As far as I know, Alexa doesn't monitor for 'dns lookup failures.' If that's the case then I think this number is way off. About the 22nd or so a lot of people were deploying BIND patches to block this nonsense, and I'm not sure Alexa is registering that. I think their numbers reflect only the ISPs which actually null-routed the sitefinder IP, not ISPs that patched their nameservers.
Maybe I'll start playing again now that they've cleaned things up, not that I noticed the cheaters before (except when I was trying to do some trading, of course, when the SOJ is a standard unit of barter there's something wrong, but then pskulls are easy enough to come by legitimately and they were worth quite a bit for a while).
I don't think you understand how bad it is. The SoJ is no longer a form of currency, the "Occy Ring" is. The occy ring is an oculus combined with an SoJ so you get a +3 skills/50% mf ring with a bunch of other mods. Totally hacked, but they're *everywhere*. Pefect skulls won't get you crap these days. When the game's economy switches to using hacked items to make trades, you know there's a *huge* problem.
If Blizzard got me and the dupers/hackers I wouldn't be particularly bothered. I knew that by running the bot I ran the risk of getting my account nerfed. However I think that bot runners are, sadly, helping the economy. They at least provide a small counter to the immense flood of dupes and hacks. At least bot items are legit, if not truly legitimately found.
Thing is, I'm not saying that it was unfair. All I'm saying is that Blizzard is going after the jaywalkers and letting the grand larsonists go free. They have every right to drop my accounts with or without cause. Hell, they can do whatever they want with their games and company. However, I am also free to comment on the sudden decline in quality that Blizzard is showing. My comment was simply that Blizzard is not being at all even-handed in their distribution of punishment, and that this shows the decline in quality of the products the company claims to support.
As far as good ethics.. Blizzard has shown a distinct lack of ethics in effectively lying about their stance on "cheating." The only "cheating" they care about is any activity which might cost them some money. They're entited to feel that way, but ethically speaking they should come out and admit that they don't care about people cheating as long as the cheaters don't add any load to their servers. When Blizzard shows me good ethics, I will be more than happy to exercise good ethics in my dealings with them. For a long time I was a religiously ethical Diablo 2 player. Then I learned that Blizzard just didn't care, and that anyone who didn't help themselves was going to be screwed as far as playing/enjoying the game, because Blizzard didn't have any interest in fixing what was wrong or even letting anyone else fix it either (bnetd). So until the time comes (if it ever does) that Blizzard is either honest with their customers about their motives, or their motives change, I will do what I can to continue enjoying the product I paid for, even if Blizzard doesn't care for it.
Please see the grandparent post, as well as my other replies in this thread. I would have no desire to run a bot if Blizzard wasn't letting the dupers/hackers ruin 100% legitimate play. However, as it is they have tuned the game in such a fashion that you need the most elite items to be competitive, but the most elite items are near-impossible to get without doing one of: a) botting b) duping c) item hacking.
The item hackers are by far the worst, because they end up with items totally outside the bounds of the game. The dupers ruin the game's economy (it is in complete shambles). The botters just add a little load to Blizzard's servers. They introduce legitimate items into the economy, too.
Your attitude is a lot like the attitude of people who say "a lie is a lie," and that telling somebody that they look good in some dorky outfit is equally as egregious as telling somebody that their neighbour is actually a child molestor just to watch the fireworks. I think there's a difference between those two forms of lying, and I think there's a difference between what I did and what the dupers/hackers are doing. If you can't look at anything outside of a black & white point of view, well, quite frankly I think your criticism is worthless.
Now, as I have said, it is obvious from Blizzard's continued actions that they don't actually care about cheating as an act, they just want to save a few bucks by tossing active diablo2 players who cause load on their systems. The folks dupeing and hacking items don't add load for them, so they just don't care.
That attitude would sit a lot better if they didn't squash the free battle.net server that was being worked on. Blizzard has basically made it clear that there shall be no gaming network for their games other than the one they provide. That's great, but if Blizzard wants to keep my network play restricted to their servers then they need to do a better job of dealing with cheaters instead of just getting rid of a handful of the least harmful 'cheaters' and leaving the people who ruined the game's economy unscathed. If Blizzard continues to act in this manner I will simply dump my current cache of Blizzard games (everything from Diablo to WarCraft 3+expansion) and make sure to never buy, or endorse, a Blizzard game again.
I used to think of Blizzard as the best game software company out there, but their actions of late have left me sorely disappointed. And considering the (worthwhile) founding members have left, they seem merely a dead husk of their former glory. It's a shame.
Yeah, see, I used to play 100% legit. I did it that way for a long time. Then Blizzard made massive balance changes. They made the game *extremely* difficult to beat solo, and they cut the rewards for playing outside of a large group. The difficulty increase required items of better quality. In search of better quality items I got ripped off more than once, lost *MY* legit items because of dupers, etc. So instead of getting into the bad scene that is trading/duping/hacking I decided to run a bot to get some legit items for myself so I could get back to enjoying the game.
