Your first paragraph isn't exactly correct. Kael and Vashj swore allegiance to Illidan, then all of them went to Outland with him. I've heard two explanations for why they would be joining the existing factions. One is that this is a group of Blood Elves that is abandoning Illidan, the other is that this is a deliberate ploy by Illidan to infiltrate the two factions; whether this works remains to be seen. It does, however, make sense that the Blood Elves go with the Horde (who can empathize with their wanting to be free of their magic addiction, and because of Sylvanas), and you can argue for why the Draenei would go with the Alliance (basically they hate orcs, because the orcs slaughtered them back in Draenor). At any rate I expect both of these factions to have similar status to the Undead in the current game: namely, they start with "neutral" reputation with all other races in their faction, and all other races start with "neutral" to them (with the exception of Blood Elves and Undead).
Regarding the status of Undead: two things. First, there are two "factions" of undead: the Forsaken and the Scourge. The Scourge are essentially the Undead of Warcraft 3, led by Arthas (now the Lich King after the events of Frozen Throne). The Forsaken are more or less the remains of the kingdom of Lordaeron, who are now undead due to Arthas's actions and are led by Sylvanas, formerly a High Elf Ranger. When Arthas left for Northrend, his power over a number of them faded, so they are now independent of him. This also explains why all of the Forsaken you see are more or less ex-humans. They are, as you'd imagine, none too happy with Arthas over him making them undead, and thus they are against the Scourge.
Why did they join the Horde? From their perspective, it was an alliance of convenience. The Alliance can't tell the difference between the Forsaken and the Scourge. So in that respect they share common enemies. Also, I believe the Tauren think they can "cure" the Forsaken of their undead-ness. And, as mentioned before, none of the Horde races initially trust the Forsaken, so if you start a Horde character you'll notice you start as neutral to the Forsaken, and if you're Forsaken you start as neutral to all other races.
Sketch was incredibly buggy, I'll agree, but it didn't crash my system at least. I just ended up with 1000 dirks, and enough gem boxes and economizers to get 1 MP Ultimas for the rest of the game.
I have, however, frozen my N64 a few times, and Gamecube once (Worms 3D, a terribly buggy but terribly fun game).
The hotfix is that the debuff in question can no longer leave the instance you got it from, which is as good a solution as any (it doesn't help you fight the battle because you'll just get it again, but it prevents this kind of griefing). And in some ways it's better than the solution to the warlock "bomb" thing several months ago, which they fixed by making pets untargetable by the debuff in question, since that meant there was no drawback to using pets against Geddon.
The real problem is that his high school did not prepare him. More likely, it coddle him into thinking that he was one of the top. However, with US grade inflation, he was most like average.
I don't think that's a problem with the high school. I don't care what school you went to, if you go to a sufficiently high tier university you are going to get your ego popped. They might warn you "look, you won't get straight As through natural talent alone", but that doesn't mean you'll listen, or heed the warning. I go to a school with a lot of those people, and a lot of them just can't take getting a B. (A lot of them are premed, incidentally, although there are plenty of engineers like that.)
As for discrete math, if that isn't a weedout course for CS I don't know what would be.
I thought it was just "we don't want Microsoft to sue us". I used MyIE2 around that time (switched to Firefox shortly thereafter, after I couldn't make the Gecko engine thing work) and didn't have any spyware as a result of it.
Of course. And, of course, since a card of this power is now "mid-range" at $450 MSRP, everyone should have one by now.
Wait, you mean you DON'T upgrade your $500 video card every 6 months? You mean you've never spent more than $200 on a video card in your entire life and don't really care to? You're obviously not a gamer, we don't have to cater to you, only to our early-adopter ricer customers who feel inferior if they don't have a $4000 Alienware.
Shrieking "it's not true, it's not true!" doesn't make it not true.
Fact: People sell online currency for real money, the license agreement notwithstanding. Companies deny their currencies have value for the most part because of possible legal liability.
This article simply says that the effective exchange rate fluctuates a lot because of imperfect information exchange.
In starcraft it was common to amass a large number of same units, marines and medics, hydras, zerglings, bcs, or carriers. But in the actual combat, there wasn't much to it, attack ground, throw out a few psi storms, try and hit critical buildings.
You weren't a good Starcraft player, were you? There's more to it than attack-move.
