Thankfully other countries are a bit more enlightened about it. They pay a 'workable' wage, and tips are for 'above and beyond'. Although, I still like the idea of a 'bribe me to prioritize' system:)
Different priorities - developers in my experience are always developing, and that tends to spill over and make 'live systems' unstable.
I know they hate going through testing, staging, production for every niggling little quick fix - I do too, as a sysadmin.
But where their priority is a 'quality bit of code', my priority is a stable system. So there's a conflict of interest, because I insist that nothing goes near production without exhaustive testing.
It does get easier, once you start to talk to each other and appreciate the different constraints - development does sometimes require 'messing around to see what happens', and so a 'development zone' is vitally important - you need a sandbox for your developers to experiment, and you need that sandbox isolated so e.g. someone installing a DHCP server doesn't totally hose your entire user base.
This pain I know. Every job I do 'in production' requires about an hour of paperwork, about two hours of sitting on a CAB. That's at bare minimum, if I'm _really_ lucky, I'll get to re-fill the form again a couple of times with more details, and have to represent at another CAB or two as well.
If a developer can quickly hack it to 'be right' then chances are I can too. However that's the tip of the iceberg, where the remainder is:
Have you tested it?
Will this change require a service outage?
Has your back out plan been tested, and is it achievable within the timescale of the change?
What is the impact, or possible impact to production services?
How will production services impacted be tested following the change?
In the event of an issue, does the change have a clear and tested backout plan
Does this change require additional capacity? If so, how will this be managed?
Timing justification - is the time you've selected the best time for the protection of the service?
Pre-requisites to the change?
Communications plan - confirm how you intend to notify the people impacted or potentially impacted by the change
Is there a comprehensive documented plan for live proving? If not, then explain why?
What is being done to evidence this change was successful?
What procedures and activities are in place to to confirm that all services potentially impacted are working correctly?
Is there a point of no return, after which a backout cannot be performed?
If you have to do a backout, does that mean a service outage?
Who is responsible for performing a backout?
Do you have adequate resources in place to perform a backout within the change window?
What risks are associated with the backout plan?
What period of monitoring is needed to verify the change is working as planned, and how do you intend to monitor it?
Justification - why do you need to do this change? (If in core hours, include why)
These are pretty much questions on our change requests. ALL of them. Even a 'it's one line in a sendmail.cf' type changes. And there's quite a few more, where similar questions are asked (like descriptions - technical and non technical of what you're doing, backout plans, communications plans etc.)
That's why it takes me a week to 'tweak' something - because this form has to go in, be approved by a bunch of people, be represented in a Change Advisory Board and... well, then I have to actually do it. And heaven help me if the change aborts part way for some reason, because then _next_ time I have to answer 'yes' to "has this change failed in the previous 18 months" and then undergo even more scrutiny.
Wish I had mod points, because your comment is insightful. If you 'keep the distance' from your colleagues, you'll gain hate, because people don't understand computers or you. If you have lunch with them, then you'll know them personally, and they'll feel a little more comfortable about talking to you about little IT problems, which have been annoying them.
Alternatively, make a point of going for a walk around each of the departments you support EVERY day, to say 'hi' and maybe see if everything's ok.
In my experience, most of the frustration with 'IT' is very often trivial problems, that escalate until they get annoyed enough to go see IT about it. By having a walk 'round the site, you'll spot these, have a bit of a chat, pick up on the 'my mouse is a bit odd' type problems, and get 'em sorted proactively. It sounds like slacking off - and to be fair, it is, sort of - but it's the kind that will end up with your IT department appreciated and welcomed. Call it 'user support clinic' or something, if you need to justify it.
It will also let you see the smouldering before a fire breaks out that you'll have to go pounce on and fix - usually users will be bitching to each other about something being 'a bit flakey' long before it gets to IT as a critical fault.
No. The answer is to give a realistic perspective on what's possible and what's not. In IT almost anything is _possible_ it's just some stuff is infeasibly expensive, or overly time consuming. That's the major reason why not every user gets admin rights - because the time and effort involved in keeping everything shiny increases greatly in that situation. Or why not every user gets the 500Tb of storage they think they deserve. But none the less, it's not _impossible_ to do these things - it just requires more resources.
