I saw "4 of 79 comments" on the main page and thought it had to be a mistake... as it turns out, somebody's been testing a bot. That's the only explanation I can come up with.
Yeah, that's why I mentioned it in the blurb. I left out the part about him being Evil Incarnate because, hey,/. has enough bias already. ^_^ (I had a rant on my site about it, too. </shameless plug>)
... to the rumours that the X-Box 2 will not have a HD? If MS are really aiming to make their latest dev cross-platform, the X-Box 2 would need to have a hard disk in order to be comparable to the PC.
Not necessarily. Flash memory being what it is (ie cheap and plentiful), all you'd really need to do is put version 1.0 of the XNA framework on ROM and push patches/bugfixes to a 64MB slice of flash on the system.
Of course, this being MS, you'd probably need a hell of a lot more than 64MB...
the appropriateness and usage of the abbreviation/racial slur "Jap". (It's a degrading racial slur. Ask someone who lived in the USA before 1975, and use another abbreviation. I suggest J, JP, JPN or just typing it out.)
I've always used the country codes, like.us,.mx,.ca,.jp, etc. Most computer literate people know immediately what I mean and those that aren't that smart usually catch on.
You don't need a raise before you hit the mid-teen levels. Some would argue higher, but I'm telling you that's the absolute lowest you should ask for one at. If you get turned down, oh well - just ask more people.
I have to disagree. Ask for a raise anytime you remember seeing a WHM wandering around (WHMs over level 25, that is) or a high-level RDM (over level 38). It helps you out by saving you a few XP, and it helps them out by giving them a chance to build up their casting skills. Sure, it's expensive, but the odds are good you won't get turned down. However, yeah, there's a limit-- don't bother asking before level 5 (you can easily get the lost XP back in one or two good fights). Additionally, make sure that if you see someone lying dead and not respawning, you should shout for a raise for that person. It's the nice thing to do.
Charge a reasonable amount for a teleport - and expect to pay for a teleport. Do not charge for a raise, heals or buffs!
Good points. One other thing to remember is that the Auction Houses may not be the best place to buy or sell your stuff. Let's say you're overloaded with useless stuff and you want to get rid of it. Set up your bazaar to sell the stuff at a far lower price (say, 50% to 75% of what the AH's average bid is) and sit down near the AH. Then go get yourself a sandwich or something-- take a break, but DON'T LOG OUT. When you come back, about an hour later, the odds are good you'll have sold at least a few things.
And expect us to laugh at you if you ask for money for a kit (complete set of equipment) when you start over with a level 1 job.
If you've lasted long enough to get to level 18, you should have an extra 2000 gil or so lying around. The lesson here is either save your newbie equipment or get real good at selling at the AH. On a related note, you could probably do better at the AH than the newbie vendor on the prices for the level 1 gear.
Allow me to add a couple more points:
Crystals are a good cash crop. You get crystals by having your country's military cast Signet on you, either just inside the city gates or at an outpost your country controls. Use Signet! While under the effects of signet, you can earn crystals in areas that your country controls. Additionally, you earn Conquest Points that can be exchanged for goodies by your military. But the crystals are really important. They're used for item synthesis. After a while you might want to concentrate on the more expensive crystals like Fire or Lightning, and start donating the Earth and Water crystals to the military to gain rank points.
To get a subjob item, you MUST party. For the Mhaura subjob quest, the Bloody Robe (dropped by Bogys) is typically the hardest to find. (not sure about the Selbina quest) You're sure to find a group willing to fight the appropriate enemies at any one time-- hang out either at the town's gates or near where the monster spawns.
Do not be a dickhead. I think the Friday Penny Arcade sums this point up nicely. "Normal guy + anonymity + audience = dickhead". You will find that if you have a reputation of being an ass, it will be very hard to find a party.
Follow sensibly. I was in a party where-- no lie-- we all wound up going in circles because everyone was following someone else. It was pretty amusing watching two mithra, three tarutaru, and one elvaan all chase each other around, but we got sick of it real fast. Agree on a leader or driver and go from there.
Oh yeah, have fun, too. It's a great game, but most of these rules are pretty common sense, which is probably why they're most violated.
