I leveled two chars to 60 (Shaman and Warlock) but finally got bored with WoW and frustrated with Blizzard and canceled my account last month. I think that will be a growing trend.
Blizzard's doing their very best to do a reverse-alchemist trick and turn gold into lead. Arrogant (or non-existent) customer support, inconsistent flailing, buggy releases, and spending time and energy in places other than where they need to focus (e.g. four different versions of PvP and an expansion pack, instead of revisiting instances and classes).
No doubt, Sony did look at how the (long-gone) Blizzard designers simplified an MMO. Things like not having draconian death penalties, etc. If they deliver what's been described, I think they'll fare well.
I guess this explains what they've been doing instead of fixing the MANY bugs that remain in the product a year after retail. And the many holes: things like endless 40-man raiding being the ultimate goal of the game, poorly designed and terribly performing Battlegrounds, talent trees full of talents that are well-known to be worthless (because of class evolution since beta), way too much grinding, many ways of griefing left in the system, professions that don't provide much benefit or income, etc, etc.
They're so busy puffing the NEW stuff (maybe a year out) and my guess is this gives full permission to ignore the current problems. Glad I stopped paying my monthly fee. (Had a 60 Shaman and a 60 Warlock.)
I used to respect Blizzard as the BEST game company. The early Warcraft series were AMAZING. They're in over their heads on this one, which might not be so bad if they were honest, but instead they resort to arrogant "working as intended" answers -- when they occasionally do answer -- they ignore their user base when meaningful suggestions are made (Warlock) yet cave in to popular demand (Paladin), and they insist they will change something and never do then turn around and say they'll never change something and then do a 180.
If they'd established a track record of meaningful beta testing, waiting to release new patches until they were debugged, listening to customer feedback when it's well-reasoned, and communicating with users, I'd be second-guessing my decision to quit. As it is, I see even more content that will have the same problems. No thanks.
I don't think that games turn people into killers. In fact, I enjoy Unreal Tournament 2004, WoW, etc, which obviously involve "killing" to reach your goal. But I do support the parent posting's observations...
I think that in their rush to defend an anything-goes mentality, other posters in this thread overlook obvious connections:
1. Olympic and all world-class athletes use visualization as a part of their training. They imagine themselves doing their sport in as vivid a detail as they can. For example, a weight lifter imagines walking up to the weights, feeling the bar, gripping it, heaving it upwards, etc, etc. They imagine the perfect performance again and again, and it helps to shape their reactions to achieve it.
Your brain does not know the difference between real and imagined. That's why you can get angry "just thinking about that jerk that cut you off this morning". Obviously, higher-level functions allow us to reason and realize "it's just a memory/game" but our instincts and reflexes may not be so lucky.
2. Read Blink and see how what we view affects how we act. In particular, the experiment where people were primed (unknowingly) to be either rude or polite and how unbelievably strong the effect was. The experimenters expected noticable but minor differences and found HUGE differences in reaction that astonished them.
In light of that, someone who spends HOURS trying to grief others and demolish them (or get steamrolled themselves) in vicious ways will, as the parent comment says, definitely be more likely to be jerks. Or worse. And that's the difference, say between sports and video games: you cannot demolish 20 opposing basketball teams in a long night of playing. You can easily do this in video games, including some of my favorites.
Again, I'm not going to kill someone because I play violent games. But please don't ignore obvious and deep issues to say that video games (or porn, or whatever) have nothing to do with anything. (Read Blink's description of gender and racial biases that are very unconscious but can be accurately measured and can be affected by our experiences and then think about how games or porn present various different classes/professions/races/genders and imagine how being "primed" in this way would affect attitudes and interactions, even if they never were consciously accepted and acted upon in open ways.)
From what I understand, javanese is an honorific language. That is, the words you choose depend on the relative class of yourself and the one you are addressing. So you may have six ways to say exactly the same thing -- which words you choose depend on whether you are honored more, less, or the same as your listener and to what degree.
A death penalty simply shifts the leveling window. In WoW, trivial quests are grey, easy are green, level-appropriate are yellow, challenging are orange, and impossible are red. (Actually, they have quite a few problems with their quest classification, mainly because if you're a level 40 and you fight max level 40's in the quest, it comes out yellow, regardless of whether you only ever take on one at a time or if you have to enter a room where you have no choice but to fight 5 level 40's simultaneously.)
As a solo Shaman, I preferred yellow quests with the occasional orange or green. As a Warlock, I've been able to do harder quests solo. (Warlocks are PvE kings.) If there were a stupid severe death penalty, I'd simply prefer greens that were about to go grey, or perhaps even grey.
When death severely penalizes you, you simply don't take on as difficult a challenge, you don't take on challenges alone, and you don't take on challenges with unknown players. You simply scale back your expectations and play well below your capacity to make sure you don't die. (If you play at the limit and die a fair amount, you're just plain masochistic.)
I can assure you that running back to your corpse is a royal pain and I avoid death strenuously. Not to mention that if it happens too much, your equipment becomes unusable until repaired, effectively calling a halt to your current endeavor. Instance deaths -- depending on your class mix, cooldowns, etc -- can also mean the end of that instance run and I can assure you if you do something stupid to cause a wipe you HEAR about it.
Personally, I see no benefit to draconian death penalties. It simply penalizes low-level chars that cannot fight below their level, it penalizes solo play, and it penalizes those that don't enjoy cutting off fingers playing mumbly-peg.
The CMs are a joke. Instead of policing forums to remove "nerf Shaman" posts in the Shaman forum, they lock threads with titles in all caps. Literally weeks go by without any apparent CM presence, much less posting. And when they post they often post retrospectively, to explain why this change was not documented in the patch notes in disingenuous ways.
The CMs don't advocate in the forums for their communities. The European Warlock CM recently became a celebrity in the US because he actually bothered to summarize the issues that the community feels are important -- as opposed to what Blizzard feels is important -- and posted the summary. You get the impression that perhaps he actually plays a Warlock and perhaps he actually roots for them and has sympathy for their complaints.
Plus, about half the dev posts I've seen have also been disingenuous weasle posts that ignore major issues involved in a discussion to address it in a way that can be summarized "working as intended". They reallly do bring it upon themselves with CMs allowing a lawless atmosphere, then filling it with suspicion and doubt, with the devs coming in to occasionally inform and occasionally reinforce the party line.
I try not to complain, except by masking it as part of an argumentative statement as part of a totally unrelated argument on a tech news site, because I know that Blizzard is working on it, and doing a damned fine job of it.
The 1.6 patch saw more features broken in the Warlock class than were fixed or added. It took a couple of hotfixes to begin fixing them and even with the 1.7 patch they still haven't gotten it right. These new bugs were well-documented on the test realm forums so they chose to release a very buggy release for political reasons. (And it wasn't just Warlocks, but since you seem to play a Warlock also, I address that. BWL, their PREMIER high-end content took two hotfixes to get it working.)