I guess the lesson you want me to learn is that since other people ruined the game by massively circumventing the system I should have just quit instead of trying to enjoy the game and stay as close to legit as I could? That's a pretty terrible lesson, and Blizzard is setting a pretty terrible precedent.
Like I said, duped/hacked items have been a *big* problem for over two years. However, Blizzard has made it clear through their actions that what they say ("We don't tolerate cheating") is not what they mean ("We don't tolerate people doing things that might add load to our servers, but if you cheat in a way that doesn't cost us anything then you're going to be immune.").
It wasn't an issue of getting d2jsp itself running, that was pretty easy (RTFMing and all). Configuring the scripts I was using to not sell stuff I wanted was a pain though. Lot of.ini-type files needing to be edited and whatnot. It took about half a day to tune the bot to where I felt comfortable leaving it to run and going away from the computer. Once it ran though, it ran beautifully.
As far as deleting people with dupes and hacks, yeah, I'm 100% for it. If Blizzard could nerf the illegitimate items, then I'd have a lot less desire to run a bot. Problem is, I can't trust people trading. And finding high-level items in d2 is basically impossible. If they had improved the finds in 1.10 I wouldn't be so irritated, but I played 1.10 quite a bit and found that my finds just weren't really any better than they were in 1.09. It is not fun to play for three hours and find one unique low-level item when the uniques are the only good items in the game. Add to it that beating 1.10 on Hell, with or without co-op, is extremely difficult and would be next to impossible without super high-class weapons and armor and it really sours one to the "diablo 2 experience."
I never had this problem in the original Diablo. That game was balanced well. It was fun to play solo, it was fun to play party. You could find high-level uniques without devoting weeks to the task. I don't know why they broke this in Diablo 2.
Yeah, I know. It bothers me though that they get all high and mighty and say they're taking some hardline stance against cheating. Blizzard doesn't give a fuck if we cheat, as long as our cheating doesn't cost them money. Hey, that's fine, it's their right to feel/act that way, but they shouldn't lie to people about it.
Also, I was using d2jsp w/ pwnage pindle. It worked really well but was a supreme bitch to setup.:)
If Blizzard was actually deleting accounts due to duped or hacked items I think a lot less people would be upset. However, they're not. It has been a d2 problem for two+ years and they still aren't doing anything about it. It's terrible. As far as I can tell Blizzard deleted about 0 accounts tied to duped/hacked items, because the dupers/hackers are still trading the bogus items.
I don't know about the other games, but I play Diablo 2 and I lost an account for 'botting.' Yeah, I ran a bot about 3-4 hours a day. Not one of those 24/7 guys.
Now I know someone is going to jump me for running bots period, but before you do consider the competition. I'm playing with (and against) a ton of people with hacked items. It's virtually impossible to find or trade for good items that are legit on battle.net unless you're running a bot or duping/hacking. Legit items (unided) carry a ridiculous pricetag because the problem of cheating and duping is so bad. But instead of fixing a dupe/hack problem that has been rampant in d2 for *years* Blizzard finds it better to go after people who are trying to compete against the dupers/hackers.
Let me ask, who is doing more harm? The guy who runs a bot for a few hours to improve his chances of finding an item that doesn't suck or the guy who puts together a 100% illegal item and then uses it to run around PKing others or generally gaining illegitimate advantage in other ways?
Got on bnet today and saw the same people trading occy rings and ccb garbage. These people are without fear, because Blizzard seems more interested in harassing those who use maphack or a pindlebot. They feign a desire to keep people from cheating, but the most rampant cheaters remain totally unpunished. These people ruin the closed battle.net economy, and by doing so take a good deal of enjoyment out of the game for a large majority of users. No d2 player likes having to fork over extra stuff just because they want an unid'd item so it doesn't get deleted on them. Unfortunately, because of Blizzard's totally lax stance on the real problem this is the way the d2 economy works.
I really love d2, but if Blizzard keeps going after small frys instead of the big cheaters I'm just going to toss my copy of d2, and I certainly won't be looking to buy/play any other Blizzard games.
I paid, iirc, $28 usd or so for the "non-bookend" version of the extended FOTR. That's the one with the four DVDs, not the one with five and the Argonath bookends. Within said package I got a voucher good for up to $10 to see TTT. I used that voucher for a value of $8 or so. So I guess I paid $20 all-told for my copy. I think that's an incredibly reasonable price. I imagine the next one will be the same.
Of course.. if you want the "Haradrim vs. Waning Numenoreans" miniature chess set (or whatever it's going to be) with your copy of TTT/extended then you're going to be paying more, but if you just want the flicks I doubt it'll cost much more than a normal DVD.