Two reasons: First, my hardware firewall is a hundred miles away packed in a box, and I don't want to leave my computer unprotected for a week till I go and get it; and second, I didn't think of it.
I just now (10 min ago) plugged my laptop into my brand new DSL modem... Now I have to install the antivirus program before rebooting... Shit shit shit...
I propose we introduce the death penalty on the sick motherfucker who wrote this fucking piece of shit virus. FUCK!
(And no, I haven't watched any Tarantino films lately)
Focused [game-only] publishers will always lead us in making the best games... --Scott Miller
Let's face it, Scott-- an illiterate dirt farmer from South Buttcrack, Arkansas could lead 3DRealms in making games. You're not telling us anything we don't already know.
Moreover, the Playstation was developed (initially, at least) in conjunction with Nintendo-- and anyone who says Nintendo isn't a gaming company is certainly on something mind-addling. Nokia developed the Ngage in a vacuum, and it shows (and suffered for it).
Y'know, this is just a personal view here-- I haven't played a MUD in at least a year-- but the stance you guys are taking (ie turning a bad situation into something entertaining and attractive) is one I'd dearly love to see in more companies. I'd love for, say, Square-Enix to give players gil in their other games when the main FFXI server goes down for maintenance. But you guys did something really unique and interesting with what would otherwise be a major disaster. Good job.
I'm getting the damn banner while trying to watch TNG. I DO NOT CARE because I'm not a Dish subscriber.
Neither am I, neither do I, but all the same we have all been trolled. Call them about it and they'll know it worked, that the message is out there. Dish is being equally retarded by not being up front about it and allowing the message to go by; how many calls have they got about the black scroll bar? How soon will it be before Viacom sets the message to go at random heights across the screen? It's irritating now, true, but just you wait. The shit has yet to really hit the fan.
I used to work for the cable company (not saying which one, but I'm sure you can guess based on past comments--please don't spoil it for anyone) and number one on my big list of questions was why, if the set-top digital receivers had all these fancy whizbangs for communications and PPV ordering, didn't the cable company use them to simplify stuff like tech support or channel selection? If you spend $1 million on customizing the firmware for your set-top box (a moot issue for mini-sat providers like Dish and DTV, which already use proprietary boxes) to allow customers to alter their channel lineups or fix their internet service via their boxes without ever picking up the phone, imagine the money you'd save on not having to pay overtime to the excessively-overworked phone monkeys! You could even turn the screw an extra half-inch by making the individual channels more expensive than buying the package (which is usually what happens anyway)! Make your customers happy and screw them over!
To the best of my knowledge, Samurai X is the name that was used the first time the series was localized for the US. In Japan (again, this is to the best of my knowledge, as I don't watch the series-- not a big fan of period pieces) the series was always called Ruroni Kenshin.
Why people are arguing this in a thread about Zelda is beyond me, but hey.
Now that I've stalled long enough to Google it, Samurai X is the (old) US name, before the people in charge of coming up with the name "Samurai X" were beaten, shot, and hanged. In that order.
Depending on the size of the store, yeah, it can be. During the 'Cube/XBox launch, we had stacks of all three machines in the bathroom piled to the ceiling. This is because our store was about the size of your average hotel room, backroom included.
I salute you, comrade. I got out about fourteen months ago after very nearly being put on the fast track to management of the store.
I was never terribly fond of Morgan either-- never met the guy myself, but everyone I talked to who had all seemed to say his name like they'd say any other profanity.
[Gamers hired are] elist and will, quite undiplomatically, tell customers that the game that customer has brought to the counter "sucks."
Well, being one of those guys (hired because my answer to "what game systems have you played recently?" was "all of them" followed by naming them, in reverse alphabetical order), I can say that most of the time it was true. I also probably ought to mention that my managers always could count on me for overtime, closing, whatever. I wasn't perfect, mind you, but I knew my stuff and I worked my ass off. So maybe there's a combination of "gamer" and "salesman" out there that'll work. (To be fair-- the only reason I didn't wind up talking all day about games is because a) I never worked with other "gamer"-types and b) the ones I did work with all liked games I wasn't interested in. Oh yeah, and c) by the time I was through working there I was about this close to becoming completely anti-social and going to live on some hill in Tennessee.)