The mods that they have made to the Warlock class have not addressed the core issues nor the core bugs of the class. For example, Curse of Agony simply does not work properly: it's our only Curse -- and the only DoT in the game -- that stops working if the target moves out of sight, including stealthing or the caster dying. DoTs, even with shortened durations (unless they turn out to be REALLY short) are still not viable in PvP because of slot limitations and decursive, and are not that much more viable in PvE because of slot limitations versus raid size and the speed with which non-boss mobs are killed.
As you acknowledge, they've buffed Hunter pets while ignoring the LONG STANDING problems with Warlock "High End" pets. Our endgame pets have been #3 or #4 on the Warlock request list since retail release, yet they've instead handed us all kinds of other "fixes" while ignoring these pets. Hunter pets, which carry no risk or cost, could give them a run for their money all along. They've been improperly balanced since Day 1. It's just with the latest Hunter over-buff that Hunter pets can now solo Warlock pets 100% of the time. And, oh yeah, they're looking into it and it's something that snuck up on them because mob toughness somehow crept up since retail release. Yeah, right.
This is not a slow-but-sure approach. They claimed they were done with Warlocks in 1.6 and were moving on to Hunters, etc. But it was obvious to Warlocks that they addressed none of our top issues, and instead did stuff that's nice but not wanted or really needed. They've publicly claimed that Warlock talents have been looked over and fixed. Except any 60 Warlock can easily name 5 or 6 talents that are absolutely worthless. Literally, not just a matter of taste, but they don't do anything useful at all. So now they acknowledge that after two "Warlock" patches they really do still have major holes to plug, and even then they still only give passing mention -- much less attention or discussion -- to core issues that Warlocks have discussesd since Day 1.
That's not the great job you talk about. No, what we see is a bumbling in the dark as they try to fix things that they as players of each class (or non-players for some classes) think should be fixed. Most of the changes reflect a cargo cult mentality where they refuse to change some things (shards come to mind) because the gods once said that this was critical to the class. They're busy attempting to turn out enough content now that they can justify an expansion (which is being worked in parallel, sucking off resources from the current paying customers). They're busy throwing out a bunch of half-baked BGs to see which ones might be popular. They generally refuse to communicate and when they do it's not with the attitude of "We have reasons for this decision and here they are", but rather "working as intended".
Having woked in the software industry for many years, I can smell a confused bunch of folks a mile off. These guys don't understand the principles upon which WoW was designed. They don't have a clue as to how to proceed. They have some rules that were written down in presentations of documentation somewhere, but they don't understand the underlying theories and so they bumble around, tweaking here and there. They will be very successful, as they have a lot of momentum and anyone who loved, or would have loved EQ is bound to love the increasingly EQ-like WoW. But don't even try to get away with claiming they're doing a superb job.
Seriously, the people that designed the game were brilliant. But somewhere along the way to public release they all got hit by a bus or something and now we're left with arrogant, clueless tweakers who are tweaking here and there and introducing the wrong things at the wrong time. (And who communicate poorly at best or dishonestly at worst with their user base.)
For example, they came out with Honor (/sarcasm/) before they came out with Battlegrounds, turning laggy zones into uninhabitable zones with PvP zergfests and ganking.
Then their Premier Battleground, Alterac Valley, came out with all kinds of problems and guess what? They'd also taken the time to implement a half-baked Capture the Flag BG as well. So they didn't do the big BG properly because they spent time on the lesser one, but they didn't do that properly because of a splitting of effort and a lack of foresight and this resulted in a couple of Blizzard class forums being flooded for months with whiners because of perceived class imbalances that were solely due to the improper design of the new BG.
They've been throwing unwanted changes at Warlocks while avoiding the Top 4 changes that are universally requested. But on the other hand, they cannot give any kind of reasoned description of why things work as they do.
They claimed that the Undead racial trait Will of the Forsaken would NEVER be changed, but rather other racial traits would be brought up to speed to match them. Then they nerfed WotF.
THey claim it's solo friendly, but as you get close to 60 and if you're solo (or duo) you're relegated to grinding as ALL quests require 5-man groups at a minimum. And of course there's no post-60 solo material. THey claim it's casual-user friendly but there's no content that can be beaten on an hour-per-night basis, and end-game content requires synchronized schedules for 40+ people to even be attempted, with MANY hours of that required to actually beat the content. EQ, EQ, EQ, all over again.
They designed the Warlock class around DoTs and Fear. But then they don't allow enough slots for DoTs to operate in PvE and they don't allow the Warlock to create time (i.e. Fear is nerfed) for DoTs to work in PvP, plus they weren't smart enough to see how PvE-based scripts to instantly clear DoTs from party members would render DoTs useless in organized PvP. Did I mention how Fear used to be powerful but now there are racial traits, a basketful of easily obtainable anti-fear trinkets, and diminishing returns all crippling Fear? (On top of Fear having a cast time.)
Bottom line is the game started with a well-balanced organization, which has since been tweaked bit-by-bit in a locally-optimized way that has destroyed global balance. But those Blizzard folks left behind in the Great Abduction aren't bright enough to understand this. So instead they are concentrating on raid-guild/EQ-style endgame content, poorly-implemented PvP content, and negative-feedback-loop tweaks. Oh yeah, and there are holiday celebrations in-game.
This story is so Apple-like I can only hope that Blizzard's equivalent of MacOS X and the iPod are somehow coming down the road in a couple of years. But my guess is they are actually a Microsoft now and there's no such hope.
OK, that's reassuring then. Perhaps I'll revisit it in six months or so to see if they've fixed content. (The frustrating thing today is I'm finally seeing a post from Blizzard regarding Warlock changes in the next 2 patches and they seem to be heading very slowly in a good direction with the class -- the most complex and interesting yet most broken class in the game.)
I'm not sure whether I'll still be in a guild when I get back as it will be quite easy to fade from corporate memory and have a new officer purge you from the ranks over a long period of time. IF I come back I guess. If Majesty 2 comes out on the Mac or UT2006 or whatever, I may not ever come back.
So it ends not with a bang but with a whimper. At least I'll prove to a friend that I'm not addicted to WoW, eh?
Considering that our current communications system -- including EMERGENCY communications -- is being build around cellular, I don't think jammers should be legal.
First, they can jam a signal outside of the theater. Second if they're legal you might decide to carry a personal one, creating a 911-free zone all around you for a hundred yards until you remember you forgot to turn it off when you left the theater. Third, once you can jam cellphones, what about cameras (lasers, might be bad for your eyes, but whatever), AM/FM radio (damn boomboxes), those loud EMT walkie-talkies, etc?
I've leveled two chars to 60 (first a Shaman, then a Warlock) and had a reasonable time. Spent too much time pushing for that next level, but I figured that once I had a level 60 char, I could cut it down to an hour or two on some days and maybe 3 or 4 on a weekend -- something like most people's TV watching.
Unfortunately, WoW has simply taken EQ and done it better. And it appears that the original designers -- brilliant all -- have all left the company or have slept too close to pods from outer space or something. Instead, the developers are currently thrashing around and not really accomplishing anything beyond setting us up for an expansion.
