Heehee! I'm not going to say you're right, but I will say that, due to the fact that I had the ANS in one of my bedrooms and slept in a top bunk in that room during the winter, I never had to turn the heat on in my apartment for two years.
Of course, I was living in the south SF Bay at the time, but it's still quite an accomplishment for a place where, one of the years, it frosted over every night for a month and a half.
So you're saying that if I buy a legally licensed CD manufactured in Slovakia, and then sold in, say, Copenhagan, then that CD becomes illegal if I carry it into the US? Or are you saying that if I download a track from a euro iTMS store and then carry my iPod into the US that it becomes illegal?
Let me see. Let us say for a moment that you buy a CD manufactured in Slovakia and sold in Slovakia, instead. And let us say that Slovakia has a law that says 'We do not recognize the intellectual property rights of any country except for Slovakia,' which of course means that the CD is perfectly legal in Slovakia but has not paid a cent to the artist or his record label or whatever. And then you re-import it into the United States.
Is it legal? Is it ethical?
If your definition if 'legal' is 'anything I can get away with' and your definition of ethical is similar, then the answer to both questions is probably 'yes'.
If I want to buy legally licensed music produced in Russia and then import it for my personal use into another country, why shouldn't I?
But, of course, it wasn't produced in Russia. If it were, then we wouldn't be having this discussion.
What you're saying is a version of imperialism, that somehow the US-based RIAA licensing mafia has more legality than a similar Russian-based licensing mafia.
Well, in theory at least, the RIAA is still giving some part of their profits to the artist, whereas the Russian service is not doing any such thing.
Furthermore, ignoring my colloqial use of the term "mafia", what proof do you have that the people behind allofmp3.com are involved in illegal, coordinated activities?
It is a point of faith on the internet, at least among certain groups, that that service is run by the Russian mafia. And, frankly, I think it highly likely; most of the extremely lucrative services of dubious legality in Russia are in fact run by Russian organized crime, either from the beginning or after their originators come to bad ends.
Russia is currently unfettered capitalism at its finest.
I went back to college about ten years ago and got myself a somewhat belated CS degree. I used a Mac (Quadra 800) at the time, and three of my classes (in the first two semesters) required PC software. (After a while they all ended up requiring a Sun workstation, a MIPS workstation, or the IBM System 3/70 (yuch!).
I used SoftPC (remember that?) and it all went just fine. Using emulation software to complete these sorts of courses was often better than doing it natively: I could run the DOS applications in one window and still be able to check my email and run a 'talk' session in the background at the same time.
I'm sure Virtual PC would work fine these days, even if it is a Microsoft product now.
People purchase music for many reasons, and they have the freedom to sell or transfer the rights they've paid for to someone else who's willing to buy at the market. It doesn't matter if the music is worthless to you, I have the right to resell/transfer. When you buy into this trend of non transferable rights, you're effectively diminishing your own freedom - for what exactly, Britney Spears?
You are a confused person. People purchase music for two reasons that I can think of, excluding such arcane things as collectors buying rare records. They purchase music to play, or to gift to other people. Nobody in their right minds purchases a $15 CD in order to resell it to a used CD place for $5. That may be the effect after five years, but it is hardly the reason that the CD was purchased, and, one hopes, most of the time the person has wrung some utility out of it in the mean time.
The utility of music is in the playing. You are the one who is misleading.
The reality of the booming market for used CDs should prove you wrong. There's nothing illegal for stores buying and selling legit used CDs.
This in no way is any kind of argument against what the previous poster said. People buy music in order to play it. They may, perhaps, become tired of it later, and resell it, but that in no way alters the reason that the music was bought in the first place.
The monetary value relies on what the market will pay. If the market doesn't pay what you ask for, your monetary value is worth "Bull". For example, if you're trying to sell your brownish rocks for $1M, but people won't pay because they smell bad, your brownish rocks are worth $0.
The funny thing, of course, is that you are arguing FOR his exact statement, while trying to refute it.