I think the EB I worked at was run extremely tightly, with an emphasis on professionalism, politeness, and gaming knowledge.
Incidentally, which store did you run? I was at the Millcreek Mall in Erie, PA and the Olean Center Mall in Olean, NY. I was about ready to strangle the GameDoctor guy by the end of six months. ^_^
When Diablo 2 was hot, EB near where I live had plenty of used copies in just the jewel case, shrink wrapped, with the product key showing. Nice way to jot down and get a legit code for playing a bootleg copy online. I couldn't believe EB was so stupid.
When I worked there, I caught on to that pretty quick and started double-shrinking stuff with "conveniently" placed price tags. My manager complained until I told him why I did it. He still wasn't happy about it until, on my recommendation, he bought a used game (Starcraft) that had been sitting there exposed for about a week and found he couldn't play online because the code was in use. He liked it after that. I did this primarily on the games I liked; some which I thought deserved to be stolen I just left. Who the hell is still buying those damned Deer Hunter games, anyway?
We don't take items that we even suspect are stolen. In fact, I turned down a nice mp3 player yesterday because I suspected it was stolen. I couldn't prove anything so I couldn't call the police, but I didn't take it either.
Looking at it from the perspective of an employee of EB for a year and a half, that was the precise lesson all four of my managers told me. If it looks, feels, or smells stolen, or even if you're not sure, make up a bullshit excuse and get the punk out of the store. This happened to me about five times during my time; one time the thief even threatened to call the cops on me because I was "discriminating against him" by refusing to take his ten games which coincidentally all were in Blockbuster containers. With the receipt stating the return date (three days prior) also stuck in one of them.
Your best bet for protection? Always right[sic] down serial numbers! It makes it 85% more likely that you will get your property back.
One problem with this-- few video games come with serial numbers anymore. Typically it's only the systems themselves which have s/ns, and even then the computer requires us to track 'em. Nintendo's recently been putting brochures with "redemption codes" in a few of their games, but it's just box spam that isn't attached to the cartridge or disc itself, so it's no good.
So don't go describing EB as a pawn shop. It isn't.
It wasn't, technically. Since now (at least at my local store in Olean, NY) EB can give cash for games, it falls under the category of "pawn shop" (in my admittedly non-lawyer dictionary). Previously EB got around having to have a pawn license by only issuing store credit.
I left EB because I got sick of having to deal with dishonest fucktards. Not ironically, I took a job in phone tech support immediately afterwards. I'm still looking for a new job.
Oh, and don't hate all the EB employees, please. Some of us-- well, maybe 15% of the clerks-- know what we're talking about and aren't actively trying to screw you over. Not all the time, anyway. ([Shadowcabbit] remembers the time he sold a Dreamcast to a grandmother who thought it was a portable game system.)
Agreed. UT2K3 worked just fine on my old P3 700 MHz and a GeForce2; boosting the RAM from 128 to 256 made it almost flawless. I'm now running a P4 2.8 GHz and 512 RAM with an onboard Intel graphics set and the game still runs beautifully; I imagine that uninstalling 2K3 to make room for 2K4 will cause no noticeable difference in performance (no broadband for the duration of my unemployment, so I haven't picked up the demo).
It's been my experience that missing one or two of the "minimum requirements" by a short amount (say, having a 733 MHz when it says 1 GHz) is still within acceptable limits when checking out. It's also been my experience that if a game's demo is out first, it does a hell of a lot in the way of allowing potential customers to gauge what they'll need. I applaud Atari and Epic for bothering to care about their customers, and you can bet that the next game I buy is going to be the deluxe DVD set.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw "4 of 79 comments" on the main page and thought it had to be a mistake... as it turns out, somebody's been testing a bot. That's the only explanation I can come up with.
Yeah, that's why I mentioned it in the blurb. I left out the part about him being Evil Incarnate because, hey, /. has enough bias already. ^_^ (I had a rant on my site about it, too. </shameless plug>)
Anyone who lives near the billboard want to set up a webcam? Some of us are stuck in... (shudder) Pennsylvania!
