Sometimes he demonstrates card tricks, and yes, he admits that they are "only" tricks.
But you honestly can't deny some of his other "tricks" or "magic" employing NLP, suggestion, misdirection and pyschology.
His strenght is that he very often actually reveals how he did it. And when you realize how he did it, you know that there is much more in it than just "magic" or whatever catch-it-all word you label it. I actually did some of the simpler stuff he did, and yes it is hard to pull off, yes you need suggestible people, but it actually *works*, and there is no better satisfaction then a bewildered and confused friend who thinks you can read minds. But, go ahead keep living under the rock, and do deny it all because denial is probably the easiest/laziest thing to do.
If you want to see some real thing like Neuro Language Programming, sublimal advertising, misdirection, suggestion etc, look for Derren Brown at youtube.
I quite understand what you mean and I agree on some of your points. But I still think that some of the newer bosses require very intricate strategy and it doesn't matter if you you are level 70 or 60 if you get hit by twice or thrice the hit points you got or you are swarmed by adds. Those new bosses (in AQ and Naxx) don't have tank-nuke-heal tactic like the all bosses/mobs before. They require special tactics, somewhat complex positioning, excellent timing, superb knowledge of boss fight phases, which pretty much all of the casuals don't have.
But, it doesn't matter what we are writing here, we'll see by ourselves anyway what will happen anyway=)
I was kinda lost in the thread. I meant parent, not grand parent. I was replying in the http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=217138&cid=176 28702 post, and I repeated that I don't think casuals will ever (as things are now) see hardcore content (and the only real content added through last year) that only few selected people farm/grind/see/enjoy/hate for the last year.
I didn't state anything wrong, or I just wrote my answer with poor readability. I'm not quite familiar if players could play Naxx at more difficult setting (I thought those new lvl60+ dungeons could be configured that way) but it only agrees with my point. And my point was loosely this: Casuals won't ever see much (ie most of the bosses and/or final bosses) of the hardest instances for lvl60 (ie AQ40 or Naxx, and they are almost a year old btw) because they are, I presume, still too difficult for them at lvl 70 to get there. That was my point in telling GP that AQ40 and Naxx will never "friendly" to casual players Well, I could be wrong if somehow Blizzard "nerfs" severely those dungeons, but that is another point.
This is utter BS. After ppl hit lvl 70 nobody will be going to lvl 60 instances because at lvl 70 you get much better gear then you get at lvl 60. Another thing is that newer raid instances like AQ and Naxx require tons and tons of coordination and practice that casuals will never manage. So yeah, they will never see final bosses there. After reading your comment uninformed reader could think: "Why I don't gather 39 more lvl 70 people and lets down Kel'Thuzad (last boss in Naxx)?" This is quite impossible. First they *all* have to know flawlessly all the tactics for numerous bosses and hard trash mobs, and even if they somehow (impossible IMO) get to Sapphiron, they all need a lot of special crafted frost-resistant armor which can't be bought outright, they need materials which are farmed by farming Naxx up until Sapphiron. Even if they miraculously kill Kel'thuzad, what are they going to do afterward? Nothing, that was as futile as farming Maraudon (lvl 50 instance) at lvl 60.
I just cannot understand why would anyone need a truck to build a house. Friend of mine with his two sons built and equipped a 3 story house all by themselves and then *never* needed nothing more than a normal sedan (europe one). All biggest materials (cement, sand, rocks etc) were delivered (with no extra charge) on site. After the house was complete, he ordered a kitchen, an couple of days later a truck arrived with parts. 2 guys assembled it in house for no extra cost. So, all in all he never needed anything more than a basic car. Everything he couldn't put in his car (small by US standards I guess) was delivered to his house with no or very small fee.
I don't mean to question your decision for a private truck, but I just don't get it why stores where you live don't offer delivery.
Weight doesn't have much to do with safety. Modern cars weight much less and they are much more safer because they have crumple zones and at the same time much better brakes, airbags etc. If you ever had a high(way) speed collision with that mercedes I doubt you would have been here to write it. Few weeks ago, my friend had a front-on diagonal collision (they crashed with their car corners) with another car. They were going about 65, 80km/h. So that is like 145km/h total. There was no braking. Friend was driving a 1-year old vw polo, and the other guy (who was guilty of the collision) was driving a vw golf mk2 (old car). Friend escaped with no major injuries, but the other guy was killed. Polo was totaled, but the cabin wasn't deformed (much). Golf lost all engine space, cabin acted as a crumple zone, and of course, there were no airbags to cushion the body. Believe me, it wasn't a pretty sight. Dunno what kind of roads you got in canada but some parts of europe have very dangerous roads so people generally prefer to drive as safe as possible cars.
Thank you for the informative reply. I kinda know what capacitors do (even though my knowledge now is pretty much too rusty;), but thanks for the refreshment anyway.
Couple of years ago, I did just that, but only with my bare hands. I didn't know back then that unplugged/broken tv had such a dangerous coils/condensators/whatever.
Luckily, nothing happened, and I'm still in one piece.
Article autor has it very wrong. Explanation:
on
The Lameness of Warcraft
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've read the whole article and even though there are a few good points I must point to the obvious bullshit.
Last winter, it challenged players to team up and fuel a worldwide war effort. As a payoff, it unlocked new territory. This was a good example of letting the users drive a story, but Warcraft needs more of them.
Not only I beg to differ, but furthermore, I cannot find words to express my disgust with that event. Let me explain.
