Well, that's the trick isn't it? I could be searching around the web looking for more info on a work-related subject, but for all my boss knows I could be slacking off reading Fark or whatever. It's all based on your boss's perception. I find the GP is very fortunate to have a boss like he does. If the boss thinks you are slacking off even when you are doing work related things, it's only because he sees you (or more accurately in the Boss's sence, CATCHES YOU) not grinding away.
Let's say you are told to crank out 1000 lines of code in x amount of time (I know, poor example to use define work quality, but bear with me). You crank out 900 lines in an hour, and the last 100 lines in 3 days. Lets say your boss does an 'audit' on your most recent workday. He sees you spit out 30 lines of code in 8 hours. It doesn't matter if you did the 900 lines of code, the boss will perceive you as a terrible worker, because that is what he SAW with his very own eyes.
Another example: lets say you have server trouble. The boss doesn't know, and you want to solve it before he notices. You have no idea what the problem is, and begin diagnosing symptoms. He catches you on google. *surfing the web - demerit!* You still can't find the answer. You go on Instant Messenger to discuss this with one of your colleagues. *chatting online - another demerit!* The boss finds out there is server trouble, but by the time he reaches you, you managed to find the problem and solve it. The boss is thinking to himself "What was my employee doing when my server was down?? It was down all this time, and he was able to fix it in seconds. He's a smart kid, but he's got absolutely no work ethic. I can't have him here much longer."
Just out of curiosity, what will you be running on your laptop that will be doing that will cause your drive to be doing a couple million write cycles?
Using it as a pagefile? (IMO that's a pretty bad idea)
Running a database? (IMO another pretty bad idea)
The big question right now is how laptops are going to deal with the pagefile, since that's going to be the flashdrive killer. Personally I beleive the pagefile really needs to go the way of the dinosaur. VM was just a temporary solution for people without enough ram. It's either that or come up with another piece of hardware that'll act as an intermediary between the ram and the storage. You know, like a ram cache. A harddisk could come to use here, but then again it's more $$$. I say just toss it all and plop in tons of ram, or at the very least, use cheap, massproduced slow ram as a pagefile substitute. On a laptop, 2 Gigs should be enough for everybody:-)
I think for most uses, the laptop will be for making documents on the fly, surfing the web, checking your email, things like that. Lightweight work on the go. If you are doing video/audio editing, or heavy photoshop work that requires you to start using a scratch disk, what the heck are you doing on a laptop??
One thing I would love to see is some hibernation/sleep done right. You know - close the laptop, computer recognizes it being in sleep state, and dumps the ram to hd. Depending on the side of the ram, should take like 5-6 seconds (hopefully). Then open the laptop, HD is read for 5-6 seconds (hopefully) and computer is right where you were at. When can we finally see THAT?
Kudos for the hardwork! I hope the/.ing goes ok, as I'm unable to check your site out, to which I'll do tomorrow. But anyways, my quick question was:
What kind of server hardware were they throwing out? And where can I get some!??:-)
I'm only asking because I find it - well - wasteful that some company would literally throw away a complete server whole like that. Was it low end? Or was it just too old? Do you guys still run the same exact hardware, or did you guys upgrade to newer stuff? And if you guys upgraded, can I have the handmedowns??;-)
I believe the real trick is to design classes so the player gets the perception that their progress is optimal. Unfortunately this will be very difficult in MMOs because everybody is comparing their progress to each other, and seeing what works and what doesn't (even if it's just gametheory that's been pulled out of someone's arse). When I first started playing my rogue in WoW, I've looked and researched into what kind of talent path I've wanted to take, to see what will optimize my play style. It was unorthodox, but I liked it and suited me very well.
Everbody in my guild looked at me like some kind of idiot player that had no clue how to 'play his class correctly.' Eventually I've started to have doubts in my talent build, thinking of how it could have been done 'better.' The real answer is that blizzard did a good job in play balance - a lot better than what people actually give them credit for. But endgame MMO players (who by definition are more hardcore than casual) are always looking for that One Perfect Path(TM) to the top, and it really discourages many other players from trying new things, which results in a lot of 'trash skills/talents' that are overlooked more often than not. This is much more noticable when there are multiple classes that seem to have the same set of trash skills/talents, and public perception is that the devs are just recycling the same classes with different names and graphics.