Which is to say, only the person who bought the CD can decide what that CD is worth to him, and therefore whether he should buy it in the first place (if the asking price is MORE than it is worth to the potential owner, then the owner doesn't buy it) and whether to, when he starts getting tired of it, sell it for $5 to a used CD place (if it is still worth more than $5, though less than $15, then he doesn't sell it).
Thus, only the owner (or potential owner) can decide what the CD is actually worth to him, and therefore whether it is worth purchasing.
In your 'brown rocks' example above, of course, you had it exactly backwards. The owner of the 'brown rocks' finds out what he can sell them for, and if their utility to him is above that number, then he doesn't sell them. And only the owner can ascribe that monetary value to the rocks... the value which enables him to decide whether it is worth selling them at any given price or not.
Oh, hell, I don't expect you to understand. You've got your head stuck in a brown rock mine.
And so by that reasoning, Napster is a better deal, because I have the utility of 80,000 songs, by paying $15/month.
Er... no. You only have 'utility' if you actually 'utilize' something. Being able in theory to listen to any music you want, but not actually ever listening to it, has very little value for most people.
Go even further. Lets say you buy those CD's for $10 each (a pretty typical price for people who buy hits and don't pay full price). Lets assume you had to buy 350 albums to get those 360 songs.
I'm out $3,500. Ouch. But as I get tired of each song, I can sell them for, oh, $5 each, so my cost is $1,750. If I assume I enjoy those songs for 10 years, then it costs me....Hmmm about $15 a month.
Wow. I don't think I could possibly find someone who used music more differently than I do. But let's take your little example here.
Let's say that instead of buying those 350 albums to get your 360 songs, you bought those 360 songs from iTMS, over those same 10 years. Then you paid $3/month, instead of $15/month. Of course. Obviously. AND you still have the songs, unless you elect to try to sell them, or give them away. (Apple has publicly stated that selling iTMS music is cumbersome and probably not practical, but is still legal. You're welcome to assume that they were lying when they said that, but since I'll just challenge you to prove it, you've got an uphill battle.)
I'm saying the whole idea of renting music (and I consider iTMS renting) is bad for the consumer.
I can't imagine in what way you could call iTMS 'renting'. You pay once for the song. You never have to pay again. You keep it, and the right to play it or listen to it, forever. The only way to define this as 'renting' is to completely change the meaning of the word 'renting' to include this.
On the other hand, the only thing that might make iTMS worthwhile is HYMN, so you strip the stupid DRM off it, and then give copies to all your friends. If they do the same, you can build a decent song library for 1/10th the cost.
And here we find the crux of your argument: 'I know how much music should cost and so I should have the right to decide how much I pay for it, and iTMS doesn't let me do that.' As a musician, and a friend to professional musicians, let me say that while I don't appreciate the RIAA's view of life, I don't like yours either.
In fact, I'd be delighted if I could sell my tracks on iTMS for $0.50 and get 1/2 of that for myself. (I sell about 50 albums a year these days (at about 15 songs per album), so it's not like that would cover recording expenses, but oh well, such is the life of a folk musician.) But, of course, people like you believe that you should be able to decide what my creative output should sell for, and how it should be used.
As I recall, some early 68000-based workstations (Apollos, maybe?) had two processors... no, not for multiprocessing: one was running one (or more?) instruction ahead of the other, in place of an MMU.
If you're actually interested, I managed to get both AIX and Linux running on one of these puppies, actually using it for a web server and file server for a while.
It is a wholly random procedure, as far as I can tell. I tried what I believe to be an identical set of steps three or four times before it finally actually worked, when trying to get Linux installed.
And yes, every single time you tried it, you had to take the battery out for an hour or so. In fact, the time I actually got Linux installed, I had left the battery out overnight. (And the machine unplugged.)
Worth it? Well, I replaced it with a G4 Cube that runs 1/10 as hot, 1/1000 as noisy, three or four times as fast, and much, much prettier. Running Mac OS X Server, natch.
And you can bet that taxpayers prefer small government to big.
Absolutely you can bet that way, but you'd be wrong. The majority of taxpayers support, just as an example:
- Universal Health Care, including if it means raising taxes - Child Day Care Assistance, including if it means raising taxes - Significant investments in Homeland Security (which we haven't seen so far), including if it means raising taxes
There were more in the study, but I don't recall what they were. If I can find it again, I'll post it here.