Test realms? Please! No bugs are fixed in response to these realms. The 1.6 patch broke more Warlock features than it added or fixed, and every one of these new bugs were well-documented in the test realm forums. And the new highest-end content was so broken it took two hotfixes to get it to work. No, test realms are to generate enough buzz that people will wait another month before canceling their account.
High-end content for casual players? Notice how they mentioned "quests". Quests are only applicable to chars that are leveling, with the possible exception of Warlock/Paladin quests for their epic mounts. Other than that, you need a large guild that can guarantee 40 people attending a raid. Some of us cannot be there at some raid times (in my guild's case, set too early in the evening for me to make it from work), so as the questioner asked: what about content that a level 60 can do solo or with 1 friend in an hour or two?
No such content. How about content that may take many hours but can be worked on an hour or two at a time? Nope. Of course, there is grinding/farming, mind-numbing to raise cash for some purchase, but that's not enjoyable and the item bought requires some kind of outlet to be valued, not just using it to do more grinding.
How about PvP? As far as I can tell, they're trying to create a fourth-rate Unreal Tournament 2004. I'd hope for a third-rate or even second-rate, but they're not even close. PvP boils down to zerg-fests and the computer spec required to not be zerged AND lagged is probably 2x or 3x what UT2004 requires. (Not to mention that an RPG has many intrinsic factors that will keep PvP from being as balanced as Halo, UT2004, etc.)
And did we mention no Blizzard-written voice chat? UT2004 includes it, so it's a lowest-common-denominator. WoW depends on vent, teamspeak, etc, which fragments voice comms. (Or in the case of Macs, eliminates it.)
Anyhow, I'm bored out of my skull now and thee last three times I've logged in I've been unable to get together a party to tackle the items I have left to tackle. If this continues for another week, I'll probably have to reluctantly cancel my account.
It feels like a horrible waste to throw away such cool chars. It's like I have the Batmobile and several of his gadgets but the power sources are all dead and I either have to pay for storage for them until maybe someday we discover how it's powered or just junk them. It's more fun to read Theorycraft and rumors on Blizzard's site than to enter the game. Sad, really.
Search: Maybe I'm missing something, but name one somewhat modern OS without a built in search function.
And you can't see any difference between them? Sit down at a UNIX/Linux box and use 'find' to find all files that have a name that ends in ".jpg". How long does it take? Try it in MacOS from the GUI. Try it in Windows from the GUI.
This is as simple a search as it gets since all OS's already have filename "metadata". And it's SLOW. With Spotlight, you see results as quickly as you can type the letters. And it also works for file content, etc. Try that with a UNIX/Mac/Windows find.
Scripting: Again, maybe I'm missing something, but WTF!
Have you even looked at any pictures? This is: a) integrated into the OS and all programs via Applescript, and b) elegantly graphical. A UNIX shell script is NOT even comparable in either category: it has no hooks into other programs or the OS, and it's certainly not visual (much less elegantly so).
Info Display Panel: No idea what this is. But it sounds like a web browser to me. It could be the single thing in this list worth fighting about though.
Not sure what is meant here. Perhaps this means Dashboard, which is a very elegant, extensible widget mechanism. Yes, Konfabulator existed first, and it does use Javascript as well, but it uses it's own custom XML for layout instead of building (as Apple does) on existing solutions (HTML, CSS).
RSS: This (again) has been done in Opera and Mozilla for quite a while.
I believe the difference is the level of aggregation of Safari's new RSS and Mozilla's bookmarks, including the ability to do searches on RSS feeds. Not sure how capable Mozilla is in this realm, though.
Instant Messaging: Who on earth wrote this list?
You only have to think for a moment to realize that it's not the inclusion of Instant Messaging, which has existed for quite some time. (Even looking only at Apple's software, iChat has been around for years now, much less the Big World.) The difference is in the features of iChat, which now includes 4-way videoconferencing and 10-way audio conferencing. Not revolutionary, but one of the slickest packages out there and it's about to become the lowest-common-denominator for every Mac.
It's hidden behind a government conspiracy, but I know the truth. These so-called "magnetars" are in fact Halo rings. We're just darn lucky that the one we witnessed malfunctioned and did not trigger all the others in the galaxy.
They are not only testing the new servers/languages, they also have an extensive list of class balance and bug fixes as well. Test it first in a new market, where you won't have all the "you nerfed my lvl 50 char!" comments.
You mentioned that there was a site where beginners played other beginners. I'd highly recommend against this. You really need to play against someone who knows what they're doing or you're going to adopt crazy strategies and tactics. Even if you're both reading books and trying it out on each other.
Using your 'don't publish until ALL factors are measured', nothing would ever get done, especially in SOFT science like analyzing poll-results. "We can't be sure these numbers are truly valid until we've verified what percentage of actual voters had undergone botox treatments."
I never said ALL factors, I said many obviously relevant factors. For example, CNN's national exit polling indicated that Bush received 9% more Latino votes, 6% more Jewish votes, 5% more 65+ votes, and 13% more "Large City dwellers" votes in 2004 than he did in 2000. The conclusions of the study are basically based on urban counties of south Florida with large elderly, Jewish, Latino, and African American populations, where all of these percentage changes would be major factors, yet they considered basically none.
As I noted, they considered Latinos, but only non-voting-related stats and only from 2000. No way to see how Latino voters might've influenced the 2004 election.
Of course, the whole study hinges on e-voting and the supposed differences between counties with and those without. They never investigate any factors that might have something to do with which counties have e-voting and which do not. I can't find any stats in a quick web search, but yes they do need to address this issue to be a real study. There aren't an infinite number of such issues and they're not that difficult to think of.
saying that using county demographics is wrong since the better number is county-likely-voter demographics: in statistics, one uses the best data you can get your hands on, and I'm sure any of us that weren't trying to stick our heads in the sand would agree that the two are similar enough to allow that as a insightful substitute, given the (I'll bet) UTTER LACK of comprehensive, published exit-poll demographic data.
Non-voter demographics don't address the "ground game" where unions, parties, churches, etc, fight to get out voters for their side. It doesn't matter if the county is 15% Hispanic if there is a Hispanic hot button issue that turns out the community in unusually large numbers. That's what voting is all about, and if you eliminate it, you aren't talking about voting anymore.
"Close enough" is not some kind of scientific argument, last I checked. I think it's a leap to say that Latino population from one election is enough data to be able to factor out their influence in a future election. Not to mention the other voting groups I mentioned. So, no, this is not a reasonable substitute for poll data.
Speaking of biases, given your posting history, (June 27 '04: calling Michael Moore a Lying Hack repeatedly,
Did I call Moore a "Lying Hack"? As far as I remember, I was having a discussion with a fellow who said that he had doubts about Moore's honesty, but in spite of this he still liked what he (Moore) had to say. A strange proposition, which I tried to point out.
using Wing-Nut party-line excuses and lies as your basis) if they'd done this study and shouted 'no news here', you'd be on that like flies on stink, now wouldn't you?
Wow, strange how quickly you get vague. I'm a "party line" guy, wrong on every issue, a wing-nut. Poof, make it so.