Read that again. Two points are made. First, the door does not open, which is a bug. Second, if you find a way to get through the door (I'm aware of a guild that used the fear effect of Deviate Delights to run a couple people through the door), you're exploiting. (The ostensible reason is that it would at a later date allow you to completely skip the encounter.)
The ratings exist but they are unenforced. Game shops actually have a high motivation to ignore the ratings and make the sales wherever they can. The new legislation (in CA, Japan, etc.) would make it illegal to sell M games to a minor.
There's nothing at all wrong with that, in fact it's a positive step (much like the similar pushes in movies and music in the last 5-10 years). But again, this is something to be done at the level of the RETAILERS.
The problem is the allegation that the video game industry is doing nothing and, in some cases, is entirely responsible for the actions of already screwed-up kids.
So why, God, why are we trying to make it harder for parents to raise their kids? Parental advisories on games won't stop a 20-year-old from buying a game. But it will, at least, slow down the sale of certain games to minors. And if the parents don't have a problem with the game in question, they can still pick it up and let their kid play it. Restricting the sale of cigarettes and booze and porn to minors is not a violation of free speech, and neither is restricting the sale of computer games.
The problem is that THIS ALREADY EXISTS, just the mass media and politicians with an eye on reelection don't seem to care... to say nothing of the retailers who don't have any pressure at all to uphold it. Notice there's a self-fulfilling prophecy in there?
Yes, the ESA rating system is flawed. But GTA, and just about every other scapegoat game that comes out, has a rating of M, which means it is not appropriate for children. Would you take your child to an R rated movie at the age of 11? Of course not. So why would you buy an M rated game for your 11 year old child? Doing so makes you no worse of a parent than the parent who takes their 11 year old to see an R rated movie.
What we need is for the mass media to stop this ridiculous scaremongering and actually explain the rating system to a public which really doesn't get it and will continue to not get it because their only source of information is biased so blatantly toward whatever gives them the best ad revenue.
I don't think anyone here is advocating that an 11 year old should be able to walk into the store and purchase the newest GTA with an M rating. But it's ridiculous that it's entirely Take Two/Rockstar's fault that this happens.
I've heard of people 5 manning up to the Beast (although that'd be a hell of a fight). And one person claimed to have finished the whole thing by mind controlling half the captain pulls off the bridge, although I have a hard time believing they didn't get half of LBRS to come after them.
As a sidenote: the article writer is most definitely a human paladin. I'll get to that in a second.
You can't make every class an even match with every other class. There will always be classes which are built to take out other classes. WoW examples: warriors > rogues, rogues > mages. Although I dislike RPS systems on principle, on some level you end up with that.
I play a priest in WoW. Like most priests, I was shadow until about 57, then changed to a PvE spec. I still PvP. I do fairly well in it, although I don't put out nearly the damage I did as a shadow priest. In return, I have vastly better mana efficiency when I'm healing, which believe it or not is quite a bit, especially in Battlegrounds. My main problem with PvP balance as it currently stands is that I'm always - always - the first one to die, because the idea of tanking doesn't exist in PvP. If I was shadow it'd be the same way, so that's not a solution.
So basically I disagree with parent. The problem is not that PvP and PvE CAN'T coexist, just that Blizzard has added a number of PvP only workarounds. Example: the PvP reward trinket, which turned priest vs. rogue matchups from somewhat interesting to nothing more than a time trial for the rogue. (Unless the rogue is undead, of course, in which case I pity you even more.) Example: all forms of aggro control don't work at all in PvP. Why? "Players don't like losing control." This when the entire point of the rogue class is to do just that.
Also, as a WoW player you should know that as of this patch, there's not a whole lot of difference between PvP and PvE servers...
Let's also take a server and turn it into a world controller and have that controller distribute world processing tasks over a distributed computing network the size of Manhattan, the client computers. Done properly this has many advantages. There are potential pitfalls too, however at the time much of the research, implementation and testing of core systems to make this possible had already been done.
Wait a second... distribute computing over the clients? Oh, wouldn't we all like to be able to do that... unfortunately it's a security nightmare. And if real money is involved in the game, even one money dupe is extremely, extremely bad for you as a company.
