The Linux game market is *not* all those willing to buy a native Linux port of a game, it is *only* those who refuse to buy a Win32 version and dual boot or emulate. If a company does a native Linux port it needs *new* sales to justify it. Cannibalizing existing sales, having a person buy a Linux version instead of a Win32 version, does not bring in any new money. It loses money, they got the same sale but they spent more money getting it. The majority of Linux gamers dual boot or emulate, until that changes the Linux gaming market will not be viable - Linux gamers are already paying customers via the Win32 version.
I agree completely, and it's a very difficult problem. If you're not really a gamer, then it's easy to say "i'll only play games that run natively on Linux" because you don't play that many games to begin with. If you're a gamer, it's hard to stay Linux-exclusive because unlike say office suits the specific game that you play makes a big difference - i.e. if you like RTS then Kohan is fun, but if you really want Starcraft you're SOL unless you use the windows version. Since just about anyone right now who is using Linux can handle dual-boot or setting up wine, that's the option the gamers take, even if they try to mostly stick to Linux games, simply because the games they want aren't on Linux.
The only solution I see in the visible future is for Linux to simply become a larger portion of desktop marketshare, in particular those who are only running Linux and don't have the technical capability to install a second OS or set up an emulator. Basically, I'm talking about OEM-installed Linux ala Dell. It isn't clear whether or not Dell's Linux plan will succeed, or draw a significant number of non-Linux-geeks to purchase Linux desktops, but it's the clearest way out of this chicken-and-egg problem.
diablo was a feature in itself. it opened up a WHOLE genre. dont come up saying that there was some obscure game million years ago that resembled some of its gameplay. doing it fully right and spreading the thing around counts.
Um, yeah, that was the entire point of the GP's post: While not necessarily innovative (there was basically nothing in Diablo's game play mechanics that was actually new, nor was combining those mechanics), it was an excellent implementation of old themes and thus became the most popular and well-known entry in its genre, resulting in the genre becoming known to many people who had never tried it before.
That's fantastic, and a reason Blizzard is and deserves to be a top-dog gaming studio, but it isn't innovation. It's flawless execution. If that sounds like a cut, well, you're just not understanding.
Having a remarkable number of players isn't innovation. Mass market appeal and innovation are not the same thing. Often truly innovative titles don't find mass market appeal because the mass market doesn't know what to expect from a new genre, doesn't want to try something new, and the original efforts in new directions are often clunky and awkward in some form or fashion. Mostly hardcore gamers play because they are willing to put up with the wrinkles. Mass market appeal comes when the innovative ideas have fully baked, and a studio like Blizzard comes in and does their thing of creating an exemplary example of the genre that everyone from the hard core to the beginner can get into and enjoy.
You don't have to say anything about WoW. Everyone knows it's the perfect example of this concept. The game contains nothing innovative at all compared to any other MMO, yet it is chock full of polish and good design decisions, with the ultimate goal of creating more mass-market appeal.
Try actually replying for once and see what an actual dialogue looks like, genius. Actually respond for once. It's amusing watching you change the subject to avoid answering, but it gets old.
Anyway, you want few sentences, got it.
Tell me what I'm supposed to be supporting. Not in hypotheticals that mean nothing. No "invasion in the name of [reducing] suffering in Darfur", actually give me some kind of outline here. I'm not supporting a hypothetical, ever. I'm not going to agree to whatever your plan is based on the false dichotomy of "my plan, or do nothing! [insert scary orchestral music]", because that's insane. I want you to for one second to actually talk about something as though you might actually have to make it work in reality.
One sentence to remember as you craft your answer: reality does not care what you intend. cause and effect is all that matters.. Repeat that until it makes sense.
No, not by any accepted definition of the word 'wrong'. At best you can say the researchers were wrong when they reached that conclusion. It is perfectly possible to get a right answer with faulty reasoning.
But the conclusion of the researchers was that the bullets could not have come from multiple shooters. That conclusion is wrong, because the analysis that preculded other shooters was wrong. If this new analysis is correct, of course.
And they still have not disproven this particular analysis. At best they have cast doubt on it. But conspiracy theorists have been casting doubt on it for decades.
And have any of them done so through actual forensic science on the actual bullets? Have any of them had the ability to? Have any of them had the credibility in the field of forensics that the one conducting this study has? No? Then this is news.
I can "cast doubt" on the moon landings by spouting off the stupid standard conspiracy points, that's a far cry from providing geological evidence that the "moon rocks" and "moon dust" are an exact match for sand and rocks from a beach in Paraguay.
Either way your approach is typically neo-con. But you really think your original post had nothing to do with politics?! Inter-species relations, colonizing already-populated worlds, having an "insurance policy" for the human race, you don't think that's politics?! Well you're wrong. The fact that your decision on what to do was informed by your politics just makes that even more plain.
I know you had your major crack up long ago, but have you recovered enough to realize that I haven't actually changed the topic whatsoever? That I have benn arguing you, even if I choose to infuratiate you by applying a completely accurate label that you don't like? You label yourself and others all the time, just because my label fits too don't get your panties in a bunch. Because it's not just the label that fits, but the details as well as applied to your own words. But look, it got you to meet me "straight on" instead of ignoring what I say to rant some more! Well kinda.
And seriously, now you want to talk about Darfur, and you're accusing me of changing topics randomly? WTF, you're frighteningly unbound. But hey, this is still fun, so I'm game. Here we go:
is it ok to invade sudan in the name of the suffering in darfur? (something i am completely for)
Which is a perfect example of what I've been talking about this entire time. You are completely for invading Darfur, with absolutely no consideration or mention of who will be doing the invading, what they actually consider to be their goal, and how they actually plan to attain those goals, and when they will leave if ever. None of that matters; you're for it! Just because it's in the name of the suffering in Darfur.
As if being "in the name of" ever meant anything.
Yet, without even the barest of details, you still seem to assume that whatever happens in the invasion would reduce the suffering in Darfur. Just like you assumed that attacking an alien world would reduce the chance that humanity would be wiped out.
Apparently, if the Somalian Islamicists decided that they should head down to Sudan and invade "in the name of the suffering in Darfur", you'd be completely for it. Even though their method would be to establish their own mini-Islamic state in the Sudan and kill anyone in the refugee camps that didn't convert. Even if their presence didn't actually stop any of the Sudanese government death squads. Even if the only affect it had on the suffering was to add women getting stoned for innappropriate dress in addition to being raped, stabbed, and shot by the government. Even if they decided to stay forever and another thirty years of civil war ensued.