It's funny how you talk about ad-hominum attacks, yet that's exactly what you're doing: "Why look, you're obviously a nut because you disagree with Micheal Moore, so you must be an idiot here, too."
Twice you've trumpeted that the study was flawed. Neither time have you given a concrete example of better data.
You don't seem to understand what I'm saying. I'm not saying that the data they have is wrong, but that they don't have data that reasonably and obviously would affect their conclusions. (Since their conclusions talk about accounting for other factors.)
I have a day job and am not publishing a study for national distribution, so my res
Someone else has responded, but let me add some questions for you:
Can you explain why they have Hispanic population data and median income data for the year 2000 included at all? Remember, this is not data from 2000 and from 2004, it's only data from 2000 and yet it's included in a study that's looking at changes in voting patterns between 2000 and 2004. Not very discriminating.
While you're at it, please explain how county-wide demographic data is useful: it's the demographic data of actual voters that affects a vote count. That's what the "ground war" between Democrats and Republicans was all about: it's them that votes that counts.
Maybe you'll have a great explanation, but as far as I can tell, the demographic data was inadequate and not obviously related to anything. It appears to have been thrown into the mix so that they could talk about controlling for demographic factors and could say that "electronic voting had the greatest positive effect on change in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 in democatic counties" as if there were other real factors they accounted for.
Their electronic voting machine data is also for only a single election: 2004. When looking for changes in election patterns due to electronic voting machines, perhaps one should consider changes in the patterns of the use of electronic voting machines as well?
In fact, it gets worse than simply throwing in useless data. The excess data is not useful for comparing 2000 to 2004, but it does tell us that the counties (in 2000) were different. Break up the data into counties with (2004) e-voting and those without and compare the median income or the vote turnout size (as a proxy for county size) and you'll see that the counties are different in value and distribution. Heck, the fact that some counties adopted e-voting while others did not indicates underlying differences at work.
These differences could turn out to be insignificant in light of the mere presence of e-voting machines. But the reasoning, choosing, and analysis must be done before conclusions are drawn. Especially in an environment where the authors know full well that their final statement about 130,000 more votes than expected would be interpreted to mean either fraudulent votes or gross negligence.
Despite claims that they took many variables into account, a quick glance at the paper shows they took very few variables into account.
For example, they did not account for: population growth between elections, the demographic makeup of such growth, median income change since the previous election, voter registration stats for each party and their changes since the previous election, reversals of traditional voting patterns (better-educated going Democratic, older going Republican), local issues that would draw certain voters to the polls, the involvement of and relative successes of get-out-the-vote organizations (the parties, unions, churches, etc), and the list goes on...
Of course, they never bother to look at which counties went electronic and why. They act as if it's a random variable or as if it would be somehow tied to who voted for Bush in 2000 or something silly like that. Far more likely to be tied to a county's population size, how much trouble it had last election, how much money it has, who were its governing officials, etc. How much trouble they had with butterfly ballots is in turn tied to the age and education level of those in the county, etc.
Sheesh, it's like when a high school student first gets a graphing stats calculator and proceeds to "prove" all kinds of things are correlated.
Fewer weapons, fewer weapons fire modes, fewer vehicles, fewer game types, no multiplayer bots, slow movement, (not quite) "destructible" vehicles...
I'll be trying it out at a friend's, to see if destructible walls, etc, work well enough to justify scoring it as "surpasses UT2004" in at least one area.
Just wanted let you know that there is always a way technology can be used by the military that is related to killing people.
Such uses will be found by someone. People manage to kill with baseball bats, steak knives, phone cords, broken bottles, etc.
The question is who will find such a use first, and in particular who will find a use that provides overwhelming advantage first.
And last, some people need to be killed. Not willy-nilly, not widespread, not whoever I don't like, but there are people in this world who need to be stopped dead in their tracks before they rape, pillage, and destroy to their hearts' content.
I've heard two technical reasons: 1) the green is brighter than the blue, making it easier to work with and expose properly, and 2) the human eye is more sensitive to green and hence film and video are also. (In the video component world, red and blue are represented as delta's from the brightness channel.)
... but I hope you're not offended if it voids your warranty. Also, if Apple patches the iPod OS and your blessed songs stop playing, will you blame Real (evidently the "innovators" here), or Apple? Somehow, I think you'll blame Apple, further destroying the reputation and goodwill they've gained with an outstanding product. All because you insist on using a kludge from a marginal company that brings nothing to the table except a "choice".
I could understand if Real were actually adding value here. But they have a smaller selection, a crummier DRM, poorer sound quality,... Hey, worship your freedom of choice all you want, but why not go ahead and buy a cheap piece-of-junk player that already plays Ogg, etc, and stop ragging on Apple?
Anything? You mean you already have a cellphone and if your boss calls you on it -- presumably business-related -- you refuse to answer?
I agree that you do have to draw the line somewhere. ("You buy pens and paper for yourself, so we shouldn't have to.") But be careful what hill you want to die on. As an example, I think cellphones (probably with text messaging) are so ubiquitous now that work should not have to buy one for you. Cable modem is more iffy. A specific kind of cellphone, PDA, etc, they should buy it.
(This is no different from the old low-tech world. If your employer required you to wear a specific uniform, they paid. But if they required a suit and tie, you paid. Even if you're a t-shirt-only man outside of work, suits are still general-purpose and ubiquitous enough that you're expected to get one yourself.)
Not dissing chess players -- I was on the high school chess team myself -- but it feels to me that chess programs are in beat-a-dead-horse mode now. I mean, the best programs can beat all but a handful of humans and from my brief reading on the subject it would appear that most of the progress that's been made in the last 20 years has been faster computers searching move trees to greater and greater depths.
By comparison, the best Go programs in the world play at intermediate amateur levels. Why not explore this fertile territory?
For those not familiar with Go, there are many differences that make it much harder to make a good Go program...
1. Chess starts in a fixed position, with a full set of pieces of which the most powerful are blocked in, while Go starts with an empty board. In fact, a Go game might be thought of as 9 skirmishes that flow over into each other. (Battles usually start first in the four corners, then spread to the four edges, then into the center.)
2. A chess board is 8x8 while a Go board is 19x19, which means large search trees for any brute-force search.
3. In chess, there are 6 different kinds of pieces, each with a different role and capabilities. In Go, all pieces are the same. In fact, pieces are placed and do not move (though they can be removed by capture) and basically have no power on their own. It is the configuration of groups of pieces that determines their safety, power, and influence.
4. Go has an aesthetic element to it that is hard to describe. It's amazing to me how close to strategically correct you can get by looking at the black and white stones aesthetically and saying, "Looks like my piece would look good here." Of course, "close" is not usually good enough and there's the matter of timing.
5. In Go, the board is filling up throughout the game and territorial control is being solidified. This means that timing is critical and there is always a tension between making an important move now and making a more urgent move first. This wrestling over iniative ("sente" in Japanese) is a key factor in the game.