Ok, Blizzard announced that in next content patch there will be some huge event, which everyone can take part which will unlock some new content. Content patch arrived, and for each server both factions (alliance and horde) needed to chinese-farm *ridiculous* amounts of materials (which drop from monster, can be gathered etc). Then, when all the materials were gathered, the Guy-with-the-key can open the gates of the new content ("Ahn'Qiraj"), which everyone should enjoy. Well, that one can sound kinda fun, but lets see some facts first.
Amount of materials were too much for like 98% of servers (look at the sheer number of materials here: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wareffort/wareffort .html?113, so blizzard after a few weeks of those majority of servers "slacking", filled those materials by "themselves". Horde faction actually had to gather less materials then Alliance (probably because of many servers have greater Alliance population then Horde), so on the servers where alliance population was about the same as horde, it just didn't work out. Furthermore, blizzard obviously calculated that pretty much all of the server population would help the "war effort" by gathering stuff. Problem is, it didn't. People couldn't care less for two new dungeons (aka instances) which are only available to like 5% of the server population. So players didn't farm those materials much. So it all fell behind.
At the same time with those huge farming effort, there was a quest line which could effectively be only taken by one(!) person in the whole server. Only that guy could initiate the boss fights, pick rewards, see quest text etc. But that guy needed help from his guild (best guild on the server) and other guilds in defeating some bosses. On some boss fights there was such a big slowdowns that server(s) couldn't handle it and crashed repeatedly. At the end of that ridiculously long quest line (for just that one guy), he got [Scepter of the Shifting Sands] by which he could open the gates of Ahn'Qiraj and ultimately unlock the new content (assuming that war effort - materials gathering was done). So what happened on our server (Ragnaros, EU)? Our server was average in gathering materials so after a month or more, they gathered them "for us". But there was a problem with the guy who needed to open the gates. Some major guilds (me included) helped him and his guild defeat some bosses and make that Scepter. When he finished the scepter somewhere in the middle of the night, he didn't came online for days, telling on the realm servers that whole realm population didn't "deserve" the gates to be opened, that he will not do it, generally flexing his e-peen. The guy single handedly held whole realm as a fools. Some seven days later guy opened the doors after some ass licking by his guild mates on forums. And this was not the one and only incident, there were a lot of them on other servers.
So to conclude, the event was total fiasco because of server crashes, non-existent story for 99.999% of players, e-peen flexing moron with the key, nolife kids telling others that they should farm materials more so they (nolifers) can go into the new instance, mind-puzzling number of materials to farm for *all* of the population etc.
I didn't want to sound like troll, it is a misfortune if it looked that way.
My professor in ancient greek philosophy was/is an distinguished expert on Aristotle and Plato, and during one of his lectures he (iirc, was 5 years ago) said that the names of his works were probably added by the guy (forgot his name) who collected and "organised" his works. He said that Aristotle never titled his works; instead the before metioned guy named the books himself.
Btw, I can only agree Aristotle (and Plato) were probably the foundation stone to Western society we know today.
Well, mine and yours server are clearly different then.
If I only played like you said 2-3 days a week I would be guildless faster than you say naxx. One who convinently comes online just before invite times is clearly looked down as a leecher, and soon kicked out from guild. My guild was learining end of aq40 and started naxxramas. 10 ppl were kicked last week because they did nothing to help guild, they just turned up when there was a mc or bwl raid (we had those on a farm status for a looong time). If your guild is going to make a progress they need dedication from every member. That means I have to farm herbs, make flasks/potions, farm nature/shadow/whatever gear, farm gold etc. You can't do that by doing 2 or 3 days a week. And another thing to note. On our alliance side there aren't much mc/bwl/aq farming guilds. One is really "pro", complete nolifer guild, another one is almost as good, but a bit more relaxed, but they change players more times that I reboot windows, and there is our guild, pvp turned pve guild with 15-20 rank 14 players, and many other active players. If I quit that guild, I couldn't find another one. There are couple of hungarian guilds, few swedish, italian, etc. But certainly there aren't much as you say it "hundreds of good ones". It is a supply and demand thing really. Organizing and running a guild is goddamned hard so there are really few good guilds, and many guildless (and excellent) people. Other guilds are really a training guild for "predators" as our guild is. One more thing, you can't really live by buying and (re)selling stuff at ah. You have to eventually go out and farm those herbs. And I didn't buy my gold from some farmer so I can buy herbs from ah.
I compelety agree with you except for your last part, but nevertheless, I'll answer you.
The only fun I ever had in the game was pvp. I got to rank 10 and I have t2 gear with my warlock. With rogue I had rank 8 gear. I really enjoyed pvp-ing with both chars but as I said before, horde on our server totaly destroy pugs (and as a pve guild we didn't had any premade pvp group) in ab,wsg and av. I went to neutral to exalted with warlock with only 5 or so wins. Belive me, it was really a pain(*). You are right, one does come to bg and have some fun. Yes I did that with all my "spare" time. Some 7 days ago my evening was looking like this: I was late for a raid start so some replacement took my spot in raid, nevermind, I was happy because I could pvp. Joined ab, horde rank 10+ premade. We lost in 7 min. Another one the same. Horde pug, 10 min fight. I was really angry, because it looked like a rerun of an evening few days ago. Logged off. Returned half an hour later, same story. I was feeling like a weed that needs to be farmed. I couldn't do nothing. Hour later I went out of soulshards (no lessons on shard conserving please;) and pissed off I went to bed. This isn't first time, I have loads of the same experience. But the next day, I said goodbye to my dearest wow friend, shed a tear and uninstalled the game (I tried that many times but I couldn't do it). For days I was really devastated by the loss of friends (and my cute little gnomette;).