By pointing out that that's the limiting factor in their request, you're left being a reasonable 'not-bofh', they leave content - because it's not your fault that they cannot have a shinything - and sometimes you do actually get the new resources you said you needed, when it's important enough. We work on a charging basis for storage - we assume a certain amount per user, and charge (their department) above and beyond that. We therefore don't end up in cockslapping matches with the user, we let them (and their manager) decide how important it is to them to have more disk storage than everyone else - and if it's important enough for them to cover our additional cost in installing, owning, running it, then... well, why should we care?
In the long run they wil lcome to realise that their place is a hostile working environment and managment will force their hand for staff to change their approach.
No, they won't. They'll just assume that everyone in IT is workshy and a layabout, and just can't 'hack it' in the real world.
Scotty had the right idea, just not really enough ambition to go with it.
Your personal task time estimates should always factor in 'contingency' and for that a factor of 4 or so is probably about right.
However you should also consider lead times, and bear in mind that every dependency has a lead time - chances are you can't start right now, but there's high odds of starting sometime this week. 5 days lead time.
Bear in mind that that lead time applies every time the request leaves your hands - if you have to pass it to another department, they'll have the same problem. If you need a part, then... same problem.
OK, so it makes the timescales involved look rather revolting (WTF?? 5 days to give me a new mouse??) but it's justifiable as "no, that's that we'll _always_ deliver you a mouse within 5 days. If we can do it faster, we will".
What's hilarious though is when these timescales start to merge and mesh, and turn into projects - your boss will pad numbers as well, for much the same reason. Project managers will do the same, and probably put a large 'day rate' on there too. So projects rapidly escalate in timescales and costs...
Self select 'urgent' only works if 'urgent' also incurs additional charges. Hammer out a standard service level, for a time at which you could usually turn around a request - include a realistic estimate, and bear in mind workload, and information you'll need to do the task. Y'know, if you're generally working on 5 days of 'backlog' then say it'll take 5 days to get around to their request.
Then allow 'urgent' to be specified, and be chargable - I would be stunned to find that there is no departmental cross charging in a company of any size - Enough to make it work the 'time lost' that you'd have by dropping everything and doing the request right now. (This too, can be justified to management as such).
And then, you'll find your 'urgents' vanish quickly, as your average blowhard 'I am very important' isn't actually as important as they think, and their manager isn't prepared to sign off trivial requests as 'urgent'.
Make it departmental chargable, make it clear to the user, and ask for a cost code and manager approval. If their boss agrees that it's a rush job, then fair enough. We do this for backup restores on a 'priority service' - it's because our tapes are offsite, and so we have to wait for the daily collection, or pay for a courier.
It's amazing how many 'this is urgent DO IT NOW' type requests disappear in this situation.
Depends how you define real advantage. I've got a reasonable cashflow, but have injected... a few GTCs over my time, into my wallet. Mostly because I have this bad habit of eyeing up new toys every time my wallet clears 200mil or so.
So technically speaking GTCs funded my carrier skills and a carrier itself.
Is that a 'real advantage' as you put it though? I could have done missions or market fiddled - and have done in the past, and since. Been playing EVE for... something like 5 years now, so over that time a large sum of isk has passed through my wallet.
*shrug*. That is mostly as you say, why it's not as bad as it could be - EVE isn't actually the sort of game where your 'bought' advantage is proportionate the the RL money you put into it.
Indeed. You still get gold farmers selling isks for RL cash, but it's against the EULA and so catches the ban stick when people do it. I wouldn't like to think what would happen if someone could 'cash in' their isks for real money - not least, because it'd mean that the developer would need to be able to 'cover' the size of their economy - but also because it _would_ attract the type of behaviour that would stop the game being a game - when you're talking about places with low hourly wages, comparative to the US (e.g. China) then you'll attract 'professionals' to your game, and that _will_ destroy it, because all the casual players will be shut out.
It happens, even today, to an extent - some people see the EULA as optional, buy from an isk seller website. But it would be much worse if it didn't have the GM team applying slappings to everyone who got caught doing it.
You're quite correct - generating free cash and injecting it into the economy causes a trickledown and inflates prices across the game. But at the same time, since EVE does have a lot of destruction in it's game, that's not as critical as it sounds - the more expensive fits people fly, the more isk is destroyed when it explodes, and the edge advantage granted by pimp fitting a ship is not particularly extreme - you can maybe take on 2-3 people of your sizeclass, but against any more you're still going to die.
