I've never played an MMO without a currency system. To have a currency system, you must have things worth buying, otherwise why bother? The things that are most worth buying ought to have this reflected in their value. Prices on the Auction House are not set by Blizzard, they are set by good old Adam Smith.
The only reason in the world that they make you pay for things like mounts, epic mounts, skill training, repairs, etc, is to remove money from the world. This is necessary to counterbalance the constant influx of money taken from mobs, shopkeepers, and received as quest rewards. The only other option would be to make the money supply fixed, and this has vast problems associated with it...inactive high level characters with a ton of money in the bank would create a financial crisis. Your other option would be to have people lose significant gold when they die.
So how else would you do it? Can't make money too easy to get, or you'll just cause inflation. Can't fix the supply without strangling the noobs...It'll hit a point pretty quick when almost all the money will be in player hands, and killing mobs will net you nothing but items which can't be sold to a vendor because the vendor can't pay for it. So what do you do?
I think the biggest problem is that we don't put enough emphasis in schools on the methods and criteria of analytical thought, and instead just teach fact after fact after fact. Which is more useful to know?
If you tell someone "This is the truth" then what you get is someone who believes what he hears. If you show someone how to find the truth, what you get is someone who can make his own descision about what he is told.
You see this every day with stupid lawsuits from people whining because they weren't told that something could be dangerous, when the ability to think rationally and apply logic to a situation should have made that obvious!
Uh no. See the word "nazi" appiles to people with overly rigid and critical belief structures, while the proper noun "Nazi" applies to the National Socialist Party of Germany, active during the 4th and 5th decade of the 20th century. If you were applying the proper noun in every instance of the meme (noun) nazi, you'd be variously attributing a lot of false beliefs...Just because someone is obsessed with subject verb agreement, doesn't mean they are for the extermination of Jews, and the creation of an empire through conquest and eugenics.
I'm a big believer in #4. The right uses them as a big scary enemy to keep their voting block in line, attributing to them dark motives, and evil agendas, and basically dehumanizing the hell out of them.
If there were no homosexuals, they'd pick a race or a sex, or a religion, but the propaganda would be the same. It's a way of playing on the baser instincts of man that politicians and religious leaders have been using to their advantage for as long as there have been politicians and religious leaders.
Pshh. I've been called a farmer before, and I'm as bland ass american white bread as they come; it's like a lot of "racial issues" that really boil down to the fact that you're pissing off some fourteen year old, and they don't have enough imagination to insult you without dipping into stereotypes.
Frankly, with WoW as with any other MMORPG, a certain amount of farming is inevitable. I farm mobs for gold. I farm mobs for experience. I farm them for rare drops, recipes, faction, fun, profit, amusement value, food products, cloth, trade goods, quests...It goes on and on and on. The only thing that makes me not a gold farmer is that I don't sell it online.
It goes both ways. On the one hand, supply is going to drop, so prices are bound to go up. At the same time the reduction in the overall amount of gold will cause currency deflation which would suck for virtual trade balances, but should make stuff cost less.
All that is counter-balanced however by people who camp out the auction houses buying commodities that are "underpriced" and re-selling them at an inflated market value.
I always wondered if blizzard sends in people "undercover" to manipulate the gold supply to keep the economy going. There are certain facets that drain money out of supply...repair costs, mounts, everything bought from vendors, but it seems like that would be really difficult to fine-tune, without some occasional corrections.
All that, plus the fact that high turnover is generally fueled by seriously high workloads, which leaves little room for anything other than getting the job done, however the hell they tell you to do it.
Meh. People always say crap like this, but the reality is, good games sell better than bad games. You think the big game companies aren't trying to cut corners right now? Hell yea they are. And that's the sort of thing that separates Everquest 2 from World 'o Warcraft.
Especially in creative markets like Movies/Games/Software, there is always room for companies who develop quality product.
I tend to get called in when other people have already screwed things up, and that is one of the things I tend to find. Like I said, on my personal systems, I hardly ever use nice.
I don't know, I mean, it's kind of nice for some reasons, though I agree, nice is ancient. There is so much in Unix though, that I don't mind occasional articles about semi-obscure commands, and nice is obscure for a lot of people...I can't count the number of times I've had people bring up "irreconcilable" job scheduling to me, that can easily be solved with nice...So I think refresher articles are a good thing; occasionally I learn something.
