If you're going to attempt to be a pretentious smart ass, please take, at the very least, a cursory glance at what you're talking about, lest you sound neither pretentious nor smart. This is not a free patch. It is a paid-for expansion pack.
I'm not buying it because of this. But as to how long that will last, I don't know. Sometimes you've gotta wonder what it's worth when, as you say, the majority of people just bend over and take what their given, and in the end you just miss out on the good stuff and don't achieve anything.
I mean, I was like this with Steam. And then I read the other week that Steam sales are through the roof.
The marketing people at Valve must have seriously signed a deal with the devil to get gamers to on the one hand to insist that DRM is bad and then, in some cases in the same sentence, to suggest that Steam is the future.
So I decided to give in and bought Dawn of War 2 during the sale. The mocking from my gamer friends has yet to cease.
The galaxies, which are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away, are 10 times smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy and 100 times less massive. But surprisingly, given their small size, they are forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way.
Isn't there some sort of theory about time and it's constant slowing or something? If something appears 5 billion light years away and yet appears to be forming stars 10 times faster than our local system, could that not be somehow relevant to the passage of time either 5 billion years in the past?
If you can't read this because, when I press post, the entire universe changes into something completely new, then I'll know that this means that I was right and that I fucking solved it.
If you can read this line, then let it be known that I've had a lot of coffee this morning, and very little food. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
As I said, I'm currently unemployed. My choice now is to either not play games, or to pirate games. I mostly choose to not play games, but the effect on the developer is the same -- they don't get my money.
implied to me that you pirated games because you couldn't afford them. Which is where most of my ranting crap came from.
This is arguing on the internet, who is really reading what the other person is saying anyway?
This is the most heavily deluded thing I've read in a while. Companies would rather you pirate a game than not play it? You can justify not paying for games because you don't have the money to pay for games? Interesting, but only as an insight into the mindset of a pirate from the generation that believes that they are entitled to everything for nothing.
You can only "make the legitimate copy of game better than the pirated one" with physical trinkets, the type that come with special editions. There are special editions for so many games nowadays that it's getting harder to justify calling them special editions, and yet games are still pirated to death. Besides, if the special stuff is a soundtrack CD or making of disc, you can pirate that anyway. Art books can be scanned and included in the torrent with a pdf. So we're down to figurines, and if every game requires one, you can see the quality of those dropping through the floor pretty damn quickly and we'll be back to square one before you know it.
It's funny, because if you try and stop piracy with insane DRM (like Steam, Securom, TAGES etc - and yes, I did include a list in brackets purely so I could list Steam), people will use it as as an excuse to pirate games. But if you did nothing about the ability to easily copy games; if you just made it so the game could be installed from the disc and you'd never need it again, then you'd encourage a whole other set of people to pirate games because it's so easy to, so why bother paying. They can't win either way. The answer is to not pirate games, it's the only answer, and it's been the only answer, ever. And it's all because the anti-piracy stuff was created as a response to the piracy, not the other way around. For the life of me I'll never understand why people don't get this.
Seriously. Don't pirate any games at all. Nothing. And if a game comes out and you can't afford it, don't buy it. With no piracy to see, and games that review well simply not selling, the answer falls to game prices. Prices fall everyones happy. I'm sure it's not that simple, but it can't be that far off.
Then again, you appeared to equate a game under Steam to that game not having DRM, so I can see that reality and logic aren't going to be at the forefront of any discussion here.
It depends on what the OP enjoys though. It was basically a Zelda clone, and personally I can't tolerate the Zelda series, and jumped into Beyond Good and Evil after hearing about how awesome it was and just being quickly disappointed. Of course in hindsight people talk about the Zelda games as being some sort of perfection as well, something I would obviously not agree with, so I should have been more careful and actually had a good look at the game itself. But I think that in the case of Beyond Good and Evil it was a similar one to say, Psychonauts; it's 'cool' to say how awesome Psychonauts game is, but when you get down and actually play it, you're playing a pretty ordinary platformer that happens to have a strange/interesting setting.
This isn't insightful at all. Final Fantasy (which I hate, I feel I should say), is a different setting, characters, story, each time. You can't 'reboot' Final Fantasy because the games are connected in their developer and gameplay style only. And gameplay style is apparently one of the aspects the OP wants the change. So if you want less cheesy characters and darker subject matter and more free-form interactions, you jump to the Shin Megami Tensei / Digital Devil Saga series on PS2. Although if you want non-turn-based combat options, you obviously don't want a JRPG/Final Fantasy game anyway, so a reboot is even less relevant here.
Was there any way to turn off the auto-aiming in that game? I really liked it in theory, and even in gameplay, to a certain extent. But the auto-aiming could not be removed and it drove me crazy. Never could find a fix for that.
I get the team together for the monthly software dev meeting in group chat while running Stratholme. It's a pain because the QA guy told us he was going to roll a priest but he rocked up with his hunter (and rolls on fucking EVERYTHING) so now when someone gets Cadaver Worms it means they can't heal for 10 minutes and it puts a drag on proceedings. You think that meetings seem to take forever normally? Try it when the tank can't regenerate health.
