I've bought gold for WoW, and I'm not ashamed of having done it.
The day WoW hit the shelves, I picked up my copy. I played it to level 60 as a Hunter, and loved it. Then I played it to level 60 as a Rogue, still loved it. My server turned to shit over time, thanks to Blizzard's inability to build enterprise-level infrastructure, so I moved to another box. Luckily I got to move my main two characters before the (early) transfer cutoff, so I took my hard-earned gold with me. Not a small amount either, I have roughly 800 gold in cash, maybe 1200g worth of enchanting materials, about half my tier 2 gear, etc. Not a single part of this was paid for in real-world cash either, I did all that the hard way.
But I got bored for a while, and stopped playing. 6 months, roughly.
Then the APAC time-zone servers came out. So I looked into it. Turns out there were zero realm transfers happening to these new servers, but that's where I wanted to play. So I re-rolled. There I was, a lowbie with zero cash and hating the game. You see, without at least a small amount of cash the early levels are hell. You can't earn 50g in a day as a lvl 60 (no matter what anyone says, the only way to earn 50g a day is to play for 24 hours solid), and you certainly can't earn even 50s as a lvl 1. So I bought 100g online. It was dirt cheap ($7 USD), and it meant I could play the game properly.
I didn't change much though. I picked up a bunch of bags, some gear, a weapon, and levelled up fast. The fast bit stops around 25 or so, then it's just the normal game but at least you skip the pain of not being able to buy anything you need. Of having to travel back to town every 15 minutes because you filled your bags again.
The clincher for me was being unable to afford Gryphon rides. I'm a pretty skilled player, I know how to make money, yet I constantly found myself too poor to pay for transport in-game. For those of you who don't play, walking-time alone can add dozens of hours to your first 20 levels in this game. Does this fulfil some secret "purpose" of the game? Does not walking for 20 minutes to get between locations (instead using the game-provided flight system) violate the "spirit" of the thing? I doubt it.
I agree with the article, and I personally don't see how this gold farming affects the game in an adverse way. I've spent many months on high-population servers seeing first-hand the impact of farmers. They crowd some of the richer spots (Tyr's Hand, for example), and that's it. You can't find them anywhere else! Congrats to Blizzard for finding a way to concentrate them all into one single location! Prices on the AH aren't impacted, it would take hundreds of farmers per server to make any difference there. In fact, I've personally found that they're easily exploited by simply watching the prices, buying bargains, then on-selling them during timeslots where farmers aren't around!
Blizzard made some significant mistakes building WoW, but permitting gold-sales to continue wasn't one of them. They won't stamp it out completely simply because it keeps a significant number of long-term players (the ones their accountants truly want on the books) connected.
I should point out that I don't see the point buying 5000g, purchasing epic mounts, purple-gear, etc but the game was designed with this in mind. If it wasn't, this stuff wouldn't be Bind on Equip.
Finally, I pay somebody to mow my lawns each month. A mechanic services my car (despite me being more than capable of doing it myself). I wouldn't object to a house-keeper, and I certainly don't iron my own shirts! We all pay other people to do the bits we don't like. It doesn't violate the spirit of the "game" at all. It's what we call "commerce".
If you've climbed some stairs instead of waiting for the elevator - you're a fitness freak. Drinking water instead of soft drink? Freak! At a "normal" meal of meat, potato and a few different vegetables instead of three Big Macs, a mega-large fries, super sized thickshake, apple pie, sundae (with double topping), and a fourth burger "for the road"... Total freak, lunatic outcast statistical anomaly.
On the bright side, fat people will now be further ostrasized due to the "virus" they carry. "Oh no, I can't sit with the fat people - they're contagious, I wouldn't want to catch FAT from them!"
Diplomacy wore out about the same time America ripped a hole in the seat of it's already stretched pants.
Man, the crappiest articles seem to get onto this sites front-page lately. A virus that causes obesity? Yeah right. There's also a virus that makes you homeless. And another one that makes your employer move your job off-shore into a callcentre in India.
Here's my tip. Stop eating so much garbage. Get outside. Walk around once in a while. Stop using elevators and escalators - learn to climb some stairs. Put down the burger. Especially if you're fat. If by some freak of nature it really is a virus that causes obesity, stop feeding it!
BTW, you're NOT entitled to eat junk food. It's not in the constitution, that you can continue to stuff your face in defiance of that chronic heart condition, buried below 300 pounds of flab. Nor does it say that somebody else is responsible for everything that is wrong with you. There's nobody you can sue to stop you gorging on Krispy Kreemes. You can't blame a virus for putting that burger into your hand. That was you. Really - it was, didn't you notice it? How could you not have seen that 90 pound arm reach out for it. Come to think of it, how did you manage to move that arm far enough?
Instead, consider this: eating too much kills you. Really, it does. So does avoiding all exercise. Don't take my word for it though, give it a shot. See where it gets you.
It's not a silly security measure. I'm surprised we're even having to discuss this, it seems like common sense to me!
To answer the article's question, professionalism calls for a politely written resignation that offers at least the contracted (or standard) period of notice. If you can offer more, it's worth thinking about doing. They probably won't take you up on it, but it's a nice gesture. You want to avoid saying why you're leaving - I made that mistake once, and turned my resignation letter into a nasty attack on my manager (who totally deserved it). It came back to bite me eventually.
As an employer, the minute you realise one of your influential (to other staff or customers) staff is about to leave you cut them off immediately. Their heart is probably not in it, and word will get around pretty fast. If the company is (like most) an unhappy place they'll be a severe drain on morale even if they just keep working the way they always did. If they were planning on doing something nasty, it's already done so that's a moot point. Of course, once you've resigned all sorts of animosity comes to the surface and it's surprising just how angry a person can get over a little thing once they realise they don't have to supress it any more! So you escort them out of the building, and pay out their notice period.
Nobody gets hurt by cutting a departing employee's access off immediately. The employee gets paid for a couple of weeks vacation that they weren't going to have. The employer eliminates an element of risk that they had little control over (control in the workplace revolves largely around financial reward and the threat of removing that financial reward). Everybody wins!