Well, I could kinda aggree that they are tweaking the honor system, but it is too late and too little. And I have no doubt in my mind that expansion will be the same (or easily greater) mindless grind as original wow was and still is, which I tried to show in my other post.
(*) Just a little funny info: My lock is exalted in with ab, but in 3 months I was never able to complete the final quest where you have to control all 5 flags at the same time. So no league of arathor battle tabard for me=)
I understand what are you trying to say but I would like to add a remark or two.
Ok, lets look a kid who just bought a game and after a month or two leveled a char to lvl 60. Then he farmed as you call "simple" instances (BRS, DM, Scholo, Strat) for a month and he got a blue gear. Then he wanted to do some pvp only to find out that others utterly destroy him; equipment-wise, premade-wise, or just server inbalance-wise. It is not uncommon that with my tier 2.5 warlock I could kill another warlock even though I had 1/4 health and/or mana. Then he said to himself: "wtf, I really need some better gear, and farming "simple" instances is godawful boring and repetitive, and after all I got everything from there". Then if he were lucky, he joined a mc/bwl raiding guild. Then he raided almost every day for hours and he got better gear (and alot better than his previous gear). Problem is, others still have better gear than him because their guilds farm more difficult (well, not difficult if it is on a "farm status) instances. Then you in a way screw/abandon your old friendly guild and go to a better "pro" gear. Problem is, they want Your Soul there. They want 100% dedication to the game. You can't do anything but farm. It is not like a second job it is like a primary job. It sucks. You see where I'm going?
Yes, certainly you can enjoy "simpler" instances. But everything has a limit really. I know a guy who went 98(!) times (and I kid you not) to a scholomance just to get final piece of his (now bad) shadowcraft armor. He is not casual, the guy is crazy. Problem is, raiders are not really normal. I lost a year of my life with wow. I really regret it now. It was fun, I made a lot of great friends (not RL friends unfortunately), but I really had to quit. It was really difficult, saying goodbye to people you knew for one year every day. That is the reason not many ppl quit the game. They cannot do it because of the other people. And as some other slashdotter said many months ago (paraphrassed): if you are a casual, at lvl 60 wow turns to be just another chat program. But problem is, this is really expensive chat program.
Well Mr. AC, you got it wrong there. I who afked, or any other for that matter, wasn't the problem, it was blizzard who implemented premade vs pug system. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Premades eat pugs without slighest effort. Premades win even though all of the pug "team" afk. So they can't complain much. And say that you are a casual player. And you like pvp. You log on, join a queue for battleground, wait a few secons (minutes at most at our server, which was third largest pvp server in europe, which produced rank 14s every week, it was common to have 4 rank 14 in the same week) enter battleground, and you are facing a premade group who will kill anyone, and finish all objectives in a few minutes. That match ended and you in a pug get: maybe 1-3 kills if you were lucky, next to no honor, 1 battleground mark, and a sad face because you know that pug vs premade isn't really fair. Guy in a premade get, at least 20 kills, 0 deaths, 3 battleground marks, alot of honor because of the win and finished objectives, honor from killing other players.
And then you do couple of that matches, and if you are lucky (on our server) you ran into a pug horde. Then you certainly lose because horde pugs beat almost all the time alliance pugs. Then when you could afk, people afked against premades. Premades were angry because they loose a bit of honor because they have less players to mow down. Sometimes, it happened that premade afked against pug because pug was playing defensively and the game "would take too long". As a sidenote, I played around 3 weeks in a premade which produced 2 rank 14 players. It is kinda sad corpse camping their graveyard and call that skill. You are partially right, casuals did complain. What blizz did? Nothing, they put up a deserter debuff and srewed-up casuals and pugs. And may I remind you of pvp armor "upgrades"? For a reader: there are 14 ranks in the game. At rank 10 you get good quality pvp set. At rank 13 you get considerable better but similar armor set. Then, some time ago, both of the sets were upgraded, but if you had rank 10 set, you had to regrind rank 10 (definately not easy if you don't have a premade because at that rank honor decays fast), which is not casual friendly, while those ex rank 13 or 14 get their set upgrades for free. And talk about casual "friendly" game. There was a blizzard post about that upgrade. In another words they told casuals to sod off, while they endorsed with open arms hardcore players. They really showed their face in that post.
And btw you told me that I was a selfish asshole in a pug? Fine then, but why then blizz didnt implement pug vs pug, and premade vs premade only system? Don't give me that bullshit like it is "hard" to implement, long queues etc. This game is over an year old, they got like truckloads of cash, and what they did in more than a year? Added 40 man instances. Oh, and 2 20 man. They like honor farmers, they cater to them. It is a same with hardcore raiders. They cater to hardocre raiders. They are not interested in casuals. Casual players can't do shit in this game. Everyone can lvl a char 1-60. But not everyone can even see end game content. Hardcores can. And even hardcore ones can't see all.
And I can give you a tons of examples why wow isn't casual friendly game and it is tailored for hardcores. But you know it yourself because it is obvious just when you hit lvl 60 and you don't wanna quit because you invested time/effort to get your char to 60.
