I'm not a fan, but I can live with the home page. Once drilling down, though, it would be good if that right column went away.
I prefer not to scroll endlessly, page frequently, or have to press a button to load comments. I just want it all right there to read through in one page.
I don't support this move by California, but you really do have it wrong.
California gives more money to the federal government that it receives in services. California is actually subsidizing other states.
If California were to secede they would instantly be in the black instead of the red. Banking all those federal taxes and state taxes means an instant boon.
I don't know where you're from, but you might want to see if yours is one of those subsidized states before biting the hand that feeds you.
I would never, ever play a microtransaction game. I've been playing since my 7x GM tankmage in UO, 50 druid in EQ1, Doctor/Bounty Hunter in SWG (pre NGE), and current 75 mage in WoW. Along the way I've tried EQ2, Asheron's Call, AC2, AO, AoC, Vanguard, and LOTRO. I've never had a character deleted. I've come back 1, 2, 3 years later either paid or during free come back promotions and my characters have always been there.
I would never play a game with ads in it either.
Want your MMORPG to succeed? Fix the bugs. Don't let overpowered classes/specs/builds run rampant for too long (i.e. crossbows, tamers in UO, combat medics in SWG, rogues in WoW). Make new content. Set up a decent grind.
Are there really people out there who think we can achieve a perfectly safe world? Spending more and more money for ever smaller incremental gains in safety? Is the cost really worth it? Is giving up your rights really worth it?
At some point you have to stop and say look, there's an inherent danger in life. Your own body can turn against you. Are you willing to give up all your money and all your rights to feel safe? But what's left to be worth living if you've given everything up?
I cringe every time I hear about somebody dying in some unique way, because I know there are going to be laws that follow to ensure that never happens again. Unfortunately, those laws tend to be far more overreaching and subject to abuse in ways that are far beyond what incident initiated them.
I don't know either, it's like people have this weird fetish regarding autonomy and independence. It's like they don't mind doing something if it's of their own accord, but when someone makes them do it, they get all irrational and stuff. I mean it's like those guys that threw the tea in the water. They were buying tea anyway, right?
WoW PvP is a sad, pathetic, unbalanced POS. What's worse is the devs know it and have acknowledged it. They are trying to fix it in the upcoming expansion. Problem is, they let it go on all these months and it's soured a lot of people, including me, to arenas, which is WoW's PvP focus at this point. It reminds me a lot of CMs (combat medics) in SWG and their ridiculous DoTs, turning people off to PvP in that game too.
As a fire mage, my option if I want to do arenas is respec ice. Bah! If I wanted a pet, I'd have rolled a warlock! I do respec PoM/Pyro on weekends for battlegrounds, which is a total blast, but all the best gear comes from arenas, so it's crap knowing I'll always have second-best gear.
Balance. It's all about balance. That's the one thing I'll be looking for in WAR. If they can get that right, I'll give it a try. As long as there's no CMs, SHS rogues, MS warriors, or resto droods running around ruining the fun with their FoTM class.
Quests, in their current incarnation in mainstream MMORPGs, seem to be useful mainly for disguising grinding. WoW especially has mastered this art. Sure, a few of them are interesting and novel, but for the most part they're fedex or kill x # of mobs, and on your way to doing that, you'll need to kill some stuff that will daze/dismount you if you don't. Once you're done, you received some XP from the killing, some XP from the quest, some loot, some gold, and maybe an item. Rinse and repeat.
I just started the seven day trial for AoC yesterday, and it's pretty much the same thing as WoW. Some of the lore/stories are interesting, some aren't. The graphics are nice. Personally, I could do without the quests, but with the games I play they seem to be the most efficient for leveling.
Perhaps I'm not the average gamer, but I'd like to see a lot of the work that goes into quests go instead into gameplay/crafting/areas. I guess maybe I'm more of a sandbox player (played UO for a long time, SWG pre-NGE). I'm just about done with WoW, don't think I'll be sticking around in AoC, will be keeping an eye on Warhammer, Aion, and Darkfall. Or hell, maybe I'll just pick up a 360 and go back to fragging.
What I find interesting is this guy is trying to make this an issue of free speech. He opines that this will have chilling effects to bloggers everywhere. Horse shit. What about the right of people to freely engage in unorthodox or unpopular (but not illegal) behavior? What about the chilling effects this might have on them. Oh, you don't care about freedom that much do you?
