Not really. Having tried both, I actually found making corporate Java programs to be a _lot_ less stress.
It's not just the deadlines, it's also, well, let's just say that unless you work for some incredibly shitty boss (and you should probably quit then), in corporate jobs you're a lot less likely to have a constant stream of change requests right until the deadline and in fact even past the deadline. We tend to make a fuss when the client wants another field on a mask or such, but few people have a clue what it's like to have Mr Designer come up with great ideas that turn the whole engine on its head.
Also in a corporate database and Java job you may (or may not) have to deal with code that is properly structured and has automated testcases. If you're lucky, comments too. In fact, in some places it may even be enforced. And the need for ugly hacks is also a bit less present. In the games industry you have code written by people straight off college, who never had to write anything over 1000 lines and half of them still think that structure, refactoring or the rest of the theory is something that lazy old has-beens invented to make themselves look busy. If you're unlucky, it'll be code from someone who even thinks he has something to prove. If you're _really_ unlucky it will be script code from some hapless designer who got shanghaied into writing scripts because "everyone knows" scripts are teh easy stuff and game design stuff and no need to waste a real programmer on. Also, not only you'll have to deal with some obscure hack that might be there just to deal with the idiosyncrasies of some obscure driver version from 2005, but it's undocumented and everyone who even knew about it or the condition has long ago burned out and left, so you're left guessing if it's horrible code or necessary. Also, it's been written under terrible time pressure, so not only it's funky code the kind that gets produced on a Sunday evening after a 100 hour week and lots of skipped sleep, but nobody had the time to "waste" with comments, refactoring, test cases, etc.
And so on, and so forth.
Plus, I guess there's the sheer frustration about the creative part. In business a usecase may be dumb but ultimately you have to fit what the client wants done. You can argue about usability or fonts (and lose badly,) but that's about it. In games you may well have played a hundred games in that genre and actually understand better than Mr Designer why that idea is dumb and has failed before. He's not omniscient, and especially for games which get developed more out of "well, let's try genre Y because it sells better" he may actually be designing something he doesn't understand, or even hates. Just look at all the featured copied badly between games, because someone didn't even understand why they're there. Now imagine that you actually do know, and have read the interviews from the designer of the game you're trying to copy, and know full well that what you're asked to implement is a horrible caricature of it. But nobody's listening to you.
"It's true because nobody disproved it" is trying to reverse the burden of proof. Those who claim to have such powers have the burden to prove they actually can do it. It's not upon the others to disprove it.
Basically, same as if I claimed to be able to read Chinese, the burden of proof would be on me to show I can actually read a text in Chinese, not on you to prove I can't possibly.
So, basically, yes, if you claim you can do it but find excuses why you shouldn't prove that claim, I'll call you exactly delusional.
In the words of Carl Sagan: "They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
To put it simply "but they once laughed at X too" or "but they once believed Z to be false too" doesn't really prove anything and is not logical evidence. It's simply a piece of bogus sophistry that proves nothing.
You know what made us accept the physics behind that scanner photo? Actual evidence. You know what psychic woowoo _doesn't_ have? Actual evidence.
That's all it really needs. Wake me up when it has any. It's that simple.
ROFLMAO. That's a backscatter X-Ray photo from an airport scanner, lemming. It has nothing to do with body energy fields or anything.
Jesus Haploid Christ, I've seen hoaxes and mis-interpretations in support of woowoo, but this is one of the few things that truly take the cake. There is nothing mysterious or magnetic or aura about it. There is no aura there. It's some photons bouncing off matter. You know, elementary physics stuff. There is _no_ aura emitted there at all. It's only the bouncing photons. You turn those off, it ceases.
And the only way a psychic could see _that_ kind of "aura" is if their eyes could produce such radiation. Which is trivial to measure with a geiger counter, if they want to make such a claim.
Bullshit. If you bothered reading the rules, it just needs to be unexplained at the time you enter the contest. It's one of the things he explicitly addresses.
But, yes, that one has to be the #1 excuse of gullible marks who still want to believe in fairy tales. It's bullshit, but, hey, I guess when one wants to believe in fairy tales against all evidence, the choices for good rationalizations must be fairly limited.
Except, again, for the fact that none of them seem able to actually do what they claim to do.
Finding (pseudo) sciencey-sounding explanation before even knowing if there's a phenomenon to explain in the first place, has a name. It's called Tooth Fairy Science.
Sure, one can handwave a whole theory about what might be the physics behind the tooth fairy, and the market value of different kinds of teeth, and whatever. But if you don't actually have a phenomenon to explain there, it's just a pointless waste of time.