If the gameplay is balanced up to the point where there is no perception that 'my' class/build/progress is better than 'your' class/build/progress, then the game hits the field of mediocrity and gets extremely boring, and devolves into a quest to see who has the biggest baddest uberleet gear.
It's the bane of MMOs. For smaller multiplayer games it's a different story. Not an MMO, but in my opinion Top Spin Tennis for the Xbox is very balanced, and for whatever path I choose to progress, I don't ever feel like I've made the 'wrong' decision at any point in the game.
I too play on a pvp server (Mannoroth), and have tested out the honor system on the test server. To be truthful, the 'phat lewtz' that are given thru pvp awards will be *very* difficult to get, as it is percentage based. The top rank (14) will only be awarded to.1% of all the total population, which translates to 1 out of every 1000. For a server with 30,000, that means only 30. For a smaller server with 10,000, only 10(!!!) will be able to acheive rank 14 and be awarded the big gear.
With such a difficulty ranking, it's better off if you and your guildmates farmed out MC or something.
That said, it will be a rough time for the first few weeks, since people will not realize that the honor system only kicks into high gear for endgame people. What I DO suspect is that the rampant lowbie ganking will ebb quite a bit to acceptable levels, Tarren Mill not withstanding, and that we will see a LOT more raids on the capital cities. (which should be fun!)
The problem lies with people farming gold and selling it for real money. Eventaully what will happen is that the market will inflate so high that only players that have purchased their virtual money for real money will have any substantial coin to purchase what they want/need.
"What's this? The Big Bad Gun of Slaying costs 2200 gold?? There is no way I can manage to collect that much gold! Hrm, lemme ebay for people selling gold on my server..."
Ten bucks says that the players monopolizing the market are also the friendly ebay merchants that are selling you money..
at the very least, if it doesn't get adopted, then I suppose using an uncommon format will help curb piracy being that nobody will have easy access to blank disks or a burner and all...:-P
Must be a largest-on-the-coast thing. I live right between Philadelphia and NYC, and everybody here knows NYC as "the city" and Philadelphia as Philly. Atlantic City which is about an 90 mins away is always referred to as "AC" and if anyone calls it 'the city' than all the locals will look at your funny. My friend down south in Florida referrs to Miami as "the city" and Orlando as Orlando. I guess we are all just lazy like that.:-)
Personally anything that doesn't have an underground transit system I don't really consider a city. Well except for Gotham City, maybe. Oh and Metropolis.
When was the last time someone sued a movie studio for making violent movies - and won? Or HBO for the Sopranos? Or music studios for gangster rap? Or Simon and Scheuster for violence in their books?
Launchcast has got some really cool features in it, and I enjoy using it at home. But now that we've been slowly getting macs at work, it've been slowly forgetting about it and started to surf around itunes and shoutcast. It's not as convenient as launchcast, but at least I can listen to something over my macs.
Launchcast has some great ideas going and it's genre selecting features are pretty awesome, but if I can't even use it simply because I'm on a different platform, then it'll get no support from me anymore. It's a shame such a good idea will go to waste.
then we should start a lawsuit against crispy creme donuts for hiring people that come up with delicious donut recipes.
Even better, McDonald's and their french fries.
Once again we come up with another irresponsible parent that's looking to lay the blame for the death of their child. Anybody that does not practice any self control (or delegation of it) is making a beeline straight for the darwin awards.
To be fair, yeah I'm an avid player of (back then) EQ and (as of now) WoW. Yeah, I did play WoW obsessively for the first few months. But it's waned down a lot. I've gotten to the mode of casual playing and truth be told I'm just too busy trying to stay on top of RL to really commit to it. My friend who just moved in the area and is going on interviews for jobs, plays a whole lot more, because he's got the time to at the moment. Sure I'm jealous, but that doesn't drive me over the edge. *sigh*
It's all a matter of convenience. When I first got my G5, the first thing I did was download firefox on it (must have been a windows reflex action thing). But as time rolled on I've been sticking to safari more and more. To this date the only reason why I fire up firefox is to use maps.google.com. That's it. Now, is safari better than firefox? Honestly, I can't tell the difference other than memory footprint and aesthetics.
