimes, and in the fullness of time people will forgive Card as a fuddy duddy for his homophobia, but in the here and now where it has extreme political relevance to my life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people on this globe, I say he is an ass for his views and I do not wish to patronize him. Let the future enjoy him unfettered by these concerns like I can enjoy Wagner now.
agreed!
I think of that crowd as weekend gamers, and they can spend more on it than teenagers and unemployed or poorly employed twenty somethings! I'm really in the metamorphosis stage from the first group to the second. I can increasingly afford more, increasingly spend more, and yet have less time to play.
And yet, it is a job to be TSA agent where you are supposed to be professional. Picking on the "funny" guys or even the guys who say something like "no, you may not." is not polite, its not professional, and I think it violates the spirit of what it means to be an American. Toe the line or get harassed/punished... what? It is sort of understandable to give it a bit more to someone who is being rude, but as a person who served tables, you still have to maintain some professionalism even in that situation. Also, your last comment is just horrible