Ditto here. Trying to explain how aura reading might work before anyone proved they can actually read an aura (again: anyone can win a million dollars if they just prove they can) is exactly tooth fairy science.
Yes. It turns out it's actually an advantage to be able to recognize the cheap magician tricks that half of these frauds use. (The other half being just poor deluded idiots.)
But nevertheless, the methodology is pretty public and straightforward. Very much in line with the scientific method too.
But ultimately that's just irrelevant anyway. He's not offering his million for showing the quantum reasons for that aura reading or anything. He just asks someone to prove they can do whatever they claim to do. If they claim to be able to read an aura, they can get a million dollars for doing just that. Should be easy money if they actually can, right?
Not to take anything away from the graphene story, but the floating frog story is really interesting.
It posits that there is a magnetic field surrounding all matter. The positive and negative particles produce a tiny force that can be measured with even crude instruments like a compass. Strangely, these fields become stronger and weaker depending on many variables, including emotional state, vitality, and stress levels.
I'm not saying this is what psychics "see" when they "read someone's aura", but there seems to be more to their woo-woo than many skeptics are willing to accept. If there is a measurable energy field around all things, then there might be something to things like Reiki and other eastern traditional medicines.
Actually, sorry, the ultimate test for that is that Randi still has a 1 million dollars prize for whoever can demonstrate any paranormal abilities in a controlled setting. Aura reading does explicitly qualify, and has been tested ad nauseam before, only to turn out bunk every time.
So if you think a psychic can read such things at all, just send them here: Challenge Application
Hey, you could be doing them a favour. Humanity too. Think of how many people they could treat or how many other psychics they could train with that money.
But until one actually does win the prize, I hope you'll understand why I'm less than impressed if yet another gullible mark handwaves some vague "we don't know" as a reason to believe in bullshit woowoo. Not knowing something is false is not a reason to believe there's something to it. What you illustrate there is just the mainstream form of the . The question isn't what skeptics are willing to accept, but what can be supported by evidence. That's all.
You're not seeing the real advantage. That being, of course, more money for Epic.
With traditional consoles you buy a game, plug in 2, 3 or 4 controllers and can play with your friends or family. With networked handhelds (which actually isn't new either, the PSP already did wireless multiplayer in 2004, and so did the Nintendo DS) you can play with several people too, but you're not going to do that with 4 people around a tiny screen. You're going to buy 2, 3 or 4 games. Ka-ching.
Add the fact that this is, you know, Epic. The guys who fled the PC because they only had one rehash of the same game to offer again and again until it tanked. And they blamed it on the imminent demise of the PC market and piracy and whatever, when similar games sold several times the number of copies in the same period. Then they did ok on the XBox as long as basically they were almost the only FPS game in town. Now they're pretty much the only major game dev excited about Apple's walled garden enforced with an iron fist. I wonder why;)
What, did you think he was excited about it because of advantages for _you_?
Ah, shut up, you just can't recognize a visionary. Just imagine a future where you'll have just hand-held device that you can play your games on, read your email, have your calendar, and make phone calls too. If only someone could start making a, dunno, a Nokia N-Gage. And you could look like a complete retard while making calls with it too, for no extra cost!;)
(The geniuses at Nokia placed the speaker and phone on the side, so, yeah, you'd have to hold it in a completely ridiculous position to actually use it as a phone. Official version is that they didn't have enough room on the front after all those buttons, but I have to wonder if it's not really a marketroid's idea so everyone could see you're making calls with their game console.)
When the year 2003 comes by, you'll see how much of a visionary this guy was;)
To some extent, yes. But the devil is in the details. (Though my D&D GM would say he's in one of the monster compendiums;))
For a start even the WoW endgame raids are a lot more forgiving than what other games used to put you through right off the bat. The tranditional school of MMO design has been, well, like the old testament: lots of rules, lots of possibilities to fail, disproportionately harsh penalties for the smallest failure, and no mercy. Light on the carrot, very heavy on the stick. By contrast, WoW actually makes it quite bearable to wipe once or twice.
More importantly, though, the message I was answering to wasn't just talking about that, but about turning the knobs up to the point where one wouldn't even consider going in with a stranger, much less a whole PUG. That's quite the quantitative and qualitative difference there. And all I'm saying is that I've seen _that_ point, and it wasn't fun or a success.