Or maybe China decides to step in, and to take care of things quick they just nuke Khartoum. Shit gets real peaceful for a while as the old government is gone and populations are more balanced, at least until someone decides to start questioning the new Chinese occupation...
Are you completely for that? That's rhetorical, of course you aren't. The point is you don't stop to think about what the reality of your hastily conjured ideology would be. You have a simple ideological crutch, and are unwilling to let it go long enough to embrace the nasty world of cause and effect.
Now as for me, is there a hypothetical military incursion into the Sudan aimed at stopping the genocide that I would support? Yes, hypothetically. But hypothetical invasions cannot stop real suffering. Only a real invasion can, and I'm sure as fuck not going to support a real invasion based on its hypothetical one-line description! Because in the real world your actions can have unintended consequences, in the real world people say they're doing one thing but actually do another, in the real world ideology cannot substitute for a plan. When ideology does substitute for a plan, then the result is failure.
I could never get push-to-talk working with Teamspeak. I'm running Linux, running WoW through cedega. It seems to be a focus issue. If the teamspeak window has focus, push-to-talk works. Otherwise, no. That doesn't help me much when the WoW window needs focus.
The classic example used in my AI class to describe the problem of getting a computer AI to... recognize speech.
Though to me the problem with dictating text (the obvious use for speech recognition) is the need for some kind of escape for punctuation or program control. I mean, you can't just say "I went to the store period select all cut" because even assuming it recognizes all the words perfectly it wouldn't know if the "period" is supposed to be a word or punctuation, and either way it "assumes" you'd need a way to get the opposite behavior. Saying "escape" out loud constantly would be weird, espcially if you need the word escape "escape escape" or maybe you also need to invoke the escape key so you have "escape" and "escape escape" and "escape escape escape".
But what's funny is that despite your protests, I've got you perfectly pegged.
Do you not describe yourself as a "liberal warhawk"?
Liberal Warhawk == Neo-Con, who supports gay marriage or some bullshit that's only a relevent distinction to one-dimensional thinkers.
As you've also made clear before, you believe that one-dimensional thinking is not only correct but natural. So I know why you don't like to be called a neo-con (doesn't fit your one-dimensional scale) but in every way that matters the term describes you perfectlyaccording to your own words.
But keep pretending that I'm not perfectly describing your own words. I'm basically repeating them back to you, and you say it has nothing to do with you? It is to laugh!
Your original post, and every one after it, is a perfect example of your binary thinking, and how you can only discuss terms that trivialize a complex problem into "kill or be killed". You can't argue that I haven't accurately portrayed your illogic, you can only cry about it.
When you say "you apparently know more about what goes on in my head than i do" you really meant "posts", not head. Which isn't much of a trick, as you're a one-trick pony.
Oh, the answer I promised. Pointing out your logical fallacies and flawed binary thinking is easy and fun! I'm sure you'll reply with more of the same. It's like a tee-ball machine, where a brand new fallacy is automatically loaded onto the tee after every time I knock one out of the park. And then after the third straight homer, the tee starts to cry. Hilarious!
And Abu Graib- it isn't concievable that the Iraqis know that was an abberation, since many may know peole who were detained and released, who told everyone it wasn't so bad?
Um... actually, long before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke many Iraqis who had been detained were saying that it was very bad, that torture and rape were common -- especially women saying they had been raped, which at least if I recall the Taguba Report correctly was only a minor part of the actual Abu Ghraib scandal. Accusations of rape have continued since Abu Ghraib. Of course U.S. officials said they were lying, but I suspect many of their stories were true enough to get their fellow Iraqis riled up.
In other words, Iraqis don't think it was an abberation. The reason there was not a massive increase in violence (only a relatively small one) when the scandal broke is because most of them already knew and their anger was already accounted for in the scale of attacks.
The writer of the memo wasn't be racist at all. Saying Iraqi culture is very violent is not the same as saying anything about arabs.
So because the context was Iraq (nation) not all Arabs (race), it isn't racist. Fine, but that's a pedantic argument that ignores the clear meaning of the sentence. Is there a word for "prejudiced about those of a specific nation"? Racism may not be the word, but it is something very similar only applied to a nation instead of a race. In its place "racism" is perfectly clear, if not perfectly, 100% pedant-approved precise.
That's because this is about why violence has stopped, not why it's been happening in the first place.
Yet it does include some speculation about why violence is occuring as this is clearly necessary to understanding why it has stopped. Ignoring a significant source of violence is to fail to understand why it stopped.
Anyway, I think a lot of the anger of the analyst comes from the fact that we are looking at this analysis with the benefit of 3 years of hindsight so it's very easy to see what they weren't aware of and how that related to subsequent decisions that lead to the problems of today. I'm sure he's much more level-headed when he's reading diaries of wars long past.
Not that I know of. You'd have to find some way to distinguish them based on dorkiness, since we're really relying on self-selection here.
The thought of an RP server for counterstrike amuses me. You know, where people really -get into- their character and name them and everything, and they could have little parties, and parlay with the enemy before they start fighting. It would be awesome.
Oh please. Save me the bullshit. I don't care what your social beliefs are, because I'm not an idiot who can only think in one-dimension. The neo-cons grew within the Republican aparatus, and thus share their social stances for largely political reasons, but that's not relevent to what they are.
Neo-cons are the combination of the worst aspects of the Liberals and the Conservatives.
Like the Libearls, they believe that they can change the world for the better without having any understanding of what it is they're trying to solve. Like the Conservatives, they believe that the best tool for executing foreign policy is military force.
Thus "spreading Democracy" by invading Iraq. You may not self-identify as a neo-con, but you don't self-identify as an idiot either, and you are clearly both. I'm not referring to what club you're a part of, I'm referring to the nature of your reality-deficient philosophy, and it's 100% neo-con.
"liberal warhawk" == "neo-con who supports gay marriage". Big deal. If the neo-con philosophy hadn't turned out to be such a flop in reality I'm sure we'd be seeing them start to pop up on the Democratic side of the
But it is funny hearing you all-caps screaming "respond to me not a caricature", Captain Straw Man. Keep it up, the ironing is delicious.
i am saying that if it is starkly clear there are no other choices, then the little green men get wiped out, adios, hasta la vista baby
In an absolutely trivial and meaningless case where all humans are in a box and all aliens are in another and in the human box there's a button that kills all the aliens and a timer that if it expires before the button is pushed kills all the humans, sure, anyone would agree what to do. Like all such trivial statements, it's irrelevent and extremely boring because reality is never going to be like that. Do you get it? Reality will never be like that.