And of for course the weekly updates on project progress, I just pick a random TF2 server and we all jump on there and have a quick chat to keep up to date. It's easier to break for sanviches that way as well. Generally you have to read between the lines, and by between the lines I mean the ones that say WLL U FGTS STFU PLS. But we still get the work done.
Is this like being able to tell if the TV is on in another room, even if the console/dvd player that it's plugged into is turned off? So the screen is on, but black and mute. Because I assumed everyone always got bugged by that really low hum, and never thought anything of it.
For the most part pointless, they apparently spend most of their time trying to come up with new crap in order to try and justify their existence, and are often only noticed when people mock the next stupid thing they've come up with.
And yes, I was so gutless I waited until I got home to post this, just in case someone else from the ^H^H^H... ahhhh, you nearly got me there.
I've been reading bullshit arguments about how we shouldn't go to other planets before we've got things sussed back home for so long I just skip that crap nowadays, and through all that time it's taken this long for someone to actually come up with a brilliant and meaningful argument other than feeding the poor or some other humanitarian garbage. For what it's worth (nothing), I'm impressed.
... by sufficently primitive people. It's quite amazing to see, but also quite freaky at the same time. I can imagine people who didn't understand the concept of planets and moons and the sun and how they all fit together to find this sort of thing as indicative of some greater event. I suppose you'd also have to have quite a self-centered view of the universe to believe that way, but I guess that's part and parcel with not understanding what is going on; if you don't get it, assume it's all about you.
Yes, the Diablo games are terriible, horrible, hardly even 'game' games, but WoW is basically true 3D Diablo-game with a Warcraft Total Conversion mod, in case you weren't aware. You'll spend all your time simply clicking buttons and waiting for cooldowns much like Diablo. Once you actually start to notice this, it becomes very painful to play. WoW just has a few bits outside of combat, and combat isn't quite as click/dead/loot/click/dead/loot as Diablo, but it's not far off.
Yeah I have to admit, I still make sure I always stop and laugh repeatedly at anyone prancing around on that cat mount from Winterspring that required about 400 turn ins of that stupid cat meat quest. You're paying $15 a month and hours of your life for that? That's borderline depressing.
This is a really good point. One of the first things I've noticed about my waning desire to play WoW is that solo the game is absolutely terrible, and it always has been, it's just that at the start the addiction was heavy and I didn't notice as much. Last weekend I spent most of my time in Morrowind instead, and the difference in the two games is just amazing (duh). I've complained in the past (to no one in particular, I've just complained) about the lack of a solid single player experience in an MMO but, quite frankly, I'd probably be happier if for them to purely focus on making everything as multiplayer as possible, if this is the best single player they can muster. Single player and MMO simply don't work together, any attempt appears transparent and lame, and the old MMO requirements come back to haunt the experience every time. The new phasing crap in WoW just means that helping out friends that haven't done specific quests just mean that they are attacked by things you simply can't see, and quests involving NPCs are such a waste of time because, just in case you didn't think it possible, the lack of risk and challenge was lowered even further than before by completely overpowered helpers that did all the work while you just stood around and waited for it to finish.
On the other hand, in my new game of Morrowind, I joined the mages guild, joined the thieves guild, which are full of different people and varied quests. I was tasked to collect mushrooms initially (sigh), but then I was told to was to slip a fake soul gem into someones desk, then travel to a distant area and either convince a man to join the guild, or kill him. I was also asked to steal a diamond from someone, and procure a house key via whatever means available to me from a particular person, be it stealth, violence or my smooth tongue. During this I was attacked by Dark Brotherhood agents, and in the process of tracing them to their source, found a man who had stolen some magical armor from the local Duke. I lured the man underwater, where I paralysed him until he drowned, taking his magical armor and the other magical weapons he had stashed. That diamond is now permanently gone from that vendor. That man is now permanently floating near the underwater entrance to his cave. The key is no longer with the servant. If I loiter around long enough to guy won't disappear from the water and reappear at the back of the cave for the next loser. The key won't magically come back to the guys pocket, the diamond is forever in the hands of the thieves guild leader. The guy I locked in a downstairs room before testing my paralyse/bash-him-over-the-head-with-my-summonded-sword strategy is... well, he is gone for good too. But the game world has changed. Permanently.
And I've realised that the trade off between being able to permanently change the game world, or help a friend find a dirt mount behind a farm once owner by a guy now camping by a river, only to have the dirt mound never disappear, the man never move on from his camp, and the bad guys that were loitering around the farm to magically reappear a few minutes after us killing them, is a trade off I'm happy to make. And thats before we even consider the fact that I don't have the option to just murder the man himself for whatever he was intending to give me instead of running his errands.
I'm not really making a point, but seriously, 2 player co-op Morrowind would be completely fucking amazing.
I still don't understand how a user rating system will remove subjectivity from other developers. The stories I've heard from the submission process so far has involved people making similar games trying to get games rejected by picking on the tiniest little thing. Surely having to at least come up with a reasoning behind a rejecting is a bit more transparent than generic user ratings with no explanation behind them? I don't like the content of a book on amazon. After logging in, a single click later, and I've affected the rating for that book in the negative, with no responsibility and no requirement to back up my one-star rating. If I'm forced to give a short reason as to why I gave it one star, that can then be itself reviewed by other people, surely the process is stronger and safer for it.