Plain truth: people will just naturally gravitate for what's convenient. Dealing with all the BS with IE, it was just so inconvenient that it was less convenient for the average noncomputer-using-joe-user to search, download and install a secondary browser. And these are the same idiots that have trouble 'downloading pictures from their digital cameras to their computers.'
If longhorn launches with a browser that is comparitive to firefox or anything similar, then there would be no real good enough reason why people should switch, and the only people using firefox will be the hardcore firefox zealots, or linux users.
Heh, I would say it's the distractions at work that keep me productive without going insane. Removing the distractions thru forcable means by either management babysitting you or other oppressive methods just hurts company morale. It also gives me my 'fix', so that I don't have the 'feel like the browsing for the next/. article' on the brain all day. Plus, now that I am satiated whenever I feel, I am fully capable of grinding out work for very long periods of time (weeks at a time) without feeling any 'withdrawl' symptoms if the situations needs be. After all, I DO want to do a good job.
My manager is pretty cool. He pretty much lets me do what I want, AS LONG as I get my stuff done. And I always get my stuff done. Sure, sometimes a few mistakes slip by, but of course management is there to bitch me out, to which I always respond with, "Hrm, maybe I should control my distracting habits a bit." Management thru self government works for everybody.
Considering all your concerns, the WoW gameplay mechanics almost nullifies your 'people are idiots' statement. Almost all the people I've met as allies were pretty civil, but I'm curious as to that because it was a beta test, but we'll have to see.. In any case, there is no real necessity for selfish jerks to lash out at others because the game is extremely geared toward the individual gameplay. In fact, concernes of this gameplay mechanic brought up the possbility that partying might become unwelcome and eventually obsolete.
Another point is that while gear DOES matter on your effectiveness, it doesn't FEEL that way. That is extremely important to me, because I don't have to be in a constant state of 'gear envy' and thinking that I need to keep killing in hopes for that 'uber lewt'. All that gear that I wore was done from the quests that I've completed by myself. That gear was hard earned and made me proud to wear it. Sure, there will be those powergamers that will only go for the best, but fortunately the game doesn't cater to only those that play that way.
The kicker is of course the pvp aspect. If you are the hoard, you can't even communicate with the anybody in the alliance EVEN if you wanted to. This brings on the aspect of the enemy race being simply an evil creature you need to destroy. And of course they think likewise of you. It's a constant state of war, and I wasn't truly hooked on this game untill I was part of a raid party of 40 rushing headlong towards an enemy raid party of 40.
The signs have been there for a while. We've been hearing reports from the beta for some time that the game isn't ready for release. After playing the stress-test and the open beta, this is also my own impression. It's not a disaster on the same scale as launch-day Galaxies, but it's severely lacking in content and has horrible issues with balance and the operation of PvP.
Dude, you must be the only person in the world that doesn't think World of Warcraft is not ready. Of all the 3rd gen mmorpgs out there, majority concensus is that WoW is the MOST ready game, and could have been released months ago as is. Severely lacking in content? Now we know you are just trolling. There's so much content in the game that people were afraid it would be taking AWAY from the multiplayer aspect. And I've seen no issues with imbalance, or pvp.
Thing is, while Blizzard have a fairly good (but not perfect) record of delivering decent singleplayer and small-scale multiplayer games, releasing a MMORPG is an undertaking on a totally different order of magnitude.
For every single game they launched that uses battlenet, they've always run into launch problems. The first couple of days of the Diablo 2 launch was a total disaster, as was war3. But give them a couple of days, and things smooth out. Diablo 2 and War3 are still incredibly popular today, and nobody remembers what craziness was going on at the beginning of the launch.
MMORPGs are vast games, in terms of content, complexity and number of players. The potential for something serious to go wrong and not be picked up (or, more damningly, picked up but not corrected) is significant. Nothing I've seen has convinced me that Blizzard have had the capacity to do this.
I'm curious, what is it that you are looking for to convince you that Blizzard can handle this venture? Seriously? Do you honestly beleive that Blizzard hasn't done their research, especially since they are entering an extremely mature market? Do you honestly beleive that Blizzard hasn't looked at the successes and failures of other mmo's out there? Do you think that Blizzard is just chucking millions of dollars without any regard for quality and satisfaction of customers? So tell me again, what is it you are looking for in regards to a successful mmorpg launch? After you answered me that, also please tell us why it should be anybody else's business but Blizzard's to give us their strategy for launch?