Personally, I feel the right to privacy is an inalienable one and necessary for a free society. Yeah, I read 1984 as a kid and no, I don't want to live in a world like that. So much so that I'm qualified expert with the M16A2 and M9, and am proficient with the M203, M2, M249, M60, Mk19, and M1911. Yeah, I like freedom that much.
Hell, I've had girlfriends who like a little spanking every now and then. All in good fun I say. There's a whole subculture out there who takes it to extremes, but as long is it's consensual, it's none of my business. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and all that.
So douchebag here fraudulently elicits responses and posts them for lulz and now is whining to the judge that he has no money to defend himself when one of them drops the hammer on him. Cry moar nub. Stay out of the kitchen if you can't stand the heat. I feel not an ounce of compassion for you. These people are minding their own business doing their BSDM thing and what they don't need is a jackass like you "exposing" them for not "protecting" their privacy. Maybe some of them are married, still not your business unless you know their wives. And what about the single ones?
The world needs deviants. What it doesn't need is people like you trying to chill their free association. Hell, the world even needs jackasses like you, but this time, you crossed the line. So man up and borrow the money, take some cash advances on your credit card, hock your car, and hire a lawyer. Declare bankruptcy and learn that when you mess with someone personally, some times they're gonna mess with you back in a way that's going to hurt you, like in your wallet.
If this succeeds, I do think it will set a bad precedent. Criminal law should not be used to enforce a TOS. The Myspace part of it should be strictly a civil matter.
That said, I think this woman Drew needs to be charged. This wasn't a case of two kids being mean to eachother, or flaming someone on Slashdot. It was an adult preying on a child, an especially vulnerable one at that. I think this is a clear case of child abuse. I have no idea why she isn't being charged with that.
I would love to stick with what I have, but let's just say they're not quite in compliance when it comes to licensing. Not to mention all the clients are set up in unmanaged mode and there's no central management server installed. I just started here so I'm trying to get them legit. At my previous job I inherited a NAV Corporate (7 or 8) install. It worked okay so I'm just looking for something like it that I can get running that's low maintenance so I can get moving on to other things. I've been evaluating Trend Micro and it seemed to do the job... I was literally hours away from ordering it (this afternoon or tomorrow).
I thought about just ordering the licenses for the newest version of Symantec Corporate and continuing to use what I have. I figure that's legit enough. I so thoroughly despise their consumer products, though, that I was looking for another company to throw our money at. I'm taking a look at the AVG user guide right now. I have to say I wasn't too impressed with Trend Micro's administrative web interface either.
I've been evaluating their client server product for SMB for a week now. I need about 75 licenses to replace our aging Symantec Corporate 7. I was a couple of days away from purchasing 75 licenses for one company and 10 for another, but then this. I vote with my dollars and if my research shows their claims are BS, they just lost 85 2-year licenses.
The problem with SWG was the balance, bugs, and lack of fresh content. Certain classes had overpowering abilities that needed to be reduced. Bugs needed to be fixed. New content needed to be added.
Everybody wondered why these issues weren't being addressed. They were needed for the health of the game but they were being totally ignored.
Now we know why. Instead of fixing bugs, balancing, and creating new content, they were too busy writing a new overhaul. WTH? If they would have invested the time they spent in the Combat Upgrade (CU) overhaul and the NGE into addressing those issues, they would have never been in this situation.
Just think of how much time they spent in secret working on those two upgrades. All that time that could have been spent enhancing the game instead of rewriting it. Just stupid.
I quit after the first CU because of this. I tolerated the problems thinking they were working on fixes as they said they were, but then they come out with a revamp and a realized they squandered all that time. No thanks, I canceled.
Leave it be. Every discussion goes off on tangents, but there is always useful information to be had. There's a lot of noise on the signal but it's that way everywhere, and slashdot currently has enough tools in place to deal with it.
Personally, I've never adjusted my preferences other than setting my default view to nested. If I'm not interested in something, I simply don't click on it.
They had the best skill system I've ever seen in a game. I've played Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest 2, and now World of Warcraft. I preferred SWG's skill system over all others. UO was second. No classes, but a certain amount of skill points you would distribute among the skills. Don't like what you have, you can change or tweak it. Certain templates emerged as that's just the way people are, but if they would have spent some real time balancing that out it wouldn't have been the disruptive force it was.
Crafting was cool: you spend time "experimenting" and you make a schematic, then you throw that schematic into a factory along with the resources for mass production. Player housing, player cities, resources gathering devices, bounty hunting Jedis, weaponsmithing, armor crafting, droid making, buff and health pack creating, dancers, and musicians... tons of variety.
