That's why you make QA use the 15-year-old barely-functioning $20 TV sets to test your game.
Re:Ok, so windows does have its fanbois too
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Gaming On Windows 7
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"if you have hardware older than 4 years, just spend $800 and you're good again"
Note that the person saying this is a gamer. It's typical for PC gamers to upgrade all of their hardware more frequently than every 4 years to play the newest games in high quality (or at all, in some cases).
Most companies didn't "switch to" console gaming, they added it as an additional platform because the tools have become mature enough to make this easy (especially if your game was already in Direct3D) and doing so increased their potential market, and therefore potential profit margin.
Just because TF2 and Fallout3 are on consoles in addition to PC doesn't make the PC platform dead.
You're modded troll because your random capitalization, bold font, misuse of ellipses, bizarre random punctuation, and misuse of paragraphs make your posts completely unreadable.
Shouldn't the fact that they tried to hide the reason for their release was due to a GPL violation prove that they were NOT interested in going down the "GPL is viral!" path?
In the U.S. many *states* have laws against driving while using a cell phone. Most driving laws are left to the states since they are the ones who issue licenses and have the power to enforce the laws. Police are all local to cities or counties, most highway patrol officers are local to the state.
I'd like to think that most people in the U.S. would rather states/counties/cities handle things like this instead of always relying on the federal government to pass laws or ban things or whatever (since that's pretty much the basis of our entire government), but I know that's probably not true.
Every expansion so far they've changed the stat scaling formulas. Every expansion. You can literally look at every stat/gear/whatever scaling formula in the game, and you get 3 piecewise functions that go from 1-60, 61-70, 71-80 (with a couple stats having either odd or non-scaling formula for sub 20 or 30).
There's no need to plan past any arbitrary level number when you change all the numbers in the entire game every level increase to match whatever you want.
Will interest wane in WoW simply because it seems like just an extension to the treadmill? Are people getting tired of the aesthetic? These are questions from someone who doesn't see the attraction in the first place.
Being killed by a player has no penalty in a PvP zone, you're just sent back to the entrance of the zone. However, the computer controlled "cartoon" enemies in the zone will inflict an experience loss(known as "debt") on the players that die by their hand, and this loss takes a considerable amount of time to mitigate.
This is entirely the fault of the developers, not the players. When Alterac Valley was initially in testing for WoW, one of the first changes made was to removed damage done to gear as a result of a death from NPCs within the zone (a much smaller penalty than XP debt in CoH/CoV). This was a lesson learned within two weeks of testing, four years ago, and before CoV was even in closed beta, and fixed long before the zone was released. And yet this has persisted how long in CoH/CoV?
There are players in this zone who are there to defeat the enemies because they give increased experience, they aren't there to fight or interact with enemy players in any way and are left alone instead.
The reason the NPCs have a greater XP yield in the zone is specifically because of the increased danger posed by being in an open PvP zone. Players not participating in PvP within the zone are effectively exploiting the zone outside of its intended purpose. Again, this is another obvious problem within the game that needs to be fixed by the developers, and players playing with an expectation of PvPing should not be run out by players wholly intent on exploiting a PvP zone for PvE benefit.
Except that WoW developers force the player base to do things all the time, and it's the most popular MMO on earth. The problem is when developers force players to do things that are *not fun*, not when developers force players to do things in general. The obvious deduction taken from this article is that CoH/CoV PvP is *not fun*. But rather than attempt to overhaul it and make it fun, the developers have left the playerbase to make their own game of it, to the detriment of those who would at least like to try the game that it was originally meant to be.
I bet if they overhauled the PvP system to be fun, then forced the people to PvP in PvP zones instead of standing around fighting NPC's or chatting, then they'd actually see a net increase in the game's population, rather than a decrease, because they would be adding an element to the game that did not already exist (fun PvP), without really removing anything (the ability to chat and stand around doing nothing).