Finally, remember that a large part of running any business is managing risk. Departing employees are often unhappy ones. Unhappy ones are risky ones. Especially unhappy ones that you can't threaten any more.
You buy the game, and agree to the EULA. Unlike most of these agreements, this one is pretty clearly worded. The bit where it says you can't "bot" is in all caps, is dead obvious, and if you missed it that's your own stupid fault.
There are regular posts on the WoW forums on the subject too. You're not allowed to run external programs that interact with the game, it's that simple. Programs that walk you places, kill things for you, whatever, are all clearly against their rules.
Now this is the bit that shits me the most: if you play a game of basketball, you agree to abide by a bunch of rules. There are a lot of these rules, but you can't be stuffed reading the manual (equivalent to an EULA). Fortunately the main rules are common knowledge and obvious enough for you to survive. Of course, you can't dribble to save your life. It's a hassle, because you can run a lot faster if you just carry that ball. So you don't bother dribbling. What happens next do you think?
Everybody knows where to find the EULA for WoW. They all know that botting is against the rules of the game. But no, they're too lazy to actually play the game so they cheat. Then they get caught. Then they get sent off the court.
Another important thing to understand: most of these articles about how the "Warden" is spyware, about how it sends personal information to Blizzard, are written by paranoid, ignorant conspiracy freaks. The Warden takes a hash of a bunch of attributes of your computer - window titles, memory locations, filenames, etc. A HASH. This is Slashdot, so I shouldn't have to explain this, but the very definition of a HASH is that it is non-reversable. That hash is then compared in-memory to a list of known "bad" hashes. It finds a match, and presumably that hash gets sent back to Blizzard. I dunno, because I don't cheat so I haven't triggered this end of the process.
So Blizzard gets this hash once you cheated, but for the sake of the tin-foil-hats out there let's assume that every 15 seconds the Warden is actually sending the hashes back regardless of whether or not you were found cheating. Window title, memory location, DLL listing. For every window. Think about the traffic. Seriously, think about it for just one second. You have maybe 50 "windows" open at a time on a Windows PC. Again, I shouldn't have to explain this but the term "window" does not just refer to applications visible in the task bar. All those tray icons have windows associated with them, not to mention tons of other invisible programs. Every 15 seconds all this data gets pushed to Blizzard from your machine. That's a lot of data. So they use a hash instead. They take this big chunk of data (one chunk per window), hash it down to a smaller size, and either process it in memory or send it.
Still, can Blizzard use that hash for anything? Can they extrapolate your credit card number from it, or your bank balance? If you believe they can, then you might be better off reading CNN because Slashdot isn't the place for you. Hashes are non-reversable. Duh.
Finally, the Warden is not spyware. It does not get to you unannounced - it's clearly explained in the EULA (even down to roughly what it scans). It is not left behind if you uninstall WoW. If you block WoW from talking to the Internet, the Warden stops working. It does not "spy" on you, because it doesn't send any useable information back to it's owners. No demographic data, no browsing habits, no credit card numbers, and no - it won't even reveal to your mother that you spend half your evening browsing through kiddie pr0n sites. Spyware? Not bloody likely. It's part of the game you idiots, and this isn't the first time companies have used this technology. PunkBuster has been around a whole lot longer and does roughly the same thing. Microsoft do something like this for product activation. They do it for Microsoft Update. DVD-XCopy used to scan window titles for.NFO, and hunt for known keygens during registration.
Oh, and every time an admin approves an article that links to a piece of video hosted on some poor bastard's DSL link at home a fairy dies. No really, how many times does this have to happen before they figure out it's wrong? A billion times?
This isn't newsworthy. It's stupid and boring. Since when did/. become "News for Star Wars fanboys"?
For the record, the story about Star Wars Episode 3 being downloaded a lot? Same category. Dunno if any of the admins have been paying attention, but movies get downloaded once in a while and at least one or two of them have nothing to do with Star Wars.
I'm all for posting a story about the release of the film. It's a geek film. But half a dozen of the stupid things in a week is just plain rubbish. Slashdot is rapidly working it's way off my list of daily reads simply because I'm sick of reading the same articles over and over again. Seeing the same three articles every week is kinda boring: "Check out this Star Wars [blah]", "Google are about to take over the world", and "Microsoft sucks because Penguins are cute".
Actually, one of the key mistakes people make is treating products like World of Warcraft as a game. Yes, they have game-like qualities. They are marketed, at least superficially, as games.
Yet they include features that make them stand out against other things we consider to be games. Once you start playing them, especially if you happen to get hooked, they become social experiences. I've played a few of these MMORPGs, and in every case the social interaction has become the reason for participating, not the "game" aspect of it.
Once you accept that these are at least more than "just games", you can apply other sensible rules to it. Companies like IGE, for example, offer unfair advantages to cashed-up players and get in the way of casual players (especially when they camp out an entire zone). Would this type of behaviour be acceptible in the "real world"? Probably not, although it does happen. What we have to remember though is that these "games" are in many ways representations of a better version of reality, a world in which we have a strong influence over our destiny, and one where we don't have to deal with as many of the nasty aspects of real life.
There's also the fact that the players resent it. The act of selling goods and gold is not the thing players hate, at least not the ones I've spoken to. They dislike the way the items are gathered. Any serious player has run into a zone where they simply cannot participate because of farmers. I found a group of them in Stranglethorn Vale, camping out a boss spawn for 8 hours straight. The boss dropps some handy stuff once in a while, but it's also the goal of a quest. I wasn't the only person affected, lots of people just couldn't do that quest because this crew of farmers were persistently killing this boss. This really affects the players, especially those who don't have entire days to devote to the game.
The simplest answer is for Blizzard (and the other MMO producers) to sell items and gold directly to the public. No need for farming, no need to interfere with the players, just create the stuff and sell it for cash. Keep some special items off the list of things you can buy, and be done with it. Personally I don't care if you have 1000g, and if you do I also don't care where you got it. All I care about is you messing up my evening by stopping me from doing my thing.
This isn't a new genre - Everquest, Ultima Online, Diablo (no servers, but still MMORPG), There, Star Wars Galaxies, EQ2, and many more have been here first. If you want to get technical, I was playing MMORPGs well over 10 years ago in the form of MUDs.