Should comment on isk generation - market value of a 30 day PLEX is around 300mil. Mission running level 4s can generate up to 30mil an hour or so (varies a bit dependant on skills, equipment etc.). Mining in 0.0 is about the same, mining in highsec is... somewhat less than 10mil/hour.
However you can make cash much faster if you're smart and use the market or large scale industry.
Oh, and you don't need to buy 'cards' from CCP. Shattered Crystal is an example of one 3rd party retailer who will send you a Game Time CODE within about half an hour. In theory, the first time they validate that you are who you say, so it takes longer. In practice, they were very quick and effective.
Well, as a long time EVE player, I remember when trading cash for isks was forbidden by the EULA - and it still is, you can just work around it by selling game time codes for in game cash.
I have to say, the article seems to have missed one of the most effective ways of doing this - PLEXes (Pilot License Extensions) are tradable on the in game market - that's by far the most effective way of trading them these days. Head to Jita, list one for sale, and it'll probably have sold within the week - much less faff than using the forum, which... well, fundamentally it's a forum, so not that great for trading - particularly items like GTCs which are functionally identical, with a different price tag - the delay on them means that it's easy enough for buyers to request a bunch of buys off a bunch of different people, and only accept the most favourable.
I'm still in two minds as to whether it's a good thing or not - I don't like the fact that RL cash can have influence on the game, any more than I'd be happy that a chess player could whip out a credit card and buy an extra queen.
On the other hand, I do like that people on lower incomes can actually play EVE for 'free' (300mil isks/month isn't particularly hard to raise), and I do like the fact that someone with less 'free' time, because of an intensive job, can shortcut the direct 'run missions' or 'mine' to generate isks.
I think the reason it actually works in EVE, is because of the nature of the game - if you fork out a few billion isks on a really pimp fitted ship, then you'll get a nice ship, sure. If you don't know what you're doing, it'll die shockingly fast. Even if you do know what you're doing, it'll maybe be a match for 2-3 equivalent class ships, but no more. And you'll then provide someone with a juicy killmail, and a nice big pile of loot.
For PvE usage... yeah, it does skew the economy somewhat, and have some items worth... disporportionate prices, as people pimp their shiny toy (if it's good for mission running, the price is inflated to the point where it becomes even less viable to use in PvP). But barring that, the isolationist mission runner doesn't actually have much impact on the rest of the game, so whatever.
And it serves as a control mechanism on 'actual' RMT - by letting people 'trade' via GTCs, the game developer and thus the game itself benefits. Before that, you still had 'isk sellers', that'd elicit a ban if you got caught. Now... you have probably more 'small time' isk buyers and sellers, as people finance their account through mission running, but the tradeoff is, because they're doing so via GTCs, it means everyone who 'buys isks' also finance an extra player account, meaning more subscribers.
.... and more targets.
I usually know who's going to win based on the first stage. It's quite obvious which teams are cohesive and effective, and which ones aren't.
But then I find I actaully still quite enjoy being on the losing side. I don't ragequit when my team is losing, because I'm still having fun playing.
The reason it died, is because the first season and a half were mediocre, and it only really ramped up to 'being good' right towards the end of season 2.
As slow starters go, it's not really any suprise it's canned.
I am kind, polite and professional, even when someone is making stuff up and sticking tech words together because it makes them sound like they have a clue what they're talking about. However I'll also make certain assumptions about the kind of person they are.
I'm actaully fairly happy with the notion that a user might be ignorant about what they're using - you don't need to know how an engine functions to drive a car, nor do you need to know what's inside the case of your computer in order to use it.
As I work in IT support (ish anyway) I don't really mind if someone comes to me saying 'my computer isn't working'. I'll assume a relatively low level of understanding, and just get on with it, and maybe take some time to explain what was up and how it was fixed if they're interested.
But I do mind 'picking up words' that 'sound technical' because they think it makes them sound like they are more knowledgeable. Because then you've got to assume the same level of baseline experience, but this time without an accurate description of what is actually wrong.
I have to say I rather like the 'limited' weapon selection in L4D - in most FPS games, I find the weapons mostly exist to provide progression, and an artificial 'you must swap to the.... because you're out of ammo' sort of thing. Occasionally you'll get secondary weapons which are good for different tasks, like shooting across a level or something, but whatever. In Doom, I went through with the shotgun mostly, and the BFG for boss fights.