You're trying to put violence into this context because the video game's rules are overlayed with a metaphor of violence. There was definitely no violence being perpetrated on the actual persons playing the game. A "kill" in the game is no more violent in the real sense than a 3 point shot in basketball.
The fact is the other players were not even playing any game at all, and certainly not the game the area was designed for. If you had seen NHL games on television, and paid to join a hockey league, and then when you finally got into your first game after buying expensive equipment found that all the players on both sides just stood around chatting, refusing to play, and harassed and insulted you when you tried to score a goal, then you would be in a similar position as the researcher. Except a "real" player probably would have given up and written off the time and money invested in the game after a much shorter period, and for an amateur hockey league you'd probably have other options, whereas if you like the game mechanics/art/world/whatever of CoH/CoV you have no other options.
You have it backwards. This is players standing around using voice chat after the match has started, and yelling at the guy 1 guy actually playing the game and fragging people.
It seems most people either didn't read the article or didn't understand it. Imagine if you bought Team Fortress 2, a game wholly centered around team vs. team competition, and found that on every server you joined, the players were sitting in the middle of the map spamming the voice chat buttons and re-enacting Hamlet.
You would be sorely disappointed. You thought you bought a game of team vs. team competition, but the out-of-game rules set by the community have turned the game into a virtual theater troupe. That's an extreme analogy of what is currently going on in CoH/CoV. I understand why this happened, because I know the history of both games and the type of people they have attracted, but a new player might not understand with or agree with the current state of that game's community, and try to play the game more as it was intended (team based player vs. player combat). They would not be able to and would basically be bullied into conforming or quitting, sacrificing all the time and money they had put into the game expecting the player vs. player combat it was designed with and advertised.
The "customs" of the community, in its current state, directly oppose both the letter of and intention of the original rules of the game, in that PvP zone. The community is effectively "stealing" that part of the game away from anyone who would potentially wish to participate in it.
I don't really know about other games, but in WoW max level playtime is truly limited by lockouts. Raids lockout for a full week once completed, heroic dungeons and daily quests lock out for a day when completed. Arena points are only awarded once a week and the reward is dependent on your rank not the amount you play (directly, at least).
The time sink is built into the game in other ways not dependent on travel time.
This is wrong, at least in NA/EU markets, because time spent playing does not coincide with amount paid. MMO's here use the monthly fee model where it doesn't matter if you play for 1 hour or 100 hours in a month, you pay the same.
Minor nit pick: Raids have had meeting stones since at least early TBC.
I will also support the number one reason it takes forever to get people together for a dungeon or raid in WoW is that the majority of the people are simply inconsiderate, and not because of any kind of difficulty traveling in-game. They will keep doing their own thing until the absolute last second when they expect everyone else to summon them to the dungeon. Occasionally while leveling up, if I'm not playing with a guild mate or friend, I will be at the meeting stone in less than 5 minutes, then have to wait up to 15 for one of the other 4 idiots to realize they're not going to get summoned unless at least one of them joins me at the entrance.
Additionally, the next patch (3.2) is going to decrease the price of almost every mount, set the speed of the "slow" flying mount to 150% increase instead of 60% increase, set the level flying mounts can be obtained to 60 (it's currently 70), and lower the initial level for the slow ground mount to 20 and the fast ground mount to 40.
The real reason they retain it is because it's the easiest way to assign a unique ID to an individual for their customer service reps to verify database queries. There could literally be 1000 people with the same first and last name as you in their database, but unless an illegal immigrant randomly picks the same 9 digits as your social when they make up their fake one, no one will share the same SSN as you, and it will stay with you no matter where your new address is or even if you get married and change your last name.
For most companies, there's nothing nefarious about it. It's just the most practical way to keep track of people in a large database.
I grew up in suburban sprawl and got a lot of exercise riding my bike to my friends' houses or to the movies, lazer tag place, and card/comic shops. Maybe the area you grew up in was a lot more spread out, or maybe you're just a lazy ass and your social isolation was self-inflicted.
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That's why you make QA use the 15-year-old barely-functioning $20 TV sets to test your game.
