"It's not desirable that somebody with 500$ to spare can become top-dog within WoW."
That's just it... in WoW, having even 100,000 gold would still not get you gear as good as those who attend 40-man raid dungeons. There just aren't enough good sellable items - every good instance drop binds to you when you pick it up, and becomes usable only by you.
The best you could do using gold is to buy an epic mount (which doesn't really help you much), and maybe one or two lower level epic armor pieces or weapons.
What is your plan to reach out to all those players who left before the combat revamp, doctor buff changes, and now this new revamp? Do you hope to draw them back somehow? Will there be any incentives for old veterans to return?
For the cost of one or two short missions, you could buy a harvester machine to gather resources for you while you were offline. But I guess you might not get that far in just ten days.
However, yes, the game becomes a big boring time sink. Attaining Jedi, particularly. No skill required, just obscene amounts of time. First it was grind out as many professions as you can, next it was grind out experience from a single profession (hope the one you choose has the most efficient XP-to-Jedi conversion, if not grind up Commando) for weeks on end.
Eventually, I left for WoW, which has NEVER felt like a grind in the year I've been playing.
I think the main difference is that in SWG, every single item is unique.
In WoW, for example, every Dazzling Mithril Raiper is the same as every other Dazzling Mithril Rapier. The only variants are, what single enchant has been added to it and how much durability is left? So when one drops, the game just adds one more simple record to your inventory, and it's done.
In SWG, every single item is different from every other one. Very few items can even stack because they can differ ever so slightly. The quality of the resources that you use to craft, the skill of the crafter, and a bit of randomness luck make each item unique. You can do factory batch jobs to craft multiple identical items, but those max out at 1000 or so (and far less for items which rely on other facotry runs to be made first). The database requirements must be enormous.
Also, in SWG, you can interact with and change the environment. You can build houses, place harvesters, start towns, have passive and active defenses, etc. In WoW, there's none of this at all. Except for the players, every WoW server is exactly the same. You can't build player cities, can't place harvesters, can't craft an especially high quality Dazzling Mithril Rapier, etc.
So SWG really is much more intricate (for better or for worse) than WoW, but I think the revamp is going to reduce this unneccesary complexity.
What really matters is the Section 5 Fair Use amendments. In just a few lines, Rep Boucher has probably sent most of the content industry apoplectic.
Yup, this is perfect:
`and it is not a violation of this section to circumvent a technological measure in order to obtain access to the work for purposes of making noninfringing use of the work'
I've been asked to build a massive storage solution to scale from an initial threshold of 25TB to 1PB, primarily on commodity hardware and software......At this point data redundancy is not a priority, however it will have to be addressed.
What you're asked to do isn't always what needs to be done. You're making a huge mistake if data redundancy for this enormous project is just an afterthought.
I don't know what role you play in your organization, but try to get the business-minded folks to tell you what they want to accomplish, and then YOU and your architecture people will decide what needs to be done to accomplish it.
With such vague requirements, how can they already know that you should build it from scratch instead of choosing a turnkey solution?
Maybe 4 years is pushing it, but just 3 years ago you could have had a 9700 Pro and 2 ghz Athlon XP processor. That same setup would still run most games just fine today.
With a PC, you don't NEED to upgrade your graphics card all the time. When a console comes out there are many games unique to it that require an upgrade. When pc titles come out you can still run them on older hardware with some settings turned down. Very rarely will a game come out which won't even run on a 4-year old graphics card.
Call me a bleeding heart, but aren't there more important problems than file sharing in the world, such as starvation, aids, poverty, political repression, terrorism? It amazes me how many resources are wasted on this file sharing crap, and I'd never vote for a legislator who spent more time on file sharing than real problems.
Great, just one more thing that will say "Oh my god... Harold, is that really you? I don't even recognize you!" after you get in a horrible disfiguring accident involving lye, spit, and a rottweiler in heat. And your name's not even Harold!
If he can actually do that. I mean, he's made the offer, you make this game I give $10,000 to charity. I kind of wonder if he actually has the legal ability to just go "ha ha only kidding" at this point and back out.
It's not like he entered into a contractual agreement with a developer. He made a false promise; nothing illegal about that. Campaigning politicians do it all the time.
Someone should have made a game where you kill the CEO and the family, but they come back as zombies, and then you play as the zombies and go torture and kill the lawyer "Thomp Jackson"
Perhaps more important to note is that major manufacturers are creating and stores are stocking enough well-featured AMD-based computers to achieve this landmark of retail sales. This would not have been possible several years ago.
Gun crime went down steadily in the 8 years before they banned firearms. (Not just guns, rifles are banned too) In the couple years after the ban, they reached the point of being the murder capital of the US
I think this is similar to gun "control" laws- two of the places with the biggest restrictions on guns have the highest crime rates- California and Wash. D.C.
Yeah, but which came first?
If they had no gun crime in the first place, they wouldn't have felt the need to pass those laws.
Oh, I read that more literally, as in "the packaging (paper and plastic) for a console game costs $10-$15"; not taking into account the console makers royalties.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's not desirable that somebody with 500$ to spare can become top-dog within WoW."
That's just it... in WoW, having even 100,000 gold would still not get you gear as good as those who attend 40-man raid dungeons. There just aren't enough good sellable items - every good instance drop binds to you when you pick it up, and becomes usable only by you.
The best you could do using gold is to buy an epic mount (which doesn't really help you much), and maybe one or two lower level epic armor pieces or weapons.
This one's long and interesting (to me, at least) and details the inventory's journey; the Ascadia Zubbles article was just a blurb.
Don't worry, they'll add an EthicsBuddy bot to your buddy list tomorrow.