Picked mine up today as well (thank goodness I preordered early - in my area people who preordered late are gonna have to wait for the next shipment - it's the new tickle me elmo of this year) I only have on thing that makes me wary of the stylus: I'm afraid how how much abuse the touchpad can take before I end up denting it with force.
I only say this because while I was trying out Metroid, I noticed that when things started to heat up I've been tapping the screen harder and harder in order to jump. I'm thinking about getting one of those pda screen protector sheets of plastic things to save it.
Anybody got any suggestions on which screen protectors would be good for the Nintendo DS?
I'm a domestic techie, and I'm willing to work for 25-35k/yr. Where can I sign up?
I don't know what the market is like right now, as I've just about given up looking for a job related in this field. As a recent (well, been 2 years now) CS graduate, I didn't have any skills, and no job experience. Which brings up the catch-22: can't have a job without any experience, and can't get any experience without a job.
In my desparation for a job, I thought perhaps I could scrounge up a couple of certs to 'beat the filters', so to speak. Managed to save some money and passed the java programmer's certification exam easily, but I've been holding off untill I felt completely confident that I can take the next programming assignment, as the next exam is very expensive ($400) and I don't want to feel like blowing $400 away as I've been reading horror stories about it.
Eventually I found a job - as a graphic designer at a print shop (Lucky my second degree in Art helped me here). At the printshop, I've been wearing many hats: fix printers/copiers, re-lay out and lock down the network, install and set up network file servers, assemble computer, etc etc. The job itself is very easy, and because I can work so quickly, I can afford large lapses of free time which I can allocate to studying. However, the pay isn't that great. It's really tough trying to scrounge up a living with 25k in the NY area, especially with car payments and school loans to clear. In fact, more than 1/2 my paycheck goes straight to these two payments every month.
I took the graphic design job in hopes to build up some work experience - but mainly to prevent myself from starving. The previous year I was a delivery boy - but that's not exactly resume building material.
So my big question is: how do I beat the Catch-22? how long will i have to continue on working in order to build up some cred? How long will i have to continue driving over 100 miles everyday to commute to work? I just want to get my foot in the door. Will it be easier for me to get my foot in the door than it was last year? or the year before? Or should I stick with what I'm doing here and just stick to the IT related stuff as a hobby?
One of the greatest experiences I've had with this was the massive raid battle between the alliance and the horde on the last day. On my server as part of the Hoard, I know that there were at least 2 full raid groups of 40 that I was aware of (I was on one, my cousin was on the other) and a whole slew of other people who decided to tag along. We crossed into enemy territory and destroyed everything that came upon us. Fortunately we had the element of suprise so we were doing really well.
The alliance resorted to hit-and-run tactics, which whittled us down bit by bit untill we were at a size where their main force was finally assembled and steamrolled over us. Now that they had a sizeable army they figured it was a good time to attack our town (the crossroads) while we were down for the count.
Which in turn sparked another rally to regroup another force to counterattack (in additon to the two raid parties). It was bloodshed and meyhem, dead bodies everywhere!
I love this game, but first thing's first: need to upgrade my video card. All those players online really brought my old video card to it's knees..
There are tons of them, I have not run out (currently have 11 quests active). There are rumors of "elite" quests that require groups, but the one I had I was able to solo. I prefer to level up and quest alone, saving groups/raids for big events or RvR stuff.
They aren't rumors. I've gotten my first 2 elite quests this past weekend. You can tell the difference because in the quest log it'll actaully say "elite" in the entry. The ones that I've gotten so far were from 'linked' quests which I've completed to recieve these quests. Incidentally, the two elite quests I got involve the same location, however one takes place at night only, the other takes place during the day. So I will not be able to finish both quests in one sitting. I've been to the area before when I was exploring, and my party and another got rocked. We can tell it's not going to be easy. But the end items look attractive enough for me to try untll we succeed.:-)
The biggest problem with HR staff is that the skills that IT people have/want are so specialized that they have absolutely no idea what these terms mean. Ask a regular joe on the street to differentiate between assembly, c and java. (an archaic analogy, but I don't feel like thinking today) The truth is, they won't know jack. They will probably have heard of Java because of it's branding value (like in cell phones and whatnot), so that will most likely be the object they associate with corporations and high techandmoneyblablabla therefore sounding the most impressive. (not to say that a java coder is less skilled than someone who does assembly - it's strictly a case-by-case basis)
That kind of information is being fed to them by regular out lets of media - whether it be annoying banner ads that flash SONY! or MICROSOFT!, or IT magazines for PHBs, or their 'tech saavy' brother in law who knows how to program a vcr. And they just have to take their word for it. It's just a case of the blind leading the blind.