6. I don't know how to describe it, but Chess seems much more constricted than Go. The ultimate symbol of this, for me, is zugzwang, which is a point in chess where it is a disadvantage for it to be your turn. Any move you make is bad. In Go, by comparison, it is always to your advantage to move right up until the end of the game. In fact, you're free to pass and skip your move at any time and the game ends when both players pass.
Others can add more observations, but I think these are some of the areas where Go is somewhat more "squishy" than chess and a much better challenge. I mean, Chess has basically already been conquered in one sense. Move along people, nothing to see here.
(As a side note, one of the beauties of Go for humans is its handicap system. You can play against opponents up to 9 levels better or worse than yourself, with even expectations of winning. The way this handicap is implemented is elegantly and seamlessly part of the game, allowing the stronger player full use of their toolbox of experience yet still balancing the game. By comparison, chess handicap games literally strip pieces from the stronger player, changing the very nature of the game, IMO.)
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I leveled two chars to 60 (Shaman and Warlock) but finally got bored with WoW and frustrated with Blizzard and canceled my account last month. I think that will be a growing trend.
Blizzard's doing their very best to do a reverse-alchemist trick and turn gold into lead. Arrogant (or non-existent) customer support, inconsistent flailing, buggy releases, and spending time and energy in places other than where they need to focus (e.g. four different versions of PvP and an expansion pack, instead of revisiting instances and classes).
No doubt, Sony did look at how the (long-gone) Blizzard designers simplified an MMO. Things like not having draconian death penalties, etc. If they deliver what's been described, I think they'll fare well.
I guess this explains what they've been doing instead of fixing the MANY bugs that remain in the product a year after retail. And the many holes: things like endless 40-man raiding being the ultimate goal of the game, poorly designed and terribly performing Battlegrounds, talent trees full of talents that are well-known to be worthless (because of class evolution since beta), way too much grinding, many ways of griefing left in the system, professions that don't provide much benefit or income, etc, etc.
They're so busy puffing the NEW stuff (maybe a year out) and my guess is this gives full permission to ignore the current problems. Glad I stopped paying my monthly fee. (Had a 60 Shaman and a 60 Warlock.)
I used to respect Blizzard as the BEST game company. The early Warcraft series were AMAZING. They're in over their heads on this one, which might not be so bad if they were honest, but instead they resort to arrogant "working as intended" answers -- when they occasionally do answer -- they ignore their user base when meaningful suggestions are made (Warlock) yet cave in to popular demand (Paladin), and they insist they will change something and never do then turn around and say they'll never change something and then do a 180.
If they'd established a track record of meaningful beta testing, waiting to release new patches until they were debugged, listening to customer feedback when it's well-reasoned, and communicating with users, I'd be second-guessing my decision to quit. As it is, I see even more content that will have the same problems. No thanks.
I don't think that games turn people into killers. In fact, I enjoy Unreal Tournament 2004, WoW, etc, which obviously involve "killing" to reach your goal. But I do support the parent posting's observations...
I think that in their rush to defend an anything-goes mentality, other posters in this thread overlook obvious connections:
1. Olympic and all world-class athletes use visualization as a part of their training. They imagine themselves doing their sport in as vivid a detail as they can. For example, a weight lifter imagines walking up to the weights, feeling the bar, gripping it, heaving it upwards, etc, etc. They imagine the perfect performance again and again, and it helps to shape their reactions to achieve it.
Your brain does not know the difference between real and imagined. That's why you can get angry "just thinking about that jerk that cut you off this morning". Obviously, higher-level functions allow us to reason and realize "it's just a memory/game" but our instincts and reflexes may not be so lucky.
2. Read Blink and see how what we view affects how we act. In particular, the experiment where people were primed (unknowingly) to be either rude or polite and how unbelievably strong the effect was. The experimenters expected noticable but minor differences and found HUGE differences in reaction that astonished them.
In light of that, someone who spends HOURS trying to grief others and demolish them (or get steamrolled themselves) in vicious ways will, as the parent comment says, definitely be more likely to be jerks. Or worse. And that's the difference, say between sports and video games: you cannot demolish 20 opposing basketball teams in a long night of playing. You can easily do this in video games, including some of my favorites.
Again, I'm not going to kill someone because I play violent games. But please don't ignore obvious and deep issues to say that video games (or porn, or whatever) have nothing to do with anything. (Read Blink's description of gender and racial biases that are very unconscious but can be accurately measured and can be affected by our experiences and then think about how games or porn present various different classes/professions/races/genders and imagine how being "primed" in this way would affect attitudes and interactions, even if they never were consciously accepted and acted upon in open ways.)
From what I understand, javanese is an honorific language. That is, the words you choose depend on the relative class of yourself and the one you are addressing. So you may have six ways to say exactly the same thing -- which words you choose depend on whether you are honored more, less, or the same as your listener and to what degree.
I'd disagree with your disagreement.
A death penalty simply shifts the leveling window. In WoW, trivial quests are grey, easy are green, level-appropriate are yellow, challenging are orange, and impossible are red. (Actually, they have quite a few problems with their quest classification, mainly because if you're a level 40 and you fight max level 40's in the quest, it comes out yellow, regardless of whether you only ever take on one at a time or if you have to enter a room where you have no choice but to fight 5 level 40's simultaneously.)
As a solo Shaman, I preferred yellow quests with the occasional orange or green. As a Warlock, I've been able to do harder quests solo. (Warlocks are PvE kings.) If there were a stupid severe death penalty, I'd simply prefer greens that were about to go grey, or perhaps even grey.
When death severely penalizes you, you simply don't take on as difficult a challenge, you don't take on challenges alone, and you don't take on challenges with unknown players. You simply scale back your expectations and play well below your capacity to make sure you don't die. (If you play at the limit and die a fair amount, you're just plain masochistic.)
I can assure you that running back to your corpse is a royal pain and I avoid death strenuously. Not to mention that if it happens too much, your equipment becomes unusable until repaired, effectively calling a halt to your current endeavor. Instance deaths -- depending on your class mix, cooldowns, etc -- can also mean the end of that instance run and I can assure you if you do something stupid to cause a wipe you HEAR about it.
Personally, I see no benefit to draconian death penalties. It simply penalizes low-level chars that cannot fight below their level, it penalizes solo play, and it penalizes those that don't enjoy cutting off fingers playing mumbly-peg.
The CMs are a joke. Instead of policing forums to remove "nerf Shaman" posts in the Shaman forum, they lock threads with titles in all caps. Literally weeks go by without any apparent CM presence, much less posting. And when they post they often post retrospectively, to explain why this change was not documented in the patch notes in disingenuous ways.
The CMs don't advocate in the forums for their communities. The European Warlock CM recently became a celebrity in the US because he actually bothered to summarize the issues that the community feels are important -- as opposed to what Blizzard feels is important -- and posted the summary. You get the impression that perhaps he actually plays a Warlock and perhaps he actually roots for them and has sympathy for their complaints.
Plus, about half the dev posts I've seen have also been disingenuous weasle posts that ignore major issues involved in a discussion to address it in a way that can be summarized "working as intended". They reallly do bring it upon themselves with CMs allowing a lawless atmosphere, then filling it with suspicion and doubt, with the devs coming in to occasionally inform and occasionally reinforce the party line.