Blizzard always said that wow is a casual friendly game. I have 130+ days played on my warlock (main) and rogue (alt), and I can without shadow of a doubt say that this game is hardcore gamer only. There are 2 things you can do in the game:
1. level character(s) to 60 2. raid at lvl 60
Leveling is to be honest boring an repetitive. 98% the quests can be summed up in this scheme: a. Kill X number of mobs Y on location Z. b. Kill mobs Y until they drop N number of items I. c. Take item J and take it to place P.
And once you leveled your char to 60, leveling another one will lead you doing the same quests all over again. True, if you reroll on another faction (horde/alliance), you get different quests, but only superficialy, not fundamentaly.
Then when you hit lvl 60 there is only one way to progress: getting better gear.
Better gear can be obtained through raiding 5, 10, 20, 40 man instances. You get best gear in 40 man instances. Comparing gear from 5 man instances, and 40 man instances is like comparing tiger to a cat. Considering equal skill, player with 40 man "raid eq set" will eat another player geared in 5-20 man instances.
Well, there is another way to get good gear and that is by doing pvp. To get comparable gear from pvp to 40 man (purple=epic) gear, you will have to get a pvp team and farm pvp battlegrounds whole days. Problem is you are competing against whole server, and to get first part of the epic/purple set you need at least 2 months of weekly full-time pvp-ing. And that is far from easy and casual.
Well, one would ask: "Why don't you farm 40 man instances then?". This is easier to say than do. Consider:
1. You have to be in end game instance farming guild 2. Be active (4-8 at least hours/day) 3. Have good gear 4. Raid every day, only with toilette breaks, from i.e. 6:45PM, to 1:00AM 5. Compete with other players from your guild that have the same class for points which you get from attendance, because points get you the loot/gear you want. 6. Farm money/materials(herbs, ore etc), so you can raid in the evenings.
And belive me this isn't casual, nor pleasant.
To be honest, in the game I always liked pvp most. But the problem was: Battlegrounds imbalance. Problem is simple: 1. Premade groups>>pickup groups (game is over in 10 minutes or less, if you are in a pickup group, you get nothing, premade gets all: honor, reputation etc. and 3x more faster than you) 2. Premade vs premade (they exit battlegrounds if they meet each other because fights are "too long" and premades need pickups so they can utterly destroy them) 3. Pug vs pug: I was the unlucky one which rolled alliance warlock. On our server horde pug beats alliance pug 9/10 of times. 4. It is not easy to have a good premade group.
One thing to note is this: few patches ago (2 or so), when you were in a pug and faced a premade group (who will eat you in 10 min and you will get next to nothing), you could "go afk", or in other words exit battleground and rejoin some other battle. This was bad for premade farmers so they complained and blizz introduced Deserter debuff. So if you exit battleground you get that debuff and you can't rejoin another one for 15 min. So when faced against a premade as a pug, the most dominant tactic was to do nothing and be killed as many times possible in 5 min. You get nothing, but at least you didn't get debuff. Premades were very happy because they could farm pugs more easily that way. And premades got smarter: when the battleground was open for their group, they would send one player which would scout if another group is premade too. If it is, nobody would join and that scout would exit, and the group would just rejoin another battle. That way, premades didn't fight each other, and the farmed non-deserting pugs. And this is very very unfriendls and uncasual. Blizzard as to this day did *nothing* to help casual pvper against premade groups. More so, they did exactly the opposite.
He's redistributing wealth from the first world to the third world and doing what he can to make the world better.
I think it is the other way around. In my eastern european country we have established MS company/distribution center. And BSA ofc. All MS does here is lobbying government to get every possible contract, telling/scaring users that only licenced software is ok etc. About 2 years ago we got new law regarding copyright ("Zakon o autorskom pravu"), and some passages are word by word copies of some generic MS eulas. There are passages literaly called (Digital) Rights Management ("Zastita podataka o upravljanju pravima"). I'm certain that 99.8% citizens don't even know what that means. I wouldn't be suprised at all if MS contributed in writing that law. But back to the point. You say that in a sense money from US is going worldwide? Yes of course it does, but the majority of money is going back. MS licences here are *more* expensive than those in US. Did I mention that our standard of living is way lower than in the US?
since you're talking about phones which ostensibly would be "wired" for radio so to speak.
If I understood you correctly, you are claiming that mobile phones and FM tuners go hand in hand because m.p. are already "wired". But frankly that's not the case. FM tuners are completely different than GSM technology. Moreover I think that it's more natural to have mp3 player+FM tuner than mobile phone+tuner.
Here I would argue making headphones white is different than adding circuitry... what possible problem could there be because headphones are white?!?
You are not following your own line of reasoning from the previous post, but I will not press it further.
Depends upon what you mean by decent. For me, the bar is pretty high. I can't stand fading, bad handling of multi-path interference, and low S/N ratios.
Nobody is forcing you to use it. In my experience integrated FM tuners in mobile phones are very good. Their S/N ratio is not on audio CD level but IMO that's more than enough.
Small and simple doesn't guarantee no increased possibility of something going wrong.
Come on. We are not designing next NASA vehicle here. It's *much* more likely that you'll loose (or something like that) your player than a FM tuner crashing it.
Even just a simple toggle switch to move from radio to player is a switch that wouldn't have otherwise been there, and it's one more switch to stop working
You are again splitting hairs here. What's next? Button-less players because buttons are known to fail? Suppose you have 5 buttons on a player. To use FM tuner let's say you add second function to one of the buttons. Voila, no button(s) added, and no increased probability of a mission-critical failure.
(I had a player that did just that!)
Poor design, nothing more, nothing less.