EQ was considered revolutionary at the time, with piles of Slashdot articles talking about the addictive nature of the game, the scale of the world, the ugly UI yet immersive gameplay... this is nothing new.
As an interesting thing to note, Blizzard doesn't need to make stuff like this up just now. You can't get a hold of World of Warcraft in the stores for love nor money in many cities, and it's plain to see they're struggling under the load of players. More people jumped into this game than anybody anticipated, and Blizzard are usually pretty good at figuring out this sort of stuff. My guess is they're as shocked as we all are. I'm even thinking Blizzard deliberately controlled the release of copies of the game so the player load arrived gradually instead of all at once.
A worm that spreads via IM? Or a worm that spreads via stupid dumb-ass users who don't know better than to run a.exe they weren't expecting to receive?
One day, with a bit of luck, people opening attachments/files/emails/whatever like this will be considered much the same as people eating strange pieces of food that they find in the street.
For those in the support side of the field, remember that as long as there are stupid people (and there always will be) security vulnerabilities will always be a poor second cousin to humans. The bulk of your support calls won't come from clever little worms that capitalise on obscure security flaws in a product, they'll come as a result of idiots thinking that "nakedwoman.exe" is actually something they want to see.
Yet another reason we should embed cattle-prods into keyboards... "wow, some stranger sent me some naughty pictures of herself! Pity they're archived, I'll just double-click and let them extract themsel *zaaaaaaaap!!!*"
These have been around for ages now. I've had one in my XBox for close to half a year! NEWS means current info, not ancient bloody history. Pogo installations aren't "news", they're ancient history. The Xenium chips aren't "news", they're just another mod chip that has been around for ages.
Man I hate Slashdot lately. Duplicate posts on the front page, uninformed MS bashing at random, borderline "infomercial" posts about products that don't deserve the screen real-estate... get your act together people, Slashdot is losing face.
I've been using Skype heavily the last few months. Despite being closed source (and thus attracting the ire of the Slashdot community in much the same way as bikies don't like bikes that aren't black) and not conforming to a standard (who is to say the VOIP standard is any better than Skype's methods?), the thing works brilliantly.
End users don't give a stuff if it conforms to a standard. Just look at how many ignorant users log into AOL IM every single day! They care about features. Reliability. Simplicity. Cool icons. Pretty colours. RFC compliance does not factor into their decision. The sooner developers in general realise and accept this, the better life will become.
I use Skype for gaming. It runs in the background, does not interfere with my entertainment, and almost never causes any problems at all.
I use Skype for staying in touch with my home while travelling. It's a cheap alternative to expensive international phone rates in hotels. Again, it has yet to fail me.
I don't use Skype for calling land lines, but that will change pretty soon. They admitted to overload-related problems recently, so I'm waiting for these to die down.
Some observations from using their free service include... nice low latency even during international calls. Possibly lower latency than calls placed from a land-line. Reliability makes me smile - find user in contact list, highlight user, click CALL and it rings. They answer, we talk, no bugs, no glitches. Not requiring an expensive handset (ala Cisco VOIP) also makes me smile. Lots.
Show me an equivalent solution with all these good points that adheres to some magical standard and I might show an interest. But only if it look purty.
Rubbish. Spent half an hour in any computer game store and see who lays out their cash... sure, half the people in the store are kids, but how many spend any money?
As an adult my expenditure on gaming has grown by several orders of magnitude. I fork out money for computer hardware and software that no kid would spend.
Adult gamers (ie. over 18) are in my opinion the biggest gamer market. Most of them own a PC, one or two consoles, and buy games.
Nope, the point of middle age is to be able to afford the things you want. If they still happen to be similar to what you wanted ten years earlier, good for you!
I play video games still. I also own a sports-bike, used to own a fancy car, have plenty of things going on that fit the profile for my age but I still like video games.
The ones that really bug me though are the ones where you can only save once every hour or so. Hunting for a save-point when you only have a few minutes to wrap up your gaming bugs the hell out of me. One of the realities of "growing up" is that your time isn't always your own. Often you get interrupted, either by work, kids, partners, or just life in general. If games are going to be pitched at an older audience, they need to take these things into consideration.
Two things come to mind after reading this thread...
One, teachers are rarely computer literate. This is changing slowly, but generally speaking the third graders know more than they do. As a direct result, teachers are unable to utilise these resources effectively and they become a serious problem. Internet access in school classrooms does not help this at all, the number of times my kid sister has messaged me from school to "chat" amazes me.
Two, children are not learning how to communicate properly using these resources. They definitely resort to one word or one line answers, and consistently fail to know how to dig deeper into issues. Online resources like Google don't help - yes, Google is a godsend to you and I, but at the age of 15 these kids don't have a clue how to research. If the answer isn't in Google, they assume it doesn't exist. Not good.
Third, lack of math/science education is bad news for us all. I'm not saying that we all have a need for second and third order differential integration, but there's no doubt that basic understanding of mathematical principles is valuable. My GF has trouble figuring out how to pack large objects into the boot of the car, simply because she wasn't taught trigonometry very well in high school. Sounds trivial, but extrapolate that small example as far as you like and you should find dozens of common situations where this sort of knowledge is important.
Four, and worst of all, I saw something on Big Brother last night that applies here (sad, I know). A couple of housemates had never heard of the Vietnam War. They had no idea what it was, when it happened, who was involved, etc. This war happened right at the start of my life, it wasn't something a hundred years ago! Where did this get missed in their education?!?!
Surely all these issues need addressing, and cutting sections of education simply because computers are expensive is obviously not the answer. Personally, I'd be all in favour of cutting Internet access in schools off from all but selected workstations (heavily locked down library machines, used only for research for example), locking down every piece of software to minimise opportunity to "mess around", and generally restricting what computers are used for in school.
My school years (not too long ago I might add) resulted in almost no computer education at all, heavy math/science, and lots of broad knowledge. The end result is that I can use computers better than most, I can understand how just about anything works, and I am a professional problem solver (ie. network architect). Somehow I doubt that the current batch of students will be capable of the same things.
I own both ATI and nVidia cards at home, with two gaming rigs and one multipurpose machine...