Big huge problem with this line of argument: The difference between, say, the set of blues that your average level 60 has, and the PvP reward set (which is going to take a lot more than one victory to attain, and which only a finite number of people on each side can have at one time) is not that great, especially since the latter is mostly stamina. In a 10v10 battle, an extra 500 HP is not going to do you a whole lot of good against a coordinated attack. In a 40v40 battle it's almost negligible.
I'm currently ranked about 900th in my server in PvP. This means there are roughly 900 people who are more active in PvP than I am. Divide that into teams of 40. Repeat for the other side. Now tell me that I'm going to be playing the same team of 40 every time I go into Battlegrounds.
Actually, the baseball analogy is quite nice... sure, there are only 32 teams in MLB, but that doesn't mean one of them always wins over another. And, like this, the winning teams get more money from attendance and merchandising, yet this doesn't keep them winning. (Example: the Yankees.)
Also, you'd be surprised how little the PvP rewards mean when you actually start fighting.
Next you're going to tell me that all online deathmatch-type games (RTS also works here) are pointless because the same person wins every time.
Or, to pre-empt the Guild Wars crowd, the same applies there... once you've beaten the other team once, there's no point in ever doing it again, is there?
Just take a look at the "anonymous email" link. I may be a Nintendo fan, but this is just silly. The person writing the email purports that there are "high standards" for a GameFAQs review (go look at the reviews for any new game... 95% 10/10 with no real comment, 1 hater who gives it a 4/10 with even less comment, and the rest somewhere in between), and seems to miss the point that this is reviewing a game _system_, and thus all the components of the system are in play: games both current and near-future, other abilities, form factor, battery life...
1. In the review, he states that because of the lack of memory available for MP3s, that it doesn't stack up to the iPod as an MP3 player. This seems perfectly obvious to any rational person, and the review doesn't seem to make it a major point of contention, just a point that it's jack of all trades, master of none.
The response: We removed your review because it compared the PSP to an iPod. Quote: "For starters, this is the first and foremost reason why the review was removed."
2. Here's some damaging "false information" for you... The PSP costs $250, not $300. 2GB and 4GB Memory Sticks don't exist yet. And you shouldn't add the cost of additional hardware like Memory Sticks to the cost of the system.
One of those three is a minor point. The second is in the PSP's favor to even mention. The third doesn't even apply to the review.
3. "As a small side note, the mention of slim pickings for movies available is laughable at best. Did people blame the Ps2 when DVDs were a new breed of entertainment? No, they blame the movie studios and DVD release corporations."
Okay, so the lack of games argument is now moot on every system ever made, because it's the publishers' fault for not putting the game out for the new medium. Wanna bet that they aren't enforcing this on other systems?
I'm not even going to bother with the rest. There's a repeated implication that there is a bar of quality that must be met to get a review posted on GameFAQs. I can say unequivocally that this implication is false. Here's an example. Now I want you to look at those reviews and tell me that every single one of them justified the score they gave.
I have a hard time calling a game that, despite its server stability problems which continue 4 months after release, is still beating the tar out of everything except Lineage in subscriber numbers a "neverending disappointment".
Well, I think that instancing hasn't gone far enough yet. In WOW, you can still somtimes come into a monster's lair only to find another group already waiting for it to spawn, so instancing isn't universal.
I'll tell you a story from my WoW play as a counterargument. A week or so ago, I was doing a quest which required a group to go through a densely packed area of elite (balanced for groups) mobs to find an Ancient Egg. My group worked its way through the area, which wasn't instanced, and finally reached the final objective. As we turned to leave, we saw a single human rogue run from behind us to get the egg as well. Turns out he'd found another way to accomplish the quest, even though he was not grouped, he was too low to sneak past everything, and he certainly couldn't fight his way there: he simply followed our path of destruction and finished the quest. No exploits, no bugs, just a clever way to avoid trying to find a group.
If that area were instanced (which would be easily possible, although currently instancing in WoW is not transparent because the instances are on a separate server), it would not be possible to do what he did. Is this something we want, to make everyone do things in a conventional manner? I think the imaginative solution is worth something as well.
I predict that future MMORPGs will take instancing even further, so that the entire world will seem instanced as soon as you step out of the homebase city, with the only other visible players being those in your party.
This game is called Guild Wars.