Either that or I'm completely missing the point here.
The absolute worst kind of cat owner is the ones that let kitty roam the neighborhood free. That is wrong and incredibly rude. Kiltty can die or get hurt in tons of ways many a cat hater leaves out bowls of antifreeze to kill kitties that enter their yard, and letting them piss and crap all over the neighborhood is simply being a jerk.
Yeah this is why I love cats, but I'm not a big fan of other cat owners. I've lived in three rental properties over three years, and at two out of the three we've had problems with other idiot's cats. Back when I lived with my parents I lost three cats to the fact that there were allowed outside overnight / not allowed to stay inside (Father's orders... "You can just get another cat"... enough said), so now that I'm part of the control system, myself and my wife only let our cats outside under full supervision. But we've had issues with other people's cats constantly. One of our cats was attacked by someone elses cat that had come into our yard, and that was one of two cats that would sit at our windows and freak out out cats in our own home. We had another male cat on heat piss on our door and car because we have two female cats. We had a party once, with the back doors open the whole day (the cats were locked in a back room), and a neighbours cat came into our house and slept on our couch and loitered around our porch for the next two days. We were nearly going to keep it, but then it just up and left. I don't have a hard time imagining that it was someone that had gone on a weekend holiday and decided to leave the cat outside the whole time. Pathetic.
But the worst I ever heard was a friend whose cat's neck was broken by a neighbour and just chucked back over the fence. I consider it rude to let your cat run free in other people's yards, but short of throwing screwed up bits of foil or trying to hit them with the hose or simply running at them to scare them away, I would never hurt someone elses cat, regardless of how big a jerk the owners are.
I do find it amazing, and quite disturbing that it's seemingly quite acceptable and humourous to talk about killing or hurting cats, maybe it's a 'manly' thing, I don't know, but for all the "Lost your cat? Check my tyres" and "The only good cat is a flat cat" car stickers I've never seen any that suggest hurting dogs.
I was hardly trolling or I would have got an instant negative mod. Mods just left it because it was true but didn't want to see me get flamed into oblivion by WoW fanboys like yourself that can't take any kind of criticism of your beloved game.
This is just amazing. You really are in some fantasy world where you're this all knowing fountain of gaming knowledge aren't you? This is better than I thought. A true post gets insightful mods. Your incredible self delusion that a post left at 1 is not simply because no one is reading it but actually because the mods know it's the truth but don't want to see it sullied by... positive karma? is just amazing. I don't really know what to say, but anyway, picture me reading that with slack jaw and a head slowing turning side to side in pity.
Shit like yours gets left at 1 because no one reads it. This is mainly because criticising WoW is what all the pseudo-intellectuals do, because itâ(TM)s such an easy target, and shooting fish in a barrel doesnâ(TM)t make for insightful or interesting reading. The same garbage is re-hashed over and over, when is issue people are taking to task are the core elements of a streamlined, casual MMO. Yours is there with the people that shit up these comments with stuff like telling people to go outside and get a life. People that play MMOs want to have an easy game experience where they can feel a sense of achievement for a lower level of input than a proper RPG. Thatâ(TM)s the whole point of the game, and if your main arguments are that MMOs arenâ(TM)t enough like single player, dynamically changing RPGs then youâ(TM)re going to have find little argument because youâ(TM)re not making an actual valid point. All people can do is take issue with the fact that youâ(TM)re completely missing the point, and that your trolling bullshit is just that, at which point people are apparently just getting defensive about their beloved game. Describing people calling you out for being stupid as WoW fanboys that canâ(TM)t take criticism of their game makes it sound like you just dribble shit and go la-la-la-canâ(TM)t hear at any responses.
You want to blame someone? Blame the action-RPG. Blame Blizzard, but blame them for Diablo, not WoW. WoW is little more than a 3D client for a Diablo game model, but with quests tacked on so itâ(TM)s isnâ(TM)t as transparent an XP grind. Action-RPGs are the bane of the core-RPG existence, and MMOs just allow everyone else to see your purple gear instead of you gently caressing the screen by yourself. The funny thing is that the action-RPG genre like Diablo or Titanâ(TM)s Quest is much more lowest common denominator than your standard MMO, itâ(TM)s just bare bones kill/loot/kill with no interesting background outside of âStay a while and listenâ, yet that phrase is known much more than anything Minsc might say. Yet dumping shit on MMOs is what all the blowhards do because it makes them feel like theyâ(TM)re making a point - when they really arenâ(TM)t - because they are much more popular in the general gaming, and casual gaming, population.
I had my âoesick of bullshit on the internetâ release with my first response, so I canâ(TM)t be bothered going any further than this. We argued on the internet, so, just like the special olympics, even though you believe you won (and that the mods donâ(TM)t +1 you because of ⦠I just canâ(TM)t get over the fact that you believe that, have I just fallen for an amazingly good troll?), from the outside looking in, weâ(TM)re both so very retarded.
Ha ha ha do I need to comment on the fact that youâ(TM)re now +1 and Iâ(TM)m flamebait. OH NO THIS MUST MEAN THE MODS DONâ(TM)T AGREE WITH YOU, or something. How does this work in your fantasy world again?