Too bad there aren't that many hiring staff that comes from an CS/engineering background - because I know for sure if I had to hire staff for IT positions, I would do one hell of a job.
Sadly I don' t have the 'skillset' to land a job like that.
Finally got on the beta last night - here is my first few impressions:
For those now playing right now, when Blizzard says the game has an emphasis for casual gamers, they really mean it. Certain mechanics of the game are defined so that powerleveling is discouraged - and at times, just plain difficult. In other words, nevermind the fact that leveling up is fairly nice and easy, the actual process of counting heads from all the kills you made is slow. So that means you (by yourself) will not be physically able to empty out an entire zone by ravaging the whole land before they respawn - on the other hand, there is always plenty of stuff to kill, and little downtime.:-)
I beleive grandparent's gripe is strictly from a powergamer's perspective - trying to find every single gaming mechanic in order to maximize what is perceived as playing efficiency in the quest to try and 'beat' the system. I know I was like that for the first few hours of playing WoW. But gameplay style is completely different than EQ for instance (don't really know much about the other MMOs), and once I realized that the STORY and exploration is as much of the game as leveling, the whole game became so much more enjoyable it's retarded I didn't realize it sooner.
As for character customization: No more sticking with the few tried and true 'caste' classes, this is the flexibility in a MMORPG I was looking for! I beleive 'cheat sheet' sites like Castersrealm and Allakhazam (are those sites still around?) may begin to become obsolete as this game gains popularity.
That said, WoW's target demographic is NOT the powergamers, NOT the people already playing EQ or FF or CoH or whatever MMORPG is popular right now. It's primary aim is for guys like me: ex powergamers who are over the top, who need to pay off bills, mortgage, and focus on RL things in general now that I'm old. I feel like I can play an hour a day and not feel like it was a waste of effort (like in EQ).
I'm sold.
Oh, is the whole battlegrounds thing up and running? Can anyone clue me in on how that works? That kind of PvP sounds like a blast!
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you are told to crank out 1000 lines of code in x amount of time (I know, poor example to use define work quality, but bear with me). You crank out 900 lines in an hour, and the last 100 lines in 3 days. Lets say your boss does an 'audit' on your most recent workday. He sees you spit out 30 lines of code in 8 hours. It doesn't matter if you did the 900 lines of code, the boss will perceive you as a terrible worker, because that is what he SAW with his very own eyes.
Another example: lets say you have server trouble. The boss doesn't know, and you want to solve it before he notices. You have no idea what the problem is, and begin diagnosing symptoms. He catches you on google. *surfing the web - demerit!* You still can't find the answer. You go on Instant Messenger to discuss this with one of your colleagues. *chatting online - another demerit!* The boss finds out there is server trouble, but by the time he reaches you, you managed to find the problem and solve it. The boss is thinking to himself "What was my employee doing when my server was down?? It was down all this time, and he was able to fix it in seconds. He's a smart kid, but he's got absolutely no work ethic. I can't have him here much longer."
How should we handle managers like that?
It's because GP didn't want to do 45 minutes worth of work, duh. :-)
Good names like:
Operation 405 - raids smaller sites in operation
Operation Slashdot - for large raids that require more manpower
Operation Beowulf - large raids of multiple sites, at the same time
Operation Sovietrussia - warez raids you; the copy of longhorn has a little trojan that tells the fbi where you are
Operation Allyourbasearebelongtous - there is no chance to survive make your time
And the big one: Operation Goatse - let's not talk about how this goes
Using it as a pagefile? (IMO that's a pretty bad idea)
Running a database? (IMO another pretty bad idea)
The big question right now is how laptops are going to deal with the pagefile, since that's going to be the flashdrive killer. Personally I beleive the pagefile really needs to go the way of the dinosaur. VM was just a temporary solution for people without enough ram. It's either that or come up with another piece of hardware that'll act as an intermediary between the ram and the storage. You know, like a ram cache. A harddisk could come to use here, but then again it's more $$$. I say just toss it all and plop in tons of ram, or at the very least, use cheap, massproduced slow ram as a pagefile substitute. On a laptop, 2 Gigs should be enough for everybody :-)
I think for most uses, the laptop will be for making documents on the fly, surfing the web, checking your email, things like that. Lightweight work on the go. If you are doing video/audio editing, or heavy photoshop work that requires you to start using a scratch disk, what the heck are you doing on a laptop??