I choose cards on a short and simple list of criteria:
1. Does it do what I want - most important
2. Is it quiet
3. Price
ATI doesn't meet option 1. for one of my machines (my primary gaming rig) because ATI's support for dual monitors is crap. So I run an nVidia in it. The second gaming maching gets the old hand-me-down card from my main machine, so it's nVidia too.
The multipurpose machine though is connected to a television set for DVD playback. In this instance I wanted good TV-Out quality and driver support, so ATI won the battle.
There was a time when I was an nVidia fanboy (yes, I admit it) but these days the two brands are close enough in performance to be the same. Yes, their latest and greatest take turns in being the fastest, but I don't buy at that level - I buy the 6 month old cards that have halved in price already. Most of the time I find that at a given price both vendors have identical performance figures.
Finally, a lot of these high-performance cards aren't worth the attention they get. Yes, you can play UT2004 on them at 1600x1200 and still get 60fps. So bloody what?!?! My LCD is fixed at 1280x1024 so even one year old cards give me nice steady 40fps performance in high quality mode. Faster framerates don't help me play any better, I still suck online. So I'm not going to spend twice as much as I want just to buy performance I can't use.
You're dead right - ease of installation, both OS and apps, is standing in the way of wide-spread acceptance of Linux.
I work in IT as a senior systems architect. I've been a Solaris admin in my time, managed VMS systems, but these days I design and build large-scale Active Directory and Exchange systems. Yet somehow even I find it difficult at times to get a Linux box to do what I want it to do.
Having to know the type of mouse is only the tip of the iceberg. What about the need to install all sorts of hard-to-find libraries to get some apps (especially games) to work, or the need to read complicated (and poorly written) man pages in order to maintain your installation once it's up and running.
I'm not saying they need to dumb it down and build a wizard for everything. I'm just saying that it's hard, and most people don't want hard, they want easy. While geeks like me don't care if they lose an entire weekend to building a system, "normal" people expect to stick the CD in and have a machine built nice and fast. This is why OEM machines (like laptops, for example) come with self installing OS CDs - because that's what the bulk of customers truly want.
Incidentally, even I'm heading towards reducing my management efforts for my home machines. Having 5 machines at home works out as a hell of a lot of admin work to add an app or hotfix to all the machines if I run Linux. Running Windows means the hotfixes install themselves, and the apps take just a few minutes to install.
This isn't just a demo, it's fucking art. Nothing short of art.
These guys consistently put together tightly coded, artistics pieces of material that not a single contributor to this discussion could have done no matter how long they had available to them.
Yes, they used DirectX. Who cares. No, the game isn't a commercial effort. But it's tiny. And it looks awesome. And on good enough hardware it runs perfectly.
This is the programming equivalent of carving a portrait into the top of a needle.
So what if it doesn't run on Linux. Who said it was supposed to? It doesn't use OpenGL, that's their personal choice. Just respect it for the phenomenal level of expertise required to produce something like this. For the innovation, skill and effort they must have poured into 96KB of data.
Personally, I'd love to come close to this level of skill in anything, let alone something this difficult.
People who said that about Windows were obviously not paying attention. Being able to carry out multiple tasks in parallel, to have several applications available to facilitate workflow, that's dead simple to justify.
Bear in mind that the windowed nature of the Windows GUI wasn't the big step forward - the multiple application, flexible workflow side of things is what truly mattered (working in windows had been around for ages, just look at the Mac, or even better GEOS on the C64!).
Having a pretty 3D interface to do the same thing? I'm not convinced. Gimme something truly revolutionary.
3 Dimensional interfaces like these (especially Suns new project) are just annoying. They don't represent any signficant increase in productivity, they aren't going to make your system easier to use - they just look cool, and that's enough to grab attention.
The downside of these interfaces is the ridiculously high processor and memory requirements. All that extra graphic manipulation comes at a price, and I for one don't see any reason to waste processor cycles. What I'd much rather see is somebody developing a faster, more lightweight UI that is a nice combination of OSX and Windows XP. One that chews up LESS memory (instead of more, like this), one that speeds things up.
Who cares about ogg? Seriously, I haven't got a single ogg file despite having a sizable collection of MP3's and WMA'a. Nor do I know of anybody who does!
Is it only the linux zealots who support this standard? Is it just another opportunity for the penguin-lovers to thumb their nose at whoever they feel MP3 represents? Or am I just missing some beautiful benefit of ogg...
Saying it runs at 54mbps is one thing, but try getting that much out of it... Even with high-end Cisco gear it doesn't actually deliver that much throughput thanks to the overhead of the 802.11g protocol.
Data storage that not only is seriously expensive, but far too slow for any real use. I have an 802.11G wireless network here at home and while it's fine for basic tasks like Internet access and moving small files around it's slow.
Despite claiming to be 54mbit, it really only gets 8 - 20 mbit even when I sit right next to the access point. There are a bunch of technical reasons why this is so, but the bottom line is that disk should be fast. ATA20 isn't a disk standard because people want ATA150. They'd buy ATA600 if it were possible, because disk is already the slowest part of our computers.
Making it slower is just stupid marketing guys trying to figure out how else to get rid of 15 million spare wireless chips.
I was retrenched after 2.5 years with an employer. It sucked in a big way. Sure, I was one of about a dozen people marched out the door on the day but it was largely the result of stupid internal politics, nasty staff, and bad luck.
In my case it only happened once, but I contracted for over a year after that hopping from one short-term contract to the next. Each time I sat an interview the question was asked... why did you leave that 2.5 year job, why did you leave your last 3 employers so rapidly. So I told 'em the truth: I got retrenched, suckage but what can you do? The others were short-term gigs, just contracts. They'd ask me leading questions to see if I'd be nasty about the ex-employer, and I'd cheerfully tell them that yeah, I didn't like 'em very much any more... would you, if they laid you off? But that's business, and I'm here to work for you guys now.
I only missed out on two jobs during that period of my life, neither because of being laid off. Honesty is a valuable commodity these days, especially in the IT industry. Use it to your advantage.
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Yep. Counterstrike was totally cheating, as was BF:Desert Combat. I hate those damned cheaters and everything they stand for!
Just because the company that makes the game doesn't provide you with it, doesn't make it cheating.