I KNOW a quality product CAN have a quality tuner.... I just haven't experienced it. (And I'm not, as many aren't, really in the market for $200 phones just to get an FM tuner as part of the package (decent).
So you are a priori against FM tuners in players? I'm not a prophet but I think it is very possible, considering todays trends, in 1-2 years to have decdent FM tuner (as a standard part) in mobile phones and mp3 players.
Slashdot Mirror
We can argue to eternity with this, but with this sweeping dismissal of everything the guy did you are not gaining any credibility.
Go back to your cage troll.
Sometimes he demonstrates card tricks, and yes, he admits that they are "only" tricks.
But you honestly can't deny some of his other "tricks" or "magic" employing NLP, suggestion, misdirection and pyschology.
His strenght is that he very often actually reveals how he did it. And when you realize how he did it, you know that there is much more in it than just "magic" or whatever catch-it-all word you label it. I actually did some of the simpler stuff he did, and yes it is hard to pull off, yes you need suggestible people, but it actually *works*, and there is no better satisfaction then a bewildered and confused friend who thinks you can read minds. But, go ahead keep living under the rock, and do deny it all because denial is probably the easiest/laziest thing to do.
If you want to see some real thing like Neuro Language Programming, sublimal advertising, misdirection, suggestion etc, look for Derren Brown at youtube.
n +brown&search=Search
I guarantee it will blow you away.
To save you the trouble: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=derre
I quite understand what you mean and I agree on some of your points. But I still think that some of the newer bosses require very intricate strategy and it doesn't matter if you you are level 70 or 60 if you get hit by twice or thrice the hit points you got or you are swarmed by adds. Those new bosses (in AQ and Naxx) don't have tank-nuke-heal tactic like the all bosses/mobs before. They require special tactics, somewhat complex positioning, excellent timing, superb knowledge of boss fight phases, which pretty much all of the casuals don't have.
But, it doesn't matter what we are writing here, we'll see by ourselves anyway what will happen anyway=)
I was kinda lost in the thread. I meant parent, not grand parent. I was replying in the http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=217138&cid=176 28702 post, and I repeated that I don't think casuals will ever (as things are now) see hardcore content (and the only real content added through last year) that only few selected people farm/grind/see/enjoy/hate for the last year.
I didn't state anything wrong, or I just wrote my answer with poor readability. I'm not quite familiar if players could play Naxx at more difficult setting (I thought those new lvl60+ dungeons could be configured that way) but it only agrees with my point. And my point was loosely this: Casuals won't ever see much (ie most of the bosses and/or final bosses) of the hardest instances for lvl60 (ie AQ40 or Naxx, and they are almost a year old btw) because they are, I presume, still too difficult for them at lvl 70 to get there. That was my point in telling GP that AQ40 and Naxx will never "friendly" to casual players Well, I could be wrong if somehow Blizzard "nerfs" severely those dungeons, but that is another point.
This is utter BS. After ppl hit lvl 70 nobody will be going to lvl 60 instances because at lvl 70 you get much better gear then you get at lvl 60. Another thing is that newer raid instances like AQ and Naxx require tons and tons of coordination and practice that casuals will never manage. So yeah, they will never see final bosses there. After reading your comment uninformed reader could think: "Why I don't gather 39 more lvl 70 people and lets down Kel'Thuzad (last boss in Naxx)?" This is quite impossible. First they *all* have to know flawlessly all the tactics for numerous bosses and hard trash mobs, and even if they somehow (impossible IMO) get to Sapphiron, they all need a lot of special crafted frost-resistant armor which can't be bought outright, they need materials which are farmed by farming Naxx up until Sapphiron. Even if they miraculously kill Kel'thuzad, what are they going to do afterward? Nothing, that was as futile as farming Maraudon (lvl 50 instance) at lvl 60.
I just cannot understand why would anyone need a truck to build a house. Friend of mine with his two sons built and equipped a 3 story house all by themselves and then *never* needed nothing more than a normal sedan (europe one). All biggest materials (cement, sand, rocks etc) were delivered (with no extra charge) on site. After the house was complete, he ordered a kitchen, an couple of days later a truck arrived with parts. 2 guys assembled it in house for no extra cost. So, all in all he never needed anything more than a basic car. Everything he couldn't put in his car (small by US standards I guess) was delivered to his house with no or very small fee.
I don't mean to question your decision for a private truck, but I just don't get it why stores where you live don't offer delivery.
Weight doesn't have much to do with safety. Modern cars weight much less and they are much more safer because they have crumple zones and at the same time much better brakes, airbags etc. If you ever had a high(way) speed collision with that mercedes I doubt you would have been here to write it. Few weeks ago, my friend had a front-on diagonal collision (they crashed with their car corners) with another car. They were going about 65, 80km/h. So that is like 145km/h total. There was no braking. Friend was driving a 1-year old vw polo, and the other guy (who was guilty of the collision) was driving a vw golf mk2 (old car). Friend escaped with no major injuries, but the other guy was killed. Polo was totaled, but the cabin wasn't deformed (much). Golf lost all engine space, cabin acted as a crumple zone, and of course, there were no airbags to cushion the body. Believe me, it wasn't a pretty sight. Dunno what kind of roads you got in canada but some parts of europe have very dangerous roads so people generally prefer to drive as safe as possible cars.
Thank you for the informative reply. I kinda know what capacitors do (even though my knowledge now is pretty much too rusty;), but thanks for the refreshment anyway.
Couple of years ago, I did just that, but only with my bare hands. I didn't know back then that unplugged/broken tv had such a dangerous coils/condensators/whatever.