Harumph. I am not a boob, though I do play one on television. Hence, obviously, your confusion.
And anyway, I like my interpretation better. And absolutely prefer 'the senator's florid face' to his speech, which was riddled with incongruities and inanities, not to mention intangibles and insane introspection.
So that would be the Beige G3/266, which doesn't run 10.3 at all, which certainly won't run 10.4, and which even crashes once a week or so when you're running 10.2.8 (which is rock-solid on other machines). They have ADB I/O, a built-in SCSI motherboard connector, no firewire, no USB, old-world ROMs which have serious problems with bootstrapping Mac OS X at all... I could go on.
As opposed to the Blue and White G3. which runs 10.2 and 10.3 just fine, and which almost certainly will run 10.4 as well.
Now, quick quiz: which one is worth more? (No, not to YOU, but on the open market.)
Which don't include Apple Store sales. They didn't include online Apple Store sales either, last I checked, but they might have fixed this since then. I doubt it, but maybe.
Gartner's market share polls are paid for primarily by Microsoft. Now, I'm not saying that they're lying, exactly. But they sure do know exactly what their customer wants to hear, and, much like the intelligence agencies and GWB, are quite willing to be very selective about what they say...
How hard is it to add in a cheap $5 LCD display like you find on other MP3 players that size?
And keep it the same size it is? Impossible.
And make it bigger and clunkier and more expensive just to add a tiny little screen that in no way constitutes a reasonable user interface anyway? Pretty easy.
I understand it's more a iBook than G4 Cube, but from a user's perspective, that doesn't really matter.;-)
No. What matters is that this is literally 1/3 the price. One third. See, things that don't succeed at $1500 may well succeed at $500.
The G4 Cube had two FireWire ports though, the only item I wish the Mac mini would have included.
Well, fair enough, although most of my firewire equippage (external hard drive, external DVD burner) can be daisy-chained together; I don't even need my firewire hub (which itself cost only $70 anyway). Since the two ports are on the same firewire channel for most Macs anyway, I don't see any real reason for two. Only reason for two USB ports is because lots of people don't like plugging their printer into their keyboard.
Actually, the Cube could also hold more memory, I believe. (Or did it top at 1Gb? Not sure... either way, it was 4 slots, better than just 1, but then again I don't suppose that's even physically possible with the Mac mini.)
It could indeed hold more memory (1.5 gigs) but had only three slots, each of which (obviously) could take a 512 MB SDRAM PC100 DIMM.
Apple developers get the preview builds months before the actual release. It only costs $500 to become an Apple Select member, which gives you these benefits. There are, shall we say, quite a few of us around. So it doesn't surprise me that some of them are willing to share the wealth.
Frankly, even if I were willing to break the agreement I made with Apple not to do such things, I don't like any of you enough to want to do you any favors.
Well, I've seen a lot of sniping at Windows Software Updates and how they break things and stuff in here. But I gotta tell ya, before 10.3.7 my uptime was directly 1:1 related to the amount of time since the last software update. I would put the machine to sleep, wake it up... the only time I rebooted was when I installed an update that required it. That had been going on for over four months now, except for one memorable experience where I dropped the damn thing four feet onto a hard floor and it froze up on me.
After 10.3.7? Well, in the last 24 hours I've gotten three kernel panics on my 15" AlBook. All of them while the machine was left unattended, one when the screen was asleep and two when it was awake.
It's always funny to read remarks from people who assume that everyone in the world is exactly like them.
'I would sell my soul for grants, and lie to everyone and pretend there are dangers when there aren't, just for a little money. Pity I'm not cut out to be a scientist. But obviously since I would, then EVERY SINGLE CREDIBLE SCIENTIST would, since everyone else in the world is just as dishonest at the core as I am.'
I have the opposite opinion: I haven't been grinding for levels. I have been trying to KEEP from gaining levels... I've been gaining them so fast that my equipment is really suited for a character about six levels lower than I am, for the most part.