The 1.6 patch saw more features broken in the Warlock class than were fixed or added. It took a couple of hotfixes to begin fixing them and even with the 1.7 patch they still haven't gotten it right. These new bugs were well-documented on the test realm forums so they chose to release a very buggy release for political reasons. (And it wasn't just Warlocks, but since you seem to play a Warlock also, I address that. BWL, their PREMIER high-end content took two hotfixes to get it working.)
The mods that they have made to the Warlock class have not addressed the core issues nor the core bugs of the class. For example, Curse of Agony simply does not work properly: it's our only Curse -- and the only DoT in the game -- that stops working if the target moves out of sight, including stealthing or the caster dying. DoTs, even with shortened durations (unless they turn out to be REALLY short) are still not viable in PvP because of slot limitations and decursive, and are not that much more viable in PvE because of slot limitations versus raid size and the speed with which non-boss mobs are killed.
As you acknowledge, they've buffed Hunter pets while ignoring the LONG STANDING problems with Warlock "High End" pets. Our endgame pets have been #3 or #4 on the Warlock request list since retail release, yet they've instead handed us all kinds of other "fixes" while ignoring these pets. Hunter pets, which carry no risk or cost, could give them a run for their money all along. They've been improperly balanced since Day 1. It's just with the latest Hunter over-buff that Hunter pets can now solo Warlock pets 100% of the time. And, oh yeah, they're looking into it and it's something that snuck up on them because mob toughness somehow crept up since retail release. Yeah, right.
This is not a slow-but-sure approach. They claimed they were done with Warlocks in 1.6 and were moving on to Hunters, etc. But it was obvious to Warlocks that they addressed none of our top issues, and instead did stuff that's nice but not wanted or really needed. They've publicly claimed that Warlock talents have been looked over and fixed. Except any 60 Warlock can easily name 5 or 6 talents that are absolutely worthless. Literally, not just a matter of taste, but they don't do anything useful at all. So now they acknowledge that after two "Warlock" patches they really do still have major holes to plug, and even then they still only give passing mention -- much less attention or discussion -- to core issues that Warlocks have discussesd since Day 1.
That's not the great job you talk about. No, what we see is a bumbling in the dark as they try to fix things that they as players of each class (or non-players for some classes) think should be fixed. Most of the changes reflect a cargo cult mentality where they refuse to change some things (shards come to mind) because the gods once said that this was critical to the class. They're busy attempting to turn out enough content now that they can justify an expansion (which is being worked in parallel, sucking off resources from the current paying customers). They're busy throwing out a bunch of half-baked BGs to see which ones might be popular. They generally refuse to communicate and when they do it's not with the attitude of "We have reasons for this decision and here they are", but rather "working as intended".
Having woked in the software industry for many years, I can smell a confused bunch of folks a mile off. These guys don't understand the principles upon which WoW was designed. They don't have a clue as to how to proceed. They have some rules that were written down in presentations of documentation somewhere, but they don't understand the underlying theories and so they bumble around, tweaking here and there. They will be very successful, as they have a lot of momentum and anyone who loved, or would have loved EQ is bound to love the increasingly EQ-like WoW. But don't even try to get away with claiming they're doing a superb job.
Seriously, the people that designed the game were brilliant. But somewhere along the way to public release they all got hit by a bus or something and now we're left with arrogant, clueless tweakers who are tweaking here and there and introducing the wrong things at the wrong time. (And who communicate poorly at best or dishonestly at worst with their user base.)
For example, they came out with Honor (/sarcasm/) before they came out with Battlegrounds, turning laggy zones into uninhabitable zones with PvP zergfests and ganking.
Then their Premier Battleground, Alterac Valley, came out with all kinds of problems and guess what? They'd also taken the time to implement a half-baked Capture the Flag BG as well. So they didn't do the big BG properly because they spent time on the lesser one, but they didn't do that properly because of a splitting of effort and a lack of foresight and this resulted in a couple of Blizzard class forums being flooded for months with whiners because of perceived class imbalances that were solely due to the improper design of the new BG.
They've been throwing unwanted changes at Warlocks while avoiding the Top 4 changes that are universally requested. But on the other hand, they cannot give any kind of reasoned description of why things work as they do.
They claimed that the Undead racial trait Will of the Forsaken would NEVER be changed, but rather other racial traits would be brought up to speed to match them. Then they nerfed WotF.
THey claim it's solo friendly, but as you get close to 60 and if you're solo (or duo) you're relegated to grinding as ALL quests require 5-man groups at a minimum. And of course there's no post-60 solo material. THey claim it's casual-user friendly but there's no content that can be beaten on an hour-per-night basis, and end-game content requires synchronized schedules for 40+ people to even be attempted, with MANY hours of that required to actually beat the content. EQ, EQ, EQ, all over again.
They designed the Warlock class around DoTs and Fear. But then they don't allow enough slots for DoTs to operate in PvE and they don't allow the Warlock to create time (i.e. Fear is nerfed) for DoTs to work in PvP, plus they weren't smart enough to see how PvE-based scripts to instantly clear DoTs from party members would render DoTs useless in organized PvP. Did I mention how Fear used to be powerful but now there are racial traits, a basketful of easily obtainable anti-fear trinkets, and diminishing returns all crippling Fear? (On top of Fear having a cast time.)
Bottom line is the game started with a well-balanced organization, which has since been tweaked bit-by-bit in a locally-optimized way that has destroyed global balance. But those Blizzard folks left behind in the Great Abduction aren't bright enough to understand this. So instead they are concentrating on raid-guild/EQ-style endgame content, poorly-implemented PvP content, and negative-feedback-loop tweaks. Oh yeah, and there are holiday celebrations in-game.
This story is so Apple-like I can only hope that Blizzard's equivalent of MacOS X and the iPod are somehow coming down the road in a couple of years. But my guess is they are actually a Microsoft now and there's no such hope.
OK, that's reassuring then. Perhaps I'll revisit it in six months or so to see if they've fixed content. (The frustrating thing today is I'm finally seeing a post from Blizzard regarding Warlock changes in the next 2 patches and they seem to be heading very slowly in a good direction with the class -- the most complex and interesting yet most broken class in the game.)
I'm not sure whether I'll still be in a guild when I get back as it will be quite easy to fade from corporate memory and have a new officer purge you from the ranks over a long period of time. IF I come back I guess. If Majesty 2 comes out on the Mac or UT2006 or whatever, I may not ever come back.
So it ends not with a bang but with a whimper. At least I'll prove to a friend that I'm not addicted to WoW, eh?
Considering that our current communications system -- including EMERGENCY communications -- is being build around cellular, I don't think jammers should be legal. First, they can jam a signal outside of the theater. Second if they're legal you might decide to carry a personal one, creating a 911-free zone all around you for a hundred yards until you remember you forgot to turn it off when you left the theater. Third, once you can jam cellphones, what about cameras (lasers, might be bad for your eyes, but whatever), AM/FM radio (damn boomboxes), those loud EMT walkie-talkies, etc?