So the problem is that in any real situation your interpretation of "starkly clear" is highly suspect. Your previous assessments of this nature are -- how shall I say this generously -- retarded. The fact that you didn't even mention an alternative to genocide until after you had rhetorically wiped out a whole planet and had moved on to another just demonstrates how deeply ingrained your warmonger thinking goes. Along with the assumption that any choices must have already been tried, so if nothing is being tried that leaves only war. As if the existence of alternatives is the hypothetical, rather than the black-and-white decision which will never appear in reality. Which is an extremely frightening way to think, because it deliberately avoids thinking.
Your simplistic binary "us-or-them" thinking is fine and dandy up until the very second it collides with reality, at which point it becomes not just irrelevent, but also foolish and dangerous.
Well, I could find fault with the line "By June, when there is a transition of the force rather than a pullout, we will have a new set of challenges anyway, but if this bought us some months of peace it will be worth the confusion." on the basis that it ignores the fact that if the insurgents were being quiet because they thought the U.S. was pulling out, then they were going to be doubly pissed and resume hostilities with gusto when they realized it isn't happening.
But you're right, it is just a staff reporter who isn't necessarily tasked with deciding whether any of these things were "good" or not, and that line there is probably an example of the "informalism". Even more so, were I living in a place where suicide bombs and masked gangs with assault rifles roaming the streets were common, I'd consider any period of peace as "worth it" even if in a long-term view that is foolish.
I'll give this staffer a pass for not being incompetent. But the overall message of the redacted sections is of the larger problem with the occupation: Those in the Green Zone just didn't have a solid grasp on what was going on outside, and that affected all planning. Even when Iraqis told them that the insurgency would continue as long as they were there, it just didn't stick. Ultimately, it's the people at the top that are responsible for this blindness.
Here's the problem with an approach like that: any civilization, save the most pacifist ones, that is at least equal to you in firepower, can exterminate us just as easily. The benefits of trying to be friendly is that anything less than xenophobes on your scale could be influenced to accept us, regardless of their technological prowess. In other words, you've just increased your chance of finding a hospitable planet to live on.
It is one of the fundamental flaws of neo-con thinking that they specifically don't think about how their actions might make them less safe, or how less aggressive action may result in greater survival chances.
This is why they have pretty much completely failed to accomplish anything positive in the real world. The real world doesn't care what you refuse to think about, and the thing the neo-cons refuse to think about turns around and bites them in the ass every time. Why they continue to think they have any ideas relevent to surviving in the real world I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's just another artifact of their inability to see reality.
The real hilarity is that you talk about self-preservation being universal, but assume your own brand of how to survive is the only method possible, without ever considering the consequences and how those consequences might reduce your ability to survive.
It is very much colonial era and neo-con thinking that starting wars of aggression is a sure fire way of increasing the odds of survival. Because of course nobody has ever regretted starting a war! History proves this, if you are completely and utterly ignorant. The 'if' of course being unecessary in your case.
It is very much an aspect of the modern idiot neo-con movement to think that your ideology can, by itself, ensure your survival without having to worry about reality. It is very much neo-con to think that anyone who questions your ideology-based plan based on practical grounds is actually an enemy of your ideology. Because neo-cons don't know anything about reality or practicality, they can only discuss ideology.
Perfect example: You're such a neo-con idiot you don't even realize that I was talking about the necessity of survival too! The words just bounce off your brain, removed by an ideological filter that prevents you from seeing reality.
Perfect example of why your way of thinking is dangerous: You talk about how when we colonize our 2nd extraterrestrial planet we may be able to consider the lives of the natives, but you don't talk about trying to find such a 2nd planet -- perhaps even an uninhabited one -- before wiping out the population of the first. Because you're a warmonger, war is always your first choice. And because you're an idiot, you think war will always make you safer.
Which is the real problem. Long before any of this stuff about alien worlds becomes relevent, philosophies like yours are causing many unnecessary wars here on earth. Warmongers like you are, right now, the biggest danger to the species.
If you were really concerned about the survival of the human species, you would kill yourself.
But in reality you are like most other organisms, ultimately concerned only with your own survival and the species be damned. And because you are a moron, you think that as long as someone else is being attacked, you cannot be hurt. Just keep laughing, genius, pay no attention to the consequences. That's a sure way to ensure your survival, you joke of darwinism.
s/green/brown/ and you're just another genocidal conquistador who thinks their people are the only ones who deserve to live. You're not any less racist than they, they too thought these "aliens" were sub-human and should be required to give up their land. Just because you know about DNA doesn't make you any better. Maybe you'll bring them gifts of blankets as a false offering of peace?
You better hope these little green men can't fight back, or your attempt at an "insurance policy" could result in the very extinction of humanity that you're so pissing-your-pants scared of.
If I was going to work on an insurance policy to minimize the chance humanity bites it, I'd start with killing all the idiots who, without even knowing who the enemy is or why they are the enemy, call for their complete annihilation. It is the war caused by those chicken-shit wanna-be-hawks that are incapable of considering the negative consequences of their own warmongering that will end humanity.
Do humanity a favor. Kill yourself. No, I'm not joking.
Well that actually got me thinking, though I may have my facts wrong.
Doesn't SETI focus on a specific band of the EM spectrum that is not polluted by solar radiation and thus an obvious place for any sentient beings on another world to broadcast a signal that would allow themselves to be found?
The follow up question being: Are we broadcasting such a signal at that frequency?
Seems like if we're assuming whatever sentient beings out there think like us and thus we can deduce what they would do to be found, that only makes sense if it's something we would do in order to be found by other sentient life forms.
Or, if anything, they want your to believe they are incompetent. The rules are few: keep your enemies closer than your allies. Appear incompetent if need be, but never malicious, gaming or ulterior.
If making the government and the military appear incompetent is a deliberate goal, then it is the most successfull project that this administration has embarked on.
Not appearing malicious, gaming, or ulterior... that's not working so good. But incompetent? They're spot on!
I basically don't need to hear you unless you saying something you want me to hear.
But... But I want you to hear me breathing, arguing with my mom, opening and drinking beers, making cute noises at the cat, and masturbating furiously.
In practice, I've found that the best way to minimize the amount of 'negative energy' that you encounter in-game is to simply roll your character on a role play server. All of the teenie-boppers and frat boys who seem to live to spew bile and idiocy avoid these servers like the plague*. People are more polite and more helpful -- even the teenagers. Overall it's a night-and-day experience. The best part? Unless you're in an RP guild, nobody really cares if you role-play or not!