I hardly ever use nice...Usually only to de-prioritize some job that isn't playing well with others, so you're nice-knowledge is bound to be superior to my own.
One of the things I don't like about nice is that people often use it to baby weak code. Some joker writes the world most inefficient Perl script, and then, because it takes forever to run, uses nice to give it a higher priority than it deserves, thus cutting it's runtime down to an acceptable time, rather than just fixing the damn code. I hardly ever see anyone use it nicely (har har), setting a non-critical job to run at a lower priority.
So I'm always suspicious when I see nice used. I really prefer to just schedule more intelligently, so things don't overlap as much, and running daemons that hog cycles 24/7 on their own hardware.
I think it's a misunderstanding of the power involved. The sun hitting a mirror transfers energy to that mirror, as well as being reflected by it...Touch the mirror, and it'll be warm. A megawatt laser will transfer so much energy to the mirror that, unless its seriously massive or made of some dense material capable of absorbing a huge quanta all at once, it'll explode.
Make a shiny missle, and all you'll get is shiny debris after it goes boom, because there is no way you could make a missile heavy enough to absorb the energy and still fly.
I've found that Best Buy generally drops the price last of any of the major chains, so it's worth taking a look at EB or Target. I don't mention Walmart because the only way I'd shop at Walmart is if my life depended on it...But that's about it...I lived within sight of a Super Walmart for about 2 years, and never went there once.
Hate that place. If I wanted to see inbreeding, I'd watch American Idol.
I never early adopt on Elder Scrolls games...They almost always have some issues coming out the gate. Morrowind was a joke, in terms of system stats. If you had the recommended system specs, that meant you could play the game with normal settings at a normal framerate (we're not talking advanced graphics options here). Anything less than the reccommended settings, you were going to have problems, and god help you if you were hovering around the supposed minimum stats. There were a lot of annoying little bugs in places as well.
All that being said, Morrowind was a good game on release day (if your system was buff), and the bugs weren't game killers, they were just annoying. From what I've heard about Oblivion, the same applies. I think, with the scale that these games usually run in, a certain number of bugs are bound to slip through the process.
It is pretty sad, but, from experience, as soon as you start telling your superiors it won't work "because of human nature", you're already screwed. You have to make something up like, "We can't do it this way because our systems will be swamped by the massive server traffic."
I'd have set it up so that people had to apply to be able to register, so that they'd be able to weed out the illegit registrars, then I'd make everyone submit their lists, in order of preference, and work my way down.
The real problem with HTML is companies who graft non-standard functions on to it and release development tools, etc, that perpetuate these screwy standards, making it much more difficult to create a true standards compliant browser that views all pages.
That's kinda the downside of the open standard...The company that takes the standard, and bends it to fit their agenda, then propogates the bent standard to the world.
The real issue is, as no one seems to be recognizing, that you have to set your desktop machine to connect to the router, and sync the time.
And since D-Link is not a brand with a great reputation in the segment of the population who knows HOW to do that, all we're going to end up with is a bunch of routers with crewy internal time, and a bunch of clueless users who will never know it.
Their boss, in this case, is US, remember? We pay their salaries, they damn well better be telling us the truth about this research that we're paying for.
Nah, people just love to come up with reasons why it's not your fault. Admittedly "I can't exercise because my brain is too highly trained to do something so repetitive" is stretching it, but it still sounds better than, "I have a sedentary job that makes me into a lazy flabby bastard, and I can't be bothered to do anything about it."
I wish people would come to terms with the fact that yes, it can be your fault. The fast food campanies don't make you fat. The car companies don't make you wreck their product. Video game companies are not responsible for your psychoses. Drugs don't leap into your bloodstream from across the room. People need to take some damn responsibility.
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I've never played an MMO without a currency system. To have a currency system, you must have things worth buying, otherwise why bother? The things that are most worth buying ought to have this reflected in their value. Prices on the Auction House are not set by Blizzard, they are set by good old Adam Smith.