I've leveled two chars to 60 (first a Shaman, then a Warlock) and had a reasonable time. Spent too much time pushing for that next level, but I figured that once I had a level 60 char, I could cut it down to an hour or two on some days and maybe 3 or 4 on a weekend -- something like most people's TV watching.
Unfortunately, WoW has simply taken EQ and done it better. And it appears that the original designers -- brilliant all -- have all left the company or have slept too close to pods from outer space or something. Instead, the developers are currently thrashing around and not really accomplishing anything beyond setting us up for an expansion.
Test realms? Please! No bugs are fixed in response to these realms. The 1.6 patch broke more Warlock features than it added or fixed, and every one of these new bugs were well-documented in the test realm forums. And the new highest-end content was so broken it took two hotfixes to get it to work. No, test realms are to generate enough buzz that people will wait another month before canceling their account.
High-end content for casual players? Notice how they mentioned "quests". Quests are only applicable to chars that are leveling, with the possible exception of Warlock/Paladin quests for their epic mounts. Other than that, you need a large guild that can guarantee 40 people attending a raid. Some of us cannot be there at some raid times (in my guild's case, set too early in the evening for me to make it from work), so as the questioner asked: what about content that a level 60 can do solo or with 1 friend in an hour or two?
No such content. How about content that may take many hours but can be worked on an hour or two at a time? Nope. Of course, there is grinding/farming, mind-numbing to raise cash for some purchase, but that's not enjoyable and the item bought requires some kind of outlet to be valued, not just using it to do more grinding.
How about PvP? As far as I can tell, they're trying to create a fourth-rate Unreal Tournament 2004. I'd hope for a third-rate or even second-rate, but they're not even close. PvP boils down to zerg-fests and the computer spec required to not be zerged AND lagged is probably 2x or 3x what UT2004 requires. (Not to mention that an RPG has many intrinsic factors that will keep PvP from being as balanced as Halo, UT2004, etc.)
And did we mention no Blizzard-written voice chat? UT2004 includes it, so it's a lowest-common-denominator. WoW depends on vent, teamspeak, etc, which fragments voice comms. (Or in the case of Macs, eliminates it.)
Anyhow, I'm bored out of my skull now and thee last three times I've logged in I've been unable to get together a party to tackle the items I have left to tackle. If this continues for another week, I'll probably have to reluctantly cancel my account.
It feels like a horrible waste to throw away such cool chars. It's like I have the Batmobile and several of his gadgets but the power sources are all dead and I either have to pay for storage for them until maybe someday we discover how it's powered or just junk them. It's more fun to read Theorycraft and rumors on Blizzard's site than to enter the game. Sad, really.
This is as simple a search as it gets since all OS's already have filename "metadata". And it's SLOW. With Spotlight, you see results as quickly as you can type the letters. And it also works for file content, etc. Try that with a UNIX/Mac/Windows find.
Have you even looked at any pictures? This is: a) integrated into the OS and all programs via Applescript, and b) elegantly graphical. A UNIX shell script is NOT even comparable in either category: it has no hooks into other programs or the OS, and it's certainly not visual (much less elegantly so). Not sure what is meant here. Perhaps this means Dashboard, which is a very elegant, extensible widget mechanism. Yes, Konfabulator existed first, and it does use Javascript as well, but it uses it's own custom XML for layout instead of building (as Apple does) on existing solutions (HTML, CSS). I believe the difference is the level of aggregation of Safari's new RSS and Mozilla's bookmarks, including the ability to do searches on RSS feeds. Not sure how capable Mozilla is in this realm, though. You only have to think for a moment to realize that it's not the inclusion of Instant Messaging, which has existed for quite some time. (Even looking only at Apple's software, iChat has been around for years now, much less the Big World.) The difference is in the features of iChat, which now includes 4-way videoconferencing and 10-way audio conferencing. Not revolutionary, but one of the slickest packages out there and it's about to become the lowest-common-denominator for every Mac.It's hidden behind a government conspiracy, but I know the truth. These so-called "magnetars" are in fact Halo rings. We're just darn lucky that the one we witnessed malfunctioned and did not trigger all the others in the galaxy.
They are not only testing the new servers/languages, they also have an extensive list of class balance and bug fixes as well. Test it first in a new market, where you won't have all the "you nerfed my lvl 50 char!" comments.
You mentioned that there was a site where beginners played other beginners. I'd highly recommend against this. You really need to play against someone who knows what they're doing or you're going to adopt crazy strategies and tactics. Even if you're both reading books and trying it out on each other.
I never said ALL factors, I said many obviously relevant factors. For example, CNN's national exit polling indicated that Bush received 9% more Latino votes, 6% more Jewish votes, 5% more 65+ votes, and 13% more "Large City dwellers" votes in 2004 than he did in 2000. The conclusions of the study are basically based on urban counties of south Florida with large elderly, Jewish, Latino, and African American populations, where all of these percentage changes would be major factors, yet they considered basically none.
As I noted, they considered Latinos, but only non-voting-related stats and only from 2000. No way to see how Latino voters might've influenced the 2004 election.
Of course, the whole study hinges on e-voting and the supposed differences between counties with and those without. They never investigate any factors that might have something to do with which counties have e-voting and which do not. I can't find any stats in a quick web search, but yes they do need to address this issue to be a real study. There aren't an infinite number of such issues and they're not that difficult to think of.
Non-voter demographics don't address the "ground game" where unions, parties, churches, etc, fight to get out voters for their side. It doesn't matter if the county is 15% Hispanic if there is a Hispanic hot button issue that turns out the community in unusually large numbers. That's what voting is all about, and if you eliminate it, you aren't talking about voting anymore.
"Close enough" is not some kind of scientific argument, last I checked. I think it's a leap to say that Latino population from one election is enough data to be able to factor out their influence in a future election. Not to mention the other voting groups I mentioned. So, no, this is not a reasonable substitute for poll data.
Did I call Moore a "Lying Hack"? As far as I remember, I was having a discussion with a fellow who said that he had doubts about Moore's honesty, but in spite of this he still liked what he (Moore) had to say. A strange proposition, which I tried to point out.
Wow, strange how quickly you get vague. I'm a "party line" guy, wrong on every issue, a wing-nut. Poof, make it so.
It's funny how you talk about ad-hominum attacks, yet that's exactly what you're doing: "Why look, you're obviously a nut because you disagree with Micheal Moore, so you must be an idiot here, too."
You don't seem to understand what I'm saying. I'm not saying that the data they have is wrong, but that they don't have data that reasonably and obviously would affect their conclusions. (Since their conclusions talk about accounting for other factors.)