I'm not sure how I came to read your shit dribbling because it's only at 1 as I'm responding to this. But it's Monday morning and I'll be damned if I don't waste time responding to this instead of getting on with the working day. Also, you've trolled blatantly in spots so don't be surprised when I act like a dick back to you.
You apparently understand how MMOs struggle to tell a coherent story given the nature of the game-style, you said it yourself, so you obviously are just a standard WoW-basher, which is really sweet and all, but here we go anyway.
RTS games are good at story telling because they are inherently linear games. I'm sorry if you don't have a damn clue WTF is going on, I can only assume you struggle with books - that is, assuming you read - that tell more than one story at the same time, jumping between plot lines in order to allow the advancement of characters not in the same place at the same time. MMOs have the added issue that the direction of the story is dictated by which quests the player takes. Find me an RTS that allows you to skip possibly important plot/story points because you decided not to play a certain mission. There is plenty of story in WoW, it's just that the majority of it is reading, and obviously a lot of the more "You need to do this to get more exp for your character" missions that are a standard in all RPGs are more common in an MMO, and for the idiot casual gamer that just wants to get on with the killing and looting that can be a problem.
Maybe those people should be playing that most brain-dead of genres, the action-RPG. If you want the perfect "awful gaming tastes" and mindless "I just want to click on things until they are dead, loot and move on" garbage, then a game like Diablo is perfect. The problem with World of Warcraft for a lot of people is the sheer amount of story they want to tell. It was one of the first patches that implemented the ability to skip through quest dialog that used to scroll smoothly in its reveal, under the assumption that you wanted to read it all. Some of us do; many people don't.
WoW is a really crap MMO from a lot of standpoints? None of which you make. And it doesn't hold a candle to single player games like Warcraft and Starcraft in terms of something completely subjective, like fun? And a generic 'quality' descriptor. Gosh man, you're hitting home with the well established and backed up points here. You give someone shit further down for having no points, but you're just throwing out empty generic statements as though they are establishing some iron clad argument, dusting your hands off and patting yourself on the back for a job well done. You aren't 'doing any details' for some other dude in your circle jerk to 'condense into a powerful phrase', which by the way, was the biggest wankery of a post I think I've seen on this place in a long time.
I suppose if you suspect people that play WoW have really awful gaming tastes, then it must be true. And I'm sure many people laughed when reading that you call it the "bottom feeders" MMO. I bet you like to use that phrase a lot, thinking that you are showing those damn WoW players, and telling it your friends before sitting back and crossing your arms; king dick because your opinions on gaming are that much more valid, and that everyone else feels that much worse because they don't have your approval. Some people make valid points and coherent arguments and take part in reasonable discussions about the positives and negatives of a certain game or genre. Some people claim absolutes on subjective factors, and paint incredibly broad strokes with their huge retard brush and think that people care. I'm short on sleep and high on coffee, and I read utter garbage like yours on a daily basis, and sometimes I can't just move on without leaving them to fester in their own stupidity, and this is the result.
And here comes the millionth moron to call out WoW for cartoony graphics, not realising that part of the appeal of the game is that the graphics arenâ(TM)t requiring
Yeah, I have to agree with you here. Normally unless a game is first person I simply cannot be scared by it. But playing the UFO/XCOM games, I could seriously creep myself out, and leave myself on edge for ages. Those games really did do something amazing given you are looking down on an isometric battlefield at small figures of the men in your team (not even a representation of yourself), and still be holding your breath during the aliens turn in the fear that one will appear around the corner.
This is marked as interesting, but isn't this the exact line of thinking that we endlessly mock? Violence doesn't bother you because, well, no one is going to kill anyone hurr, that never happens.But OMG KIDS MIGHT WANT TO HAVE SEX THIS IS TERRIBLE WE HAVE TO STOP THEM SEEING THIS.
It's still about control then, surely. Sex is considered more 'seductive' than violence because it's not overtly illegal. Yet. You can't go out and hit/shoot/kill someone because that's against the law, so sure, let people watch people murder other people because that's fine, they aren't actually allowed to do it anyway. But let them watch sex? But... but, that might make them curious about what it's like and then they might actually go have sex and that would be... bad? I guess? Because we can't directly control that, maybe?I don't know, it's not my own stupid point I'm trying to back up here.
Then there is the awesome logic that I've heard where violence is okay because violence is a fact of life and kids need to be exposed to what can happen. But sex isn't?
I really do have trouble getting my head around all this crap.
Seeing as apparently no one is going to follow the second link that talks about it, this is the massive block of text you have to wade through on that page to get that information, after going through the arduous effort of a mouse click:)
7/09/2009
MechWarrior to be Distributed Free on BattleTech.com
In honor of BattleTech's 25th anniversary, Smith & Tinker has authorized MekTek.net and MekTek Studios to distribute MechWarrior 4 (along with its expansion packs) completely free. For years, MekTek.net has been the central point for online distribution of MechWarrior 4 expansion packs. Now they can provide the core game free to the fans as well. Keep an eye on BattleTech.com â" the free download will be available soon!
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If you're going to attempt to be a pretentious smart ass, please take, at the very least, a cursory glance at what you're talking about, lest you sound neither pretentious nor smart. This is not a free patch. It is a paid-for expansion pack.