"even claiming it to be as powerful and easier to use than Linux."
Gates is also authoring a new book called "Supercomputing For Dummies", for all those super-computer admins who are frightened by command prompts.
As someone posted above...
For current computers, adding a bit to the key makes it twice as hard to crack; so it's 2^n hard to crack where n is the number of bits.
For quantum computers, adding a bit to the key only adds a constant amount of time it'd take to crack.
128 bit encryption is 2^64 = (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) as hard to crack as 64 bit.
But with quantum computers, 128 bit would only be 128/64 = 2 times as hard to crack as 64 bit.
What is your plan to reach out to all those players who left before the combat revamp, doctor buff changes, and now this new revamp? Do you hope to draw them back somehow? Will there be any incentives for old veterans to return?
For the cost of one or two short missions, you could buy a harvester machine to gather resources for you while you were offline. But I guess you might not get that far in just ten days.
However, yes, the game becomes a big boring time sink. Attaining Jedi, particularly. No skill required, just obscene amounts of time. First it was grind out as many professions as you can, next it was grind out experience from a single profession (hope the one you choose has the most efficient XP-to-Jedi conversion, if not grind up Commando) for weeks on end.
Eventually, I left for WoW, which has NEVER felt like a grind in the year I've been playing.
I think the main difference is that in SWG, every single item is unique.
In WoW, for example, every Dazzling Mithril Raiper is the same as every other Dazzling Mithril Rapier. The only variants are, what single enchant has been added to it and how much durability is left? So when one drops, the game just adds one more simple record to your inventory, and it's done.
In SWG, every single item is different from every other one. Very few items can even stack because they can differ ever so slightly. The quality of the resources that you use to craft, the skill of the crafter, and a bit of randomness luck make each item unique. You can do factory batch jobs to craft multiple identical items, but those max out at 1000 or so (and far less for items which rely on other facotry runs to be made first). The database requirements must be enormous.
Also, in SWG, you can interact with and change the environment. You can build houses, place harvesters, start towns, have passive and active defenses, etc. In WoW, there's none of this at all. Except for the players, every WoW server is exactly the same. You can't build player cities, can't place harvesters, can't craft an especially high quality Dazzling Mithril Rapier, etc.
So SWG really is much more intricate (for better or for worse) than WoW, but I think the revamp is going to reduce this unneccesary complexity.
Or if you do, can you just block that cookie?
What really matters is the Section 5 Fair Use amendments. In just a few lines, Rep Boucher has probably sent most of the content industry apoplectic.
Yup, this is perfect:
`and it is not a violation of this section to circumvent a technological measure in order to obtain access to the work for purposes of making noninfringing use of the work'
I've been asked to build a massive storage solution to scale from an initial threshold of 25TB to 1PB, primarily on commodity hardware and software... ...At this point data redundancy is not a priority, however it will have to be addressed.
What you're asked to do isn't always what needs to be done. You're making a huge mistake if data redundancy for this enormous project is just an afterthought.
I don't know what role you play in your organization, but try to get the business-minded folks to tell you what they want to accomplish, and then YOU and your architecture people will decide what needs to be done to accomplish it.
With such vague requirements, how can they already know that you should build it from scratch instead of choosing a turnkey solution?
http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/video/ati_rade on9700p/
? i=1685
http://firingsquad.com/hardware/r300/default.asp
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.html
Maybe 4 years is pushing it, but just 3 years ago you could have had a 9700 Pro and 2 ghz Athlon XP processor. That same setup would still run most games just fine today.
With a PC, you don't NEED to upgrade your graphics card all the time. When a console comes out there are many games unique to it that require an upgrade. When pc titles come out you can still run them on older hardware with some settings turned down. Very rarely will a game come out which won't even run on a 4-year old graphics card.
What makes you think that noone is working on stavation, aids, poverty, political reporession, or terrorism?
Africa.
Well, it's not like there's no one working on it, but clearly way too few.
Call me a bleeding heart, but aren't there more important problems than file sharing in the world, such as starvation, aids, poverty, political repression, terrorism? It amazes me how many resources are wasted on this file sharing crap, and I'd never vote for a legislator who spent more time on file sharing than real problems.
Great, just one more thing that will say "Oh my god... Harold, is that really you? I don't even recognize you!" after you get in a horrible disfiguring accident involving lye, spit, and a rottweiler in heat. And your name's not even Harold!
Slashdot Editor should change the post to indicate that.
Change "on their website" to say "on our website".
If he can actually do that. I mean, he's made the offer, you make this game I give $10,000 to charity. I kind of wonder if he actually has the legal ability to just go "ha ha only kidding" at this point and back out.
It's not like he entered into a contractual agreement with a developer. He made a false promise; nothing illegal about that. Campaigning politicians do it all the time.
Someone should have made a game where you kill the CEO and the family, but they come back as zombies, and then you play as the zombies and go torture and kill the lawyer "Thomp Jackson"
Oblig. clever Onion reference:
Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes
Perhaps more important to note is that major manufacturers are creating and stores are stocking enough well-featured AMD-based computers to achieve this landmark of retail sales. This would not have been possible several years ago.
Gun crime went down steadily in the 8 years before they banned firearms. (Not just guns, rifles are banned too) In the couple years after the ban, they reached the point of being the murder capital of the US
Care to cite any sources?
I think this is similar to gun "control" laws- two of the places with the biggest restrictions on guns have the highest crime rates- California and Wash. D.C.
Yeah, but which came first?
If they had no gun crime in the first place, they wouldn't have felt the need to pass those laws.
Oh, I read that more literally, as in "the packaging (paper and plastic) for a console game costs $10-$15"; not taking into account the console makers royalties.