Basically it's not an all or nothing proposition. There are nuances for how much wiggle room is allowed and how harsh the penalties are for exceeding it. WoW managed to find a decent spot (but not perfect, obviously.) That's why I'm wondering why would they want to take it to a worse spot for most players.
Actually, I hope that's an oversimplification and that Blizzard is smarter than that. They have been so far, at least, so there is no reason to assume they've just got a lobotomy.
The formula that you'll wipe lots and presumably only dare play with people you personally know has been tried in other games before, and it was a major failure. In fact, it's one reason most new players went to WoW and not to the other games.
The days of "one wipe and everyone bails" will never be gone just because people don't like to waste their time and fail. Even on COH where death penalties have been reduced to a joke, or STO when it never had them, there is only so often that a group can faceplant before players _will_ leave. Add some form of cost (financial, XP or otherwise) and it just means they'll leave even earlier so as not to rake up a huge debt.
Most people will never get to know the people well enough to form those long lasting groups.
And those who do will be shafted when one of that group just have to leave for other reasons. (Like because they're in China and just can't afford another month, or their new GF doesn't let them play any more, or mom made them learn for the exam, or they're in hospital, or just some other game got launched.) And a lot of downtime when those you know aren't online.
Heck, the more important you make it to be only with the right clique, the harder it becomes to break into one when you start from the rank of some nobody who might or might not get them wiped. The more penalty there is in case that unknown turns out to be a smacktard, the less people are inclined to give him/her a chance. Yep, that's more downtime.
Plus, it's the perfect recipe to create even more drama than raiding guilds already have. The more the group gets kicked in the nuts if you can't show up for a given raid and has to fill it with some potential liability or skip it entirely, the more it becomes like a job where you absolutely have to be there or else. Trust me, there are a lot of us who never liked that aspect to start with. Making it worse isn't going to spell "greatest game ever".
Sure, to a greedy fucktard like Bobby Kotic it may sound like he'll keep more players around with a premise boiling down to "stick around or your friends will suffer", but that's not a setup most people enjoy. For a start because it means a lot of time of not just being the guy whose friends are kept hostage, but being the hostage for a change. The bigger the penalty you make it for when one of your clique leaves, the more people will see a non-fun time as a result. It's not a recipe for keeping people around long.
But basically as I was saying, I doubt that Blizzard is going to turn out that retarded this time. Then again, they did have ideas like the RealID and such. I guess I'll just wait and see.
And then there are those of us who've played Ultima games, and probably outnumber the druids. Took me a while to find out that for example F is Feh and not Flam:p
So your runic tattoo of, say, Bjarka Tyr will be read by about a million Ultima players not as "growth through harmonious changes", but as "Bet Tym" or the combination of "small" and "time" and wonder what spell is that. Slow time, maybe? I mean "An Tym" was stopping the time, Bet Tym sounds like it should work too in some game or another:P
Well, I probably wasn't too clear about it. I do come back now and again, so the point is kinda: I too could technically make a claim like "oh, I've been playing WoW since launch" and even go into what got changed in which EP. But it's more like since start playing a month or two, then taking a half a year break, then playing another month, then taking a break until the next EP, then taking yet another break, then figured I'd try playing a horde char to see what's different, then take another break, and so on.
And for that matter I could make a similar claim that I played COH since launch (except most of the time not actually playing it) or EQ2 since launch (ditto.)
Most people I know who count as "playing WoW since 2005" are really something like that. _Very_ few have actually played it for so many years in a row. But when people hear about "playing WoW since launch" they assume the former, not the latter, for some reason. Which IMHO for most people is actually the very wrong assumption.
Well, now seriously, I don't know anyone who actually played non-interrupted since start. The longest I know someone playing in a row is like 3 years, which admittedly is still a lot, but still not quite since start.
What most of us do is really play one game, play and eventually get bored, move to another game, played and eventually get bored, and so on. Not even all MMOs. There'll be lots of falling back to single player games in between MMOs.
I mean, technically I've started WoW relatively soon after it got launched in Europe myself, but, good grief, not continuously. In fact, the vast majority of these years I was _not_ on WoW at all. Ditto for other games. Actually my all time favourite MMO is City Of Heros, not WoW, but, you guessed, it's been actually a lot of not being on COH either.
At any rate, I'll probably have a look on WoW when cataclysm launches. Or maybe not. But it's not like, you know, a marriage or a job or swearing allegiance to a new king. It's a game. You play it until you've seen all the quests that are easy to get to, maybe try again with a different character or three, but eventually that's it.
There are online presence management companies that actively fight this kind of negative publicity.