I have to say I think the selection of weapons in L4D is pretty good - the pistols are actually pretty handy as 'secondary' weapons - expecially if you're running with a shotgun, because they're more accurate - and the choice of M16/Shotgun/Hunting rifle is pretty good (Although I don't tend to see many people using hunting rifles) - because you're selecting weapons on a party basis, not on a 'I need every gun in my backpack' sort of basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Thankfully other countries are a bit more enlightened about it. They pay a 'workable' wage, and tips are for 'above and beyond'. Although, I still like the idea of a 'bribe me to prioritize' system :)
Different priorities - developers in my experience are always developing, and that tends to spill over and make 'live systems' unstable.
I know they hate going through testing, staging, production for every niggling little quick fix - I do too, as a sysadmin.
But where their priority is a 'quality bit of code', my priority is a stable system. So there's a conflict of interest, because I insist that nothing goes near production without exhaustive testing.
It does get easier, once you start to talk to each other and appreciate the different constraints - development does sometimes require 'messing around to see what happens', and so a 'development zone' is vitally important - you need a sandbox for your developers to experiment, and you need that sandbox isolated so e.g. someone installing a DHCP server doesn't totally hose your entire user base.
If a developer can quickly hack it to 'be right' then chances are I can too. However that's the tip of the iceberg, where the remainder is:
These are pretty much questions on our change requests. ALL of them. Even a 'it's one line in a sendmail.cf' type changes. And there's quite a few more, where similar questions are asked (like descriptions - technical and non technical of what you're doing, backout plans, communications plans etc.) ... well, then I have to actually do it. And heaven help me if the change aborts part way for some reason, because then _next_ time I have to answer 'yes' to "has this change failed in the previous 18 months" and then undergo even more scrutiny.
That's why it takes me a week to 'tweak' something - because this form has to go in, be approved by a bunch of people, be represented in a Change Advisory Board and
Wish I had mod points, because your comment is insightful. If you 'keep the distance' from your colleagues, you'll gain hate, because people don't understand computers or you. If you have lunch with them, then you'll know them personally, and they'll feel a little more comfortable about talking to you about little IT problems, which have been annoying them.
Alternatively, make a point of going for a walk around each of the departments you support EVERY day, to say 'hi' and maybe see if everything's ok.
In my experience, most of the frustration with 'IT' is very often trivial problems, that escalate until they get annoyed enough to go see IT about it. By having a walk 'round the site, you'll spot these, have a bit of a chat, pick up on the 'my mouse is a bit odd' type problems, and get 'em sorted proactively. It sounds like slacking off - and to be fair, it is, sort of - but it's the kind that will end up with your IT department appreciated and welcomed. Call it 'user support clinic' or something, if you need to justify it.
It will also let you see the smouldering before a fire breaks out that you'll have to go pounce on and fix - usually users will be bitching to each other about something being 'a bit flakey' long before it gets to IT as a critical fault.
No. The answer is to give a realistic perspective on what's possible and what's not. In IT almost anything is _possible_ it's just some stuff is infeasibly expensive, or overly time consuming. That's the major reason why not every user gets admin rights - because the time and effort involved in keeping everything shiny increases greatly in that situation. Or why not every user gets the 500Tb of storage they think they deserve. But none the less, it's not _impossible_ to do these things - it just requires more resources.
By pointing out that that's the limiting factor in their request, you're left being a reasonable 'not-bofh', they leave content - because it's not your fault that they cannot have a shinything - and sometimes you do actually get the new resources you said you needed, when it's important enough. We work on a charging basis for storage - we assume a certain amount per user, and charge (their department) above and beyond that. We therefore don't end up in cockslapping matches with the user, we let them (and their manager) decide how important it is to them to have more disk storage than everyone else - and if it's important enough for them to cover our additional cost in installing, owning, running it, then... well, why should we care?
No, they won't. They'll just assume that everyone in IT is workshy and a layabout, and just can't 'hack it' in the real world.
Scotty had the right idea, just not really enough ambition to go with it. ... same problem.
Your personal task time estimates should always factor in 'contingency' and for that a factor of 4 or so is probably about right.
However you should also consider lead times, and bear in mind that every dependency has a lead time - chances are you can't start right now, but there's high odds of starting sometime this week. 5 days lead time.