I'm not buying it because of this. But as to how long that will last, I don't know. Sometimes you've gotta wonder what it's worth when, as you say, the majority of people just bend over and take what their given, and in the end you just miss out on the good stuff and don't achieve anything.
I mean, I was like this with Steam. And then I read the other week that Steam sales are through the roof.
The marketing people at Valve must have seriously signed a deal with the devil to get gamers to on the one hand to insist that DRM is bad and then, in some cases in the same sentence, to suggest that Steam is the future.
So I decided to give in and bought Dawn of War 2 during the sale. The mocking from my gamer friends has yet to cease.
The galaxies, which are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away, are 10 times smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy and 100 times less massive. But surprisingly, given their small size, they are forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way.
Isn't there some sort of theory about time and it's constant slowing or something? If something appears 5 billion light years away and yet appears to be forming stars 10 times faster than our local system, could that not be somehow relevant to the passage of time either 5 billion years in the past?
If you can't read this because, when I press post, the entire universe changes into something completely new, then I'll know that this means that I was right and that I fucking solved it.
If you can read this line, then let it be known that I've had a lot of coffee this morning, and very little food. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
My apologies, but the 'mostly' in :
As I said, I'm currently unemployed. My choice now is to either not play games, or to pirate games. I mostly choose to not play games, but the effect on the developer is the same -- they don't get my money.
implied to me that you pirated games because you couldn't afford them. Which is where most of my ranting crap came from.
This is arguing on the internet, who is really reading what the other person is saying anyway?
This is the most heavily deluded thing I've read in a while. Companies would rather you pirate a game than not play it? You can justify not paying for games because you don't have the money to pay for games? Interesting, but only as an insight into the mindset of a pirate from the generation that believes that they are entitled to everything for nothing.
You can only "make the legitimate copy of game better than the pirated one" with physical trinkets, the type that come with special editions. There are special editions for so many games nowadays that it's getting harder to justify calling them special editions, and yet games are still pirated to death. Besides, if the special stuff is a soundtrack CD or making of disc, you can pirate that anyway. Art books can be scanned and included in the torrent with a pdf. So we're down to figurines, and if every game requires one, you can see the quality of those dropping through the floor pretty damn quickly and we'll be back to square one before you know it.
It's funny, because if you try and stop piracy with insane DRM (like Steam, Securom, TAGES etc - and yes, I did include a list in brackets purely so I could list Steam), people will use it as as an excuse to pirate games. But if you did nothing about the ability to easily copy games; if you just made it so the game could be installed from the disc and you'd never need it again, then you'd encourage a whole other set of people to pirate games because it's so easy to, so why bother paying. They can't win either way. The answer is to not pirate games, it's the only answer, and it's been the only answer, ever. And it's all because the anti-piracy stuff was created as a response to the piracy, not the other way around. For the life of me I'll never understand why people don't get this.
Seriously. Don't pirate any games at all. Nothing. And if a game comes out and you can't afford it, don't buy it. With no piracy to see, and games that review well simply not selling, the answer falls to game prices. Prices fall everyones happy. I'm sure it's not that simple, but it can't be that far off.
Then again, you appeared to equate a game under Steam to that game not having DRM, so I can see that reality and logic aren't going to be at the forefront of any discussion here.
It depends on what the OP enjoys though. It was basically a Zelda clone, and personally I can't tolerate the Zelda series, and jumped into Beyond Good and Evil after hearing about how awesome it was and just being quickly disappointed. Of course in hindsight people talk about the Zelda games as being some sort of perfection as well, something I would obviously not agree with, so I should have been more careful and actually had a good look at the game itself. But I think that in the case of Beyond Good and Evil it was a similar one to say, Psychonauts; it's 'cool' to say how awesome Psychonauts game is, but when you get down and actually play it, you're playing a pretty ordinary platformer that happens to have a strange/interesting setting.
This isn't insightful at all. Final Fantasy (which I hate, I feel I should say), is a different setting, characters, story, each time. You can't 'reboot' Final Fantasy because the games are connected in their developer and gameplay style only. And gameplay style is apparently one of the aspects the OP wants the change. So if you want less cheesy characters and darker subject matter and more free-form interactions, you jump to the Shin Megami Tensei / Digital Devil Saga series on PS2. Although if you want non-turn-based combat options, you obviously don't want a JRPG/Final Fantasy game anyway, so a reboot is even less relevant here.
Was there any way to turn off the auto-aiming in that game? I really liked it in theory, and even in gameplay, to a certain extent. But the auto-aiming could not be removed and it drove me crazy. Never could find a fix for that.
I just don't think you get it.
I get the team together for the monthly software dev meeting in group chat while running Stratholme. It's a pain because the QA guy told us he was going to roll a priest but he rocked up with his hunter (and rolls on fucking EVERYTHING) so now when someone gets Cadaver Worms it means they can't heal for 10 minutes and it puts a drag on proceedings. You think that meetings seem to take forever normally? Try it when the tank can't regenerate health.