As long as you can make use of these services, it should not be possible to sue. It should be up to the individual to manage their own online presence.
Hmm? So basically I can smear your name with any crap I can think of, and it should be ok because you can then pay some other sleazeballs to link-spam and game google to bury the nasty bits?
Surely you can't be serious there.
For a start it's basically a DIY protection racket. If your "presence management" link-spammer business is slow, just buy adwords in some people's names and, hey, you can't be sued if they don't want to pay money to have that crap removed.
But, generally, that's not how justice or the law were supposed to work in any society. The idea that someone's only recourse if they're wronged is to pay some goons to do right it -- because that's essentially what you advocate there -- is wrong on several levels. Not the least being that basically it means you can be a bully as long as you can make it too expensive for the other guy to repair the damage done. And it's usually cheaper to damage than repair.
But generally, we don't rule that keying cars is ok because you can pay for a new door. We don't rule that throwing a brick through someone's window is ok because they can just pay for a new window. We don't rule that "boosting" someone's TV is ok because they can pay for a replacement TV. And we sure as heck don't rule a libel campaign ok because someone could just pay an agency to buy every copy of that newspaper to keep people from finding it.
I seriously don't see why here the victim should shut up or pay some spammers to cover something that isn't the victim's fault. Surely _if_ some malicious mis-representation has been done (which here doesn't actually seem to be the case), then it shouldn't be expected that the victim _also_ makes a financial loss to fix that.
Though, come to think of it, it would be funny if someone did get a runic inscription that was readable as some crap omen.
I mean, I can see it. "Mr Svensson, if I read your tattoo right, feh is the rune for wealth or cattle, but its being inverted would indicate or foretell a loss of such. To make it worse, the rest of it puts it in the context of a disastrous overseas travel. So... can you explain why should we hire you to program our traveling agency's booking and financial software?";)
Oh, most definitely so, but we're talking about stuff someone could actually read, in which case it would be really an alphabet. Though I guess someone COULD theoretically tattoo a divination sequence of runes. But good luck finding anyone who can read that.
Plus, that would open a whole new set of problems. I mean look at all the people with Chinese symbols that don't mean they think they are or are mirrored or even rotated in weird ways, because the artist didn't know any better. Now think an ancient divination sequence that the tattoo parlour guy really doesn't know anything about. You could end up carrying a fortune foretelling of cowardice and horribly bad luck and not know it.
It can get even worse. At least "chop suey $3.99" is clear where is came from.
Funnier stories are those like the guy who got "pig meat" in chinese letters because it was copied off a can of that. But I'd imagine that the latter realization comes after seeing that this guy has "pig meat" written on him. Yeah.
Then there was the guy who thought he got a tattoo saying "wise dog that guards the pack", but it actually meant "dog's ass".
In the same vein of "you're not going to get hooked up with any woman that can read that", one guy got a tattoo which he thought was totally bad ass, until a Japanese girl told him it means "abusive husband". Well, I guess at least it works as a warning.
Conversely one woman got the longer version of that, and it translated to "my abusive husband beats me." It's one of the things that aren't even funny but make one wonder if she got ripped off or it's a cry for help.
Though to be entirely fair, apparently cool kids in Beijing tattoo themselves with nonsensical combinations of English letters too, like "TWARP", "GWIPO", "FRUNK" and get told by unscrupulous tattoo parlor artists that they mean stuff like "old soul with young spirit" in English. (Actual example. If you were wondering what FRUNK means in English, now you know;)) Also apparently both CRYMPH and DLECH mean "beautiful flower dancing in the wind" in American according to one tattoo parlour in Beijing. In case you were wondering;)
Luckily individual letters are not whole words in the Latin alphabet, so most are just nonsense. But you just have to wonder if there's some brave soul somewhere in China wearing a tattoo that says "I suck cock" and thinks it means "loyalty, courage, honour";)
That said, since runes were an alphabetic system, I would assume most of those are equally nonsense combinations. I wouldn't wonder if some guys out there were running around with tattoos that just say "FUTHARK" because someone just copied the first characters of the runic alphabet.
What an idiot. Obviously another case of not understanding how things work. I hope that you managed to resist instigating a flamewar over that.
Well, not a proper flame war, but some mocking may have been involved, after about two pages of him refusing to understand that it's digital.