Luckily, nothing happened, and I'm still in one piece.
Not only I beg to differ, but furthermore, I cannot find words to express my disgust with that event. Let me explain.
Ok, Blizzard announced that in next content patch there will be some huge event, which everyone can take part which will unlock some new content. Content patch arrived, and for each server both factions (alliance and horde) needed to chinese-farm *ridiculous* amounts of materials (which drop from monster, can be gathered etc). Then, when all the materials were gathered, the Guy-with-the-key can open the gates of the new content ("Ahn'Qiraj"), which everyone should enjoy. Well, that one can sound kinda fun, but lets see some facts first.
Amount of materials were too much for like 98% of servers (look at the sheer number of materials here: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wareffort/wareffor
At the same time with those huge farming effort, there was a quest line which could effectively be only taken by one(!) person in the whole server. Only that guy could initiate the boss fights, pick rewards, see quest text etc. But that guy needed help from his guild (best guild on the server) and other guilds in defeating some bosses. On some boss fights there was such a big slowdowns that server(s) couldn't handle it and crashed repeatedly. At the end of that ridiculously long quest line (for just that one guy), he got [Scepter of the Shifting Sands] by which he could open the gates of Ahn'Qiraj and ultimately unlock the new content (assuming that war effort - materials gathering was done). So what happened on our server (Ragnaros, EU)? Our server was average in gathering materials so after a month or more, they gathered them "for us". But there was a problem with the guy who needed to open the gates. Some major guilds (me included) helped him and his guild defeat some bosses and make that Scepter. When he finished the scepter somewhere in the middle of the night, he didn't came online for days, telling on the realm servers that whole realm population didn't "deserve" the gates to be opened, that he will not do it, generally flexing his e-peen. The guy single handedly held whole realm as a fools. Some seven days later guy opened the doors after some ass licking by his guild mates on forums. And this was not the one and only incident, there were a lot of them on other servers.
So to conclude, the event was total fiasco because of server crashes, non-existent story for 99.999% of players, e-peen flexing moron with the key, nolife kids telling others that they should farm materials more so they (nolifers) can go into the new instance, mind-puzzling number of materials to farm for *all* of the population etc.
We'll, that was my take on that glorious event.
PS Sorry for the grammar
I didn't want to sound like troll, it is a misfortune if it looked that way.
My professor in ancient greek philosophy was/is an distinguished expert on Aristotle and Plato, and during one of his lectures he (iirc, was 5 years ago) said that the names of his works were probably added by the guy (forgot his name) who collected and "organised" his works. He said that Aristotle never titled his works; instead the before metioned guy named the books himself.
Btw, I can only agree Aristotle (and Plato) were probably the foundation stone to Western society we know today.
Do you have any evidence to support both claims?
Well, mine and yours server are clearly different then.
If I only played like you said 2-3 days a week I would be guildless faster than you say naxx. One who convinently comes online just before invite times is clearly looked down as a leecher, and soon kicked out from guild. My guild was learining end of aq40 and started naxxramas. 10 ppl were kicked last week because they did nothing to help guild, they just turned up when there was a mc or bwl raid (we had those on a farm status for a looong time). If your guild is going to make a progress they need dedication from every member. That means I have to farm herbs, make flasks/potions, farm nature/shadow/whatever gear, farm gold etc. You can't do that by doing 2 or 3 days a week. And another thing to note. On our alliance side there aren't much mc/bwl/aq farming guilds. One is really "pro", complete nolifer guild, another one is almost as good, but a bit more relaxed, but they change players more times that I reboot windows, and there is our guild, pvp turned pve guild with 15-20 rank 14 players, and many other active players. If I quit that guild, I couldn't find another one. There are couple of hungarian guilds, few swedish, italian, etc. But certainly there aren't much as you say it "hundreds of good ones". It is a supply and demand thing really. Organizing and running a guild is goddamned hard so there are really few good guilds, and many guildless (and excellent) people. Other guilds are really a training guild for "predators" as our guild is. One more thing, you can't really live by buying and (re)selling stuff at ah. You have to eventually go out and farm those herbs. And I didn't buy my gold from some farmer so I can buy herbs from ah.
I compelety agree with you except for your last part, but nevertheless, I'll answer you.
The only fun I ever had in the game was pvp. I got to rank 10 and I have t2 gear with my warlock. With rogue I had rank 8 gear. I really enjoyed pvp-ing with both chars but as I said before, horde on our server totaly destroy pugs (and as a pve guild we didn't had any premade pvp group) in ab,wsg and av. I went to neutral to exalted with warlock with only 5 or so wins. Belive me, it was really a pain(*). You are right, one does come to bg and have some fun. Yes I did that with all my "spare" time. Some 7 days ago my evening was looking like this: I was late for a raid start so some replacement took my spot in raid, nevermind, I was happy because I could pvp. Joined ab, horde rank 10+ premade. We lost in 7 min. Another one the same. Horde pug, 10 min fight. I was really angry, because it looked like a rerun of an evening few days ago. Logged off. Returned half an hour later, same story. I was feeling like a weed that needs to be farmed. I couldn't do nothing. Hour later I went out of soulshards (no lessons on shard conserving please;) and pissed off I went to bed. This isn't first time, I have loads of the same experience. But the next day, I said goodbye to my dearest wow friend, shed a tear and uninstalled the game (I tried that many times but I couldn't do it). For days I was really devastated by the loss of friends (and my cute little gnomette;).