If you can get past the comment about "phallic joysticks" (patently ridiculous, supposedly a joke, but didn't apppear to be) you're doing better than i did at first. Saying things like that shows a heavy bent towards a priapic mindset or a staggering lack of understanding of both history (of flight control sticks and video games) and ergonomics.
It gets worse further on, though. The writer states about Tomb Raider: "I never played this game" and then goes on to say "Eidos, you really blew it - you alienated all the girls who would have *loved* this game." Excuse me, but how do you know? You never played it, remember? Maybe the gameplay wouldn't even have been of the sort that girls enjoy? I've never played Tomb Raider either, so I certainly won't bash Eidos for "blowing it" in any aspect of its gameplay.. because I don't know if they did.
Following along she makes a good point about the DOA Volleyball game, but then blows it with a rant about a barmaid in Baldur's Gate. Okay, I don't know about you... but when I play some game with medieval feel I expect my barmaids (wenches) to be ditzy, busty, and generally exactly like the description she gives. It sounds like a perfect fit in that kind of game to me. Guess what, sluts and whores are real and they are a part of the collective group of women on this planet no matter how embarassed you might be about it.
Also, who the hell is "Justin"? I have a hard time taking an article seriously when the writer talks about random third parties without any introduction. (I do know who Justin is from reading other stories on the site, but I might as well not from the article. it's bad writing.)
Moving along I see another thing which frustrates me. She makes a comment about the genderless trolls of Tolkien's world and how they are "inherently male." Okay, fine, let's say I take that at face value (I don't, if something is genderless than it is genderless). Then she goes on to say that she "would like to see more experimentation with genderless or gender-ambivalent characters" Well, which is it? Pick one, please.
Okay, other than that she doesn't trip up. However, I have another major gripe with this article and another point which keeps me from taking it seriously. She never mentions the "male stereotype" that is just as easy to find in videogames. Main characters are always buff and bronzed, always fighting their way through situations. Very rarely if ever will you find a male protagonist in a videogame who is a scrawny 5'2" pasty-faced kid with glasses. Or a chubby awkward boy. The main characters as adults and children are idyllic, and anything that diverts from the stereotypical perfection is villainous or sinister (evil genius plotting destruction) or comic relief (fat person struggling to keep up, always wanting to eat).
She really blows it here. Instead of taking the issue of female stereotyping and the overall shallowness of most videogames (I agree with her) and using it as representative of the greater problems with the total lack of realism and sensibility she totally ignores every other slight to every other class of people because, in typical human fashion, she portrays the injustices as directed primarily at her chosen group of identification. It's a very human thing to do, but also extremely frustrating for someone trying to find some subjective analysis and critique where it is sorely needed.
At any rate, if she had just been up front about wanting some more intelligent, realistic, and more engaging games to go with the testosterone infused ones I think this article would have read much better. However she didn't, and the article (and her cred) suffers because she attempted to take a good point and emphasize it with good evidence (ample in the world of gaming) but instead beat it into the ground with some bad examples and a terribly shallow view. It's a definite shame.
As for the aircraft engineers, I don't have a comment on that. It would be interesting to have insight into the man who made it.
It's not all that complicated. Way back when the control stick was just a lever to maneuver the necessary bits. It was basically just a metal rod that connected to other parts in a simple system.
Now, if you want to say the rod is phallic.. well, then lots of things are phallic. Many bones are phallic, etc. I think if you look long and hard (nods to Beavis & Butthead) you'll find that anything long and, er, hard is phallic. Big deal.
I hate them now. There is no string of obscenities long or colorful enough to describe just how much they pissed me off with the final few minutes of tonight's episode.
Good lord man. Listen to yourself. It's just a television series! I can understand frustration, I can understand boycotting the channel to avoid similar frustration in the future too. But to go on about how you're so mad and angry that you can't see straight over a fucking television show... well.. jesus. I wish my life was so pleasant and worry-free that my biggest causes of anger were some second-rate cable network cancelling a show I enjoyed.
Think about this for a bit, and perhaps reconsider your position here. Is a TV show worth getting that upset over?
I'm surprised I didn't see this mentioned anywhere. I remember one of the particularly depressing things from 1984 was the music generating machine used to create music for the proles.
A machine that checks to see if a song is going to be a hit with the masses based on mathematics is not far behind a machine that will be able to generate a hit for the masses.
Creepy.
Re:Am I the only geek who HATES Nethack?
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Nethack 3.4.1 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I always have to remind myself that this game isn't technically about having fun in the sense most roleplaying games define "fun". This is more like Diablo for people with some parts of the brains still active.
I can't really agree there. I've played nethack. I've retrieved the amulet. I feel I've "beaten" it for my intents and purposes (please, god, don't flame me about this). I also basically got this far because I stubbornly refused to be beaten down by the game.