... to the rumours that the X-Box 2 will not have a HD? If MS are really aiming to make their latest dev cross-platform, the X-Box 2 would need to have a hard disk in order to be comparable to the PC.
Not necessarily. Flash memory being what it is (ie cheap and plentiful), all you'd really need to do is put version 1.0 of the XNA framework on ROM and push patches/bugfixes to a 64MB slice of flash on the system.
Of course, this being MS, you'd probably need a hell of a lot more than 64MB...
Hear hear.
.us, .mx, .ca, .jp, etc. Most computer literate people know immediately what I mean and those that aren't that smart usually catch on.
the appropriateness and usage of the abbreviation/racial slur "Jap". (It's a degrading racial slur. Ask someone who lived in the USA before 1975, and use another abbreviation. I suggest J, JP, JPN or just typing it out.)
I've always used the country codes, like
You don't need a raise before you hit the mid-teen levels. Some would argue higher, but I'm telling you that's the absolute lowest you should ask for one at. If you get turned down, oh well - just ask more people.
I have to disagree. Ask for a raise anytime you remember seeing a WHM wandering around (WHMs over level 25, that is) or a high-level RDM (over level 38). It helps you out by saving you a few XP, and it helps them out by giving them a chance to build up their casting skills. Sure, it's expensive, but the odds are good you won't get turned down. However, yeah, there's a limit-- don't bother asking before level 5 (you can easily get the lost XP back in one or two good fights). Additionally, make sure that if you see someone lying dead and not respawning, you should shout for a raise for that person. It's the nice thing to do.
Charge a reasonable amount for a teleport - and expect to pay for a teleport. Do not charge for a raise, heals or buffs!
Good points. One other thing to remember is that the Auction Houses may not be the best place to buy or sell your stuff. Let's say you're overloaded with useless stuff and you want to get rid of it. Set up your bazaar to sell the stuff at a far lower price (say, 50% to 75% of what the AH's average bid is) and sit down near the AH. Then go get yourself a sandwich or something-- take a break, but DON'T LOG OUT. When you come back, about an hour later, the odds are good you'll have sold at least a few things.
And expect us to laugh at you if you ask for money for a kit (complete set of equipment) when you start over with a level 1 job.
If you've lasted long enough to get to level 18, you should have an extra 2000 gil or so lying around. The lesson here is either save your newbie equipment or get real good at selling at the AH. On a related note, you could probably do better at the AH than the newbie vendor on the prices for the level 1 gear.
Allow me to add a couple more points:
Crystals are a good cash crop. You get crystals by having your country's military cast Signet on you, either just inside the city gates or at an outpost your country controls. Use Signet! While under the effects of signet, you can earn crystals in areas that your country controls. Additionally, you earn Conquest Points that can be exchanged for goodies by your military. But the crystals are really important. They're used for item synthesis. After a while you might want to concentrate on the more expensive crystals like Fire or Lightning, and start donating the Earth and Water crystals to the military to gain rank points.
To get a subjob item, you MUST party. For the Mhaura subjob quest, the Bloody Robe (dropped by Bogys) is typically the hardest to find. (not sure about the Selbina quest) You're sure to find a group willing to fight the appropriate enemies at any one time-- hang out either at the town's gates or near where the monster spawns.
Do not be a dickhead. I think the Friday Penny Arcade sums this point up nicely. "Normal guy + anonymity + audience = dickhead". You will find that if you have a reputation of being an ass, it will be very hard to find a party.
Follow sensibly. I was in a party where-- no lie-- we all wound up going in circles because everyone was following someone else. It was pretty amusing watching two mithra, three tarutaru, and one elvaan all chase each other around, but we got sick of it real fast. Agree on a leader or driver and go from there.
Oh yeah, have fun, too. It's a great game, but most of these rules are pretty common sense, which is probably why they're most violated.
Yes! Brilliant! After all, you don't need to store games that don't exist!
Two reasons: First, my hardware firewall is a hundred miles away packed in a box, and I don't want to leave my computer unprotected for a week till I go and get it; and second, I didn't think of it.