I've bought gold for WoW, and I'm not ashamed of having done it.
The day WoW hit the shelves, I picked up my copy. I played it to level 60 as a Hunter, and loved it. Then I played it to level 60 as a Rogue, still loved it. My server turned to shit over time, thanks to Blizzard's inability to build enterprise-level infrastructure, so I moved to another box. Luckily I got to move my main two characters before the (early) transfer cutoff, so I took my hard-earned gold with me. Not a small amount either, I have roughly 800 gold in cash, maybe 1200g worth of enchanting materials, about half my tier 2 gear, etc. Not a single part of this was paid for in real-world cash either, I did all that the hard way.
But I got bored for a while, and stopped playing. 6 months, roughly.
Then the APAC time-zone servers came out. So I looked into it. Turns out there were zero realm transfers happening to these new servers, but that's where I wanted to play. So I re-rolled. There I was, a lowbie with zero cash and hating the game. You see, without at least a small amount of cash the early levels are hell. You can't earn 50g in a day as a lvl 60 (no matter what anyone says, the only way to earn 50g a day is to play for 24 hours solid), and you certainly can't earn even 50s as a lvl 1. So I bought 100g online. It was dirt cheap ($7 USD), and it meant I could play the game properly.
I didn't change much though. I picked up a bunch of bags, some gear, a weapon, and levelled up fast. The fast bit stops around 25 or so, then it's just the normal game but at least you skip the pain of not being able to buy anything you need. Of having to travel back to town every 15 minutes because you filled your bags again.
The clincher for me was being unable to afford Gryphon rides. I'm a pretty skilled player, I know how to make money, yet I constantly found myself too poor to pay for transport in-game. For those of you who don't play, walking-time alone can add dozens of hours to your first 20 levels in this game. Does this fulfil some secret "purpose" of the game? Does not walking for 20 minutes to get between locations (instead using the game-provided flight system) violate the "spirit" of the thing? I doubt it.
I agree with the article, and I personally don't see how this gold farming affects the game in an adverse way. I've spent many months on high-population servers seeing first-hand the impact of farmers. They crowd some of the richer spots (Tyr's Hand, for example), and that's it. You can't find them anywhere else! Congrats to Blizzard for finding a way to concentrate them all into one single location! Prices on the AH aren't impacted, it would take hundreds of farmers per server to make any difference there. In fact, I've personally found that they're easily exploited by simply watching the prices, buying bargains, then on-selling them during timeslots where farmers aren't around!
Blizzard made some significant mistakes building WoW, but permitting gold-sales to continue wasn't one of them. They won't stamp it out completely simply because it keeps a significant number of long-term players (the ones their accountants truly want on the books) connected.
I should point out that I don't see the point buying 5000g, purchasing epic mounts, purple-gear, etc but the game was designed with this in mind. If it wasn't, this stuff wouldn't be Bind on Equip.
Finally, I pay somebody to mow my lawns each month. A mechanic services my car (despite me being more than capable of doing it myself). I wouldn't object to a house-keeper, and I certainly don't iron my own shirts! We all pay other people to do the bits we don't like. It doesn't violate the spirit of the "game" at all. It's what we call "commerce".
If you've climbed some stairs instead of waiting for the elevator - you're a fitness freak. Drinking water instead of soft drink? Freak! At a "normal" meal of meat, potato and a few different vegetables instead of three Big Macs, a mega-large fries, super sized thickshake, apple pie, sundae (with double topping), and a fourth burger "for the road"... Total freak, lunatic outcast statistical anomaly.
On the bright side, fat people will now be further ostrasized due to the "virus" they carry. "Oh no, I can't sit with the fat people - they're contagious, I wouldn't want to catch FAT from them!"
Diplomacy wore out about the same time America ripped a hole in the seat of it's already stretched pants.
Man, the crappiest articles seem to get onto this sites front-page lately. A virus that causes obesity? Yeah right. There's also a virus that makes you homeless. And another one that makes your employer move your job off-shore into a callcentre in India.
Here's my tip. Stop eating so much garbage. Get outside. Walk around once in a while. Stop using elevators and escalators - learn to climb some stairs. Put down the burger. Especially if you're fat. If by some freak of nature it really is a virus that causes obesity, stop feeding it!
BTW, you're NOT entitled to eat junk food. It's not in the constitution, that you can continue to stuff your face in defiance of that chronic heart condition, buried below 300 pounds of flab. Nor does it say that somebody else is responsible for everything that is wrong with you. There's nobody you can sue to stop you gorging on Krispy Kreemes. You can't blame a virus for putting that burger into your hand. That was you. Really - it was, didn't you notice it? How could you not have seen that 90 pound arm reach out for it. Come to think of it, how did you manage to move that arm far enough?
Instead, consider this: eating too much kills you. Really, it does. So does avoiding all exercise. Don't take my word for it though, give it a shot. See where it gets you.
Virus my left nut.
It's not a silly security measure. I'm surprised we're even having to discuss this, it seems like common sense to me!
To answer the article's question, professionalism calls for a politely written resignation that offers at least the contracted (or standard) period of notice. If you can offer more, it's worth thinking about doing. They probably won't take you up on it, but it's a nice gesture. You want to avoid saying why you're leaving - I made that mistake once, and turned my resignation letter into a nasty attack on my manager (who totally deserved it). It came back to bite me eventually.
As an employer, the minute you realise one of your influential (to other staff or customers) staff is about to leave you cut them off immediately. Their heart is probably not in it, and word will get around pretty fast. If the company is (like most) an unhappy place they'll be a severe drain on morale even if they just keep working the way they always did. If they were planning on doing something nasty, it's already done so that's a moot point. Of course, once you've resigned all sorts of animosity comes to the surface and it's surprising just how angry a person can get over a little thing once they realise they don't have to supress it any more! So you escort them out of the building, and pay out their notice period.
Nobody gets hurt by cutting a departing employee's access off immediately. The employee gets paid for a couple of weeks vacation that they weren't going to have. The employer eliminates an element of risk that they had little control over (control in the workplace revolves largely around financial reward and the threat of removing that financial reward). Everybody wins!