I can see the Diablo comparison. They're both hack and slash games. The thing Diablo does not do to you, though, is leave you stranded and basically screwed at the beginning of the game. It doesn't, through lack of balance, force you to continually cycle through characters because the game gave you bad breaks.
The thing is, as a player of both games, I think Diablo is a hell of a lot more fun. Diablo is like nethack with balance. I think, in fact, that people who like to kick back and do some hacking for a while, are much better served by Diablo. Wasting time trying to beat (yeah yeah) nethack was probably a very poor decision on my part. It was a very smart decision on my part to never touch it again.
What I'm saying is, if all you want to do is hack and find treasure and use it on your quest to hack, Diablo is probably going to be more enjoyable. It's easier to get in to, much more friendly and intuitive, and much less likely to leave you in a completely unsalvageable game.
If, on the other hand, you enjoy the randomness of being potentially screwed in every other game you play, well, go nuts with nethack. Some people seem to really enjoy this. That's fine, but it's sure not for me, and I don't think it is for most people. Including those of us with "some parts of the brain still active."
And please, don't tell me about how you can always "work through" problems in nethack. I know, I've played it enough to know the tricks. What you fail to see is that often "working through" will just leave you screwed down the road, even if your immediate problem is solved. I honestly don't find that challenging, I find it irritating.
A game with really excellent balance *will* allow you to screw yourself, but it won't force you to abandon a game you've put hours (or days!) into. It will provide means by which to salvage your game. Even if it means hard work on your part, you'll still be able to do it. Plus, the game won't screw you through ridiculous arbitrary randomness. Sure, you can get yourself killed if you're careless, or stick your neck out too far, but you don't die from "starvation" well into the game because you can't get a bite, or you get poison meat, and your deity decides it's his day off, or whatever. That's just arbitrary and irritating. It isn't fun.
I read slashdot for the comments. Unfortunately this requires that I find stories that interest me on the front page, or wherever else they might be. I enjoy the comments, from the lowest -1 troll, to the loftiest +5 writer of superior articles. Honestly, I like the trolls (sometimes, anyhow) and I like the information that is provided by others in "the community." I consider this site pretty worthwhile, and if it weren't for the aforementioned glaring problems, would be happy to pay for it so that it would not go away.
CT: Yeah yeah. It's a dupe. Funny that not a single reader emailed me in almost 2 hours to tell me.
Come off it. I don't see where you get off bitching because nobody told you that you posted a dupe of a story two stories down. I mean, had you taken a cursory glance at your own site you probably would have seen this story.
You know, if you didn't want us to pay for this, I wouldn't even care. But I cannot believe that you are bitching at paying customers because of your lack of editing. What gives? As I've said before this site has editorial practices slightly worse than that of your average grade school newspaper. I think it's really insulting that you would expect anyone to pay for this.
Let me up the ante here. You editors are pretty tech-savvy, right? I just used Mozilla's oft-praised tabbed browsing feature to open another tab and look up the post I linked above. Now, when you are approving submissions, how hard would it be to have a second tab open to make sure you aren't posting a dupe. I mean, look, you guys approve at most 20 stories a day. Between the four or five (estimate) active editors, that's.. well.. not a lot. It wouldn't be hard to simply say "when I'm ready to approve a story I'll make sure there aren't any dupes." This kind of work wouldn't take long at all, and combined with a little editing would go a long way towards getting some new subscribers. I, for one, pledge to subscribe when the editorial quality of this site improves. That means, basically, that every other story can't have glaring grammatical or spelling errors, and that dupes are practically nonexistant.
I realize that everybody makes mistakes, myself included, but the number of mistakes from people who are professionals (and you are professionals if you do this for a living -- you do) is just too much to be tolerated -- or at least paid for.
"Warning: site is most definately not in english."
What, like you'd know?
How does slashdot expect anyone to pay for their services if they can't even edit their damn submissions (or even the actual text of the editors!)
I'd be first in line to pay if the editors actually edited their story content. I'm dead serious. Every time I think about getting a subscription though, I see misedited or unedited garbage like this.
I offer HTTP and anonymous CVS retrieval as well as XDCC distribution. However, I've had XDCC distribution for far longer, and so I keep it that way for people who are used to it.
And please, show me where it says I am under the belief that DALnet *has to* permit anything? I'm not, I'm simply saying that they're trying to blow up a molehill with an atom bomb.
I have not misunderstood at all. They may not moderate the content being traded, but they still monitor the content of *traffic on the network*. Which is to say they monitor their channel content, what goes on in those channels (the content of channel conversation), etc.
I'm a little confused by this step. Do they really think file sharing has anything to do with the DDoS attacks? Just who do they think DDoS-ed them all the time. My guess it's the kiddies that love file-sharing.
No. This has nothing at all to do with the DDoS attacks. This is just an attempt by DALnet to pull a CYA maneuver. They're preemptively trying to counter the *AA agencies. I doubt it will work.