I lucked out. Got BlackIce patched right away, removed Norton and installed McAfee. Rebooted and I'm still here. All is well.
I still want to gut the motherfucker like a fish, but I'm calm enough now that I can take my time.
FUCK!
I just now (10 min ago) plugged my laptop into my brand new DSL modem... Now I have to install the antivirus program before rebooting... Shit shit shit...
I propose we introduce the death penalty on the sick motherfucker who wrote this fucking piece of shit virus. FUCK!
(And no, I haven't watched any Tarantino films lately)
Focused [game-only] publishers will always lead us in making the best games... --Scott Miller
Let's face it, Scott-- an illiterate dirt farmer from South Buttcrack, Arkansas could lead 3DRealms in making games. You're not telling us anything we don't already know.
Moreover, the Playstation was developed (initially, at least) in conjunction with Nintendo-- and anyone who says Nintendo isn't a gaming company is certainly on something mind-addling. Nokia developed the Ngage in a vacuum, and it shows (and suffered for it).
Easily solved. DirecTiVo, man.
Y'know, this is just a personal view here-- I haven't played a MUD in at least a year-- but the stance you guys are taking (ie turning a bad situation into something entertaining and attractive) is one I'd dearly love to see in more companies. I'd love for, say, Square-Enix to give players gil in their other games when the main FFXI server goes down for maintenance. But you guys did something really unique and interesting with what would otherwise be a major disaster. Good job.
Parent post is clearly a troll.
Nobody would willingly watch G4.
I'm getting the damn banner while trying to watch TNG. I DO NOT CARE because I'm not a Dish subscriber.
Neither am I, neither do I, but all the same we have all been trolled. Call them about it and they'll know it worked, that the message is out there. Dish is being equally retarded by not being up front about it and allowing the message to go by; how many calls have they got about the black scroll bar? How soon will it be before Viacom sets the message to go at random heights across the screen? It's irritating now, true, but just you wait. The shit has yet to really hit the fan.
I used to work for the cable company (not saying which one, but I'm sure you can guess based on past comments--please don't spoil it for anyone) and number one on my big list of questions was why, if the set-top digital receivers had all these fancy whizbangs for communications and PPV ordering, didn't the cable company use them to simplify stuff like tech support or channel selection? If you spend $1 million on customizing the firmware for your set-top box (a moot issue for mini-sat providers like Dish and DTV, which already use proprietary boxes) to allow customers to alter their channel lineups or fix their internet service via their boxes without ever picking up the phone, imagine the money you'd save on not having to pay overtime to the excessively-overworked phone monkeys! You could even turn the screw an extra half-inch by making the individual channels more expensive than buying the package (which is usually what happens anyway)! Make your customers happy and screw them over!
Here's a PROTIP: Drop some acid and you can experience "Eternal Darkness: The Home Game".
To the best of my knowledge, Samurai X is the name that was used the first time the series was localized for the US. In Japan (again, this is to the best of my knowledge, as I don't watch the series-- not a big fan of period pieces) the series was always called Ruroni Kenshin.
Why people are arguing this in a thread about Zelda is beyond me, but hey.
Now that I've stalled long enough to Google it, Samurai X is the (old) US name, before the people in charge of coming up with the name "Samurai X" were beaten, shot, and hanged. In that order.
...call me when this shoots beams when the wielder's at full hearts.
"Is it me or has the world gone completely apeshit?"
It's not you.
Depending on the size of the store, yeah, it can be. During the 'Cube/XBox launch, we had stacks of all three machines in the bathroom piled to the ceiling. This is because our store was about the size of your average hotel room, backroom included.
I salute you, comrade. I got out about fourteen months ago after very nearly being put on the fast track to management of the store.
I was never terribly fond of Morgan either-- never met the guy myself, but everyone I talked to who had all seemed to say his name like they'd say any other profanity.
[Gamers hired are] elist and will, quite undiplomatically, tell customers that the game that customer has brought to the counter "sucks."