Finally, remember that a large part of running any business is managing risk. Departing employees are often unhappy ones. Unhappy ones are risky ones. Especially unhappy ones that you can't threaten any more.
You buy the game, and agree to the EULA. Unlike most of these agreements, this one is pretty clearly worded. The bit where it says you can't "bot" is in all caps, is dead obvious, and if you missed it that's your own stupid fault.
.NFO, and hunt for known keygens during registration.
There are regular posts on the WoW forums on the subject too. You're not allowed to run external programs that interact with the game, it's that simple. Programs that walk you places, kill things for you, whatever, are all clearly against their rules.
Now this is the bit that shits me the most: if you play a game of basketball, you agree to abide by a bunch of rules. There are a lot of these rules, but you can't be stuffed reading the manual (equivalent to an EULA). Fortunately the main rules are common knowledge and obvious enough for you to survive. Of course, you can't dribble to save your life. It's a hassle, because you can run a lot faster if you just carry that ball. So you don't bother dribbling. What happens next do you think?
Everybody knows where to find the EULA for WoW. They all know that botting is against the rules of the game. But no, they're too lazy to actually play the game so they cheat. Then they get caught. Then they get sent off the court.
Another important thing to understand: most of these articles about how the "Warden" is spyware, about how it sends personal information to Blizzard, are written by paranoid, ignorant conspiracy freaks. The Warden takes a hash of a bunch of attributes of your computer - window titles, memory locations, filenames, etc. A HASH. This is Slashdot, so I shouldn't have to explain this, but the very definition of a HASH is that it is non-reversable. That hash is then compared in-memory to a list of known "bad" hashes. It finds a match, and presumably that hash gets sent back to Blizzard. I dunno, because I don't cheat so I haven't triggered this end of the process.
So Blizzard gets this hash once you cheated, but for the sake of the tin-foil-hats out there let's assume that every 15 seconds the Warden is actually sending the hashes back regardless of whether or not you were found cheating. Window title, memory location, DLL listing. For every window. Think about the traffic. Seriously, think about it for just one second. You have maybe 50 "windows" open at a time on a Windows PC. Again, I shouldn't have to explain this but the term "window" does not just refer to applications visible in the task bar. All those tray icons have windows associated with them, not to mention tons of other invisible programs. Every 15 seconds all this data gets pushed to Blizzard from your machine. That's a lot of data. So they use a hash instead. They take this big chunk of data (one chunk per window), hash it down to a smaller size, and either process it in memory or send it.
Still, can Blizzard use that hash for anything? Can they extrapolate your credit card number from it, or your bank balance? If you believe they can, then you might be better off reading CNN because Slashdot isn't the place for you. Hashes are non-reversable. Duh.
Finally, the Warden is not spyware. It does not get to you unannounced - it's clearly explained in the EULA (even down to roughly what it scans). It is not left behind if you uninstall WoW. If you block WoW from talking to the Internet, the Warden stops working. It does not "spy" on you, because it doesn't send any useable information back to it's owners. No demographic data, no browsing habits, no credit card numbers, and no - it won't even reveal to your mother that you spend half your evening browsing through kiddie pr0n sites. Spyware? Not bloody likely. It's part of the game you idiots, and this isn't the first time companies have used this technology. PunkBuster has been around a whole lot longer and does roughly the same thing. Microsoft do something like this for product activation. They do it for Microsoft Update. DVD-XCopy used to scan window titles for
I know it's fun to sling shit at "the man", b
Oh, and every time an admin approves an article that links to a piece of video hosted on some poor bastard's DSL link at home a fairy dies. No really, how many times does this have to happen before they figure out it's wrong? A billion times?
This isn't newsworthy. It's stupid and boring. Since when did /. become "News for Star Wars fanboys"?
For the record, the story about Star Wars Episode 3 being downloaded a lot? Same category. Dunno if any of the admins have been paying attention, but movies get downloaded once in a while and at least one or two of them have nothing to do with Star Wars.
I'm all for posting a story about the release of the film. It's a geek film. But half a dozen of the stupid things in a week is just plain rubbish. Slashdot is rapidly working it's way off my list of daily reads simply because I'm sick of reading the same articles over and over again. Seeing the same three articles every week is kinda boring: "Check out this Star Wars [blah]", "Google are about to take over the world", and "Microsoft sucks because Penguins are cute".
BORING!
Actually, one of the key mistakes people make is treating products like World of Warcraft as a game. Yes, they have game-like qualities. They are marketed, at least superficially, as games.
Yet they include features that make them stand out against other things we consider to be games. Once you start playing them, especially if you happen to get hooked, they become social experiences. I've played a few of these MMORPGs, and in every case the social interaction has become the reason for participating, not the "game" aspect of it.
Once you accept that these are at least more than "just games", you can apply other sensible rules to it. Companies like IGE, for example, offer unfair advantages to cashed-up players and get in the way of casual players (especially when they camp out an entire zone). Would this type of behaviour be acceptible in the "real world"? Probably not, although it does happen. What we have to remember though is that these "games" are in many ways representations of a better version of reality, a world in which we have a strong influence over our destiny, and one where we don't have to deal with as many of the nasty aspects of real life.
There's also the fact that the players resent it. The act of selling goods and gold is not the thing players hate, at least not the ones I've spoken to. They dislike the way the items are gathered. Any serious player has run into a zone where they simply cannot participate because of farmers. I found a group of them in Stranglethorn Vale, camping out a boss spawn for 8 hours straight. The boss dropps some handy stuff once in a while, but it's also the goal of a quest. I wasn't the only person affected, lots of people just couldn't do that quest because this crew of farmers were persistently killing this boss. This really affects the players, especially those who don't have entire days to devote to the game.
The simplest answer is for Blizzard (and the other MMO producers) to sell items and gold directly to the public. No need for farming, no need to interfere with the players, just create the stuff and sell it for cash. Keep some special items off the list of things you can buy, and be done with it. Personally I don't care if you have 1000g, and if you do I also don't care where you got it. All I care about is you messing up my evening by stopping me from doing my thing.
This isn't a new genre - Everquest, Ultima Online, Diablo (no servers, but still MMORPG), There, Star Wars Galaxies, EQ2, and many more have been here first. If you want to get technical, I was playing MMORPGs well over 10 years ago in the form of MUDs.