It's not completely devoid of idiots, and no they generally will not be banned from the server for being idiots. However the greatly reduced volume makes/ignore a much more reasonable tool, and you just won't run into them as much. Even Barrens chat is mostly tolerable, if you can believe that. Highly recommended.
* I guess the theory is that in order to not feel like the giant dorks that they are for playing WoW they need to find an ever bigger dork to feel superior to. Whatever keeps them away, I say.
This is a product announcement for something that will be launched at 65nm, it is not the first 65nm product. You're probably thinking of 45nm, which yes Intel is well ahead of AMD on. It's always been this way, with AMD lagging 6-12 months behind in process technology. So no, no big problem that I see.
First, there never was a "proof", at least not in the way you are thinking.
That was the way I worded it, but the fact is that the statement is true for all logical arguments -- if one step in your argument is untrue, then your conclusion is unsupported. It doesn't have to be a mathematical proof. This is obvious, I didn't think the word "proof" would hang anyone up so much. Sorry.
The summary is clearly saying that the conclusion was shown to be false (meaning Oswald didn't do it), not the argument itself. Which of course is not what the article says at all. If you read it differently, you need to work on your reading comprehension skills.
You need to work on realizing that extreme pedantry in a natural language is not the source of good reading comprehension. A conclusion is wrong if the argument supporting it is wrong, because one cannot draw a conclusion from false premises. That you take "wrong" to mean "logical inversion of the stated term" is a perfect example of how your pedantry (and binary thinking) has caused you to fail to understand the statement.
Experts (or rather, people calling themselves experts) have been disagreeing with the lone gunman theory since the day Kennedy was shot. This can only be considered "news" if mainstream scientists can back up the lone research team.
Yes, news only occurs under those circumstances. Really, unnecessarily restrict the meaning of words much? That they claim to have disproved a specific analysis that was used to support the lone gunman theory in specific is the news. After all, as you say experts have been disagreeing with the official story for a long time, yet none have disproven this particular analysis. That's what's new, and thus news. Of course it would be more impressive if there was independent verification, peer-reviewed journal publications, and certainly won't be something I'd ever call "truth" until such is done. I just hope you at least realize that "news" is not synonymous with "truth".
I notice you don't mention the exp penalty for death once in this post. Did you completely miss the point of my post which was very specific, or are you deliberately ignoring it so that the concept of not liking negative progress is the same as only caring about forward progress?
Who defined it like that? Everquest wasn't meant to be a game you 'finished'. It was meant to be a game you explored. There was plenty to do at 20th level, and even more to do at 30th. The game at 50th wasn't going to disappear, so what's the rush?
The makers of the game built it that way. That's why in EQ you have the rare spawns that drop the loot that get camped all day, because they want that one mob to take up literally days of your time. Of course it was never meant to be "finished", because then you'd be done and might cancel. Actually producing enough content that you could see it once then move on, but still play for more than a month, is impossible. So all MMOs from UO to EQ to WoW are based around "grinding" or "farming" locations, dungeons, mobs. Because you have to do the same thing many, many times.
And I'm not in a rush. I have no problem progressing at a nice leisurely pace, and doing things that don't cause any direct progression at all. But then, if I'm sick of the content at 20 and want to see the content at 30, then yes, that progression is important, because that's the only way to see that new content. Having a death penalty that makes it so that you have to spend more time to get the same progression certainly is the opposite of encouraging a leisurely pace.
I am okay with not making forward progress. I am not okay with having what forward progress I have made UNDONE by either a mistake or a cheapness in the game. What is so hard to understand about that?
You are the one who decided that not seeing the progress bar move amounted to 'wasting your time'. The key to having fun in a mmorpg is ignore progression and just have fun. You are going to progress anyway - some days fantasticly - other days none... but there's no reason to fixate on it.
No, seeing the progress bar move BACKWARDS is very, very much "wasting my time". Even right here, you seem to deliberately omit that part. You should have said "You are going to progress anyway - some days fantasticly - other days none - and other days negative such that you will completely undo every bit of progress you may have made the day before, so maybe you won't progress anyway."
As for EQ being 'cheap' in terms of arbitrary and completely unjust deaths: That there would be a wandering cyclops that could squash you if you weren't paying attention and let it get too close WAS part of the vision, but getting squashed on a zone-line or re-spawn were unfortunate artifacts of the game engine and never really part of the 'vision'.
And was punishing you for those "unfortunate artifacts" part of the "vision"? They couldn't get rid of the artifacts that lead to cheap deaths, but kept in the mechanic for punishing you for cheap deaths. Sounds like their "vision" could have used some lasik.
When vangaurd was announced the premise was that he'd recognized that that that the game mechanics and game vision have been at cross-purposes -- the most efficient way to "progress" was the least fun ("grinding") while the most fun path through the game (exploring new areas, challenging new creatures, taking risks, etc) resulted in the worst progression. So one of Vangaurds mottos was that the most efficient path also be the most fun. So even people fixated on progress would end up having fun in spite of themselves;)
How can you explore new areas if you aren't high enough level to reach them? And I'm sure it was tons of fun "exploring" the same zone for the Nth time because an "unfortunate artifact" made it so that the last time you "explored" the area didn't count. Then you "take a risk" (like crossing a zone boundary) and die, so you get to "
You can say that all you want, but you and I seem to be in the minority. The average gameplayer WANTS pointless difficulty. They want artificial obstacles. It somehow gives them a feeling of accomplishment.
I don't mind difficult. What I do mind is punishment for failing to meet that difficulty, especially since it sounds as though like most game developers SOE can't distinguish "hard" from "cheap".
It's bad enough that MMOs make you grind, though as you can tell by the fact that I'm subscribed to WoW I put up with it. But to be forced to regrind is just ridiculous.
This is why even though I loved Diablo II I never actually got through Hell difficulty. It just pissed me off too much when some Multiple Shot+Lightning Enchant+Fire Enchant boss would one-shot me and I'd lose every bit of experience I had earned that whole day. The only way to ensure forward progress was to never try to do anything difficult. I'd rather just start a new character.
I much prefer WoW, where if I want to throw myself at something I have no business trying just to see if I can pull it off, I can, and if I'm wrong, then I lose five minutes and some gold. Actually, sometimes I wish WoW was harder, and it would be okay because the penalty for death is reasonable. I'm ever so glad they decided not to copy the Diablo II mechanic.