Perhaps I should have also mentioned that this was a hardware forum too, so basically he was the only guy who didn't know that a 1 is a 1 is a 1, and a 0 is a 0 is a 0, or going on about chrome vs iron magnetic coatings and frequency responses. Nobody had to instigate anything as everyone else already knew that the guy is clueless anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Having tried both, I actually found making corporate Java programs to be a _lot_ less stress.
It's not just the deadlines, it's also, well, let's just say that unless you work for some incredibly shitty boss (and you should probably quit then), in corporate jobs you're a lot less likely to have a constant stream of change requests right until the deadline and in fact even past the deadline. We tend to make a fuss when the client wants another field on a mask or such, but few people have a clue what it's like to have Mr Designer come up with great ideas that turn the whole engine on its head.
Also in a corporate database and Java job you may (or may not) have to deal with code that is properly structured and has automated testcases. If you're lucky, comments too. In fact, in some places it may even be enforced. And the need for ugly hacks is also a bit less present. In the games industry you have code written by people straight off college, who never had to write anything over 1000 lines and half of them still think that structure, refactoring or the rest of the theory is something that lazy old has-beens invented to make themselves look busy. If you're unlucky, it'll be code from someone who even thinks he has something to prove. If you're _really_ unlucky it will be script code from some hapless designer who got shanghaied into writing scripts because "everyone knows" scripts are teh easy stuff and game design stuff and no need to waste a real programmer on. Also, not only you'll have to deal with some obscure hack that might be there just to deal with the idiosyncrasies of some obscure driver version from 2005, but it's undocumented and everyone who even knew about it or the condition has long ago burned out and left, so you're left guessing if it's horrible code or necessary. Also, it's been written under terrible time pressure, so not only it's funky code the kind that gets produced on a Sunday evening after a 100 hour week and lots of skipped sleep, but nobody had the time to "waste" with comments, refactoring, test cases, etc.
And so on, and so forth.
Plus, I guess there's the sheer frustration about the creative part. In business a usecase may be dumb but ultimately you have to fit what the client wants done. You can argue about usability or fonts (and lose badly,) but that's about it. In games you may well have played a hundred games in that genre and actually understand better than Mr Designer why that idea is dumb and has failed before. He's not omniscient, and especially for games which get developed more out of "well, let's try genre Y because it sells better" he may actually be designing something he doesn't understand, or even hates. Just look at all the featured copied badly between games, because someone didn't even understand why they're there. Now imagine that you actually do know, and have read the interviews from the designer of the game you're trying to copy, and know full well that what you're asked to implement is a horrible caricature of it. But nobody's listening to you.
"It's true because nobody disproved it" is trying to reverse the burden of proof. Those who claim to have such powers have the burden to prove they actually can do it. It's not upon the others to disprove it.
Basically, same as if I claimed to be able to read Chinese, the burden of proof would be on me to show I can actually read a text in Chinese, not on you to prove I can't possibly.
So, basically, yes, if you claim you can do it but find excuses why you shouldn't prove that claim, I'll call you exactly delusional.
In the words of Carl Sagan: "They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
To put it simply "but they once laughed at X too" or "but they once believed Z to be false too" doesn't really prove anything and is not logical evidence. It's simply a piece of bogus sophistry that proves nothing.
You know what made us accept the physics behind that scanner photo? Actual evidence. You know what psychic woowoo _doesn't_ have? Actual evidence.
That's all it really needs. Wake me up when it has any. It's that simple.
Well, hey, I never said I believed in "lie detector" woowoo either.
The rules clarify exactly the opposite of your claim. And since testing is pretty public it's also verifiable that nobody failed in the way you claim.
Repeating the same lie one more time won't make it true, you know. We're not in The Hunting Of The Snark.
So are you a liar or just have genuine comprehension problems?
ROFLMAO. That's a backscatter X-Ray photo from an airport scanner, lemming. It has nothing to do with body energy fields or anything.
Jesus Haploid Christ, I've seen hoaxes and mis-interpretations in support of woowoo, but this is one of the few things that truly take the cake. There is nothing mysterious or magnetic or aura about it. There is no aura there. It's some photons bouncing off matter. You know, elementary physics stuff. There is _no_ aura emitted there at all. It's only the bouncing photons. You turn those off, it ceases.
And the only way a psychic could see _that_ kind of "aura" is if their eyes could produce such radiation. Which is trivial to measure with a geiger counter, if they want to make such a claim.
Bullshit. If you bothered reading the rules, it just needs to be unexplained at the time you enter the contest. It's one of the things he explicitly addresses.
But, yes, that one has to be the #1 excuse of gullible marks who still want to believe in fairy tales. It's bullshit, but, hey, I guess when one wants to believe in fairy tales against all evidence, the choices for good rationalizations must be fairly limited.