Most of this is my own fault... I'm far too generous with other people when I play. I craft things for them for cost, I enchant things for them for free, and I end up losing money.
But level grind? I'm level 21. I know of about 30 quests that I could go on that would be good for me, but I'm holding off until I have the equipment I need. And I've *never* killed something just for the experience. If I wanted experience, I'd just take a quest. In the unlikely event that I'd finished all the local quests, I'd just go off to some other race's areas and start doing them there.
There is a level grind in WoW only if you WANT there to be. If you think all low-level play is automatically boring and you are desperate to get up to high levels as fast as possible, then there's a grind. But that's YOUR problem, not the game's.
A group of fighters running into a dungeon will be slaughtered quickly. A group of mages? Even quicker. And priests are not the 'clerics' of D&D fame, able to fight as well as the fighters and heal themselves as well; they're more like mages.
Basically, you need one or two tanks, to distract the baddies and take the damage, and KEEP the baddies attacking them. You want a ranged attacker or two, or a close-up fighter with less defense but a lot of offense, to do a bunch of damage. And you want one or two healers sitting back and healing everyone. And if anyone stops paying attention to his role... well:
- If the tanks stop paying attention, the monsters will start going after the other people, the ones who are doing more damage than the tank is, or the ones who are easier to hurt.
- If the damage-dealers stop paying attention, the monster never goes down at all.
- If the healer stops paying attention, the tank dies and then the monster goes after everyone else.
Now, most classes can fulfill more than one role: priests can do damage at range and also heal, hunters can do damage at range and also have a pet to tank for them. Druids, heck, druids can heal, do damage at range, tank (in bear form), and do massive damage from up close (in cat form) though not all at the same time. But the point is, if you start straying from your role, your party members die.
That's why you hear, in the higher level areas on WoW, 'Group for X quest wants a paladin or priest!' or 'Group for Y quest wants a rogue!'
Teamwork and strategy is not just good to have, it is necessary.
So really, what you're saying is that you'd like to jump in and start and have your character be as powerful as he ever will be... no experience, or, rather, all the experience on the keyboard end of the equation.
Three things: One: Some of us play these games to have an alter ego that has different strengths than we do. I guess, since my reflexes are lousy, by your lights I should just be an eternal newbie and never have much fun in the game. Excuse me, but I don't like that; I like games that are about more than just reflexes. In this game, it's a little reflex and quite a bit of strategy. I'm good at strategy, which is why my level 21 druid can kill level 22 and 23 enemies, one on one. If it were all twitch, I'd still be back killing deer. Plus, even if I were GOOD at twitch games, they aren't FUN to me. Ooh, let's see how fast I can mash the space bar! No... I'd rather have the immersive qualities, without the tendonitis, thanks.
Two: Some of us like the idea of our characters being able to do more things, more effectively, as time goes by.
Three: In your scenario, the people who are really good at FPS will just breeze through the entire game in a couple of weeks. If there isn't some kind of differentiation between low level and high level baddies except that the high level is harder to kill, and your character starts out as powerful as he's going to get, then those who are good might as well just go straight to the dragon's lair and keep trying until they kill it, right? And then complain, I'm sure, that the game was far too short for the money you spent on it.
Right?
Basically, if you don't LIKE RPGs, don't PLAY RPGs. If you WANT a fantasy FPS, which is exactly what you've described, then go GET one.
I can easily lend somebody one of my MDs without worrying about the condition I will get it back in.
Certainly. And if you loan them your minidisc player, too, then they can even listen to what's on them.
'Loaning' someone your MP3s via the net is much harder.
Finally, I can record onto MDs on the go.
You can do this with the iPod, too, if you like. There are a couple of $30-40 adaptors (which you can get for $20 if you're attentive), or you can just pick up a normal mic and do a little messing about with the iPod itself. (It comes with a built-in record mode, but it's kind of hard to activate it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Heehee! I'm not going to say you're right, but I will say that, due to the fact that I had the ANS in one of my bedrooms and slept in a top bunk in that room during the winter, I never had to turn the heat on in my apartment for two years.