The only reason in the world that they make you pay for things like mounts, epic mounts, skill training, repairs, etc, is to remove money from the world. This is necessary to counterbalance the constant influx of money taken from mobs, shopkeepers, and received as quest rewards. The only other option would be to make the money supply fixed, and this has vast problems associated with it...inactive high level characters with a ton of money in the bank would create a financial crisis. Your other option would be to have people lose significant gold when they die.
So how else would you do it? Can't make money too easy to get, or you'll just cause inflation. Can't fix the supply without strangling the noobs...It'll hit a point pretty quick when almost all the money will be in player hands, and killing mobs will net you nothing but items which can't be sold to a vendor because the vendor can't pay for it. So what do you do?
I think the biggest problem is that we don't put enough emphasis in schools on the methods and criteria of analytical thought, and instead just teach fact after fact after fact. Which is more useful to know?
If you tell someone "This is the truth" then what you get is someone who believes what he hears. If you show someone how to find the truth, what you get is someone who can make his own descision about what he is told.
You see this every day with stupid lawsuits from people whining because they weren't told that something could be dangerous, when the ability to think rationally and apply logic to a situation should have made that obvious!
Uh no. See the word "nazi" appiles to people with overly rigid and critical belief structures, while the proper noun "Nazi" applies to the National Socialist Party of Germany, active during the 4th and 5th decade of the 20th century. If you were applying the proper noun in every instance of the meme (noun) nazi, you'd be variously attributing a lot of false beliefs...Just because someone is obsessed with subject verb agreement, doesn't mean they are for the extermination of Jews, and the creation of an empire through conquest and eugenics.
I'm a big believer in #4. The right uses them as a big scary enemy to keep their voting block in line, attributing to them dark motives, and evil agendas, and basically dehumanizing the hell out of them.
If there were no homosexuals, they'd pick a race or a sex, or a religion, but the propaganda would be the same. It's a way of playing on the baser instincts of man that politicians and religious leaders have been using to their advantage for as long as there have been politicians and religious leaders.
Pshh. I've been called a farmer before, and I'm as bland ass american white bread as they come; it's like a lot of "racial issues" that really boil down to the fact that you're pissing off some fourteen year old, and they don't have enough imagination to insult you without dipping into stereotypes.
Frankly, with WoW as with any other MMORPG, a certain amount of farming is inevitable. I farm mobs for gold. I farm mobs for experience. I farm them for rare drops, recipes, faction, fun, profit, amusement value, food products, cloth, trade goods, quests...It goes on and on and on. The only thing that makes me not a gold farmer is that I don't sell it online.
It goes both ways. On the one hand, supply is going to drop, so prices are bound to go up. At the same time the reduction in the overall amount of gold will cause currency deflation which would suck for virtual trade balances, but should make stuff cost less.
All that is counter-balanced however by people who camp out the auction houses buying commodities that are "underpriced" and re-selling them at an inflated market value.
I always wondered if blizzard sends in people "undercover" to manipulate the gold supply to keep the economy going. There are certain facets that drain money out of supply...repair costs, mounts, everything bought from vendors, but it seems like that would be really difficult to fine-tune, without some occasional corrections.
All that, plus the fact that high turnover is generally fueled by seriously high workloads, which leaves little room for anything other than getting the job done, however the hell they tell you to do it.
Meh. People always say crap like this, but the reality is, good games sell better than bad games. You think the big game companies aren't trying to cut corners right now? Hell yea they are. And that's the sort of thing that separates Everquest 2 from World 'o Warcraft.
Especially in creative markets like Movies/Games/Software, there is always room for companies who develop quality product.
I tend to get called in when other people have already screwed things up, and that is one of the things I tend to find. Like I said, on my personal systems, I hardly ever use nice.
I don't know, I mean, it's kind of nice for some reasons, though I agree, nice is ancient. There is so much in Unix though, that I don't mind occasional articles about semi-obscure commands, and nice is obscure for a lot of people...I can't count the number of times I've had people bring up "irreconcilable" job scheduling to me, that can easily be solved with nice...So I think refresher articles are a good thing; occasionally I learn something.
I hardly ever use nice...Usually only to de-prioritize some job that isn't playing well with others, so you're nice-knowledge is bound to be superior to my own.