Except, again, for the fact that none of them seem able to actually do what they claim to do.
Finding (pseudo) sciencey-sounding explanation before even knowing if there's a phenomenon to explain in the first place, has a name. It's called Tooth Fairy Science.
Sure, one can handwave a whole theory about what might be the physics behind the tooth fairy, and the market value of different kinds of teeth, and whatever. But if you don't actually have a phenomenon to explain there, it's just a pointless waste of time.
Ditto here. Trying to explain how aura reading might work before anyone proved they can actually read an aura (again: anyone can win a million dollars if they just prove they can) is exactly tooth fairy science.
Yes. It turns out it's actually an advantage to be able to recognize the cheap magician tricks that half of these frauds use. (The other half being just poor deluded idiots.)
But nevertheless, the methodology is pretty public and straightforward. Very much in line with the scientific method too.
But ultimately that's just irrelevant anyway. He's not offering his million for showing the quantum reasons for that aura reading or anything. He just asks someone to prove they can do whatever they claim to do. If they claim to be able to read an aura, they can get a million dollars for doing just that. Should be easy money if they actually can, right?
Actually, sorry, the ultimate test for that is that Randi still has a 1 million dollars prize for whoever can demonstrate any paranormal abilities in a controlled setting. Aura reading does explicitly qualify, and has been tested ad nauseam before, only to turn out bunk every time.
So if you think a psychic can read such things at all, just send them here: Challenge Application
Hey, you could be doing them a favour. Humanity too. Think of how many people they could treat or how many other psychics they could train with that money.
But until one actually does win the prize, I hope you'll understand why I'm less than impressed if yet another gullible mark handwaves some vague "we don't know" as a reason to believe in bullshit woowoo. Not knowing something is false is not a reason to believe there's something to it. What you illustrate there is just the mainstream form of the . The question isn't what skeptics are willing to accept, but what can be supported by evidence. That's all.
Hmm, ok, I don't have much experience with the DS, but with the PSP both had to have the game.
You're not seeing the real advantage. That being, of course, more money for Epic.
With traditional consoles you buy a game, plug in 2, 3 or 4 controllers and can play with your friends or family. With networked handhelds (which actually isn't new either, the PSP already did wireless multiplayer in 2004, and so did the Nintendo DS) you can play with several people too, but you're not going to do that with 4 people around a tiny screen. You're going to buy 2, 3 or 4 games. Ka-ching.
Add the fact that this is, you know, Epic. The guys who fled the PC because they only had one rehash of the same game to offer again and again until it tanked. And they blamed it on the imminent demise of the PC market and piracy and whatever, when similar games sold several times the number of copies in the same period. Then they did ok on the XBox as long as basically they were almost the only FPS game in town. Now they're pretty much the only major game dev excited about Apple's walled garden enforced with an iron fist. I wonder why ;)
What, did you think he was excited about it because of advantages for _you_?
Ah, shut up, you just can't recognize a visionary. Just imagine a future where you'll have just hand-held device that you can play your games on, read your email, have your calendar, and make phone calls too. If only someone could start making a, dunno, a Nokia N-Gage. And you could look like a complete retard while making calls with it too, for no extra cost! ;)
(The geniuses at Nokia placed the speaker and phone on the side, so, yeah, you'd have to hold it in a completely ridiculous position to actually use it as a phone. Official version is that they didn't have enough room on the front after all those buttons, but I have to wonder if it's not really a marketroid's idea so everyone could see you're making calls with their game console.)
When the year 2003 comes by, you'll see how much of a visionary this guy was ;)
To some extent, yes. But the devil is in the details. (Though my D&D GM would say he's in one of the monster compendiums;))
For a start even the WoW endgame raids are a lot more forgiving than what other games used to put you through right off the bat. The tranditional school of MMO design has been, well, like the old testament: lots of rules, lots of possibilities to fail, disproportionately harsh penalties for the smallest failure, and no mercy. Light on the carrot, very heavy on the stick. By contrast, WoW actually makes it quite bearable to wipe once or twice.
More importantly, though, the message I was answering to wasn't just talking about that, but about turning the knobs up to the point where one wouldn't even consider going in with a stranger, much less a whole PUG. That's quite the quantitative and qualitative difference there. And all I'm saying is that I've seen _that_ point, and it wasn't fun or a success.