I'm not saying you should facilitate them but by pissing 'm off there's no way the DDoS attacks will stop. Ignoring just might be the way to go. But then again, that's just my 2 cents
Yes, you're right. But the DDoS attacks have more to do with abusive operators. Still, you speak for a large group of people who think DALnet should stop antagonizing these people, at least if it wants to continue operating.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, Alexa doesn't monitor for 'dns lookup failures.' If that's the case then I think this number is way off. About the 22nd or so a lot of people were deploying BIND patches to block this nonsense, and I'm not sure Alexa is registering that. I think their numbers reflect only the ISPs which actually null-routed the sitefinder IP, not ISPs that patched their nameservers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
I don't think you understand how bad it is. The SoJ is no longer a form of currency, the "Occy Ring" is. The occy ring is an oculus combined with an SoJ so you get a +3 skills/50% mf ring with a bunch of other mods. Totally hacked, but they're *everywhere*. Pefect skulls won't get you crap these days. When the game's economy switches to using hacked items to make trades, you know there's a *huge* problem.
If Blizzard got me and the dupers/hackers I wouldn't be particularly bothered. I knew that by running the bot I ran the risk of getting my account nerfed. However I think that bot runners are, sadly, helping the economy. They at least provide a small counter to the immense flood of dupes and hacks. At least bot items are legit, if not truly legitimately found.
Thing is, I'm not saying that it was unfair. All I'm saying is that Blizzard is going after the jaywalkers and letting the grand larsonists go free. They have every right to drop my accounts with or without cause. Hell, they can do whatever they want with their games and company. However, I am also free to comment on the sudden decline in quality that Blizzard is showing. My comment was simply that Blizzard is not being at all even-handed in their distribution of punishment, and that this shows the decline in quality of the products the company claims to support.
As far as good ethics.. Blizzard has shown a distinct lack of ethics in effectively lying about their stance on "cheating." The only "cheating" they care about is any activity which might cost them some money. They're entited to feel that way, but ethically speaking they should come out and admit that they don't care about people cheating as long as the cheaters don't add any load to their servers. When Blizzard shows me good ethics, I will be more than happy to exercise good ethics in my dealings with them. For a long time I was a religiously ethical Diablo 2 player. Then I learned that Blizzard just didn't care, and that anyone who didn't help themselves was going to be screwed as far as playing/enjoying the game, because Blizzard didn't have any interest in fixing what was wrong or even letting anyone else fix it either (bnetd). So until the time comes (if it ever does) that Blizzard is either honest with their customers about their motives, or their motives change, I will do what I can to continue enjoying the product I paid for, even if Blizzard doesn't care for it.
Please see the grandparent post, as well as my other replies in this thread. I would have no desire to run a bot if Blizzard wasn't letting the dupers/hackers ruin 100% legitimate play. However, as it is they have tuned the game in such a fashion that you need the most elite items to be competitive, but the most elite items are near-impossible to get without doing one of:
a) botting
b) duping
c) item hacking.
The item hackers are by far the worst, because they end up with items totally outside the bounds of the game. The dupers ruin the game's economy (it is in complete shambles). The botters just add a little load to Blizzard's servers. They introduce legitimate items into the economy, too.
Your attitude is a lot like the attitude of people who say "a lie is a lie," and that telling somebody that they look good in some dorky outfit is equally as egregious as telling somebody that their neighbour is actually a child molestor just to watch the fireworks. I think there's a difference between those two forms of lying, and I think there's a difference between what I did and what the dupers/hackers are doing. If you can't look at anything outside of a black & white point of view, well, quite frankly I think your criticism is worthless.
Now, as I have said, it is obvious from Blizzard's continued actions that they don't actually care about cheating as an act, they just want to save a few bucks by tossing active diablo2 players who cause load on their systems. The folks dupeing and hacking items don't add load for them, so they just don't care.
That attitude would sit a lot better if they didn't squash the free battle.net server that was being worked on. Blizzard has basically made it clear that there shall be no gaming network for their games other than the one they provide. That's great, but if Blizzard wants to keep my network play restricted to their servers then they need to do a better job of dealing with cheaters instead of just getting rid of a handful of the least harmful 'cheaters' and leaving the people who ruined the game's economy unscathed. If Blizzard continues to act in this manner I will simply dump my current cache of Blizzard games (everything from Diablo to WarCraft 3+expansion) and make sure to never buy, or endorse, a Blizzard game again.
I used to think of Blizzard as the best game software company out there, but their actions of late have left me sorely disappointed. And considering the (worthwhile) founding members have left, they seem merely a dead husk of their former glory. It's a shame.