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The Linux game market is *not* all those willing to buy a native Linux port of a game, it is *only* those who refuse to buy a Win32 version and dual boot or emulate. If a company does a native Linux port it needs *new* sales to justify it. Cannibalizing existing sales, having a person buy a Linux version instead of a Win32 version, does not bring in any new money. It loses money, they got the same sale but they spent more money getting it. The majority of Linux gamers dual boot or emulate, until that changes the Linux gaming market will not be viable - Linux gamers are already paying customers via the Win32 version.
I agree completely, and it's a very difficult problem. If you're not really a gamer, then it's easy to say "i'll only play games that run natively on Linux" because you don't play that many games to begin with. If you're a gamer, it's hard to stay Linux-exclusive because unlike say office suits the specific game that you play makes a big difference - i.e. if you like RTS then Kohan is fun, but if you really want Starcraft you're SOL unless you use the windows version. Since just about anyone right now who is using Linux can handle dual-boot or setting up wine, that's the option the gamers take, even if they try to mostly stick to Linux games, simply because the games they want aren't on Linux.
The only solution I see in the visible future is for Linux to simply become a larger portion of desktop marketshare, in particular those who are only running Linux and don't have the technical capability to install a second OS or set up an emulator. Basically, I'm talking about OEM-installed Linux ala Dell. It isn't clear whether or not Dell's Linux plan will succeed, or draw a significant number of non-Linux-geeks to purchase Linux desktops, but it's the clearest way out of this chicken-and-egg problem.
diablo was a feature in itself. it opened up a WHOLE genre. dont come up saying that there was some obscure game million years ago that resembled some of its gameplay. doing it fully right and spreading the thing around counts.
Um, yeah, that was the entire point of the GP's post: While not necessarily innovative (there was basically nothing in Diablo's game play mechanics that was actually new, nor was combining those mechanics), it was an excellent implementation of old themes and thus became the most popular and well-known entry in its genre, resulting in the genre becoming known to many people who had never tried it before.
That's fantastic, and a reason Blizzard is and deserves to be a top-dog gaming studio, but it isn't innovation. It's flawless execution. If that sounds like a cut, well, you're just not understanding.
Having a remarkable number of players isn't innovation. Mass market appeal and innovation are not the same thing. Often truly innovative titles don't find mass market appeal because the mass market doesn't know what to expect from a new genre, doesn't want to try something new, and the original efforts in new directions are often clunky and awkward in some form or fashion. Mostly hardcore gamers play because they are willing to put up with the wrinkles. Mass market appeal comes when the innovative ideas have fully baked, and a studio like Blizzard comes in and does their thing of creating an exemplary example of the genre that everyone from the hard core to the beginner can get into and enjoy.
You don't have to say anything about WoW. Everyone knows it's the perfect example of this concept. The game contains nothing innovative at all compared to any other MMO, yet it is chock full of polish and good design decisions, with the ultimate goal of creating more mass-market appeal.
Try actually replying for once and see what an actual dialogue looks like, genius. Actually respond for once. It's amusing watching you change the subject to avoid answering, but it gets old.
Anyway, you want few sentences, got it.
Tell me what I'm supposed to be supporting. Not in hypotheticals that mean nothing. No "invasion in the name of [reducing] suffering in Darfur", actually give me some kind of outline here. I'm not supporting a hypothetical, ever. I'm not going to agree to whatever your plan is based on the false dichotomy of "my plan, or do nothing! [insert scary orchestral music]", because that's insane. I want you to for one second to actually talk about something as though you might actually have to make it work in reality.
One sentence to remember as you craft your answer: reality does not care what you intend. cause and effect is all that matters.. Repeat that until it makes sense.
No, not by any accepted definition of the word 'wrong'. At best you can say the researchers were wrong when they reached that conclusion. It is perfectly possible to get a right answer with faulty reasoning.
But the conclusion of the researchers was that the bullets could not have come from multiple shooters. That conclusion is wrong, because the analysis that preculded other shooters was wrong. If this new analysis is correct, of course.
And they still have not disproven this particular analysis. At best they have cast doubt on it. But conspiracy theorists have been casting doubt on it for decades.
And have any of them done so through actual forensic science on the actual bullets? Have any of them had the ability to? Have any of them had the credibility in the field of forensics that the one conducting this study has? No? Then this is news.
I can "cast doubt" on the moon landings by spouting off the stupid standard conspiracy points, that's a far cry from providing geological evidence that the "moon rocks" and "moon dust" are an exact match for sand and rocks from a beach in Paraguay.
Either way your approach is typically neo-con. But you really think your original post had nothing to do with politics?! Inter-species relations, colonizing already-populated worlds, having an "insurance policy" for the human race, you don't think that's politics?! Well you're wrong. The fact that your decision on what to do was informed by your politics just makes that even more plain.
I know you had your major crack up long ago, but have you recovered enough to realize that I haven't actually changed the topic whatsoever? That I have benn arguing you, even if I choose to infuratiate you by applying a completely accurate label that you don't like? You label yourself and others all the time, just because my label fits too don't get your panties in a bunch. Because it's not just the label that fits, but the details as well as applied to your own words. But look, it got you to meet me "straight on" instead of ignoring what I say to rant some more! Well kinda.
And seriously, now you want to talk about Darfur, and you're accusing me of changing topics randomly? WTF, you're frighteningly unbound. But hey, this is still fun, so I'm game. Here we go:
is it ok to invade sudan in the name of the suffering in darfur? (something i am completely for)
Which is a perfect example of what I've been talking about this entire time. You are completely for invading Darfur, with absolutely no consideration or mention of who will be doing the invading, what they actually consider to be their goal, and how they actually plan to attain those goals, and when they will leave if ever. None of that matters; you're for it! Just because it's in the name of the suffering in Darfur.
As if being "in the name of" ever meant anything.
Yet, without even the barest of details, you still seem to assume that whatever happens in the invasion would reduce the suffering in Darfur. Just like you assumed that attacking an alien world would reduce the chance that humanity would be wiped out.
Apparently, if the Somalian Islamicists decided that they should head down to Sudan and invade "in the name of the suffering in Darfur", you'd be completely for it. Even though their method would be to establish their own mini-Islamic state in the Sudan and kill anyone in the refugee camps that didn't convert. Even if their presence didn't actually stop any of the Sudanese government death squads. Even if the only affect it had on the suffering was to add women getting stoned for innappropriate dress in addition to being raped, stabbed, and shot by the government. Even if they decided to stay forever and another thirty years of civil war ensued.
Or maybe China decides to step in, and to take care of things quick they just nuke Khartoum. Shit gets real peaceful for a while as the old government is gone and populations are more balanced, at least until someone decides to start questioning the new Chinese occupation...