The problem with this model is that the whole point of a MMOG is that you can and will run into other people; sometimes you'll work together, sometimes you won't, and sometimes the other player is an enemy and you'll decide your best option is to fight it out. (Also, the reason I told the story above is that it, too, couldn't happen if the area were instanced.) Making the entire world instanced means that none of these things can happen outside of towns. The effect is that you're proving the grandparent's point anyway, because the more you instance the more you make the MMOG like, say, Diablo II.
Honestly, finding a party is one of the most boring parts of a MMOG. Will you be able to find the specific set of classes you need to make a balanced party? Will you be able to find X number of people who want to go to the same place you do? You wait 2 hours for a party, so that you can spend 3 hours together, and this is fun? Honestly I would think that there are other ways of having players interact without reducing the game to single-party zones.
If we accept this logic, then we must also accept the conclusion that minors should not be exposed to influences that might cause them to go "over the edge".
Then make movie makers liable for making Action Movie #23,436 which glorifies violence and those who perpetrate it, whether police or not.
Then make the newsmedia liable for sensationalist coverage which gives more attention to those who perpetrate violence than those who do good.
Then make musical artists responsible for lyrics which glorify violence, misogyny, and any number of other things.
This is not consistent logic. This is targeting an industry because no one understands it and no one sticks up for it, least of all the parents who buy the games.
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Your first paragraph isn't exactly correct. Kael and Vashj swore allegiance to Illidan, then all of them went to Outland with him. I've heard two explanations for why they would be joining the existing factions. One is that this is a group of Blood Elves that is abandoning Illidan, the other is that this is a deliberate ploy by Illidan to infiltrate the two factions; whether this works remains to be seen. It does, however, make sense that the Blood Elves go with the Horde (who can empathize with their wanting to be free of their magic addiction, and because of Sylvanas), and you can argue for why the Draenei would go with the Alliance (basically they hate orcs, because the orcs slaughtered them back in Draenor). At any rate I expect both of these factions to have similar status to the Undead in the current game: namely, they start with "neutral" reputation with all other races in their faction, and all other races start with "neutral" to them (with the exception of Blood Elves and Undead).
Regarding the status of Undead: two things. First, there are two "factions" of undead: the Forsaken and the Scourge. The Scourge are essentially the Undead of Warcraft 3, led by Arthas (now the Lich King after the events of Frozen Throne). The Forsaken are more or less the remains of the kingdom of Lordaeron, who are now undead due to Arthas's actions and are led by Sylvanas, formerly a High Elf Ranger. When Arthas left for Northrend, his power over a number of them faded, so they are now independent of him. This also explains why all of the Forsaken you see are more or less ex-humans. They are, as you'd imagine, none too happy with Arthas over him making them undead, and thus they are against the Scourge.
Why did they join the Horde? From their perspective, it was an alliance of convenience. The Alliance can't tell the difference between the Forsaken and the Scourge. So in that respect they share common enemies. Also, I believe the Tauren think they can "cure" the Forsaken of their undead-ness. And, as mentioned before, none of the Horde races initially trust the Forsaken, so if you start a Horde character you'll notice you start as neutral to the Forsaken, and if you're Forsaken you start as neutral to all other races.
Sketch was incredibly buggy, I'll agree, but it didn't crash my system at least. I just ended up with 1000 dirks, and enough gem boxes and economizers to get 1 MP Ultimas for the rest of the game.
I have, however, frozen my N64 a few times, and Gamecube once (Worms 3D, a terribly buggy but terribly fun game).
The hotfix is that the debuff in question can no longer leave the instance you got it from, which is as good a solution as any (it doesn't help you fight the battle because you'll just get it again, but it prevents this kind of griefing). And in some ways it's better than the solution to the warlock "bomb" thing several months ago, which they fixed by making pets untargetable by the debuff in question, since that meant there was no drawback to using pets against Geddon.
As for discrete math, if that isn't a weedout course for CS I don't know what would be.
I thought it was just "we don't want Microsoft to sue us". I used MyIE2 around that time (switched to Firefox shortly thereafter, after I couldn't make the Gecko engine thing work) and didn't have any spyware as a result of it.
Of course. And, of course, since a card of this power is now "mid-range" at $450 MSRP, everyone should have one by now.