Bear in mind that that lead time applies every time the request leaves your hands - if you have to pass it to another department, they'll have the same problem. If you need a part, then
OK, so it makes the timescales involved look rather revolting (WTF?? 5 days to give me a new mouse??) but it's justifiable as "no, that's that we'll _always_ deliver you a mouse within 5 days. If we can do it faster, we will".
What's hilarious though is when these timescales start to merge and mesh, and turn into projects - your boss will pad numbers as well, for much the same reason. Project managers will do the same, and probably put a large 'day rate' on there too. So projects rapidly escalate in timescales and costs...
Self select 'urgent' only works if 'urgent' also incurs additional charges. Hammer out a standard service level, for a time at which you could usually turn around a request - include a realistic estimate, and bear in mind workload, and information you'll need to do the task. Y'know, if you're generally working on 5 days of 'backlog' then say it'll take 5 days to get around to their request.
Then allow 'urgent' to be specified, and be chargable - I would be stunned to find that there is no departmental cross charging in a company of any size - Enough to make it work the 'time lost' that you'd have by dropping everything and doing the request right now. (This too, can be justified to management as such).
And then, you'll find your 'urgents' vanish quickly, as your average blowhard 'I am very important' isn't actually as important as they think, and their manager isn't prepared to sign off trivial requests as 'urgent'.
Make it departmental chargable, make it clear to the user, and ask for a cost code and manager approval. If their boss agrees that it's a rush job, then fair enough. We do this for backup restores on a 'priority service' - it's because our tapes are offsite, and so we have to wait for the daily collection, or pay for a courier.
It's amazing how many 'this is urgent DO IT NOW' type requests disappear in this situation.
Depends how you define real advantage. I've got a reasonable cashflow, but have injected... a few GTCs over my time, into my wallet. Mostly because I have this bad habit of eyeing up new toys every time my wallet clears 200mil or so. ... something like 5 years now, so over that time a large sum of isk has passed through my wallet.
So technically speaking GTCs funded my carrier skills and a carrier itself.
Is that a 'real advantage' as you put it though? I could have done missions or market fiddled - and have done in the past, and since. Been playing EVE for
*shrug*. That is mostly as you say, why it's not as bad as it could be - EVE isn't actually the sort of game where your 'bought' advantage is proportionate the the RL money you put into it.
Indeed. You still get gold farmers selling isks for RL cash, but it's against the EULA and so catches the ban stick when people do it. I wouldn't like to think what would happen if someone could 'cash in' their isks for real money - not least, because it'd mean that the developer would need to be able to 'cover' the size of their economy - but also because it _would_ attract the type of behaviour that would stop the game being a game - when you're talking about places with low hourly wages, comparative to the US (e.g. China) then you'll attract 'professionals' to your game, and that _will_ destroy it, because all the casual players will be shut out.
It happens, even today, to an extent - some people see the EULA as optional, buy from an isk seller website. But it would be much worse if it didn't have the GM team applying slappings to everyone who got caught doing it.
You're quite correct - generating free cash and injecting it into the economy causes a trickledown and inflates prices across the game. But at the same time, since EVE does have a lot of destruction in it's game, that's not as critical as it sounds - the more expensive fits people fly, the more isk is destroyed when it explodes, and the edge advantage granted by pimp fitting a ship is not particularly extreme - you can maybe take on 2-3 people of your sizeclass, but against any more you're still going to die.
Should comment on isk generation - market value of a 30 day PLEX is around 300mil. Mission running level 4s can generate up to 30mil an hour or so (varies a bit dependant on skills, equipment etc.). Mining in 0.0 is about the same, mining in highsec is ... somewhat less than 10mil/hour.
However you can make cash much faster if you're smart and use the market or large scale industry.
Oh, and you don't need to buy 'cards' from CCP. Shattered Crystal is an example of one 3rd party retailer who will send you a Game Time CODE within about half an hour. In theory, the first time they validate that you are who you say, so it takes longer. In practice, they were very quick and effective.
Well, as a long time EVE player, I remember when trading cash for isks was forbidden by the EULA - and it still is, you can just work around it by selling game time codes for in game cash. ... well, fundamentally it's a forum, so not that great for trading - particularly items like GTCs which are functionally identical, with a different price tag - the delay on them means that it's easy enough for buyers to request a bunch of buys off a bunch of different people, and only accept the most favourable.