Basically it's not an all or nothing proposition. There are nuances for how much wiggle room is allowed and how harsh the penalties are for exceeding it. WoW managed to find a decent spot (but not perfect, obviously.) That's why I'm wondering why would they want to take it to a worse spot for most players.
Actually, I hope that's an oversimplification and that Blizzard is smarter than that. They have been so far, at least, so there is no reason to assume they've just got a lobotomy.
The formula that you'll wipe lots and presumably only dare play with people you personally know has been tried in other games before, and it was a major failure. In fact, it's one reason most new players went to WoW and not to the other games.
The days of "one wipe and everyone bails" will never be gone just because people don't like to waste their time and fail. Even on COH where death penalties have been reduced to a joke, or STO when it never had them, there is only so often that a group can faceplant before players _will_ leave. Add some form of cost (financial, XP or otherwise) and it just means they'll leave even earlier so as not to rake up a huge debt.
Most people will never get to know the people well enough to form those long lasting groups.
And those who do will be shafted when one of that group just have to leave for other reasons. (Like because they're in China and just can't afford another month, or their new GF doesn't let them play any more, or mom made them learn for the exam, or they're in hospital, or just some other game got launched.) And a lot of downtime when those you know aren't online.
Heck, the more important you make it to be only with the right clique, the harder it becomes to break into one when you start from the rank of some nobody who might or might not get them wiped. The more penalty there is in case that unknown turns out to be a smacktard, the less people are inclined to give him/her a chance. Yep, that's more downtime.
Plus, it's the perfect recipe to create even more drama than raiding guilds already have. The more the group gets kicked in the nuts if you can't show up for a given raid and has to fill it with some potential liability or skip it entirely, the more it becomes like a job where you absolutely have to be there or else. Trust me, there are a lot of us who never liked that aspect to start with. Making it worse isn't going to spell "greatest game ever".
Sure, to a greedy fucktard like Bobby Kotic it may sound like he'll keep more players around with a premise boiling down to "stick around or your friends will suffer", but that's not a setup most people enjoy. For a start because it means a lot of time of not just being the guy whose friends are kept hostage, but being the hostage for a change. The bigger the penalty you make it for when one of your clique leaves, the more people will see a non-fun time as a result. It's not a recipe for keeping people around long.
But basically as I was saying, I doubt that Blizzard is going to turn out that retarded this time. Then again, they did have ideas like the RealID and such. I guess I'll just wait and see.
And then there are those of us who've played Ultima games, and probably outnumber the druids. Took me a while to find out that for example F is Feh and not Flam :p
So your runic tattoo of, say, Bjarka Tyr will be read by about a million Ultima players not as "growth through harmonious changes", but as "Bet Tym" or the combination of "small" and "time" and wonder what spell is that. Slow time, maybe? I mean "An Tym" was stopping the time, Bet Tym sounds like it should work too in some game or another :P
Well, I probably wasn't too clear about it. I do come back now and again, so the point is kinda: I too could technically make a claim like "oh, I've been playing WoW since launch" and even go into what got changed in which EP. But it's more like since start playing a month or two, then taking a half a year break, then playing another month, then taking a break until the next EP, then taking yet another break, then figured I'd try playing a horde char to see what's different, then take another break, and so on.
And for that matter I could make a similar claim that I played COH since launch (except most of the time not actually playing it) or EQ2 since launch (ditto.)
Most people I know who count as "playing WoW since 2005" are really something like that. _Very_ few have actually played it for so many years in a row. But when people hear about "playing WoW since launch" they assume the former, not the latter, for some reason. Which IMHO for most people is actually the very wrong assumption.
OCD? ;)
Well, now seriously, I don't know anyone who actually played non-interrupted since start. The longest I know someone playing in a row is like 3 years, which admittedly is still a lot, but still not quite since start.
What most of us do is really play one game, play and eventually get bored, move to another game, played and eventually get bored, and so on. Not even all MMOs. There'll be lots of falling back to single player games in between MMOs.
I mean, technically I've started WoW relatively soon after it got launched in Europe myself, but, good grief, not continuously. In fact, the vast majority of these years I was _not_ on WoW at all. Ditto for other games. Actually my all time favourite MMO is City Of Heros, not WoW, but, you guessed, it's been actually a lot of not being on COH either.
At any rate, I'll probably have a look on WoW when cataclysm launches. Or maybe not. But it's not like, you know, a marriage or a job or swearing allegiance to a new king. It's a game. You play it until you've seen all the quests that are easy to get to, maybe try again with a different character or three, but eventually that's it.