One thing I would love to see is some hibernation/sleep done right. You know - close the laptop, computer recognizes it being in sleep state, and dumps the ram to hd. Depending on the side of the ram, should take like 5-6 seconds (hopefully). Then open the laptop, HD is read for 5-6 seconds (hopefully) and computer is right where you were at. When can we finally see THAT?
What kind of server hardware were they throwing out? And where can I get some!?? :-)
I'm only asking because I find it - well - wasteful that some company would literally throw away a complete server whole like that. Was it low end? Or was it just too old? Do you guys still run the same exact hardware, or did you guys upgrade to newer stuff? And if you guys upgraded, can I have the handmedowns?? ;-)
Thanks in advance!
Hrm, it looks like the sarcasm bus missed a few people... :-P
Everbody in my guild looked at me like some kind of idiot player that had no clue how to 'play his class correctly.' Eventually I've started to have doubts in my talent build, thinking of how it could have been done 'better.' The real answer is that blizzard did a good job in play balance - a lot better than what people actually give them credit for. But endgame MMO players (who by definition are more hardcore than casual) are always looking for that One Perfect Path(TM) to the top, and it really discourages many other players from trying new things, which results in a lot of 'trash skills/talents' that are overlooked more often than not. This is much more noticable when there are multiple classes that seem to have the same set of trash skills/talents, and public perception is that the devs are just recycling the same classes with different names and graphics.
If the gameplay is balanced up to the point where there is no perception that 'my' class/build/progress is better than 'your' class/build/progress, then the game hits the field of mediocrity and gets extremely boring, and devolves into a quest to see who has the biggest baddest uberleet gear.
It's the bane of MMOs. For smaller multiplayer games it's a different story. Not an MMO, but in my opinion Top Spin Tennis for the Xbox is very balanced, and for whatever path I choose to progress, I don't ever feel like I've made the 'wrong' decision at any point in the game.
With such a difficulty ranking, it's better off if you and your guildmates farmed out MC or something.
That said, it will be a rough time for the first few weeks, since people will not realize that the honor system only kicks into high gear for endgame people. What I DO suspect is that the rampant lowbie ganking will ebb quite a bit to acceptable levels, Tarren Mill not withstanding, and that we will see a LOT more raids on the capital cities. (which should be fun!)
"What's this? The Big Bad Gun of Slaying costs 2200 gold?? There is no way I can manage to collect that much gold! Hrm, lemme ebay for people selling gold on my server..."
Ten bucks says that the players monopolizing the market are also the friendly ebay merchants that are selling you money..
at the very least, if it doesn't get adopted, then I suppose using an uncommon format will help curb piracy being that nobody will have easy access to blank disks or a burner and all... :-P
Personally anything that doesn't have an underground transit system I don't really consider a city. Well except for Gotham City, maybe. Oh and Metropolis.
When was the last time someone sued a movie studio for making violent movies - and won? Or HBO for the Sopranos? Or music studios for gangster rap? Or Simon and Scheuster for violence in their books?
Launchcast has some great ideas going and it's genre selecting features are pretty awesome, but if I can't even use it simply because I'm on a different platform, then it'll get no support from me anymore. It's a shame such a good idea will go to waste.
Even better, McDonald's and their french fries.
Once again we come up with another irresponsible parent that's looking to lay the blame for the death of their child. Anybody that does not practice any self control (or delegation of it) is making a beeline straight for the darwin awards.
To be fair, yeah I'm an avid player of (back then) EQ and (as of now) WoW. Yeah, I did play WoW obsessively for the first few months. But it's waned down a lot. I've gotten to the mode of casual playing and truth be told I'm just too busy trying to stay on top of RL to really commit to it. My friend who just moved in the area and is going on interviews for jobs, plays a whole lot more, because he's got the time to at the moment. Sure I'm jealous, but that doesn't drive me over the edge. *sigh*
Plain truth: people will just naturally gravitate for what's convenient. Dealing with all the BS with IE, it was just so inconvenient that it was less convenient for the average noncomputer-using-joe-user to search, download and install a secondary browser. And these are the same idiots that have trouble 'downloading pictures from their digital cameras to their computers.'