Now it's crap. But whatever I'm having fun in WoW in the meantime. There's a reason it has 2 million subscribers. It's not perfect, but it's fun so far.
In my state, the tax rate isn't that bad, about 6%, if you make $40,000 a year you pay a little over $2,400 in state taxes, and probably a grand total of $5,800 by the time you pay property and vehicle taxes (a small amount more if you have a nicer home than I). If the state puts you in prison, it gets $40,080 from the federal government to keep you there. You are worth 6.9 times as much to them in prison as you are just going about your business paying taxes. ----------
Damn dude if only I had mod points. I was just having a discussion this weekend about prisons and I never thought of this angle. That is some scary stuff there.
If kidnapping children and selling them into sexual slavery was overlooked or legal, you bet they would be. The only thing stopping them is laws, and even that some times doesn't. Remember, once upon a time slavery was legal, and there were companies that participated in that.
I really wish they would go back to buttkicking Jedi and permadeath. And instead of a grind for Jedi, a certain random percentage of the active population would be force sensitive at any one time. Once you become force sensitive, you choose to pursue that path in which case your character is backed up or you refuse it. Once the Jedi dies or force sensitivity is refused, another player is randomly chosen. If the Jedi dies, his original character is restored from the backup.
That way everybody gets a chance to be Jedi. The skilled ones longer than the unskilled ones.
I second this. Those 100 hitpoints can go fast when you start hearing "Corp Por." Not only was it relatively well balanced, but looking at someone, you couldn't tell exactly what their "level" was. I kept my account for over four years before finally letting my it go.
I would love to see a game with Everquest's graphics and UO's game play, skills, vendors, potions, and crafting. Plus, you could own your own home and sail in a boat.
It's really not that bad. You do a lot of work and experimentation until you're satisfied with it, then you create a schematic. Load the schematic and the appropriate resources into a factory and they're produced while you go off and do other things. I got started financially by harvesting resources for crafters, then I became a crafter myself. It is a huge time sink but generally a rewarding one. I've only ever liked Ultima Online's crafting system more.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a fan, but I can live with the home page. Once drilling down, though, it would be good if that right column went away.
I prefer not to scroll endlessly, page frequently, or have to press a button to load comments. I just want it all right there to read through in one page.
I don't support this move by California, but you really do have it wrong.
California gives more money to the federal government that it receives in services. California is actually subsidizing other states.
If California were to secede they would instantly be in the black instead of the red. Banking all those federal taxes and state taxes means an instant boon.
I don't know where you're from, but you might want to see if yours is one of those subsidized states before biting the hand that feeds you.
Owners
--> CFO
----->Me
I would never, ever play a microtransaction game. I've been playing since my 7x GM tankmage in UO, 50 druid in EQ1, Doctor/Bounty Hunter in SWG (pre NGE), and current 75 mage in WoW. Along the way I've tried EQ2, Asheron's Call, AC2, AO, AoC, Vanguard, and LOTRO. I've never had a character deleted. I've come back 1, 2, 3 years later either paid or during free come back promotions and my characters have always been there.
I would never play a game with ads in it either.
Want your MMORPG to succeed? Fix the bugs. Don't let overpowered classes/specs/builds run rampant for too long (i.e. crossbows, tamers in UO, combat medics in SWG, rogues in WoW). Make new content. Set up a decent grind.
The subscription model is in no danger of dying.
Are there really people out there who think we can achieve a perfectly safe world? Spending more and more money for ever smaller incremental gains in safety? Is the cost really worth it? Is giving up your rights really worth it?
At some point you have to stop and say look, there's an inherent danger in life. Your own body can turn against you. Are you willing to give up all your money and all your rights to feel safe? But what's left to be worth living if you've given everything up?
I cringe every time I hear about somebody dying in some unique way, because I know there are going to be laws that follow to ensure that never happens again. Unfortunately, those laws tend to be far more overreaching and subject to abuse in ways that are far beyond what incident initiated them.
People die. Dying is a part of life.
Yeah, that's pretty sad. Talk about sheep.
I don't know either, it's like people have this weird fetish regarding autonomy and independence. It's like they don't mind doing something if it's of their own accord, but when someone makes them do it, they get all irrational and stuff. I mean it's like those guys that threw the tea in the water. They were buying tea anyway, right?
WoW PvP is a sad, pathetic, unbalanced POS. What's worse is the devs know it and have acknowledged it. They are trying to fix it in the upcoming expansion. Problem is, they let it go on all these months and it's soured a lot of people, including me, to arenas, which is WoW's PvP focus at this point. It reminds me a lot of CMs (combat medics) in SWG and their ridiculous DoTs, turning people off to PvP in that game too.