And of for course the weekly updates on project progress, I just pick a random TF2 server and we all jump on there and have a quick chat to keep up to date. It's easier to break for sanviches that way as well. Generally you have to read between the lines, and by between the lines I mean the ones that say WLL U FGTS STFU PLS. But we still get the work done.
Is this like being able to tell if the TV is on in another room, even if the console/dvd player that it's plugged into is turned off? So the screen is on, but black and mute. Because I assumed everyone always got bugged by that really low hum, and never thought anything of it.
For the most part pointless, they apparently spend most of their time trying to come up with new crap in order to try and justify their existence, and are often only noticed when people mock the next stupid thing they've come up with.
And yes, I was so gutless I waited until I got home to post this, just in case someone else from the ^H^H^H ... ahhhh, you nearly got me there.
I've been reading bullshit arguments about how we shouldn't go to other planets before we've got things sussed back home for so long I just skip that crap nowadays, and through all that time it's taken this long for someone to actually come up with a brilliant and meaningful argument other than feeding the poor or some other humanitarian garbage. For what it's worth (nothing), I'm impressed.
... by sufficently primitive people. It's quite amazing to see, but also quite freaky at the same time. I can imagine people who didn't understand the concept of planets and moons and the sun and how they all fit together to find this sort of thing as indicative of some greater event. I suppose you'd also have to have quite a self-centered view of the universe to believe that way, but I guess that's part and parcel with not understanding what is going on; if you don't get it, assume it's all about you.
Yes, the Diablo games are terriible, horrible, hardly even 'game' games, but WoW is basically true 3D Diablo-game with a Warcraft Total Conversion mod, in case you weren't aware. You'll spend all your time simply clicking buttons and waiting for cooldowns much like Diablo. Once you actually start to notice this, it becomes very painful to play. WoW just has a few bits outside of combat, and combat isn't quite as click/dead/loot/click/dead/loot as Diablo, but it's not far off.
Yeah I have to admit, I still make sure I always stop and laugh repeatedly at anyone prancing around on that cat mount from Winterspring that required about 400 turn ins of that stupid cat meat quest. You're paying $15 a month and hours of your life for that? That's borderline depressing.
This is a really good point. One of the first things I've noticed about my waning desire to play WoW is that solo the game is absolutely terrible, and it always has been, it's just that at the start the addiction was heavy and I didn't notice as much. Last weekend I spent most of my time in Morrowind instead, and the difference in the two games is just amazing (duh). I've complained in the past (to no one in particular, I've just complained) about the lack of a solid single player experience in an MMO but, quite frankly, I'd probably be happier if for them to purely focus on making everything as multiplayer as possible, if this is the best single player they can muster. Single player and MMO simply don't work together, any attempt appears transparent and lame, and the old MMO requirements come back to haunt the experience every time. The new phasing crap in WoW just means that helping out friends that haven't done specific quests just mean that they are attacked by things you simply can't see, and quests involving NPCs are such a waste of time because, just in case you didn't think it possible, the lack of risk and challenge was lowered even further than before by completely overpowered helpers that did all the work while you just stood around and waited for it to finish.
On the other hand, in my new game of Morrowind, I joined the mages guild, joined the thieves guild, which are full of different people and varied quests. I was tasked to collect mushrooms initially (sigh), but then I was told to was to slip a fake soul gem into someones desk, then travel to a distant area and either convince a man to join the guild, or kill him. I was also asked to steal a diamond from someone, and procure a house key via whatever means available to me from a particular person, be it stealth, violence or my smooth tongue. During this I was attacked by Dark Brotherhood agents, and in the process of tracing them to their source, found a man who had stolen some magical armor from the local Duke. I lured the man underwater, where I paralysed him until he drowned, taking his magical armor and the other magical weapons he had stashed. That diamond is now permanently gone from that vendor. That man is now permanently floating near the underwater entrance to his cave. The key is no longer with the servant. If I loiter around long enough to guy won't disappear from the water and reappear at the back of the cave for the next loser. The key won't magically come back to the guys pocket, the diamond is forever in the hands of the thieves guild leader. The guy I locked in a downstairs room before testing my paralyse/bash-him-over-the-head-with-my-summonded-sword strategy is ... well, he is gone for good too. But the game world has changed. Permanently.
And I've realised that the trade off between being able to permanently change the game world, or help a friend find a dirt mount behind a farm once owner by a guy now camping by a river, only to have the dirt mound never disappear, the man never move on from his camp, and the bad guys that were loitering around the farm to magically reappear a few minutes after us killing them, is a trade off I'm happy to make. And thats before we even consider the fact that I don't have the option to just murder the man himself for whatever he was intending to give me instead of running his errands.
I'm not really making a point, but seriously, 2 player co-op Morrowind would be completely fucking amazing.
I still don't understand how a user rating system will remove subjectivity from other developers. The stories I've heard from the submission process so far has involved people making similar games trying to get games rejected by picking on the tiniest little thing. Surely having to at least come up with a reasoning behind a rejecting is a bit more transparent than generic user ratings with no explanation behind them? I don't like the content of a book on amazon. After logging in, a single click later, and I've affected the rating for that book in the negative, with no responsibility and no requirement to back up my one-star rating. If I'm forced to give a short reason as to why I gave it one star, that can then be itself reviewed by other people, surely the process is stronger and safer for it.