Well, being one of those guys (hired because my answer to "what game systems have you played recently?" was "all of them" followed by naming them, in reverse alphabetical order), I can say that most of the time it was true. I also probably ought to mention that my managers always could count on me for overtime, closing, whatever. I wasn't perfect, mind you, but I knew my stuff and I worked my ass off. So maybe there's a combination of "gamer" and "salesman" out there that'll work. (To be fair-- the only reason I didn't wind up talking all day about games is because a) I never worked with other "gamer"-types and b) the ones I did work with all liked games I wasn't interested in. Oh yeah, and c) by the time I was through working there I was about this close to becoming completely anti-social and going to live on some hill in Tennessee.)
I think the EB I worked at was run extremely tightly, with an emphasis on professionalism, politeness, and gaming knowledge.
Incidentally, which store did you run? I was at the Millcreek Mall in Erie, PA and the Olean Center Mall in Olean, NY. I was about ready to strangle the GameDoctor guy by the end of six months. ^_^
When Diablo 2 was hot, EB near where I live had plenty of used copies in just the jewel case, shrink wrapped, with the product key showing. Nice way to jot down and get a legit code for playing a bootleg copy online. I couldn't believe EB was so stupid.
When I worked there, I caught on to that pretty quick and started double-shrinking stuff with "conveniently" placed price tags. My manager complained until I told him why I did it. He still wasn't happy about it until, on my recommendation, he bought a used game (Starcraft) that had been sitting there exposed for about a week and found he couldn't play online because the code was in use. He liked it after that. I did this primarily on the games I liked; some which I thought deserved to be stolen I just left. Who the hell is still buying those damned Deer Hunter games, anyway?
We don't take items that we even suspect are stolen. In fact, I turned down a nice mp3 player yesterday because I suspected it was stolen. I couldn't prove anything so I couldn't call the police, but I didn't take it either.
Looking at it from the perspective of an employee of EB for a year and a half, that was the precise lesson all four of my managers told me. If it looks, feels, or smells stolen, or even if you're not sure, make up a bullshit excuse and get the punk out of the store. This happened to me about five times during my time; one time the thief even threatened to call the cops on me because I was "discriminating against him" by refusing to take his ten games which coincidentally all were in Blockbuster containers. With the receipt stating the return date (three days prior) also stuck in one of them.
Your best bet for protection? Always right[sic] down serial numbers! It makes it 85% more likely that you will get your property back.
One problem with this-- few video games come with serial numbers anymore. Typically it's only the systems themselves which have s/ns, and even then the computer requires us to track 'em. Nintendo's recently been putting brochures with "redemption codes" in a few of their games, but it's just box spam that isn't attached to the cartridge or disc itself, so it's no good.
So don't go describing EB as a pawn shop. It isn't.
It wasn't, technically. Since now (at least at my local store in Olean, NY) EB can give cash for games, it falls under the category of "pawn shop" (in my admittedly non-lawyer dictionary). Previously EB got around having to have a pawn license by only issuing store credit.
I left EB because I got sick of having to deal with dishonest fucktards. Not ironically, I took a job in phone tech support immediately afterwards. I'm still looking for a new job.
Oh, and don't hate all the EB employees, please. Some of us-- well, maybe 15% of the clerks-- know what we're talking about and aren't actively trying to screw you over. Not all the time, anyway. ([Shadowcabbit] remembers the time he sold a Dreamcast to a grandmother who thought it was a portable game system.)
Agreed. UT2K3 worked just fine on my old P3 700 MHz and a GeForce2; boosting the RAM from 128 to 256 made it almost flawless. I'm now running a P4 2.8 GHz and 512 RAM with an onboard Intel graphics set and the game still runs beautifully; I imagine that uninstalling 2K3 to make room for 2K4 will cause no noticeable difference in performance (no broadband for the duration of my unemployment, so I haven't picked up the demo).
It's been my experience that missing one or two of the "minimum requirements" by a short amount (say, having a 733 MHz when it says 1 GHz) is still within acceptable limits when checking out. It's also been my experience that if a game's demo is out first, it does a hell of a lot in the way of allowing potential customers to gauge what they'll need. I applaud Atari and Epic for bothering to care about their customers, and you can bet that the next game I buy is going to be the deluxe DVD set.