Well, I could kinda aggree that they are tweaking the honor system, but it is too late and too little. And I have no doubt in my mind that expansion will be the same (or easily greater) mindless grind as original wow was and still is, which I tried to show in my other post.
(*) Just a little funny info: My lock is exalted in with ab, but in 3 months I was never able to complete the final quest where you have to control all 5 flags at the same time. So no league of arathor battle tabard for me=)
I understand what are you trying to say but I would like to add a remark or two.
Ok, lets look a kid who just bought a game and after a month or two leveled a char to lvl 60. Then he farmed as you call "simple" instances (BRS, DM, Scholo, Strat) for a month and he got a blue gear. Then he wanted to do some pvp only to find out that others utterly destroy him; equipment-wise, premade-wise, or just server inbalance-wise. It is not uncommon that with my tier 2.5 warlock I could kill another warlock even though I had 1/4 health and/or mana. Then he said to himself: "wtf, I really need some better gear, and farming "simple" instances is godawful boring and repetitive, and after all I got everything from there". Then if he were lucky, he joined a mc/bwl raiding guild. Then he raided almost every day for hours and he got better gear (and alot better than his previous gear). Problem is, others still have better gear than him because their guilds farm more difficult (well, not difficult if it is on a "farm status) instances. Then you in a way screw/abandon your old friendly guild and go to a better "pro" gear. Problem is, they want Your Soul there. They want 100% dedication to the game. You can't do anything but farm. It is not like a second job it is like a primary job. It sucks. You see where I'm going?
Yes, certainly you can enjoy "simpler" instances. But everything has a limit really. I know a guy who went 98(!) times (and I kid you not) to a scholomance just to get final piece of his (now bad) shadowcraft armor. He is not casual, the guy is crazy. Problem is, raiders are not really normal. I lost a year of my life with wow. I really regret it now. It was fun, I made a lot of great friends (not RL friends unfortunately), but I really had to quit. It was really difficult, saying goodbye to people you knew for one year every day. That is the reason not many ppl quit the game. They cannot do it because of the other people. And as some other slashdotter said many months ago (paraphrassed): if you are a casual, at lvl 60 wow turns to be just another chat program. But problem is, this is really expensive chat program.
Well Mr. AC, you got it wrong there. I who afked, or any other for that matter, wasn't the problem, it was blizzard who implemented premade vs pug system. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Premades eat pugs without slighest effort. Premades win even though all of the pug "team" afk. So they can't complain much. And say that you are a casual player. And you like pvp. You log on, join a queue for battleground, wait a few secons (minutes at most at our server, which was third largest pvp server in europe, which produced rank 14s every week, it was common to have 4 rank 14 in the same week) enter battleground, and you are facing a premade group who will kill anyone, and finish all objectives in a few minutes. That match ended and you in a pug get: maybe 1-3 kills if you were lucky, next to no honor, 1 battleground mark, and a sad face because you know that pug vs premade isn't really fair. Guy in a premade get, at least 20 kills, 0 deaths, 3 battleground marks, alot of honor because of the win and finished objectives, honor from killing other players.
And then you do couple of that matches, and if you are lucky (on our server) you ran into a pug horde. Then you certainly lose because horde pugs beat almost all the time alliance pugs. Then when you could afk, people afked against premades. Premades were angry because they loose a bit of honor because they have less players to mow down. Sometimes, it happened that premade afked against pug because pug was playing defensively and the game "would take too long". As a sidenote, I played around 3 weeks in a premade which produced 2 rank 14 players. It is kinda sad corpse camping their graveyard and call that skill. You are partially right, casuals did complain. What blizz did? Nothing, they put up a deserter debuff and srewed-up casuals and pugs. And may I remind you of pvp armor "upgrades"? For a reader: there are 14 ranks in the game. At rank 10 you get good quality pvp set. At rank 13 you get considerable better but similar armor set. Then, some time ago, both of the sets were upgraded, but if you had rank 10 set, you had to regrind rank 10 (definately not easy if you don't have a premade because at that rank honor decays fast), which is not casual friendly, while those ex rank 13 or 14 get their set upgrades for free. And talk about casual "friendly" game. There was a blizzard post about that upgrade. In another words they told casuals to sod off, while they endorsed with open arms hardcore players. They really showed their face in that post.
And btw you told me that I was a selfish asshole in a pug? Fine then, but why then blizz didnt implement pug vs pug, and premade vs premade only system? Don't give me that bullshit like it is "hard" to implement, long queues etc. This game is over an year old, they got like truckloads of cash, and what they did in more than a year? Added 40 man instances. Oh, and 2 20 man. They like honor farmers, they cater to them. It is a same with hardcore raiders. They cater to hardocre raiders. They are not interested in casuals. Casual players can't do shit in this game. Everyone can lvl a char 1-60. But not everyone can even see end game content. Hardcores can. And even hardcore ones can't see all.
And I can give you a tons of examples why wow isn't casual friendly game and it is tailored for hardcores. But you know it yourself because it is obvious just when you hit lvl 60 and you don't wanna quit because you invested time/effort to get your char to 60.
Blizzard always said that wow is a casual friendly game. I have 130+ days played on my warlock (main) and rogue (alt), and I can without shadow of a doubt say that this game is hardcore gamer only. There are 2 things you can do in the game:
1. level character(s) to 60
2. raid at lvl 60
Leveling is to be honest boring an repetitive. 98% the quests can be summed up in this scheme:
a. Kill X number of mobs Y on location Z.
b. Kill mobs Y until they drop N number of items I.
c. Take item J and take it to place P.