Yeah, see, I used to play 100% legit. I did it that way for a long time. Then Blizzard made massive balance changes. They made the game *extremely* difficult to beat solo, and they cut the rewards for playing outside of a large group. The difficulty increase required items of better quality. In search of better quality items I got ripped off more than once, lost *MY* legit items because of dupers, etc. So instead of getting into the bad scene that is trading/duping/hacking I decided to run a bot to get some legit items for myself so I could get back to enjoying the game.
I guess the lesson you want me to learn is that since other people ruined the game by massively circumventing the system I should have just quit instead of trying to enjoy the game and stay as close to legit as I could? That's a pretty terrible lesson, and Blizzard is setting a pretty terrible precedent.
Like I said, duped/hacked items have been a *big* problem for over two years. However, Blizzard has made it clear through their actions that what they say ("We don't tolerate cheating") is not what they mean ("We don't tolerate people doing things that might add load to our servers, but if you cheat in a way that doesn't cost us anything then you're going to be immune.").
It wasn't an issue of getting d2jsp itself running, that was pretty easy (RTFMing and all). Configuring the scripts I was using to not sell stuff I wanted was a pain though. Lot of .ini-type files needing to be edited and whatnot. It took about half a day to tune the bot to where I felt comfortable leaving it to run and going away from the computer. Once it ran though, it ran beautifully.
As far as deleting people with dupes and hacks, yeah, I'm 100% for it. If Blizzard could nerf the illegitimate items, then I'd have a lot less desire to run a bot. Problem is, I can't trust people trading. And finding high-level items in d2 is basically impossible. If they had improved the finds in 1.10 I wouldn't be so irritated, but I played 1.10 quite a bit and found that my finds just weren't really any better than they were in 1.09. It is not fun to play for three hours and find one unique low-level item when the uniques are the only good items in the game. Add to it that beating 1.10 on Hell, with or without co-op, is extremely difficult and would be next to impossible without super high-class weapons and armor and it really sours one to the "diablo 2 experience."
I never had this problem in the original Diablo. That game was balanced well. It was fun to play solo, it was fun to play party. You could find high-level uniques without devoting weeks to the task. I don't know why they broke this in Diablo 2.
Yeah, I know. It bothers me though that they get all high and mighty and say they're taking some hardline stance against cheating. Blizzard doesn't give a fuck if we cheat, as long as our cheating doesn't cost them money. Hey, that's fine, it's their right to feel/act that way, but they shouldn't lie to people about it.
:)
Also, I was using d2jsp w/ pwnage pindle. It worked really well but was a supreme bitch to setup.
If Blizzard was actually deleting accounts due to duped or hacked items I think a lot less people would be upset. However, they're not. It has been a d2 problem for two+ years and they still aren't doing anything about it. It's terrible. As far as I can tell Blizzard deleted about 0 accounts tied to duped/hacked items, because the dupers/hackers are still trading the bogus items.
I don't know about the other games, but I play Diablo 2 and I lost an account for 'botting.' Yeah, I ran a bot about 3-4 hours a day. Not one of those 24/7 guys.
Now I know someone is going to jump me for running bots period, but before you do consider the competition. I'm playing with (and against) a ton of people with hacked items. It's virtually impossible to find or trade for good items that are legit on battle.net unless you're running a bot or duping/hacking. Legit items (unided) carry a ridiculous pricetag because the problem of cheating and duping is so bad. But instead of fixing a dupe/hack problem that has been rampant in d2 for *years* Blizzard finds it better to go after people who are trying to compete against the dupers/hackers.
Let me ask, who is doing more harm? The guy who runs a bot for a few hours to improve his chances of finding an item that doesn't suck or the guy who puts together a 100% illegal item and then uses it to run around PKing others or generally gaining illegitimate advantage in other ways?
Got on bnet today and saw the same people trading occy rings and ccb garbage. These people are without fear, because Blizzard seems more interested in harassing those who use maphack or a pindlebot. They feign a desire to keep people from cheating, but the most rampant cheaters remain totally unpunished. These people ruin the closed battle.net economy, and by doing so take a good deal of enjoyment out of the game for a large majority of users. No d2 player likes having to fork over extra stuff just because they want an unid'd item so it doesn't get deleted on them. Unfortunately, because of Blizzard's totally lax stance on the real problem this is the way the d2 economy works.
I really love d2, but if Blizzard keeps going after small frys instead of the big cheaters I'm just going to toss my copy of d2, and I certainly won't be looking to buy/play any other Blizzard games.
I paid, iirc, $28 usd or so for the "non-bookend" version of the extended FOTR. That's the one with the four DVDs, not the one with five and the Argonath bookends. Within said package I got a voucher good for up to $10 to see TTT. I used that voucher for a value of $8 or so. So I guess I paid $20 all-told for my copy. I think that's an incredibly reasonable price. I imagine the next one will be the same.