As a fire mage, my option if I want to do arenas is respec ice. Bah! If I wanted a pet, I'd have rolled a warlock! I do respec PoM/Pyro on weekends for battlegrounds, which is a total blast, but all the best gear comes from arenas, so it's crap knowing I'll always have second-best gear.
Balance. It's all about balance. That's the one thing I'll be looking for in WAR. If they can get that right, I'll give it a try. As long as there's no CMs, SHS rogues, MS warriors, or resto droods running around ruining the fun with their FoTM class.
Quests, in their current incarnation in mainstream MMORPGs, seem to be useful mainly for disguising grinding. WoW especially has mastered this art. Sure, a few of them are interesting and novel, but for the most part they're fedex or kill x # of mobs, and on your way to doing that, you'll need to kill some stuff that will daze/dismount you if you don't. Once you're done, you received some XP from the killing, some XP from the quest, some loot, some gold, and maybe an item. Rinse and repeat.
I just started the seven day trial for AoC yesterday, and it's pretty much the same thing as WoW. Some of the lore/stories are interesting, some aren't. The graphics are nice. Personally, I could do without the quests, but with the games I play they seem to be the most efficient for leveling.
Perhaps I'm not the average gamer, but I'd like to see a lot of the work that goes into quests go instead into gameplay/crafting/areas. I guess maybe I'm more of a sandbox player (played UO for a long time, SWG pre-NGE). I'm just about done with WoW, don't think I'll be sticking around in AoC, will be keeping an eye on Warhammer, Aion, and Darkfall. Or hell, maybe I'll just pick up a 360 and go back to fragging.
What I find interesting is this guy is trying to make this an issue of free speech. He opines that this will have chilling effects to bloggers everywhere. Horse shit. What about the right of people to freely engage in unorthodox or unpopular (but not illegal) behavior? What about the chilling effects this might have on them. Oh, you don't care about freedom that much do you?
Personally, I feel the right to privacy is an inalienable one and necessary for a free society. Yeah, I read 1984 as a kid and no, I don't want to live in a world like that. So much so that I'm qualified expert with the M16A2 and M9, and am proficient with the M203, M2, M249, M60, Mk19, and M1911. Yeah, I like freedom that much.
Hell, I've had girlfriends who like a little spanking every now and then. All in good fun I say. There's a whole subculture out there who takes it to extremes, but as long is it's consensual, it's none of my business. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and all that.
So douchebag here fraudulently elicits responses and posts them for lulz and now is whining to the judge that he has no money to defend himself when one of them drops the hammer on him. Cry moar nub. Stay out of the kitchen if you can't stand the heat. I feel not an ounce of compassion for you. These people are minding their own business doing their BSDM thing and what they don't need is a jackass like you "exposing" them for not "protecting" their privacy. Maybe some of them are married, still not your business unless you know their wives. And what about the single ones?
The world needs deviants. What it doesn't need is people like you trying to chill their free association. Hell, the world even needs jackasses like you, but this time, you crossed the line. So man up and borrow the money, take some cash advances on your credit card, hock your car, and hire a lawyer. Declare bankruptcy and learn that when you mess with someone personally, some times they're gonna mess with you back in a way that's going to hurt you, like in your wallet.
When an adult does this to a child, it's usually called child abuse.
"Child abuse is the physical, psychological or sexual maltreatment of children."
If this succeeds, I do think it will set a bad precedent. Criminal law should not be used to enforce a TOS. The Myspace part of it should be strictly a civil matter.
That said, I think this woman Drew needs to be charged. This wasn't a case of two kids being mean to eachother, or flaming someone on Slashdot. It was an adult preying on a child, an especially vulnerable one at that. I think this is a clear case of child abuse. I have no idea why she isn't being charged with that.
I would love to stick with what I have, but let's just say they're not quite in compliance when it comes to licensing. Not to mention all the clients are set up in unmanaged mode and there's no central management server installed. I just started here so I'm trying to get them legit. At my previous job I inherited a NAV Corporate (7 or 8) install. It worked okay so I'm just looking for something like it that I can get running that's low maintenance so I can get moving on to other things. I've been evaluating Trend Micro and it seemed to do the job... I was literally hours away from ordering it (this afternoon or tomorrow).
I thought about just ordering the licenses for the newest version of Symantec Corporate and continuing to use what I have. I figure that's legit enough. I so thoroughly despise their consumer products, though, that I was looking for another company to throw our money at. I'm taking a look at the AVG user guide right now. I have to say I wasn't too impressed with Trend Micro's administrative web interface either.