Note that the person saying this is a gamer. It's typical for PC gamers to upgrade all of their hardware more frequently than every 4 years to play the newest games in high quality (or at all, in some cases).
Most companies didn't "switch to" console gaming, they added it as an additional platform because the tools have become mature enough to make this easy (especially if your game was already in Direct3D) and doing so increased their potential market, and therefore potential profit margin.
Just because TF2 and Fallout3 are on consoles in addition to PC doesn't make the PC platform dead.
You're modded troll because your random capitalization, bold font, misuse of ellipses, bizarre random punctuation, and misuse of paragraphs make your posts completely unreadable.
Shouldn't the fact that they tried to hide the reason for their release was due to a GPL violation prove that they were NOT interested in going down the "GPL is viral!" path?
The stop harping on about the Geneva Conventions which obviously do not apply and just talk directly about human rights.
In the U.S. many *states* have laws against driving while using a cell phone. Most driving laws are left to the states since they are the ones who issue licenses and have the power to enforce the laws. Police are all local to cities or counties, most highway patrol officers are local to the state.
http://www.statehighwaysafety.org/html/stateinfo/laws/cellphone_laws.html
I'd like to think that most people in the U.S. would rather states/counties/cities handle things like this instead of always relying on the federal government to pass laws or ban things or whatever (since that's pretty much the basis of our entire government), but I know that's probably not true.
Wikipedia needs more lens flares.
Sorry, didn't realize you were just trolling. Carry on, then.
"We've gotten some complaints about parties around here in the past. If you don't keep it quiet and under control we'll have to break it up."
Nope, too hard. Get the riot squad.
Too bad it's from the government so his conspiracy-theory-addled mind will never accept it.
Every expansion so far they've changed the stat scaling formulas. Every expansion. You can literally look at every stat/gear/whatever scaling formula in the game, and you get 3 piecewise functions that go from 1-60, 61-70, 71-80 (with a couple stats having either odd or non-scaling formula for sub 20 or 30).
There's no need to plan past any arbitrary level number when you change all the numbers in the entire game every level increase to match whatever you want.
Will interest wane in WoW simply because it seems like just an extension to the treadmill? Are people getting tired of the aesthetic? These are questions from someone who doesn't see the attraction in the first place.
No, no, and uh, no.
This is entirely the fault of the developers, not the players. When Alterac Valley was initially in testing for WoW, one of the first changes made was to removed damage done to gear as a result of a death from NPCs within the zone (a much smaller penalty than XP debt in CoH/CoV). This was a lesson learned within two weeks of testing, four years ago, and before CoV was even in closed beta, and fixed long before the zone was released. And yet this has persisted how long in CoH/CoV?
The reason the NPCs have a greater XP yield in the zone is specifically because of the increased danger posed by being in an open PvP zone. Players not participating in PvP within the zone are effectively exploiting the zone outside of its intended purpose. Again, this is another obvious problem within the game that needs to be fixed by the developers, and players playing with an expectation of PvPing should not be run out by players wholly intent on exploiting a PvP zone for PvE benefit.
Except that WoW developers force the player base to do things all the time, and it's the most popular MMO on earth. The problem is when developers force players to do things that are *not fun*, not when developers force players to do things in general. The obvious deduction taken from this article is that CoH/CoV PvP is *not fun*. But rather than attempt to overhaul it and make it fun, the developers have left the playerbase to make their own game of it, to the detriment of those who would at least like to try the game that it was originally meant to be.
I bet if they overhauled the PvP system to be fun, then forced the people to PvP in PvP zones instead of standing around fighting NPC's or chatting, then they'd actually see a net increase in the game's population, rather than a decrease, because they would be adding an element to the game that did not already exist (fun PvP), without really removing anything (the ability to chat and stand around doing nothing).
You're trying to put violence into this context because the video game's rules are overlayed with a metaphor of violence. There was definitely no violence being perpetrated on the actual persons playing the game. A "kill" in the game is no more violent in the real sense than a 3 point shot in basketball.