EQ was considered revolutionary at the time, with piles of Slashdot articles talking about the addictive nature of the game, the scale of the world, the ugly UI yet immersive gameplay... this is nothing new.
As an interesting thing to note, Blizzard doesn't need to make stuff like this up just now. You can't get a hold of World of Warcraft in the stores for love nor money in many cities, and it's plain to see they're struggling under the load of players. More people jumped into this game than anybody anticipated, and Blizzard are usually pretty good at figuring out this sort of stuff. My guess is they're as shocked as we all are. I'm even thinking Blizzard deliberately controlled the release of copies of the game so the player load arrived gradually instead of all at once.
A worm that spreads via IM? Or a worm that spreads via stupid dumb-ass users who don't know better than to run a .exe they weren't expecting to receive?
One day, with a bit of luck, people opening attachments/files/emails/whatever like this will be considered much the same as people eating strange pieces of food that they find in the street.
For those in the support side of the field, remember that as long as there are stupid people (and there always will be) security vulnerabilities will always be a poor second cousin to humans. The bulk of your support calls won't come from clever little worms that capitalise on obscure security flaws in a product, they'll come as a result of idiots thinking that "nakedwoman.exe" is actually something they want to see.
Yet another reason we should embed cattle-prods into keyboards... "wow, some stranger sent me some naughty pictures of herself! Pity they're archived, I'll just double-click and let them extract themsel *zaaaaaaaap!!!*"
These have been around for ages now. I've had one in my XBox for close to half a year! NEWS means current info, not ancient bloody history. Pogo installations aren't "news", they're ancient history. The Xenium chips aren't "news", they're just another mod chip that has been around for ages.
Man I hate Slashdot lately. Duplicate posts on the front page, uninformed MS bashing at random, borderline "infomercial" posts about products that don't deserve the screen real-estate... get your act together people, Slashdot is losing face.
I've been using Skype heavily the last few months. Despite being closed source (and thus attracting the ire of the Slashdot community in much the same way as bikies don't like bikes that aren't black) and not conforming to a standard (who is to say the VOIP standard is any better than Skype's methods?), the thing works brilliantly.
End users don't give a stuff if it conforms to a standard. Just look at how many ignorant users log into AOL IM every single day! They care about features. Reliability. Simplicity. Cool icons. Pretty colours. RFC compliance does not factor into their decision. The sooner developers in general realise and accept this, the better life will become.
I use Skype for gaming. It runs in the background, does not interfere with my entertainment, and almost never causes any problems at all.
I use Skype for staying in touch with my home while travelling. It's a cheap alternative to expensive international phone rates in hotels. Again, it has yet to fail me.
I don't use Skype for calling land lines, but that will change pretty soon. They admitted to overload-related problems recently, so I'm waiting for these to die down.
Some observations from using their free service include... nice low latency even during international calls. Possibly lower latency than calls placed from a land-line. Reliability makes me smile - find user in contact list, highlight user, click CALL and it rings. They answer, we talk, no bugs, no glitches. Not requiring an expensive handset (ala Cisco VOIP) also makes me smile. Lots.
Show me an equivalent solution with all these good points that adheres to some magical standard and I might show an interest. But only if it look purty.
Rubbish. Spent half an hour in any computer game store and see who lays out their cash... sure, half the people in the store are kids, but how many spend any money?
As an adult my expenditure on gaming has grown by several orders of magnitude. I fork out money for computer hardware and software that no kid would spend.
Adult gamers (ie. over 18) are in my opinion the biggest gamer market. Most of them own a PC, one or two consoles, and buy games.
Nope, the point of middle age is to be able to afford the things you want. If they still happen to be similar to what you wanted ten years earlier, good for you!
I play video games still. I also own a sports-bike, used to own a fancy car, have plenty of things going on that fit the profile for my age but I still like video games.
The ones that really bug me though are the ones where you can only save once every hour or so. Hunting for a save-point when you only have a few minutes to wrap up your gaming bugs the hell out of me. One of the realities of "growing up" is that your time isn't always your own. Often you get interrupted, either by work, kids, partners, or just life in general. If games are going to be pitched at an older audience, they need to take these things into consideration.
Two things come to mind after reading this thread...
One, teachers are rarely computer literate. This is changing slowly, but generally speaking the third graders know more than they do. As a direct result, teachers are unable to utilise these resources effectively and they become a serious problem. Internet access in school classrooms does not help this at all, the number of times my kid sister has messaged me from school to "chat" amazes me.
Two, children are not learning how to communicate properly using these resources. They definitely resort to one word or one line answers, and consistently fail to know how to dig deeper into issues. Online resources like Google don't help - yes, Google is a godsend to you and I, but at the age of 15 these kids don't have a clue how to research. If the answer isn't in Google, they assume it doesn't exist. Not good.
Third, lack of math/science education is bad news for us all. I'm not saying that we all have a need for second and third order differential integration, but there's no doubt that basic understanding of mathematical principles is valuable. My GF has trouble figuring out how to pack large objects into the boot of the car, simply because she wasn't taught trigonometry very well in high school. Sounds trivial, but extrapolate that small example as far as you like and you should find dozens of common situations where this sort of knowledge is important.
Four, and worst of all, I saw something on Big Brother last night that applies here (sad, I know). A couple of housemates had never heard of the Vietnam War. They had no idea what it was, when it happened, who was involved, etc. This war happened right at the start of my life, it wasn't something a hundred years ago! Where did this get missed in their education?!?!
Surely all these issues need addressing, and cutting sections of education simply because computers are expensive is obviously not the answer. Personally, I'd be all in favour of cutting Internet access in schools off from all but selected workstations (heavily locked down library machines, used only for research for example), locking down every piece of software to minimise opportunity to "mess around", and generally restricting what computers are used for in school.
My school years (not too long ago I might add) resulted in almost no computer education at all, heavy math/science, and lots of broad knowledge. The end result is that I can use computers better than most, I can understand how just about anything works, and I am a professional problem solver (ie. network architect). Somehow I doubt that the current batch of students will be capable of the same things.