If longhorn launches with a browser that is comparitive to firefox or anything similar, then there would be no real good enough reason why people should switch, and the only people using firefox will be the hardcore firefox zealots, or linux users.
All joking aside. If this does pan out.. wow. Just wow.
Now let's sit back and hear all the conspiracy theories about how Google is slowly preparing for world domination. :-)
My manager is pretty cool. He pretty much lets me do what I want, AS LONG as I get my stuff done. And I always get my stuff done. Sure, sometimes a few mistakes slip by, but of course management is there to bitch me out, to which I always respond with, "Hrm, maybe I should control my distracting habits a bit." Management thru self government works for everybody.
Another point is that while gear DOES matter on your effectiveness, it doesn't FEEL that way. That is extremely important to me, because I don't have to be in a constant state of 'gear envy' and thinking that I need to keep killing in hopes for that 'uber lewt'. All that gear that I wore was done from the quests that I've completed by myself. That gear was hard earned and made me proud to wear it. Sure, there will be those powergamers that will only go for the best, but fortunately the game doesn't cater to only those that play that way.
The kicker is of course the pvp aspect. If you are the hoard, you can't even communicate with the anybody in the alliance EVEN if you wanted to. This brings on the aspect of the enemy race being simply an evil creature you need to destroy. And of course they think likewise of you. It's a constant state of war, and I wasn't truly hooked on this game untill I was part of a raid party of 40 rushing headlong towards an enemy raid party of 40.
It's fun.
Dude, you must be the only person in the world that doesn't think World of Warcraft is not ready. Of all the 3rd gen mmorpgs out there, majority concensus is that WoW is the MOST ready game, and could have been released months ago as is. Severely lacking in content? Now we know you are just trolling. There's so much content in the game that people were afraid it would be taking AWAY from the multiplayer aspect. And I've seen no issues with imbalance, or pvp.
Thing is, while Blizzard have a fairly good (but not perfect) record of delivering decent singleplayer and small-scale multiplayer games, releasing a MMORPG is an undertaking on a totally different order of magnitude.
For every single game they launched that uses battlenet, they've always run into launch problems. The first couple of days of the Diablo 2 launch was a total disaster, as was war3. But give them a couple of days, and things smooth out. Diablo 2 and War3 are still incredibly popular today, and nobody remembers what craziness was going on at the beginning of the launch.
MMORPGs are vast games, in terms of content, complexity and number of players. The potential for something serious to go wrong and not be picked up (or, more damningly, picked up but not corrected) is significant. Nothing I've seen has convinced me that Blizzard have had the capacity to do this.
I'm curious, what is it that you are looking for to convince you that Blizzard can handle this venture? Seriously? Do you honestly beleive that Blizzard hasn't done their research, especially since they are entering an extremely mature market? Do you honestly beleive that Blizzard hasn't looked at the successes and failures of other mmo's out there? Do you think that Blizzard is just chucking millions of dollars without any regard for quality and satisfaction of customers? So tell me again, what is it you are looking for in regards to a successful mmorpg launch? After you answered me that, also please tell us why it should be anybody else's business but Blizzard's to give us their strategy for launch?
I only say this because while I was trying out Metroid, I noticed that when things started to heat up I've been tapping the screen harder and harder in order to jump. I'm thinking about getting one of those pda screen protector sheets of plastic things to save it.
Anybody got any suggestions on which screen protectors would be good for the Nintendo DS?
I don't know what the market is like right now, as I've just about given up looking for a job related in this field. As a recent (well, been 2 years now) CS graduate, I didn't have any skills, and no job experience. Which brings up the catch-22: can't have a job without any experience, and can't get any experience without a job.
In my desparation for a job, I thought perhaps I could scrounge up a couple of certs to 'beat the filters', so to speak. Managed to save some money and passed the java programmer's certification exam easily, but I've been holding off untill I felt completely confident that I can take the next programming assignment, as the next exam is very expensive ($400) and I don't want to feel like blowing $400 away as I've been reading horror stories about it.