The fact is the other players were not even playing any game at all, and certainly not the game the area was designed for. If you had seen NHL games on television, and paid to join a hockey league, and then when you finally got into your first game after buying expensive equipment found that all the players on both sides just stood around chatting, refusing to play, and harassed and insulted you when you tried to score a goal, then you would be in a similar position as the researcher. Except a "real" player probably would have given up and written off the time and money invested in the game after a much shorter period, and for an amateur hockey league you'd probably have other options, whereas if you like the game mechanics/art/world/whatever of CoH/CoV you have no other options.
You have it backwards. This is players standing around using voice chat after the match has started, and yelling at the guy 1 guy actually playing the game and fragging people.
It seems most people either didn't read the article or didn't understand it. Imagine if you bought Team Fortress 2, a game wholly centered around team vs. team competition, and found that on every server you joined, the players were sitting in the middle of the map spamming the voice chat buttons and re-enacting Hamlet.
You would be sorely disappointed. You thought you bought a game of team vs. team competition, but the out-of-game rules set by the community have turned the game into a virtual theater troupe. That's an extreme analogy of what is currently going on in CoH/CoV. I understand why this happened, because I know the history of both games and the type of people they have attracted, but a new player might not understand with or agree with the current state of that game's community, and try to play the game more as it was intended (team based player vs. player combat). They would not be able to and would basically be bullied into conforming or quitting, sacrificing all the time and money they had put into the game expecting the player vs. player combat it was designed with and advertised.
The "customs" of the community, in its current state, directly oppose both the letter of and intention of the original rules of the game, in that PvP zone. The community is effectively "stealing" that part of the game away from anyone who would potentially wish to participate in it.
You probably didn't have a copy editor at 13.
I don't really know about other games, but in WoW max level playtime is truly limited by lockouts. Raids lockout for a full week once completed, heroic dungeons and daily quests lock out for a day when completed. Arena points are only awarded once a week and the reward is dependent on your rank not the amount you play (directly, at least).
The time sink is built into the game in other ways not dependent on travel time.
You mean like every other zone in the entire game when you're not too low level to be in it?
This is wrong, at least in NA/EU markets, because time spent playing does not coincide with amount paid. MMO's here use the monthly fee model where it doesn't matter if you play for 1 hour or 100 hours in a month, you pay the same.
Minor nit pick: Raids have had meeting stones since at least early TBC.
I will also support the number one reason it takes forever to get people together for a dungeon or raid in WoW is that the majority of the people are simply inconsiderate, and not because of any kind of difficulty traveling in-game. They will keep doing their own thing until the absolute last second when they expect everyone else to summon them to the dungeon. Occasionally while leveling up, if I'm not playing with a guild mate or friend, I will be at the meeting stone in less than 5 minutes, then have to wait up to 15 for one of the other 4 idiots to realize they're not going to get summoned unless at least one of them joins me at the entrance.
Additionally, the next patch (3.2) is going to decrease the price of almost every mount, set the speed of the "slow" flying mount to 150% increase instead of 60% increase, set the level flying mounts can be obtained to 60 (it's currently 70), and lower the initial level for the slow ground mount to 20 and the fast ground mount to 40.
The real reason they retain it is because it's the easiest way to assign a unique ID to an individual for their customer service reps to verify database queries. There could literally be 1000 people with the same first and last name as you in their database, but unless an illegal immigrant randomly picks the same 9 digits as your social when they make up their fake one, no one will share the same SSN as you, and it will stay with you no matter where your new address is or even if you get married and change your last name.
For most companies, there's nothing nefarious about it. It's just the most practical way to keep track of people in a large database.
I grew up in suburban sprawl and got a lot of exercise riding my bike to my friends' houses or to the movies, lazer tag place, and card/comic shops. Maybe the area you grew up in was a lot more spread out, or maybe you're just a lazy ass and your social isolation was self-inflicted.