Of course, I was living in the south SF Bay at the time, but it's still quite an accomplishment for a place where, one of the years, it frosted over every night for a month and a half.
-fred
Is it legal? Is it ethical?
If your definition if 'legal' is 'anything I can get away with' and your definition of ethical is similar, then the answer to both questions is probably 'yes'.But, of course, it wasn't produced in Russia. If it were, then we wouldn't be having this discussion.Well, in theory at least, the RIAA is still giving some part of their profits to the artist, whereas the Russian service is not doing any such thing.It is a point of faith on the internet, at least among certain groups, that that service is run by the Russian mafia. And, frankly, I think it highly likely; most of the extremely lucrative services of dubious legality in Russia are in fact run by Russian organized crime, either from the beginning or after their originators come to bad ends.
Russia is currently unfettered capitalism at its finest.
-fred
I went back to college about ten years ago and got myself a somewhat belated CS degree. I used a Mac (Quadra 800) at the time, and three of my classes (in the first two semesters) required PC software. (After a while they all ended up requiring a Sun workstation, a MIPS workstation, or the IBM System 3/70 (yuch!).
I used SoftPC (remember that?) and it all went just fine. Using emulation software to complete these sorts of courses was often better than doing it natively: I could run the DOS applications in one window and still be able to check my email and run a 'talk' session in the background at the same time.
I'm sure Virtual PC would work fine these days, even if it is a Microsoft product now.
-fred
The utility of music is in the playing. You are the one who is misleading.This in no way is any kind of argument against what the previous poster said. People buy music in order to play it. They may, perhaps, become tired of it later, and resell it, but that in no way alters the reason that the music was bought in the first place.The funny thing, of course, is that you are arguing FOR his exact statement, while trying to refute it.
Which is to say, only the person who bought the CD can decide what that CD is worth to him, and therefore whether he should buy it in the first place (if the asking price is MORE than it is worth to the potential owner, then the owner doesn't buy it) and whether to, when he starts getting tired of it, sell it for $5 to a used CD place (if it is still worth more than $5, though less than $15, then he doesn't sell it).
Thus, only the owner (or potential owner) can decide what the CD is actually worth to him, and therefore whether it is worth purchasing.
In your 'brown rocks' example above, of course, you had it exactly backwards. The owner of the 'brown rocks' finds out what he can sell them for, and if their utility to him is above that number, then he doesn't sell them. And only the owner can ascribe that monetary value to the rocks... the value which enables him to decide whether it is worth selling them at any given price or not.
Oh, hell, I don't expect you to understand. You've got your head stuck in a brown rock mine.
-fred
Let's say that instead of buying those 350 albums to get your 360 songs, you bought those 360 songs from iTMS, over those same 10 years. Then you paid $3/month, instead of $15/month. Of course. Obviously. AND you still have the songs, unless you elect to try to sell them, or give them away. (Apple has publicly stated that selling iTMS music is cumbersome and probably not practical, but is still legal. You're welcome to assume that they were lying when they said that, but since I'll just challenge you to prove it, you've got an uphill battle.)I can't imagine in what way you could call iTMS 'renting'. You pay once for the song. You never have to pay again. You keep it, and the right to play it or listen to it, forever. The only way to define this as 'renting' is to completely change the meaning of the word 'renting' to include this.And here we find the crux of your argument: 'I know how much music should cost and so I should have the right to decide how much I pay for it, and iTMS doesn't let me do that.' As a musician, and a friend to professional musicians, let me say that while I don't appreciate the RIAA's view of life, I don't like yours either.
In fact, I'd be delighted if I could sell my tracks on iTMS for $0.50 and get 1/2 of that for myself. (I sell about 50 albums a year these days (at about 15 songs per album), so it's not like that would cover recording expenses, but oh well, such is the life of a folk musician.) But, of course, people like you believe that you should be able to decide what my creative output should sell for, and how it should be used.
-fred
As I recall, some early 68000-based workstations (Apollos, maybe?) had two processors... no, not for multiprocessing: one was running one (or more?) instruction ahead of the other, in place of an MMU.
Now that's just whacked.