Eventually I found a job - as a graphic designer at a print shop (Lucky my second degree in Art helped me here). At the printshop, I've been wearing many hats: fix printers/copiers, re-lay out and lock down the network, install and set up network file servers, assemble computer, etc etc. The job itself is very easy, and because I can work so quickly, I can afford large lapses of free time which I can allocate to studying. However, the pay isn't that great. It's really tough trying to scrounge up a living with 25k in the NY area, especially with car payments and school loans to clear. In fact, more than 1/2 my paycheck goes straight to these two payments every month.
I took the graphic design job in hopes to build up some work experience - but mainly to prevent myself from starving. The previous year I was a delivery boy - but that's not exactly resume building material.
So my big question is: how do I beat the Catch-22? how long will i have to continue on working in order to build up some cred? How long will i have to continue driving over 100 miles everyday to commute to work? I just want to get my foot in the door. Will it be easier for me to get my foot in the door than it was last year? or the year before? Or should I stick with what I'm doing here and just stick to the IT related stuff as a hobby?
The alliance resorted to hit-and-run tactics, which whittled us down bit by bit untill we were at a size where their main force was finally assembled and steamrolled over us. Now that they had a sizeable army they figured it was a good time to attack our town (the crossroads) while we were down for the count.
Which in turn sparked another rally to regroup another force to counterattack (in additon to the two raid parties). It was bloodshed and meyhem, dead bodies everywhere!
I love this game, but first thing's first: need to upgrade my video card. All those players online really brought my old video card to it's knees..
They aren't rumors. I've gotten my first 2 elite quests this past weekend. You can tell the difference because in the quest log it'll actaully say "elite" in the entry. The ones that I've gotten so far were from 'linked' quests which I've completed to recieve these quests. Incidentally, the two elite quests I got involve the same location, however one takes place at night only, the other takes place during the day. So I will not be able to finish both quests in one sitting. I've been to the area before when I was exploring, and my party and another got rocked. We can tell it's not going to be easy. But the end items look attractive enough for me to try untll we succeed. :-)
That kind of information is being fed to them by regular out lets of media - whether it be annoying banner ads that flash SONY! or MICROSOFT!, or IT magazines for PHBs, or their 'tech saavy' brother in law who knows how to program a vcr. And they just have to take their word for it. It's just a case of the blind leading the blind.
Too bad there aren't that many hiring staff that comes from an CS/engineering background - because I know for sure if I had to hire staff for IT positions, I would do one hell of a job.
Sadly I don' t have the 'skillset' to land a job like that.
For those now playing right now, when Blizzard says the game has an emphasis for casual gamers, they really mean it. Certain mechanics of the game are defined so that powerleveling is discouraged - and at times, just plain difficult. In other words, nevermind the fact that leveling up is fairly nice and easy, the actual process of counting heads from all the kills you made is slow. So that means you (by yourself) will not be physically able to empty out an entire zone by ravaging the whole land before they respawn - on the other hand, there is always plenty of stuff to kill, and little downtime. :-)
I beleive grandparent's gripe is strictly from a powergamer's perspective - trying to find every single gaming mechanic in order to maximize what is perceived as playing efficiency in the quest to try and 'beat' the system. I know I was like that for the first few hours of playing WoW. But gameplay style is completely different than EQ for instance (don't really know much about the other MMOs), and once I realized that the STORY and exploration is as much of the game as leveling, the whole game became so much more enjoyable it's retarded I didn't realize it sooner.
As for character customization: No more sticking with the few tried and true 'caste' classes, this is the flexibility in a MMORPG I was looking for! I beleive 'cheat sheet' sites like Castersrealm and Allakhazam (are those sites still around?) may begin to become obsolete as this game gains popularity.
That said, WoW's target demographic is NOT the powergamers, NOT the people already playing EQ or FF or CoH or whatever MMORPG is popular right now. It's primary aim is for guys like me: ex powergamers who are over the top, who need to pay off bills, mortgage, and focus on RL things in general now that I'm old. I feel like I can play an hour a day and not feel like it was a waste of effort (like in EQ).
I'm sold.
Oh, is the whole battlegrounds thing up and running? Can anyone clue me in on how that works? That kind of PvP sounds like a blast!