Are you completely for that? That's rhetorical, of course you aren't. The point is you don't stop to think about what the reality of your hastily conjured ideology would be. You have a simple ideological crutch, and are unwilling to let it go long enough to embrace the nasty world of cause and effect.
Now as for me, is there a hypothetical military incursion into the Sudan aimed at stopping the genocide that I would support? Yes, hypothetically. But hypothetical invasions cannot stop real suffering. Only a real invasion can, and I'm sure as fuck not going to support a real invasion based on its hypothetical one-line description! Because in the real world your actions can have unintended consequences, in the real world people say they're doing one thing but actually do another, in the real world ideology cannot substitute for a plan. When ideology does substitute for a plan, then the result is failure.
Let me repeat that, as it is the crux: In reality
You're assuming he doesn't consider himself to be one of the Olog-hai referenced in his sig. ;)
I could never get push-to-talk working with Teamspeak. I'm running Linux, running WoW through cedega. It seems to be a focus issue. If the teamspeak window has focus, push-to-talk works. Otherwise, no. That doesn't help me much when the WoW window needs focus.
The classic example used in my AI class to describe the problem of getting a computer AI to... recognize speech.
Though to me the problem with dictating text (the obvious use for speech recognition) is the need for some kind of escape for punctuation or program control. I mean, you can't just say "I went to the store period select all cut" because even assuming it recognizes all the words perfectly it wouldn't know if the "period" is supposed to be a word or punctuation, and either way it "assumes" you'd need a way to get the opposite behavior. Saying "escape" out loud constantly would be weird, espcially if you need the word escape "escape escape" or maybe you also need to invoke the escape key so you have "escape" and "escape escape" and "escape escape escape".
But what's funny is that despite your protests, I've got you perfectly pegged.
Do you not describe yourself as a "liberal warhawk"?
Liberal Warhawk == Neo-Con, who supports gay marriage or some bullshit that's only a relevent distinction to one-dimensional thinkers.
As you've also made clear before, you believe that one-dimensional thinking is not only correct but natural. So I know why you don't like to be called a neo-con (doesn't fit your one-dimensional scale) but in every way that matters the term describes you perfectly according to your own words.
But keep pretending that I'm not perfectly describing your own words. I'm basically repeating them back to you, and you say it has nothing to do with you? It is to laugh!
Your original post, and every one after it, is a perfect example of your binary thinking, and how you can only discuss terms that trivialize a complex problem into "kill or be killed". You can't argue that I haven't accurately portrayed your illogic, you can only cry about it.
When you say "you apparently know more about what goes on in my head than i do" you really meant "posts", not head. Which isn't much of a trick, as you're a one-trick pony.
Oh, the answer I promised. Pointing out your logical fallacies and flawed binary thinking is easy and fun! I'm sure you'll reply with more of the same. It's like a tee-ball machine, where a brand new fallacy is automatically loaded onto the tee after every time I knock one out of the park. And then after the third straight homer, the tee starts to cry. Hilarious!
And Abu Graib- it isn't concievable that the Iraqis know that was an abberation, since many may know peole who were detained and released, who told everyone it wasn't so bad?
Um... actually, long before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke many Iraqis who had been detained were saying that it was very bad, that torture and rape were common -- especially women saying they had been raped, which at least if I recall the Taguba Report correctly was only a minor part of the actual Abu Ghraib scandal. Accusations of rape have continued since Abu Ghraib. Of course U.S. officials said they were lying, but I suspect many of their stories were true enough to get their fellow Iraqis riled up.
In other words, Iraqis don't think it was an abberation. The reason there was not a massive increase in violence (only a relatively small one) when the scandal broke is because most of them already knew and their anger was already accounted for in the scale of attacks.
The writer of the memo wasn't be racist at all. Saying Iraqi culture is very violent is not the same as saying anything about arabs.
So because the context was Iraq (nation) not all Arabs (race), it isn't racist. Fine, but that's a pedantic argument that ignores the clear meaning of the sentence. Is there a word for "prejudiced about those of a specific nation"? Racism may not be the word, but it is something very similar only applied to a nation instead of a race. In its place "racism" is perfectly clear, if not perfectly, 100% pedant-approved precise.
That's because this is about why violence has stopped, not why it's been happening in the first place.
Yet it does include some speculation about why violence is occuring as this is clearly necessary to understanding why it has stopped. Ignoring a significant source of violence is to fail to understand why it stopped.
Anyway, I think a lot of the anger of the analyst comes from the fact that we are looking at this analysis with the benefit of 3 years of hindsight so it's very easy to see what they weren't aware of and how that related to subsequent decisions that lead to the problems of today. I'm sure he's much more level-headed when he's reading diaries of wars long past.
Not that I know of. You'd have to find some way to distinguish them based on dorkiness, since we're really relying on self-selection here.
The thought of an RP server for counterstrike amuses me. You know, where people really -get into- their character and name them and everything, and they could have little parties, and parlay with the enemy before they start fighting. It would be awesome.
i am not a neocon,
Oh please. Save me the bullshit. I don't care what your social beliefs are, because I'm not an idiot who can only think in one-dimension. The neo-cons grew within the Republican aparatus, and thus share their social stances for largely political reasons, but that's not relevent to what they are.
Neo-cons are the combination of the worst aspects of the Liberals and the Conservatives.
Like the Libearls, they believe that they can change the world for the better without having any understanding of what it is they're trying to solve.
Like the Conservatives, they believe that the best tool for executing foreign policy is military force.
Thus "spreading Democracy" by invading Iraq. You may not self-identify as a neo-con, but you don't self-identify as an idiot either, and you are clearly both. I'm not referring to what club you're a part of, I'm referring to the nature of your reality-deficient philosophy, and it's 100% neo-con.
"liberal warhawk" == "neo-con who supports gay marriage". Big deal. If the neo-con philosophy hadn't turned out to be such a flop in reality I'm sure we'd be seeing them start to pop up on the Democratic side of the
But it is funny hearing you all-caps screaming "respond to me not a caricature", Captain Straw Man. Keep it up, the ironing is delicious.
i am saying that if it is starkly clear there are no other choices, then the little green men get wiped out, adios, hasta la vista baby
In an absolutely trivial and meaningless case where all humans are in a box and all aliens are in another and in the human box there's a button that kills all the aliens and a timer that if it expires before the button is pushed kills all the humans, sure, anyone would agree what to do. Like all such trivial statements, it's irrelevent and extremely boring because reality is never going to be like that. Do you get it? Reality will never be like that.