And once you leveled your char to 60, leveling another one will lead you doing the same quests all over again. True, if you reroll on another faction (horde/alliance), you get different quests, but only superficialy, not fundamentaly.
Then when you hit lvl 60 there is only one way to progress: getting better gear.
Better gear can be obtained through raiding 5, 10, 20, 40 man instances. You get best gear in 40 man instances. Comparing gear from 5 man instances, and 40 man instances is like comparing tiger to a cat. Considering equal skill, player with 40 man "raid eq set" will eat another player geared in 5-20 man instances.
Well, there is another way to get good gear and that is by doing pvp. To get comparable gear from pvp to 40 man (purple=epic) gear, you will have to get a pvp team and farm pvp battlegrounds whole days. Problem is you are competing against whole server, and to get first part of the epic/purple set you need at least 2 months of weekly full-time pvp-ing. And that is far from easy and casual.
Well, one would ask: "Why don't you farm 40 man instances then?". This is easier to say than do. Consider:
1. You have to be in end game instance farming guild
2. Be active (4-8 at least hours/day)
3. Have good gear
4. Raid every day, only with toilette breaks, from i.e. 6:45PM, to 1:00AM
5. Compete with other players from your guild that have the same class for points which you get from attendance, because points get you the loot/gear you want.
6. Farm money/materials(herbs, ore etc), so you can raid in the evenings.
And belive me this isn't casual, nor pleasant.
To be honest, in the game I always liked pvp most. But the problem was: Battlegrounds imbalance. Problem is simple:
1. Premade groups>>pickup groups (game is over in 10 minutes or less, if you are in a pickup group, you get nothing, premade gets all: honor, reputation etc. and 3x more faster than you)
2. Premade vs premade (they exit battlegrounds if they meet each other because fights are "too long" and premades need pickups so they can utterly destroy them)
3. Pug vs pug: I was the unlucky one which rolled alliance warlock. On our server horde pug beats alliance pug 9/10 of times.
4. It is not easy to have a good premade group.
One thing to note is this: few patches ago (2 or so), when you were in a pug and faced a premade group (who will eat you in 10 min and you will get next to nothing), you could "go afk", or in other words exit battleground and rejoin some other battle. This was bad for premade farmers so they complained and blizz introduced Deserter debuff. So if you exit battleground you get that debuff and you can't rejoin another one for 15 min. So when faced against a premade as a pug, the most dominant tactic was to do nothing and be killed as many times possible in 5 min. You get nothing, but at least you didn't get debuff. Premades were very happy because they could farm pugs more easily that way. And premades got smarter: when the battleground was open for their group, they would send one player which would scout if another group is premade too. If it is, nobody would join and that scout would exit, and the group would just rejoin another battle. That way, premades didn't fight each other, and the farmed non-deserting pugs. And this is very very unfriendls and uncasual. Blizzard as to this day did *nothing* to help casual pvper against premade groups. More so, they did exactly the opposite.
So I joined good p
I think it is the other way around. In my eastern european country we have established MS company/distribution center. And BSA ofc. All MS does here is lobbying government to get every possible contract, telling/scaring users that only licenced software is ok etc. About 2 years ago we got new law regarding copyright ("Zakon o autorskom pravu"), and some passages are word by word copies of some generic MS eulas. There are passages literaly called (Digital) Rights Management ("Zastita podataka o upravljanju pravima"). I'm certain that 99.8% citizens don't even know what that means. I wouldn't be suprised at all if MS contributed in writing that law. But back to the point. You say that in a sense money from US is going worldwide? Yes of course it does, but the majority of money is going back. MS licences here are *more* expensive than those in US. Did I mention that our standard of living is way lower than in the US?
But, then again, how many people remember the richest (business)man in Ancient Greece?
Both Louis and Solomon have one thing in common: they were Kings. So they are remembered as kings, not really as rich men.
I watched the documentary, and IIRC they said that Luke's house was a restaurant or something like that.
If you use keyboard shortcuts try this:
Shutdown: Start-u-u
Restart: Start-u-r
Standby: Start-u-s
Hibernate: Start-u-h
This is very simple and effective.
If I understood you correctly, you are claiming that mobile phones and FM tuners go hand in hand because m.p. are already "wired". But frankly that's not the case. FM tuners are completely different than GSM technology. Moreover I think that it's more natural to have mp3 player+FM tuner than mobile phone+tuner.
You are not following your own line of reasoning from the previous post, but I will not press it further.
Nobody is forcing you to use it. In my experience integrated FM tuners in mobile phones are very good. Their S/N ratio is not on audio CD level but IMO that's more than enough.
Come on. We are not designing next NASA vehicle here. It's *much* more likely that you'll loose (or something like that) your player than a FM tuner crashing it.
You got it all wrong.
My experience has been the FM tuners are all pretty bad
BS. My experience tell otherwise (Nokia and Sony-Ericsson phones), sorry.
FM tuner has been added solely for the sake of making it more attractive
Of course it is. E.g. ipod's white headphones are made to be attractive. So what's your point?
not enhancing the quality of the user experience
Even a decent FM tuner is infinitely better than no tuner.
So, more circuitry, more electronics to support a poorly implemented FM tuner just means more things to go wrong with the device.
Nice try.
Do you know anything about electronics? These things are so small and simple that virtually no circuitry is designed.
On the other hand, why would you think that a quality product can't have a quality FM tuner?
Archimonde