Either that or I'm completely missing the point here.
The absolute worst kind of cat owner is the ones that let kitty roam the neighborhood free. That is wrong and incredibly rude. Kiltty can die or get hurt in tons of ways many a cat hater leaves out bowls of antifreeze to kill kitties that enter their yard, and letting them piss and crap all over the neighborhood is simply being a jerk.
Yeah this is why I love cats, but I'm not a big fan of other cat owners. I've lived in three rental properties over three years, and at two out of the three we've had problems with other idiot's cats. Back when I lived with my parents I lost three cats to the fact that there were allowed outside overnight / not allowed to stay inside (Father's orders ... "You can just get another cat" ... enough said), so now that I'm part of the control system, myself and my wife only let our cats outside under full supervision. But we've had issues with other people's cats constantly. One of our cats was attacked by someone elses cat that had come into our yard, and that was one of two cats that would sit at our windows and freak out out cats in our own home. We had another male cat on heat piss on our door and car because we have two female cats. We had a party once, with the back doors open the whole day (the cats were locked in a back room), and a neighbours cat came into our house and slept on our couch and loitered around our porch for the next two days. We were nearly going to keep it, but then it just up and left. I don't have a hard time imagining that it was someone that had gone on a weekend holiday and decided to leave the cat outside the whole time. Pathetic.
But the worst I ever heard was a friend whose cat's neck was broken by a neighbour and just chucked back over the fence. I consider it rude to let your cat run free in other people's yards, but short of throwing screwed up bits of foil or trying to hit them with the hose or simply running at them to scare them away, I would never hurt someone elses cat, regardless of how big a jerk the owners are.
I do find it amazing, and quite disturbing that it's seemingly quite acceptable and humourous to talk about killing or hurting cats, maybe it's a 'manly' thing, I don't know, but for all the "Lost your cat? Check my tyres" and "The only good cat is a flat cat" car stickers I've never seen any that suggest hurting dogs.
Well it was high up on a mountain top, and I believe they described it as burning like a silver flame.
You're so full of shit. They arent all dragons.
I was hardly trolling or I would have got an instant negative mod. Mods just left it because it was true but didn't want to see me get flamed into oblivion by WoW fanboys like yourself that can't take any kind of criticism of your beloved game.
This is just amazing. You really are in some fantasy world where you're this all knowing fountain of gaming knowledge aren't you? This is better than I thought. A true post gets insightful mods. Your incredible self delusion that a post left at 1 is not simply because no one is reading it but actually because the mods know it's the truth but don't want to see it sullied by ... positive karma? is just amazing. I don't really know what to say, but anyway, picture me reading that with slack jaw and a head slowing turning side to side in pity.
Shit like yours gets left at 1 because no one reads it. This is mainly because criticising WoW is what all the pseudo-intellectuals do, because itâ(TM)s such an easy target, and shooting fish in a barrel doesnâ(TM)t make for insightful or interesting reading. The same garbage is re-hashed over and over, when is issue people are taking to task are the core elements of a streamlined, casual MMO. Yours is there with the people that shit up these comments with stuff like telling people to go outside and get a life. People that play MMOs want to have an easy game experience where they can feel a sense of achievement for a lower level of input than a proper RPG. Thatâ(TM)s the whole point of the game, and if your main arguments are that MMOs arenâ(TM)t enough like single player, dynamically changing RPGs then youâ(TM)re going to have find little argument because youâ(TM)re not making an actual valid point. All people can do is take issue with the fact that youâ(TM)re completely missing the point, and that your trolling bullshit is just that, at which point people are apparently just getting defensive about their beloved game. Describing people calling you out for being stupid as WoW fanboys that canâ(TM)t take criticism of their game makes it sound like you just dribble shit and go la-la-la-canâ(TM)t hear at any responses.
You want to blame someone? Blame the action-RPG. Blame Blizzard, but blame them for Diablo, not WoW. WoW is little more than a 3D client for a Diablo game model, but with quests tacked on so itâ(TM)s isnâ(TM)t as transparent an XP grind. Action-RPGs are the bane of the core-RPG existence, and MMOs just allow everyone else to see your purple gear instead of you gently caressing the screen by yourself. The funny thing is that the action-RPG genre like Diablo or Titanâ(TM)s Quest is much more lowest common denominator than your standard MMO, itâ(TM)s just bare bones kill/loot/kill with no interesting background outside of âStay a while and listenâ, yet that phrase is known much more than anything Minsc might say. Yet dumping shit on MMOs is what all the blowhards do because it makes them feel like theyâ(TM)re making a point - when they really arenâ(TM)t - because they are much more popular in the general gaming, and casual gaming, population.
I had my âoesick of bullshit on the internetâ release with my first response, so I canâ(TM)t be bothered going any further than this. We argued on the internet, so, just like the special olympics, even though you believe you won (and that the mods donâ(TM)t +1 you because of ⦠I just canâ(TM)t get over the fact that you believe that, have I just fallen for an amazingly good troll?), from the outside looking in, weâ(TM)re both so very retarded.
Ha ha ha do I need to comment on the fact that youâ(TM)re now +1 and Iâ(TM)m flamebait. OH NO THIS MUST MEAN THE MODS DONâ(TM)T AGREE WITH YOU, or something. How does this work in your fantasy world again?