I own both ATI and nVidia cards at home, with two gaming rigs and one multipurpose machine...
I choose cards on a short and simple list of criteria:
1. Does it do what I want - most important
2. Is it quiet
3. Price
ATI doesn't meet option 1. for one of my machines (my primary gaming rig) because ATI's support for dual monitors is crap. So I run an nVidia in it. The second gaming maching gets the old hand-me-down card from my main machine, so it's nVidia too.
The multipurpose machine though is connected to a television set for DVD playback. In this instance I wanted good TV-Out quality and driver support, so ATI won the battle.
There was a time when I was an nVidia fanboy (yes, I admit it) but these days the two brands are close enough in performance to be the same. Yes, their latest and greatest take turns in being the fastest, but I don't buy at that level - I buy the 6 month old cards that have halved in price already. Most of the time I find that at a given price both vendors have identical performance figures.
Finally, a lot of these high-performance cards aren't worth the attention they get. Yes, you can play UT2004 on them at 1600x1200 and still get 60fps. So bloody what?!?! My LCD is fixed at 1280x1024 so even one year old cards give me nice steady 40fps performance in high quality mode. Faster framerates don't help me play any better, I still suck online. So I'm not going to spend twice as much as I want just to buy performance I can't use.
Here endeth the rant.
You're dead right - ease of installation, both OS and apps, is standing in the way of wide-spread acceptance of Linux.
I work in IT as a senior systems architect. I've been a Solaris admin in my time, managed VMS systems, but these days I design and build large-scale Active Directory and Exchange systems. Yet somehow even I find it difficult at times to get a Linux box to do what I want it to do.
Having to know the type of mouse is only the tip of the iceberg. What about the need to install all sorts of hard-to-find libraries to get some apps (especially games) to work, or the need to read complicated (and poorly written) man pages in order to maintain your installation once it's up and running.
I'm not saying they need to dumb it down and build a wizard for everything. I'm just saying that it's hard, and most people don't want hard, they want easy. While geeks like me don't care if they lose an entire weekend to building a system, "normal" people expect to stick the CD in and have a machine built nice and fast. This is why OEM machines (like laptops, for example) come with self installing OS CDs - because that's what the bulk of customers truly want.
Incidentally, even I'm heading towards reducing my management efforts for my home machines. Having 5 machines at home works out as a hell of a lot of admin work to add an app or hotfix to all the machines if I run Linux. Running Windows means the hotfixes install themselves, and the apps take just a few minutes to install.
This isn't just a demo, it's fucking art. Nothing short of art.
These guys consistently put together tightly coded, artistics pieces of material that not a single contributor to this discussion could have done no matter how long they had available to them.
Yes, they used DirectX. Who cares. No, the game isn't a commercial effort. But it's tiny. And it looks awesome. And on good enough hardware it runs perfectly.
This is the programming equivalent of carving a portrait into the top of a needle.
So what if it doesn't run on Linux. Who said it was supposed to? It doesn't use OpenGL, that's their personal choice. Just respect it for the phenomenal level of expertise required to produce something like this. For the innovation, skill and effort they must have poured into 96KB of data.
Personally, I'd love to come close to this level of skill in anything, let alone something this difficult.
People who said that about Windows were obviously not paying attention. Being able to carry out multiple tasks in parallel, to have several applications available to facilitate workflow, that's dead simple to justify.
Bear in mind that the windowed nature of the Windows GUI wasn't the big step forward - the multiple application, flexible workflow side of things is what truly mattered (working in windows had been around for ages, just look at the Mac, or even better GEOS on the C64!).
Having a pretty 3D interface to do the same thing? I'm not convinced. Gimme something truly revolutionary.
3 Dimensional interfaces like these (especially Suns new project) are just annoying. They don't represent any signficant increase in productivity, they aren't going to make your system easier to use - they just look cool, and that's enough to grab attention.
The downside of these interfaces is the ridiculously high processor and memory requirements. All that extra graphic manipulation comes at a price, and I for one don't see any reason to waste processor cycles. What I'd much rather see is somebody developing a faster, more lightweight UI that is a nice combination of OSX and Windows XP. One that chews up LESS memory (instead of more, like this), one that speeds things up.
Then I'll be impressed.
Who cares about ogg? Seriously, I haven't got a single ogg file despite having a sizable collection of MP3's and WMA'a. Nor do I know of anybody who does!
Is it only the linux zealots who support this standard? Is it just another opportunity for the penguin-lovers to thumb their nose at whoever they feel MP3 represents? Or am I just missing some beautiful benefit of ogg...
Saying it runs at 54mbps is one thing, but try getting that much out of it... Even with high-end Cisco gear it doesn't actually deliver that much throughput thanks to the overhead of the 802.11g protocol.
Data storage that not only is seriously expensive, but far too slow for any real use. I have an 802.11G wireless network here at home and while it's fine for basic tasks like Internet access and moving small files around it's slow.
Despite claiming to be 54mbit, it really only gets 8 - 20 mbit even when I sit right next to the access point. There are a bunch of technical reasons why this is so, but the bottom line is that disk should be fast. ATA20 isn't a disk standard because people want ATA150. They'd buy ATA600 if it were possible, because disk is already the slowest part of our computers.
Making it slower is just stupid marketing guys trying to figure out how else to get rid of 15 million spare wireless chips.
I was retrenched after 2.5 years with an employer. It sucked in a big way. Sure, I was one of about a dozen people marched out the door on the day but it was largely the result of stupid internal politics, nasty staff, and bad luck.
In my case it only happened once, but I contracted for over a year after that hopping from one short-term contract to the next. Each time I sat an interview the question was asked... why did you leave that 2.5 year job, why did you leave your last 3 employers so rapidly. So I told 'em the truth: I got retrenched, suckage but what can you do? The others were short-term gigs, just contracts. They'd ask me leading questions to see if I'd be nasty about the ex-employer, and I'd cheerfully tell them that yeah, I didn't like 'em very much any more... would you, if they laid you off? But that's business, and I'm here to work for you guys now.
I only missed out on two jobs during that period of my life, neither because of being laid off. Honesty is a valuable commodity these days, especially in the IT industry. Use it to your advantage.