-fred
If you're actually interested, I managed to get both AIX and Linux running on one of these puppies, actually using it for a web server and file server for a while.
It is a wholly random procedure, as far as I can tell. I tried what I believe to be an identical set of steps three or four times before it finally actually worked, when trying to get Linux installed.
And yes, every single time you tried it, you had to take the battery out for an hour or so. In fact, the time I actually got Linux installed, I had left the battery out overnight. (And the machine unplugged.)
Worth it? Well, I replaced it with a G4 Cube that runs 1/10 as hot, 1/1000 as noisy, three or four times as fast, and much, much prettier. Running Mac OS X Server, natch.
-fred
- Universal Health Care, including if it means raising taxes
- Child Day Care Assistance, including if it means raising taxes
- Significant investments in Homeland Security (which we haven't seen so far), including if it means raising taxes
There were more in the study, but I don't recall what they were. If I can find it again, I'll post it here.
-fred
Harumph. I am not a boob, though I do play one on television. Hence, obviously, your confusion.
And anyway, I like my interpretation better. And absolutely prefer 'the senator's florid face' to his speech, which was riddled with incongruities and inanities, not to mention intangibles and insane introspection.
As for capers, I must admit that I prefer garlic.
-fred
So that would be the Beige G3/266, which doesn't run 10.3 at all, which certainly won't run 10.4, and which even crashes once a week or so when you're running 10.2.8 (which is rock-solid on other machines). They have ADB I/O, a built-in SCSI motherboard connector, no firewire, no USB, old-world ROMs which have serious problems with bootstrapping Mac OS X at all... I could go on.
As opposed to the Blue and White G3. which runs 10.2 and 10.3 just fine, and which almost certainly will run 10.4 as well.
Now, quick quiz: which one is worth more? (No, not to YOU, but on the open market.)
-fred
Which don't include Apple Store sales. They didn't include online Apple Store sales either, last I checked, but they might have fixed this since then. I doubt it, but maybe.
Gartner's market share polls are paid for primarily by Microsoft. Now, I'm not saying that they're lying, exactly. But they sure do know exactly what their customer wants to hear, and, much like the intelligence agencies and GWB, are quite willing to be very selective about what they say...
-fred
Well, I know I want to play DVDs without a display attached. :-)
-fred
-fred
I prefer Keynote to pulling my own head off!
That's just about as good as 'It's like Microsoft Office for the rest of your life.'
-fred
And make it bigger and clunkier and more expensive just to add a tiny little screen that in no way constitutes a reasonable user interface anyway? Pretty easy.
-fred
-fred
I have a scroll-wheel mouse attached to my Mac. No drivers. In safari:
Left button does what you expect.
Right button opens contextual menus.
Scroll wheel scrolls.
Scroll wheel click opens a link in a new tab.
So... what more did you want it to do?
-fred
-fred
Apple developers get the preview builds months before the actual release. It only costs $500 to become an Apple Select member, which gives you these benefits. There are, shall we say, quite a few of us around. So it doesn't surprise me that some of them are willing to share the wealth.
Frankly, even if I were willing to break the agreement I made with Apple not to do such things, I don't like any of you enough to want to do you any favors.
Yeah, yeah, I know: you love me too.
Cheers.
-fred
Well, I've seen a lot of sniping at Windows Software Updates and how they break things and stuff in here. But I gotta tell ya, before 10.3.7 my uptime was directly 1:1 related to the amount of time since the last software update. I would put the machine to sleep, wake it up... the only time I rebooted was when I installed an update that required it. That had been going on for over four months now, except for one memorable experience where I dropped the damn thing four feet onto a hard floor and it froze up on me.
After 10.3.7? Well, in the last 24 hours I've gotten three kernel panics on my 15" AlBook. All of them while the machine was left unattended, one when the screen was asleep and two when it was awake.
Argh.
-fred
It's always funny to read remarks from people who assume that everyone in the world is exactly like them.
'I would sell my soul for grants, and lie to everyone and pretend there are dangers when there aren't, just for a little money. Pity I'm not cut out to be a scientist. But obviously since I would, then EVERY SINGLE CREDIBLE SCIENTIST would, since everyone else in the world is just as dishonest at the core as I am.'