Of course.. if you want the "Haradrim vs. Waning Numenoreans" miniature chess set (or whatever it's going to be) with your copy of TTT/extended then you're going to be paying more, but if you just want the flicks I doubt it'll cost much more than a normal DVD.
If you can get past the comment about "phallic joysticks" (patently ridiculous, supposedly a joke, but didn't apppear to be) you're doing better than i did at first. Saying things like that shows a heavy bent towards a priapic mindset or a staggering lack of understanding of both history (of flight control sticks and video games) and ergonomics.
.. because I don't know if they did.
It gets worse further on, though. The writer states about Tomb Raider: "I never played this game" and then goes on to say "Eidos, you really blew it - you alienated all the girls who would have *loved* this game." Excuse me, but how do you know? You never played it, remember? Maybe the gameplay wouldn't even have been of the sort that girls enjoy? I've never played Tomb Raider either, so I certainly won't bash Eidos for "blowing it" in any aspect of its gameplay
Following along she makes a good point about the DOA Volleyball game, but then blows it with a rant about a barmaid in Baldur's Gate. Okay, I don't know about you... but when I play some game with medieval feel I expect my barmaids (wenches) to be ditzy, busty, and generally exactly like the description she gives. It sounds like a perfect fit in that kind of game to me. Guess what, sluts and whores are real and they are a part of the collective group of women on this planet no matter how embarassed you might be about it.
Also, who the hell is "Justin"? I have a hard time taking an article seriously when the writer talks about random third parties without any introduction. (I do know who Justin is from reading other stories on the site, but I might as well not from the article. it's bad writing.)
Moving along I see another thing which frustrates me. She makes a comment about the genderless trolls of Tolkien's world and how they are "inherently male." Okay, fine, let's say I take that at face value (I don't, if something is genderless than it is genderless). Then she goes on to say that she "would like to see more experimentation with genderless or gender-ambivalent characters" Well, which is it? Pick one, please.
Okay, other than that she doesn't trip up. However, I have another major gripe with this article and another point which keeps me from taking it seriously. She never mentions the "male stereotype" that is just as easy to find in videogames. Main characters are always buff and bronzed, always fighting their way through situations. Very rarely if ever will you find a male protagonist in a videogame who is a scrawny 5'2" pasty-faced kid with glasses. Or a chubby awkward boy. The main characters as adults and children are idyllic, and anything that diverts from the stereotypical perfection is villainous or sinister (evil genius plotting destruction) or comic relief (fat person struggling to keep up, always wanting to eat).
She really blows it here. Instead of taking the issue of female stereotyping and the overall shallowness of most videogames (I agree with her) and using it as representative of the greater problems with the total lack of realism and sensibility she totally ignores every other slight to every other class of people because, in typical human fashion, she portrays the injustices as directed primarily at her chosen group of identification. It's a very human thing to do, but also extremely frustrating for someone trying to find some subjective analysis and critique where it is sorely needed.
At any rate, if she had just been up front about wanting some more intelligent, realistic, and more engaging games to go with the testosterone infused ones I think this article would have read much better. However she didn't, and the article (and her cred) suffers because she attempted to take a good point and emphasize it with good evidence (ample in the world of gaming) but instead beat it into the ground with some bad examples and a terribly shallow view. It's a definite shame.
It's not all that complicated. Way back when the control stick was just a lever to maneuver the necessary bits. It was basically just a metal rod that connected to other parts in a simple system.
Now, if you want to say the rod is phallic.. well, then lots of things are phallic. Many bones are phallic, etc. I think if you look long and hard (nods to Beavis & Butthead) you'll find that anything long and, er, hard is phallic. Big deal.
Good lord man. Listen to yourself. It's just a television series! I can understand frustration, I can understand boycotting the channel to avoid similar frustration in the future too. But to go on about how you're so mad and angry that you can't see straight over a fucking television show... well.. jesus. I wish my life was so pleasant and worry-free that my biggest causes of anger were some second-rate cable network cancelling a show I enjoyed.
Think about this for a bit, and perhaps reconsider your position here. Is a TV show worth getting that upset over?
I can only assume you meant disdain. ;)
I claim this fp in the name of.. uh.. Radiohead! New album? Eh? Eh?
I'm surprised I didn't see this mentioned anywhere. I remember one of the particularly depressing things from 1984 was the music generating machine used to create music for the proles.
A machine that checks to see if a song is going to be a hit with the masses based on mathematics is not far behind a machine that will be able to generate a hit for the masses.
Creepy.
I can't really agree there. I've played nethack. I've retrieved the amulet. I feel I've "beaten" it for my intents and purposes (please, god, don't flame me about this). I also basically got this far because I stubbornly refused to be beaten down by the game.
I can see the Diablo comparison. They're both hack and slash games. The thing Diablo does not do to you, though, is leave you stranded and basically screwed at the beginning of the game. It doesn't, through lack of balance, force you to continually cycle through characters because the game gave you bad breaks.