So the problem is that in any real situation your interpretation of "starkly clear" is highly suspect. Your previous assessments of this nature are -- how shall I say this generously -- retarded. The fact that you didn't even mention an alternative to genocide until after you had rhetorically wiped out a whole planet and had moved on to another just demonstrates how deeply ingrained your warmonger thinking goes. Along with the assumption that any choices must have already been tried, so if nothing is being tried that leaves only war. As if the existence of alternatives is the hypothetical, rather than the black-and-white decision which will never appear in reality. Which is an extremely frightening way to think, because it deliberately avoids thinking.
Your simplistic binary "us-or-them" thinking is fine and dandy up until the very second it collides with reality, at which point it becomes not just irrelevent, but also foolish and dangerous.
Well, I could find fault with the line "By June, when there is a transition of the force rather than a pullout, we will have a new set of challenges anyway, but if this bought us some months of peace it will be worth the confusion." on the basis that it ignores the fact that if the insurgents were being quiet because they thought the U.S. was pulling out, then they were going to be doubly pissed and resume hostilities with gusto when they realized it isn't happening.
But you're right, it is just a staff reporter who isn't necessarily tasked with deciding whether any of these things were "good" or not, and that line there is probably an example of the "informalism". Even more so, were I living in a place where suicide bombs and masked gangs with assault rifles roaming the streets were common, I'd consider any period of peace as "worth it" even if in a long-term view that is foolish.
I'll give this staffer a pass for not being incompetent. But the overall message of the redacted sections is of the larger problem with the occupation: Those in the Green Zone just didn't have a solid grasp on what was going on outside, and that affected all planning. Even when Iraqis told them that the insurgency would continue as long as they were there, it just didn't stick. Ultimately, it's the people at the top that are responsible for this blindness.
Here's the problem with an approach like that: any civilization, save the most pacifist ones, that is at least equal to you in firepower, can exterminate us just as easily. The benefits of trying to be friendly is that anything less than xenophobes on your scale could be influenced to accept us, regardless of their technological prowess. In other words, you've just increased your chance of finding a hospitable planet to live on.
It is one of the fundamental flaws of neo-con thinking that they specifically don't think about how their actions might make them less safe, or how less aggressive action may result in greater survival chances.
This is why they have pretty much completely failed to accomplish anything positive in the real world. The real world doesn't care what you refuse to think about, and the thing the neo-cons refuse to think about turns around and bites them in the ass every time. Why they continue to think they have any ideas relevent to surviving in the real world I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's just another artifact of their inability to see reality.
The real hilarity is that you talk about self-preservation being universal, but assume your own brand of how to survive is the only method possible, without ever considering the consequences and how those consequences might reduce your ability to survive.
It is very much colonial era and neo-con thinking that starting wars of aggression is a sure fire way of increasing the odds of survival. Because of course nobody has ever regretted starting a war! History proves this, if you are completely and utterly ignorant. The 'if' of course being unecessary in your case.
It is very much an aspect of the modern idiot neo-con movement to think that your ideology can, by itself, ensure your survival without having to worry about reality. It is very much neo-con to think that anyone who questions your ideology-based plan based on practical grounds is actually an enemy of your ideology. Because neo-cons don't know anything about reality or practicality, they can only discuss ideology.
Perfect example: You're such a neo-con idiot you don't even realize that I was talking about the necessity of survival too! The words just bounce off your brain, removed by an ideological filter that prevents you from seeing reality.
Perfect example of why your way of thinking is dangerous: You talk about how when we colonize our 2nd extraterrestrial planet we may be able to consider the lives of the natives, but you don't talk about trying to find such a 2nd planet -- perhaps even an uninhabited one -- before wiping out the population of the first. Because you're a warmonger, war is always your first choice. And because you're an idiot, you think war will always make you safer.
Which is the real problem. Long before any of this stuff about alien worlds becomes relevent, philosophies like yours are causing many unnecessary wars here on earth. Warmongers like you are, right now, the biggest danger to the species.
If you were really concerned about the survival of the human species, you would kill yourself.
But in reality you are like most other organisms, ultimately concerned only with your own survival and the species be damned. And because you are a moron, you think that as long as someone else is being attacked, you cannot be hurt. Just keep laughing, genius, pay no attention to the consequences. That's a sure way to ensure your survival, you joke of darwinism.
s/green/brown/ and you're just another genocidal conquistador who thinks their people are the only ones who deserve to live. You're not any less racist than they, they too thought these "aliens" were sub-human and should be required to give up their land. Just because you know about DNA doesn't make you any better. Maybe you'll bring them gifts of blankets as a false offering of peace?
You better hope these little green men can't fight back, or your attempt at an "insurance policy" could result in the very extinction of humanity that you're so pissing-your-pants scared of.
If I was going to work on an insurance policy to minimize the chance humanity bites it, I'd start with killing all the idiots who, without even knowing who the enemy is or why they are the enemy, call for their complete annihilation. It is the war caused by those chicken-shit wanna-be-hawks that are incapable of considering the negative consequences of their own warmongering that will end humanity.
Do humanity a favor. Kill yourself. No, I'm not joking.
Well that actually got me thinking, though I may have my facts wrong.
Doesn't SETI focus on a specific band of the EM spectrum that is not polluted by solar radiation and thus an obvious place for any sentient beings on another world to broadcast a signal that would allow themselves to be found?
The follow up question being: Are we broadcasting such a signal at that frequency?
Seems like if we're assuming whatever sentient beings out there think like us and thus we can deduce what they would do to be found, that only makes sense if it's something we would do in order to be found by other sentient life forms.
Or, if anything, they want your to believe they are incompetent. The rules are few: keep your enemies closer than your allies. Appear incompetent if need be, but never malicious, gaming or ulterior.
If making the government and the military appear incompetent is a deliberate goal, then it is the most successfull project that this administration has embarked on.
Not appearing malicious, gaming, or ulterior... that's not working so good. But incompetent? They're spot on!
I dunno, that sounds like a bunch of bull shit to me.
I basically don't need to hear you unless you saying something you want me to hear.
But... But I want you to hear me breathing, arguing with my mom, opening and drinking beers, making cute noises at the cat, and masturbating furiously.
In practice, I've found that the best way to minimize the amount of 'negative energy' that you encounter in-game is to simply roll your character on a role play server. All of the teenie-boppers and frat boys who seem to live to spew bile and idiocy avoid these servers like the plague*. People are more polite and more helpful -- even the teenagers. Overall it's a night-and-day experience. The best part? Unless you're in an RP guild, nobody really cares if you role-play or not!