Right? Right?
-fred
I have the opposite opinion: I haven't been grinding for levels. I have been trying to KEEP from gaining levels... I've been gaining them so fast that my equipment is really suited for a character about six levels lower than I am, for the most part.
Most of this is my own fault... I'm far too generous with other people when I play. I craft things for them for cost, I enchant things for them for free, and I end up losing money.
But level grind? I'm level 21. I know of about 30 quests that I could go on that would be good for me, but I'm holding off until I have the equipment I need. And I've *never* killed something just for the experience. If I wanted experience, I'd just take a quest. In the unlikely event that I'd finished all the local quests, I'd just go off to some other race's areas and start doing them there.
There is a level grind in WoW only if you WANT there to be. If you think all low-level play is automatically boring and you are desperate to get up to high levels as fast as possible, then there's a grind. But that's YOUR problem, not the game's.
-fred
Absolutely teamwork and strategy.
A group of fighters running into a dungeon will be slaughtered quickly. A group of mages? Even quicker. And priests are not the 'clerics' of D&D fame, able to fight as well as the fighters and heal themselves as well; they're more like mages.
Basically, you need one or two tanks, to distract the baddies and take the damage, and KEEP the baddies attacking them. You want a ranged attacker or two, or a close-up fighter with less defense but a lot of offense, to do a bunch of damage. And you want one or two healers sitting back and healing everyone. And if anyone stops paying attention to his role... well:
- If the tanks stop paying attention, the monsters will start going after the other people, the ones who are doing more damage than the tank is, or the ones who are easier to hurt.
- If the damage-dealers stop paying attention, the monster never goes down at all.
- If the healer stops paying attention, the tank dies and then the monster goes after everyone else.
Now, most classes can fulfill more than one role: priests can do damage at range and also heal, hunters can do damage at range and also have a pet to tank for them. Druids, heck, druids can heal, do damage at range, tank (in bear form), and do massive damage from up close (in cat form) though not all at the same time. But the point is, if you start straying from your role, your party members die.
That's why you hear, in the higher level areas on WoW, 'Group for X quest wants a paladin or priest!' or 'Group for Y quest wants a rogue!'
Teamwork and strategy is not just good to have, it is necessary.
-fred
So really, what you're saying is that you'd like to jump in and start and have your character be as powerful as he ever will be... no experience, or, rather, all the experience on the keyboard end of the equation.
Three things:
One: Some of us play these games to have an alter ego that has different strengths than we do. I guess, since my reflexes are lousy, by your lights I should just be an eternal newbie and never have much fun in the game. Excuse me, but I don't like that; I like games that are about more than just reflexes. In this game, it's a little reflex and quite a bit of strategy. I'm good at strategy, which is why my level 21 druid can kill level 22 and 23 enemies, one on one. If it were all twitch, I'd still be back killing deer. Plus, even if I were GOOD at twitch games, they aren't FUN to me. Ooh, let's see how fast I can mash the space bar! No... I'd rather have the immersive qualities, without the tendonitis, thanks.
Two: Some of us like the idea of our characters being able to do more things, more effectively, as time goes by.
Three: In your scenario, the people who are really good at FPS will just breeze through the entire game in a couple of weeks. If there isn't some kind of differentiation between low level and high level baddies except that the high level is harder to kill, and your character starts out as powerful as he's going to get, then those who are good might as well just go straight to the dragon's lair and keep trying until they kill it, right? And then complain, I'm sure, that the game was far too short for the money you spent on it.
Right?
Basically, if you don't LIKE RPGs, don't PLAY RPGs. If you WANT a fantasy FPS, which is exactly what you've described, then go GET one.
Some of us DO like them.
-fred
'Loaning' someone your MP3s via the net is much harder.You can do this with the iPod, too, if you like. There are a couple of $30-40 adaptors (which you can get for $20 if you're attentive), or you can just pick up a normal mic and do a little messing about with the iPod itself. (It comes with a built-in record mode, but it's kind of hard to activate it.)
-fred