I'm not sure how I came to read your shit dribbling because it's only at 1 as I'm responding to this. But it's Monday morning and I'll be damned if I don't waste time responding to this instead of getting on with the working day. Also, you've trolled blatantly in spots so don't be surprised when I act like a dick back to you.
You apparently understand how MMOs struggle to tell a coherent story given the nature of the game-style, you said it yourself, so you obviously are just a standard WoW-basher, which is really sweet and all, but here we go anyway.
RTS games are good at story telling because they are inherently linear games. I'm sorry if you don't have a damn clue WTF is going on, I can only assume you struggle with books - that is, assuming you read - that tell more than one story at the same time, jumping between plot lines in order to allow the advancement of characters not in the same place at the same time. MMOs have the added issue that the direction of the story is dictated by which quests the player takes. Find me an RTS that allows you to skip possibly important plot/story points because you decided not to play a certain mission. There is plenty of story in WoW, it's just that the majority of it is reading, and obviously a lot of the more "You need to do this to get more exp for your character" missions that are a standard in all RPGs are more common in an MMO, and for the idiot casual gamer that just wants to get on with the killing and looting that can be a problem.
Maybe those people should be playing that most brain-dead of genres, the action-RPG. If you want the perfect "awful gaming tastes" and mindless "I just want to click on things until they are dead, loot and move on" garbage, then a game like Diablo is perfect. The problem with World of Warcraft for a lot of people is the sheer amount of story they want to tell. It was one of the first patches that implemented the ability to skip through quest dialog that used to scroll smoothly in its reveal, under the assumption that you wanted to read it all. Some of us do; many people don't.
WoW is a really crap MMO from a lot of standpoints? None of which you make. And it doesn't hold a candle to single player games like Warcraft and Starcraft in terms of something completely subjective, like fun? And a generic 'quality' descriptor. Gosh man, you're hitting home with the well established and backed up points here. You give someone shit further down for having no points, but you're just throwing out empty generic statements as though they are establishing some iron clad argument, dusting your hands off and patting yourself on the back for a job well done. You aren't 'doing any details' for some other dude in your circle jerk to 'condense into a powerful phrase', which by the way, was the biggest wankery of a post I think I've seen on this place in a long time.
I suppose if you suspect people that play WoW have really awful gaming tastes, then it must be true. And I'm sure many people laughed when reading that you call it the "bottom feeders" MMO. I bet you like to use that phrase a lot, thinking that you are showing those damn WoW players, and telling it your friends before sitting back and crossing your arms; king dick because your opinions on gaming are that much more valid, and that everyone else feels that much worse because they don't have your approval. Some people make valid points and coherent arguments and take part in reasonable discussions about the positives and negatives of a certain game or genre. Some people claim absolutes on subjective factors, and paint incredibly broad strokes with their huge retard brush and think that people care. I'm short on sleep and high on coffee, and I read utter garbage like yours on a daily basis, and sometimes I can't just move on without leaving them to fester in their own stupidity, and this is the result.
And here comes the millionth moron to call out WoW for cartoony graphics, not realising that part of the appeal of the game is that the graphics arenâ(TM)t requiring
Yeah, I have to agree with you here. Normally unless a game is first person I simply cannot be scared by it. But playing the UFO/XCOM games, I could seriously creep myself out, and leave myself on edge for ages. Those games really did do something amazing given you are looking down on an isometric battlefield at small figures of the men in your team (not even a representation of yourself), and still be holding your breath during the aliens turn in the fear that one will appear around the corner.
This is marked as interesting, but isn't this the exact line of thinking that we endlessly mock? Violence doesn't bother you because, well, no one is going to kill anyone hurr, that never happens.But OMG KIDS MIGHT WANT TO HAVE SEX THIS IS TERRIBLE WE HAVE TO STOP THEM SEEING THIS.
It's still about control then, surely. Sex is considered more 'seductive' than violence because it's not overtly illegal. Yet. You can't go out and hit/shoot/kill someone because that's against the law, so sure, let people watch people murder other people because that's fine, they aren't actually allowed to do it anyway. But let them watch sex? But ... but, that might make them curious about what it's like and then they might actually go have sex and that would be ... bad? I guess? Because we can't directly control that, maybe?I don't know, it's not my own stupid point I'm trying to back up here.
Then there is the awesome logic that I've heard where violence is okay because violence is a fact of life and kids need to be exposed to what can happen. But sex isn't?
I really do have trouble getting my head around all this crap.
Seeing as apparently no one is going to follow the second link that talks about it, this is the massive block of text you have to wade through on that page to get that information, after going through the arduous effort of a mouse click :)
7/09/2009
MechWarrior to be Distributed Free on BattleTech.com
In honor of BattleTech's 25th anniversary, Smith & Tinker has authorized MekTek.net and MekTek Studios to distribute MechWarrior 4 (along with its expansion packs) completely free. For years, MekTek.net has been the central point for online distribution of MechWarrior 4 expansion packs. Now they can provide the core game free to the fans as well. Keep an eye on BattleTech.com â" the free download will be available soon!
To summarize : yes.