The thing is, as a player of both games, I think Diablo is a hell of a lot more fun. Diablo is like nethack with balance. I think, in fact, that people who like to kick back and do some hacking for a while, are much better served by Diablo. Wasting time trying to beat (yeah yeah) nethack was probably a very poor decision on my part. It was a very smart decision on my part to never touch it again.
What I'm saying is, if all you want to do is hack and find treasure and use it on your quest to hack, Diablo is probably going to be more enjoyable. It's easier to get in to, much more friendly and intuitive, and much less likely to leave you in a completely unsalvageable game.
If, on the other hand, you enjoy the randomness of being potentially screwed in every other game you play, well, go nuts with nethack. Some people seem to really enjoy this. That's fine, but it's sure not for me, and I don't think it is for most people. Including those of us with "some parts of the brain still active."
And please, don't tell me about how you can always "work through" problems in nethack. I know, I've played it enough to know the tricks. What you fail to see is that often "working through" will just leave you screwed down the road, even if your immediate problem is solved. I honestly don't find that challenging, I find it irritating.
A game with really excellent balance *will* allow you to screw yourself, but it won't force you to abandon a game you've put hours (or days!) into. It will provide means by which to salvage your game. Even if it means hard work on your part, you'll still be able to do it. Plus, the game won't screw you through ridiculous arbitrary randomness. Sure, you can get yourself killed if you're careless, or stick your neck out too far, but you don't die from "starvation" well into the game because you can't get a bite, or you get poison meat, and your deity decides it's his day off, or whatever. That's just arbitrary and irritating. It isn't fun.
Hmm, another 'assweasel' consumer? And here I thought that one was mine.
I can still however, lay claim to cuntburger, and jizzwaffle. Ho ho.
I read slashdot for the comments. Unfortunately this requires that I find stories that interest me on the front page, or wherever else they might be. I enjoy the comments, from the lowest -1 troll, to the loftiest +5 writer of superior articles. Honestly, I like the trolls (sometimes, anyhow) and I like the information that is provided by others in "the community." I consider this site pretty worthwhile, and if it weren't for the aforementioned glaring problems, would be happy to pay for it so that it would not go away.
Come off it. I don't see where you get off bitching because nobody told you that you posted a dupe of a story two stories down. I mean, had you taken a cursory glance at your own site you probably would have seen this story.
You know, if you didn't want us to pay for this, I wouldn't even care. But I cannot believe that you are bitching at paying customers because of your lack of editing. What gives? As I've said before this site has editorial practices slightly worse than that of your average grade school newspaper. I think it's really insulting that you would expect anyone to pay for this.
Let me up the ante here. You editors are pretty tech-savvy, right? I just used Mozilla's oft-praised tabbed browsing feature to open another tab and look up the post I linked above. Now, when you are approving submissions, how hard would it be to have a second tab open to make sure you aren't posting a dupe. I mean, look, you guys approve at most 20 stories a day. Between the four or five (estimate) active editors, that's.. well.. not a lot. It wouldn't be hard to simply say "when I'm ready to approve a story I'll make sure there aren't any dupes." This kind of work wouldn't take long at all, and combined with a little editing would go a long way towards getting some new subscribers. I, for one, pledge to subscribe when the editorial quality of this site improves. That means, basically, that every other story can't have glaring grammatical or spelling errors, and that dupes are practically nonexistant.
I realize that everybody makes mistakes, myself included, but the number of mistakes from people who are professionals (and you are professionals if you do this for a living -- you do) is just too much to be tolerated -- or at least paid for.
"Warning: site is most definately not in english."
What, like you'd know?
How does slashdot expect anyone to pay for their services if they can't even edit their damn submissions (or even the actual text of the editors!)
I'd be first in line to pay if the editors actually edited their story content. I'm dead serious. Every time I think about getting a subscription though, I see misedited or unedited garbage like this.
I offer HTTP and anonymous CVS retrieval as well as XDCC distribution. However, I've had XDCC distribution for far longer, and so I keep it that way for people who are used to it.
And please, show me where it says I am under the belief that DALnet *has to* permit anything? I'm not, I'm simply saying that they're trying to blow up a molehill with an atom bomb.
I have not misunderstood at all. They may not moderate the content being traded, but they still monitor the content of *traffic on the network*. Which is to say they monitor their channel content, what goes on in those channels (the content of channel conversation), etc.
It's all content, it's just not *file* content.
No. This has nothing at all to do with the DDoS attacks. This is just an attempt by DALnet to pull a CYA maneuver. They're preemptively trying to counter the *AA agencies. I doubt it will work.
Yes, you're right. But the DDoS attacks have more to do with abusive operators. Still, you speak for a large group of people who think DALnet should stop antagonizing these people, at least if it wants to continue operating.