Hmm? So basically I can smear your name with any crap I can think of, and it should be ok because you can then pay some other sleazeballs to link-spam and game google to bury the nasty bits?
Surely you can't be serious there.
For a start it's basically a DIY protection racket. If your "presence management" link-spammer business is slow, just buy adwords in some people's names and, hey, you can't be sued if they don't want to pay money to have that crap removed.
But, generally, that's not how justice or the law were supposed to work in any society. The idea that someone's only recourse if they're wronged is to pay some goons to do right it -- because that's essentially what you advocate there -- is wrong on several levels. Not the least being that basically it means you can be a bully as long as you can make it too expensive for the other guy to repair the damage done. And it's usually cheaper to damage than repair.
But generally, we don't rule that keying cars is ok because you can pay for a new door. We don't rule that throwing a brick through someone's window is ok because they can just pay for a new window. We don't rule that "boosting" someone's TV is ok because they can pay for a replacement TV. And we sure as heck don't rule a libel campaign ok because someone could just pay an agency to buy every copy of that newspaper to keep people from finding it.
I seriously don't see why here the victim should shut up or pay some spammers to cover something that isn't the victim's fault. Surely _if_ some malicious mis-representation has been done (which here doesn't actually seem to be the case), then it shouldn't be expected that the victim _also_ makes a financial loss to fix that.
Though, come to think of it, it would be funny if someone did get a runic inscription that was readable as some crap omen.
I mean, I can see it. "Mr Svensson, if I read your tattoo right, feh is the rune for wealth or cattle, but its being inverted would indicate or foretell a loss of such. To make it worse, the rest of it puts it in the context of a disastrous overseas travel. So... can you explain why should we hire you to program our traveling agency's booking and financial software?" ;)
Oh, most definitely so, but we're talking about stuff someone could actually read, in which case it would be really an alphabet. Though I guess someone COULD theoretically tattoo a divination sequence of runes. But good luck finding anyone who can read that.
Plus, that would open a whole new set of problems. I mean look at all the people with Chinese symbols that don't mean they think they are or are mirrored or even rotated in weird ways, because the artist didn't know any better. Now think an ancient divination sequence that the tattoo parlour guy really doesn't know anything about. You could end up carrying a fortune foretelling of cowardice and horribly bad luck and not know it.
Ouch. Reading through that is pretty much an education. Wish I could mod you up but I already posted in this thread. (Obviously.)
It can get even worse. At least "chop suey $3.99" is clear where is came from.
Funnier stories are those like the guy who got "pig meat" in chinese letters because it was copied off a can of that. But I'd imagine that the latter realization comes after seeing that this guy has "pig meat" written on him. Yeah.
Then there was the guy who thought he got a tattoo saying "wise dog that guards the pack", but it actually meant "dog's ass".
In the same vein of "you're not going to get hooked up with any woman that can read that", one guy got a tattoo which he thought was totally bad ass, until a Japanese girl told him it means "abusive husband". Well, I guess at least it works as a warning.
Conversely one woman got the longer version of that, and it translated to "my abusive husband beats me." It's one of the things that aren't even funny but make one wonder if she got ripped off or it's a cry for help.
Though to be entirely fair, apparently cool kids in Beijing tattoo themselves with nonsensical combinations of English letters too, like "TWARP", "GWIPO", "FRUNK" and get told by unscrupulous tattoo parlor artists that they mean stuff like "old soul with young spirit" in English. (Actual example. If you were wondering what FRUNK means in English, now you know;)) Also apparently both CRYMPH and DLECH mean "beautiful flower dancing in the wind" in American according to one tattoo parlour in Beijing. In case you were wondering ;)
Luckily individual letters are not whole words in the Latin alphabet, so most are just nonsense. But you just have to wonder if there's some brave soul somewhere in China wearing a tattoo that says "I suck cock" and thinks it means "loyalty, courage, honour" ;)
That said, since runes were an alphabetic system, I would assume most of those are equally nonsense combinations. I wouldn't wonder if some guys out there were running around with tattoos that just say "FUTHARK" because someone just copied the first characters of the runic alphabet.
Well, not a proper flame war, but some mocking may have been involved, after about two pages of him refusing to understand that it's digital.
Perhaps I should have also mentioned that this was a hardware forum too, so basically he was the only guy who didn't know that a 1 is a 1 is a 1, and a 0 is a 0 is a 0, or going on about chrome vs iron magnetic coatings and frequency responses. Nobody had to instigate anything as everyone else already knew that the guy is clueless anyway.