... disporportionate prices, as people pimp their shiny toy (if it's good for mission running, the price is inflated to the point where it becomes even less viable to use in PvP). But barring that, the isolationist mission runner doesn't actually have much impact on the rest of the game, so whatever.
... you have probably more 'small time' isk buyers and sellers, as people finance their account through mission running, but the tradeoff is, because they're doing so via GTCs, it means everyone who 'buys isks' also finance an extra player account, meaning more subscribers.
.... and more targets.
I have to say, the article seems to have missed one of the most effective ways of doing this - PLEXes (Pilot License Extensions) are tradable on the in game market - that's by far the most effective way of trading them these days. Head to Jita, list one for sale, and it'll probably have sold within the week - much less faff than using the forum, which
I'm still in two minds as to whether it's a good thing or not - I don't like the fact that RL cash can have influence on the game, any more than I'd be happy that a chess player could whip out a credit card and buy an extra queen.
On the other hand, I do like that people on lower incomes can actually play EVE for 'free' (300mil isks/month isn't particularly hard to raise), and I do like the fact that someone with less 'free' time, because of an intensive job, can shortcut the direct 'run missions' or 'mine' to generate isks.
I think the reason it actually works in EVE, is because of the nature of the game - if you fork out a few billion isks on a really pimp fitted ship, then you'll get a nice ship, sure. If you don't know what you're doing, it'll die shockingly fast. Even if you do know what you're doing, it'll maybe be a match for 2-3 equivalent class ships, but no more. And you'll then provide someone with a juicy killmail, and a nice big pile of loot.
For PvE usage... yeah, it does skew the economy somewhat, and have some items worth
And it serves as a control mechanism on 'actual' RMT - by letting people 'trade' via GTCs, the game developer and thus the game itself benefits. Before that, you still had 'isk sellers', that'd elicit a ban if you got caught. Now
I'm not sure, some people seem to have mist the point.
But oddly, Dune 2000 sucked, where Dune 2 still doesn't.
I liked Dune Emperor mind...
Odd. We replaced all our incandescents with CFLs when we moved in 5 years ago, and haven't had to replace any.
Aren't '100w equivalent' energy saver bulbs like 15w though? Makes their 60 watt -> 100 watt not look so impressive.
I usually know who's going to win based on the first stage. It's quite obvious which teams are cohesive and effective, and which ones aren't.
But then I find I actaully still quite enjoy being on the losing side. I don't ragequit when my team is losing, because I'm still having fun playing.
The reason it died, is because the first season and a half were mediocre, and it only really ramped up to 'being good' right towards the end of season 2.
As slow starters go, it's not really any suprise it's canned.
When was the last time you saw persistent 'memory' on a PC? I don't think I ever have.
I am kind, polite and professional, even when someone is making stuff up and sticking tech words together because it makes them sound like they have a clue what they're talking about. However I'll also make certain assumptions about the kind of person they are.
I'm actaully fairly happy with the notion that a user might be ignorant about what they're using - you don't need to know how an engine functions to drive a car, nor do you need to know what's inside the case of your computer in order to use it.
As I work in IT support (ish anyway) I don't really mind if someone comes to me saying 'my computer isn't working'. I'll assume a relatively low level of understanding, and just get on with it, and maybe take some time to explain what was up and how it was fixed if they're interested.
But I do mind 'picking up words' that 'sound technical' because they think it makes them sound like they are more knowledgeable. Because then you've got to assume the same level of baseline experience, but this time without an accurate description of what is actually wrong.
I have to say I rather like the 'limited' weapon selection in L4D - in most FPS games, I find the weapons mostly exist to provide progression, and an artificial 'you must swap to the .... because you're out of ammo' sort of thing. Occasionally you'll get secondary weapons which are good for different tasks, like shooting across a level or something, but whatever. In Doom, I went through with the shotgun mostly, and the BFG for boss fights.
I have to say I think the selection of weapons in L4D is pretty good - the pistols are actually pretty handy as 'secondary' weapons - expecially if you're running with a shotgun, because they're more accurate - and the choice of M16/Shotgun/Hunting rifle is pretty good (Although I don't tend to see many people using hunting rifles) - because you're selecting weapons on a party basis, not on a 'I need every gun in my backpack' sort of basis.
2s in the microwave first. It's awesome to microwave CDs for just a couple of seconds.