I've been evaluating their client server product for SMB for a week now. I need about 75 licenses to replace our aging Symantec Corporate 7. I was a couple of days away from purchasing 75 licenses for one company and 10 for another, but then this. I vote with my dollars and if my research shows their claims are BS, they just lost 85 2-year licenses.
But they apparently have control over the licensing and have already tried to abuse it. Do a Google search for "blu-ray porn".
They never give up.
SWG *was* an awesome game.
The problem with SWG was the balance, bugs, and lack of fresh content. Certain classes had overpowering abilities that needed to be reduced. Bugs needed to be fixed. New content needed to be added.
Everybody wondered why these issues weren't being addressed. They were needed for the health of the game but they were being totally ignored.
Now we know why. Instead of fixing bugs, balancing, and creating new content, they were too busy writing a new overhaul. WTH? If they would have invested the time they spent in the Combat Upgrade (CU) overhaul and the NGE into addressing those issues, they would have never been in this situation.
Just think of how much time they spent in secret working on those two upgrades. All that time that could have been spent enhancing the game instead of rewriting it. Just stupid.
I quit after the first CU because of this. I tolerated the problems thinking they were working on fixes as they said they were, but then they come out with a revamp and a realized they squandered all that time. No thanks, I canceled.
Leave it be. Every discussion goes off on tangents, but there is always useful information to be had. There's a lot of noise on the signal but it's that way everywhere, and slashdot currently has enough tools in place to deal with it.
Personally, I've never adjusted my preferences other than setting my default view to nested. If I'm not interested in something, I simply don't click on it.
SOE killed my master doctor. Not cool.
They had the best skill system I've ever seen in a game. I've played Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest 2, and now World of Warcraft. I preferred SWG's skill system over all others. UO was second. No classes, but a certain amount of skill points you would distribute among the skills. Don't like what you have, you can change or tweak it. Certain templates emerged as that's just the way people are, but if they would have spent some real time balancing that out it wouldn't have been the disruptive force it was.
Crafting was cool: you spend time "experimenting" and you make a schematic, then you throw that schematic into a factory along with the resources for mass production. Player housing, player cities, resources gathering devices, bounty hunting Jedis, weaponsmithing, armor crafting, droid making, buff and health pack creating, dancers, and musicians... tons of variety.
Now it's crap. But whatever I'm having fun in WoW in the meantime. There's a reason it has 2 million subscribers. It's not perfect, but it's fun so far.
In my state, the tax rate isn't that bad, about 6%, if you make $40,000 a year you pay a little over $2,400 in state taxes, and probably a grand total of $5,800 by the time you pay property and vehicle taxes (a small amount more if you have a nicer home than I). If the state puts you in prison, it gets $40,080 from the federal government to keep you there. You are worth 6.9 times as much to them in prison as you are just going about your business paying taxes.
----------
Damn dude if only I had mod points. I was just having a discussion this weekend about prisons and I never thought of this angle. That is some scary stuff there.
If kidnapping children and selling them into sexual slavery was overlooked or legal, you bet they would be. The only thing stopping them is laws, and even that some times doesn't. Remember, once upon a time slavery was legal, and there were companies that participated in that.
Yeah, I'll sacrifice YOUR life, but not that of myself or my family. Satisfied now?
I really wish they would go back to buttkicking Jedi and permadeath. And instead of a grind for Jedi, a certain random percentage of the active population would be force sensitive at any one time. Once you become force sensitive, you choose to pursue that path in which case your character is backed up or you refuse it. Once the Jedi dies or force sensitivity is refused, another player is randomly chosen. If the Jedi dies, his original character is restored from the backup.
That way everybody gets a chance to be Jedi. The skilled ones longer than the unskilled ones.
I second this. Those 100 hitpoints can go fast when you start hearing "Corp Por." Not only was it relatively well balanced, but looking at someone, you couldn't tell exactly what their "level" was. I kept my account for over four years before finally letting my it go.
I would love to see a game with Everquest's graphics and UO's game play, skills, vendors, potions, and crafting. Plus, you could own your own home and sail in a boat.
It's really not that bad. You do a lot of work and experimentation until you're satisfied with it, then you create a schematic. Load the schematic and the appropriate resources into a factory and they're produced while you go off and do other things. I got started financially by harvesting resources for crafters, then I became a crafter myself. It is a huge time sink but generally a rewarding one. I've only ever liked Ultima Online's crafting system more.