Wait, you mean you DON'T upgrade your $500 video card every 6 months? You mean you've never spent more than $200 on a video card in your entire life and don't really care to? You're obviously not a gamer, we don't have to cater to you, only to our early-adopter ricer customers who feel inferior if they don't have a $4000 Alienware.
Shrieking "it's not true, it's not true!" doesn't make it not true.
Fact: People sell online currency for real money, the license agreement notwithstanding. Companies deny their currencies have value for the most part because of possible legal liability.
This article simply says that the effective exchange rate fluctuates a lot because of imperfect information exchange.
Read that again. Two points are made. First, the door does not open, which is a bug. Second, if you find a way to get through the door (I'm aware of a guild that used the fear effect of Deviate Delights to run a couple people through the door), you're exploiting. (The ostensible reason is that it would at a later date allow you to completely skip the encounter.)
The problem is the allegation that the video game industry is doing nothing and, in some cases, is entirely responsible for the actions of already screwed-up kids.
Yes, the ESA rating system is flawed. But GTA, and just about every other scapegoat game that comes out, has a rating of M, which means it is not appropriate for children. Would you take your child to an R rated movie at the age of 11? Of course not. So why would you buy an M rated game for your 11 year old child? Doing so makes you no worse of a parent than the parent who takes their 11 year old to see an R rated movie.
What we need is for the mass media to stop this ridiculous scaremongering and actually explain the rating system to a public which really doesn't get it and will continue to not get it because their only source of information is biased so blatantly toward whatever gives them the best ad revenue.
I don't think anyone here is advocating that an 11 year old should be able to walk into the store and purchase the newest GTA with an M rating. But it's ridiculous that it's entirely Take Two/Rockstar's fault that this happens.
5) You do NOT break the eggs in the Rookery.
And yes, I have my Devout Shoulders, after doing this event about 10 times.
I just wanted to point this out as one of the least substantiated posts I've seen in awhile.
Why are we squashing this, exactly? Certainly a closed economy might be more enjoyable, but is it the only way?
I've heard of people 5 manning up to the Beast (although that'd be a hell of a fight). And one person claimed to have finished the whole thing by mind controlling half the captain pulls off the bridge, although I have a hard time believing they didn't get half of LBRS to come after them.
As a sidenote: the article writer is most definitely a human paladin. I'll get to that in a second.
You can't make every class an even match with every other class. There will always be classes which are built to take out other classes. WoW examples: warriors > rogues, rogues > mages. Although I dislike RPS systems on principle, on some level you end up with that.
I play a priest in WoW. Like most priests, I was shadow until about 57, then changed to a PvE spec. I still PvP. I do fairly well in it, although I don't put out nearly the damage I did as a shadow priest. In return, I have vastly better mana efficiency when I'm healing, which believe it or not is quite a bit, especially in Battlegrounds. My main problem with PvP balance as it currently stands is that I'm always - always - the first one to die, because the idea of tanking doesn't exist in PvP. If I was shadow it'd be the same way, so that's not a solution.
So basically I disagree with parent. The problem is not that PvP and PvE CAN'T coexist, just that Blizzard has added a number of PvP only workarounds. Example: the PvP reward trinket, which turned priest vs. rogue matchups from somewhat interesting to nothing more than a time trial for the rogue. (Unless the rogue is undead, of course, in which case I pity you even more.) Example: all forms of aggro control don't work at all in PvP. Why? "Players don't like losing control." This when the entire point of the rogue class is to do just that.
Also, as a WoW player you should know that as of this patch, there's not a whole lot of difference between PvP and PvE servers...
Wait a second... distribute computing over the clients? Oh, wouldn't we all like to be able to do that... unfortunately it's a security nightmare. And if real money is involved in the game, even one money dupe is extremely, extremely bad for you as a company.
Big huge problem with this line of argument: The difference between, say, the set of blues that your average level 60 has, and the PvP reward set (which is going to take a lot more than one victory to attain, and which only a finite number of people on each side can have at one time) is not that great, especially since the latter is mostly stamina. In a 10v10 battle, an extra 500 HP is not going to do you a whole lot of good against a coordinated attack. In a 40v40 battle it's almost negligible.
I'm currently ranked about 900th in my server in PvP. This means there are roughly 900 people who are more active in PvP than I am. Divide that into teams of 40. Repeat for the other side. Now tell me that I'm going to be playing the same team of 40 every time I go into Battlegrounds.