One of the things I don't like about nice is that people often use it to baby weak code. Some joker writes the world most inefficient Perl script, and then, because it takes forever to run, uses nice to give it a higher priority than it deserves, thus cutting it's runtime down to an acceptable time, rather than just fixing the damn code. I hardly ever see anyone use it nicely (har har), setting a non-critical job to run at a lower priority.
So I'm always suspicious when I see nice used. I really prefer to just schedule more intelligently, so things don't overlap as much, and running daemons that hog cycles 24/7 on their own hardware.
Set 'em all to -19, and let the best program win! If they don't have to fight each other for CPU cycles they will grow up weak and feeble.
I think it's a misunderstanding of the power involved. The sun hitting a mirror transfers energy to that mirror, as well as being reflected by it...Touch the mirror, and it'll be warm. A megawatt laser will transfer so much energy to the mirror that, unless its seriously massive or made of some dense material capable of absorbing a huge quanta all at once, it'll explode.
Make a shiny missle, and all you'll get is shiny debris after it goes boom, because there is no way you could make a missile heavy enough to absorb the energy and still fly.
I've found that Best Buy generally drops the price last of any of the major chains, so it's worth taking a look at EB or Target. I don't mention Walmart because the only way I'd shop at Walmart is if my life depended on it...But that's about it...I lived within sight of a Super Walmart for about 2 years, and never went there once.
Hate that place. If I wanted to see inbreeding, I'd watch American Idol.
I never early adopt on Elder Scrolls games...They almost always have some issues coming out the gate. Morrowind was a joke, in terms of system stats. If you had the recommended system specs, that meant you could play the game with normal settings at a normal framerate (we're not talking advanced graphics options here). Anything less than the reccommended settings, you were going to have problems, and god help you if you were hovering around the supposed minimum stats. There were a lot of annoying little bugs in places as well.
All that being said, Morrowind was a good game on release day (if your system was buff), and the bugs weren't game killers, they were just annoying. From what I've heard about Oblivion, the same applies. I think, with the scale that these games usually run in, a certain number of bugs are bound to slip through the process.
It is pretty sad, but, from experience, as soon as you start telling your superiors it won't work "because of human nature", you're already screwed. You have to make something up like, "We can't do it this way because our systems will be swamped by the massive server traffic."
I'd have set it up so that people had to apply to be able to register, so that they'd be able to weed out the illegit registrars, then I'd make everyone submit their lists, in order of preference, and work my way down.
Making it spammable is just begging for trouble.
The real problem with HTML is companies who graft non-standard functions on to it and release development tools, etc, that perpetuate these screwy standards, making it much more difficult to create a true standards compliant browser that views all pages.
That's kinda the downside of the open standard...The company that takes the standard, and bends it to fit their agenda, then propogates the bent standard to the world.
Scatological
You're going to have to look up "Rim", "Rimming", and "Rim job" up for yourself...I'm at work...But I think you'll see how it relates.
The real issue is, as no one seems to be recognizing, that you have to set your desktop machine to connect to the router, and sync the time.
And since D-Link is not a brand with a great reputation in the segment of the population who knows HOW to do that, all we're going to end up with is a bunch of routers with crewy internal time, and a bunch of clueless users who will never know it.
Oh so appropriate, given the scatological (pun intended) meaning of that word. I wish I had mod points.
Their boss, in this case, is US, remember? We pay their salaries, they damn well better be telling us the truth about this research that we're paying for.
You're thinking of the fundies. Catholics don't subscribe to a literal read of the bible.
Nah, people just love to come up with reasons why it's not your fault. Admittedly "I can't exercise because my brain is too highly trained to do something so repetitive" is stretching it, but it still sounds better than, "I have a sedentary job that makes me into a lazy flabby bastard, and I can't be bothered to do anything about it."
I wish people would come to terms with the fact that yes, it can be your fault. The fast food campanies don't make you fat. The car companies don't make you wreck their product. Video game companies are not responsible for your psychoses. Drugs don't leap into your bloodstream from across the room. People need to take some damn responsibility.
One of the first things you learn is that it is nearly impossible to make YOUR airbag inflate by backing into someone else.
The second thing is, most people don't use their parking break, even though they should.