I have a day job and am not publishing a study for national distribution, so my res
Someone else has responded, but let me add some questions for you: Can you explain why they have Hispanic population data and median income data for the year 2000 included at all? Remember, this is not data from 2000 and from 2004, it's only data from 2000 and yet it's included in a study that's looking at changes in voting patterns between 2000 and 2004. Not very discriminating. While you're at it, please explain how county-wide demographic data is useful: it's the demographic data of actual voters that affects a vote count. That's what the "ground war" between Democrats and Republicans was all about: it's them that votes that counts. Maybe you'll have a great explanation, but as far as I can tell, the demographic data was inadequate and not obviously related to anything. It appears to have been thrown into the mix so that they could talk about controlling for demographic factors and could say that "electronic voting had the greatest positive effect on change in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 in democatic counties" as if there were other real factors they accounted for. Their electronic voting machine data is also for only a single election: 2004. When looking for changes in election patterns due to electronic voting machines, perhaps one should consider changes in the patterns of the use of electronic voting machines as well? In fact, it gets worse than simply throwing in useless data. The excess data is not useful for comparing 2000 to 2004, but it does tell us that the counties (in 2000) were different. Break up the data into counties with (2004) e-voting and those without and compare the median income or the vote turnout size (as a proxy for county size) and you'll see that the counties are different in value and distribution. Heck, the fact that some counties adopted e-voting while others did not indicates underlying differences at work. These differences could turn out to be insignificant in light of the mere presence of e-voting machines. But the reasoning, choosing, and analysis must be done before conclusions are drawn. Especially in an environment where the authors know full well that their final statement about 130,000 more votes than expected would be interpreted to mean either fraudulent votes or gross negligence.
Despite claims that they took many variables into account, a quick glance at the paper shows they took very few variables into account.
For example, they did not account for: population growth between elections, the demographic makeup of such growth, median income change since the previous election, voter registration stats for each party and their changes since the previous election, reversals of traditional voting patterns (better-educated going Democratic, older going Republican), local issues that would draw certain voters to the polls, the involvement of and relative successes of get-out-the-vote organizations (the parties, unions, churches, etc), and the list goes on...
Of course, they never bother to look at which counties went electronic and why. They act as if it's a random variable or as if it would be somehow tied to who voted for Bush in 2000 or something silly like that. Far more likely to be tied to a county's population size, how much trouble it had last election, how much money it has, who were its governing officials, etc. How much trouble they had with butterfly ballots is in turn tied to the age and education level of those in the county, etc.
Sheesh, it's like when a high school student first gets a graphing stats calculator and proceeds to "prove" all kinds of things are correlated.
... Halo2 hasn't really caught up.
Fewer weapons, fewer weapons fire modes, fewer vehicles, fewer game types, no multiplayer bots, slow movement, (not quite) "destructible" vehicles...
I'll be trying it out at a friend's, to see if destructible walls, etc, work well enough to justify scoring it as "surpasses UT2004" in at least one area.
Such uses will be found by someone. People manage to kill with baseball bats, steak knives, phone cords, broken bottles, etc.
The question is who will find such a use first, and in particular who will find a use that provides overwhelming advantage first.
And last, some people need to be killed. Not willy-nilly, not widespread, not whoever I don't like, but there are people in this world who need to be stopped dead in their tracks before they rape, pillage, and destroy to their hearts' content.
I've heard two technical reasons: 1) the green is brighter than the blue, making it easier to work with and expose properly, and 2) the human eye is more sensitive to green and hence film and video are also. (In the video component world, red and blue are represented as delta's from the brightness channel.)
... but I hope you're not offended if it voids your warranty. Also, if Apple patches the iPod OS and your blessed songs stop playing, will you blame Real (evidently the "innovators" here), or Apple? Somehow, I think you'll blame Apple, further destroying the reputation and goodwill they've gained with an outstanding product. All because you insist on using a kludge from a marginal company that brings nothing to the table except a "choice".
... Hey, worship your freedom of choice all you want, but why not go ahead and buy a cheap piece-of-junk player that already plays Ogg, etc, and stop ragging on Apple?
I could understand if Real were actually adding value here. But they have a smaller selection, a crummier DRM, poorer sound quality,
Firkins, Furlongs, and Fortnights rule! And we thus eliminate the arbitrary seconds and use the more interesting microfortnights.
Anything? You mean you already have a cellphone and if your boss calls you on it -- presumably business-related -- you refuse to answer?
I agree that you do have to draw the line somewhere. ("You buy pens and paper for yourself, so we shouldn't have to.") But be careful what hill you want to die on. As an example, I think cellphones (probably with text messaging) are so ubiquitous now that work should not have to buy one for you. Cable modem is more iffy. A specific kind of cellphone, PDA, etc, they should buy it.
(This is no different from the old low-tech world. If your employer required you to wear a specific uniform, they paid. But if they required a suit and tie, you paid. Even if you're a t-shirt-only man outside of work, suits are still general-purpose and ubiquitous enough that you're expected to get one yourself.)
Not dissing chess players -- I was on the high school chess team myself -- but it feels to me that chess programs are in beat-a-dead-horse mode now. I mean, the best programs can beat all but a handful of humans and from my brief reading on the subject it would appear that most of the progress that's been made in the last 20 years has been faster computers searching move trees to greater and greater depths.
By comparison, the best Go programs in the world play at intermediate amateur levels. Why not explore this fertile territory?
For those not familiar with Go, there are many differences that make it much harder to make a good Go program...
1. Chess starts in a fixed position, with a full set of pieces of which the most powerful are blocked in, while Go starts with an empty board. In fact, a Go game might be thought of as 9 skirmishes that flow over into each other. (Battles usually start first in the four corners, then spread to the four edges, then into the center.)
2. A chess board is 8x8 while a Go board is 19x19, which means large search trees for any brute-force search.
3. In chess, there are 6 different kinds of pieces, each with a different role and capabilities. In Go, all pieces are the same. In fact, pieces are placed and do not move (though they can be removed by capture) and basically have no power on their own. It is the configuration of groups of pieces that determines their safety, power, and influence.
4. Go has an aesthetic element to it that is hard to describe. It's amazing to me how close to strategically correct you can get by looking at the black and white stones aesthetically and saying, "Looks like my piece would look good here." Of course, "close" is not usually good enough and there's the matter of timing.
5. In Go, the board is filling up throughout the game and territorial control is being solidified. This means that timing is critical and there is always a tension between making an important move now and making a more urgent move first. This wrestling over iniative ("sente" in Japanese) is a key factor in the game.
6. I don't know how to describe it, but Chess seems much more constricted than Go. The ultimate symbol of this, for me, is zugzwang, which is a point in chess where it is a disadvantage for it to be your turn. Any move you make is bad. In Go, by comparison, it is always to your advantage to move right up until the end of the game. In fact, you're free to pass and skip your move at any time and the game ends when both players pass.
Others can add more observations, but I think these are some of the areas where Go is somewhat more "squishy" than chess and a much better challenge. I mean, Chess has basically already been conquered in one sense. Move along people, nothing to see here.
(As a side note, one of the beauties of Go for humans is its handicap system. You can play against opponents up to 9 levels better or worse than yourself, with even expectations of winning. The way this handicap is implemented is elegantly and seamlessly part of the game, allowing the stronger player full use of their toolbox of experience yet still balancing the game. By comparison, chess handicap games literally strip pieces from the stronger player, changing the very nature of the game, IMO.)