Actually, the baseball analogy is quite nice... sure, there are only 32 teams in MLB, but that doesn't mean one of them always wins over another. And, like this, the winning teams get more money from attendance and merchandising, yet this doesn't keep them winning. (Example: the Yankees.)
Also, you'd be surprised how little the PvP rewards mean when you actually start fighting.
Next you're going to tell me that all online deathmatch-type games (RTS also works here) are pointless because the same person wins every time.
Or, to pre-empt the Guild Wars crowd, the same applies there... once you've beaten the other team once, there's no point in ever doing it again, is there?
Or should I make the sarcasm heavier for you?
Actually, yes they do. Ever LOOKED at a game review page on GameFAQs?
Just take a look at the "anonymous email" link. I may be a Nintendo fan, but this is just silly. The person writing the email purports that there are "high standards" for a GameFAQs review (go look at the reviews for any new game... 95% 10/10 with no real comment, 1 hater who gives it a 4/10 with even less comment, and the rest somewhere in between), and seems to miss the point that this is reviewing a game _system_, and thus all the components of the system are in play: games both current and near-future, other abilities, form factor, battery life...
1. In the review, he states that because of the lack of memory available for MP3s, that it doesn't stack up to the iPod as an MP3 player. This seems perfectly obvious to any rational person, and the review doesn't seem to make it a major point of contention, just a point that it's jack of all trades, master of none.
The response: We removed your review because it compared the PSP to an iPod. Quote: "For starters, this is the first and foremost reason why the review was removed."
2. Here's some damaging "false information" for you... The PSP costs $250, not $300. 2GB and 4GB Memory Sticks don't exist yet. And you shouldn't add the cost of additional hardware like Memory Sticks to the cost of the system.
One of those three is a minor point. The second is in the PSP's favor to even mention. The third doesn't even apply to the review.
3. "As a small side note, the mention of slim pickings for movies available is laughable at best. Did people blame the Ps2 when DVDs were a new breed of entertainment? No, they blame the movie studios and DVD release corporations."
Okay, so the lack of games argument is now moot on every system ever made, because it's the publishers' fault for not putting the game out for the new medium. Wanna bet that they aren't enforcing this on other systems?
I'm not even going to bother with the rest. There's a repeated implication that there is a bar of quality that must be met to get a review posted on GameFAQs. I can say unequivocally that this implication is false. Here's an example. Now I want you to look at those reviews and tell me that every single one of them justified the score they gave.
Hm. You start to wonder if perhaps Blizzard is doing this to poke fun at the /pizza thing. But no, that would be too logical.
I have a hard time calling a game that, despite its server stability problems which continue 4 months after release, is still beating the tar out of everything except Lineage in subscriber numbers a "neverending disappointment".
If that area were instanced (which would be easily possible, although currently instancing in WoW is not transparent because the instances are on a separate server), it would not be possible to do what he did. Is this something we want, to make everyone do things in a conventional manner? I think the imaginative solution is worth something as well.
This game is called Guild Wars.
The problem with this model is that the whole point of a MMOG is that you can and will run into other people; sometimes you'll work together, sometimes you won't, and sometimes the other player is an enemy and you'll decide your best option is to fight it out. (Also, the reason I told the story above is that it, too, couldn't happen if the area were instanced.) Making the entire world instanced means that none of these things can happen outside of towns. The effect is that you're proving the grandparent's point anyway, because the more you instance the more you make the MMOG like, say, Diablo II.
Honestly, finding a party is one of the most boring parts of a MMOG. Will you be able to find the specific set of classes you need to make a balanced party? Will you be able to find X number of people who want to go to the same place you do? You wait 2 hours for a party, so that you can spend 3 hours together, and this is fun? Honestly I would think that there are other ways of having players interact without reducing the game to single-party zones.
Then make movie makers liable for making Action Movie #23,436 which glorifies violence and those who perpetrate it, whether police or not.
Then make the newsmedia liable for sensationalist coverage which gives more attention to those who perpetrate violence than those who do good.
Then make musical artists responsible for lyrics which glorify violence, misogyny, and any number of other things.
This is not consistent logic. This is targeting an industry because no one understands it and no one sticks up for it, least of all the parents who buy the games.