/ignore a much more reasonable tool, and you just won't run into them as much. Even Barrens chat is mostly tolerable, if you can believe that. Highly recommended.
It's not completely devoid of idiots, and no they generally will not be banned from the server for being idiots. However the greatly reduced volume makes
* I guess the theory is that in order to not feel like the giant dorks that they are for playing WoW they need to find an ever bigger dork to feel superior to. Whatever keeps them away, I say.
This is a product announcement for something that will be launched at 65nm, it is not the first 65nm product. You're probably thinking of 45nm, which yes Intel is well ahead of AMD on. It's always been this way, with AMD lagging 6-12 months behind in process technology. So no, no big problem that I see.
First, there never was a "proof", at least not in the way you are thinking.
That was the way I worded it, but the fact is that the statement is true for all logical arguments -- if one step in your argument is untrue, then your conclusion is unsupported. It doesn't have to be a mathematical proof. This is obvious, I didn't think the word "proof" would hang anyone up so much. Sorry.
The summary is clearly saying that the conclusion was shown to be false (meaning Oswald didn't do it), not the argument itself. Which of course is not what the article says at all. If you read it differently, you need to work on your reading comprehension skills.
You need to work on realizing that extreme pedantry in a natural language is not the source of good reading comprehension. A conclusion is wrong if the argument supporting it is wrong, because one cannot draw a conclusion from false premises. That you take "wrong" to mean "logical inversion of the stated term" is a perfect example of how your pedantry (and binary thinking) has caused you to fail to understand the statement.
Experts (or rather, people calling themselves experts) have been disagreeing with the lone gunman theory since the day Kennedy was shot. This can only be considered "news" if mainstream scientists can back up the lone research team.
Yes, news only occurs under those circumstances. Really, unnecessarily restrict the meaning of words much? That they claim to have disproved a specific analysis that was used to support the lone gunman theory in specific is the news. After all, as you say experts have been disagreeing with the official story for a long time, yet none have disproven this particular analysis. That's what's new, and thus news. Of course it would be more impressive if there was independent verification, peer-reviewed journal publications, and certainly won't be something I'd ever call "truth" until such is done. I just hope you at least realize that "news" is not synonymous with "truth".
I notice you don't mention the exp penalty for death once in this post. Did you completely miss the point of my post which was very specific, or are you deliberately ignoring it so that the concept of not liking negative progress is the same as only caring about forward progress?
;)
Who defined it like that? Everquest wasn't meant to be a game you 'finished'. It was meant to be a game you explored. There was plenty to do at 20th level, and even more to do at 30th. The game at 50th wasn't going to disappear, so what's the rush?
The makers of the game built it that way. That's why in EQ you have the rare spawns that drop the loot that get camped all day, because they want that one mob to take up literally days of your time. Of course it was never meant to be "finished", because then you'd be done and might cancel. Actually producing enough content that you could see it once then move on, but still play for more than a month, is impossible. So all MMOs from UO to EQ to WoW are based around "grinding" or "farming" locations, dungeons, mobs. Because you have to do the same thing many, many times.
And I'm not in a rush. I have no problem progressing at a nice leisurely pace, and doing things that don't cause any direct progression at all. But then, if I'm sick of the content at 20 and want to see the content at 30, then yes, that progression is important, because that's the only way to see that new content. Having a death penalty that makes it so that you have to spend more time to get the same progression certainly is the opposite of encouraging a leisurely pace.
I am okay with not making forward progress. I am not okay with having what forward progress I have made UNDONE by either a mistake or a cheapness in the game. What is so hard to understand about that?
You are the one who decided that not seeing the progress bar move amounted to 'wasting your time'. The key to having fun in a mmorpg is ignore progression and just have fun. You are going to progress anyway - some days fantasticly - other days none... but there's no reason to fixate on it.
No, seeing the progress bar move BACKWARDS is very, very much "wasting my time". Even right here, you seem to deliberately omit that part. You should have said "You are going to progress anyway - some days fantasticly - other days none - and other days negative such that you will completely undo every bit of progress you may have made the day before, so maybe you won't progress anyway."
As for EQ being 'cheap' in terms of arbitrary and completely unjust deaths: That there would be a wandering cyclops that could squash you if you weren't paying attention and let it get too close WAS part of the vision, but getting squashed on a zone-line or re-spawn were unfortunate artifacts of the game engine and never really part of the 'vision'.
And was punishing you for those "unfortunate artifacts" part of the "vision"? They couldn't get rid of the artifacts that lead to cheap deaths, but kept in the mechanic for punishing you for cheap deaths. Sounds like their "vision" could have used some lasik.
When vangaurd was announced the premise was that he'd recognized that that that the game mechanics and game vision have been at cross-purposes -- the most efficient way to "progress" was the least fun ("grinding") while the most fun path through the game (exploring new areas, challenging new creatures, taking risks, etc) resulted in the worst progression. So one of Vangaurds mottos was that the most efficient path also be the most fun. So even people fixated on progress would end up having fun in spite of themselves
How can you explore new areas if you aren't high enough level to reach them? And I'm sure it was tons of fun "exploring" the same zone for the Nth time because an "unfortunate artifact" made it so that the last time you "explored" the area didn't count. Then you "take a risk" (like crossing a zone boundary) and die, so you get to "
You can say that all you want, but you and I seem to be in the minority. The average gameplayer WANTS pointless difficulty. They want artificial obstacles. It somehow gives them a feeling of accomplishment.
I don't mind difficult. What I do mind is punishment for failing to meet that difficulty, especially since it sounds as though like most game developers SOE can't distinguish "hard" from "cheap".
It's bad enough that MMOs make you grind, though as you can tell by the fact that I'm subscribed to WoW I put up with it. But to be forced to regrind is just ridiculous.
This is why even though I loved Diablo II I never actually got through Hell difficulty. It just pissed me off too much when some Multiple Shot+Lightning Enchant+Fire Enchant boss would one-shot me and I'd lose every bit of experience I had earned that whole day. The only way to ensure forward progress was to never try to do anything difficult. I'd rather just start a new character.
I much prefer WoW, where if I want to throw myself at something I have no business trying just to see if I can pull it off, I can, and if I'm wrong, then I lose five minutes and some gold. Actually, sometimes I wish WoW was harder, and it would be okay because the penalty for death is reasonable. I'm ever so glad they decided not to copy the Diablo II mechanic.