I make sure I have some for any long car trip or plane flight.
In some strange joke, as a sufferer of sever motion sickness all my life, I was raised on one of the great scenic coastal drives in Australia. I used to get motion sick going to school everyday. I am expert at targetted vomiting, either through car windows or into the gutter from a moving car...
I don't personally ow anyone who has bought gold, and I know people who have thousands of in game gold in WoW who are not "farmers", they are hard-core raiders with too much time on their hands once they've been locked out for another week because we've already cleared MC, BWL and you can only handle dying in AQ40 for some many hours at a hit.
We haven't bought another game since installing WoW, we used to buy a new console game about once a month on average. In fact, I don't think the GameCube has even been switched on in 9 months - as opposed to daily pre-WoW (Animal Crossing encourages daily care and feeding).
For some reason, "don't like raiding" seems to equate to "casual" on the general forums. Anyone who complains that they play 20+ hours per week and still don't have any of the 'free epix' you get from raiding, isn't really casual in my books, but they seem to have adopted this label.
As someone who doesn't work in the computer games industry, but knows several poeple who do, and has been paid to design non-computer games, I think the take home message is that there are a number of roles in the game industry - game design as a role is not well catered to by games developer courses.
Why are people surprised by that? There are a number of roles in the building industry - an engineering degree will teach you how to design a structure which will stay up, or an air flow system, or the electricals, or water - it won't teach you how to design spaces that draw people to them. You do a degree in architecture or interior design to cover that skill set. And there are still the guys who actually build the structure.
No I didn't read the article, so I don't know if this is the only 'lesson' they cite.
This is the casual vs. raiders argument, as found all over the Blizzard general forum.
You could equally say that the lessons I learned from WoW were:
big rewards come from teamwork and cooperation
time management and commitment are important in achieveing your goals
you can't please all the people all the time
People, especially 'casual' gamers like to bandy around the idea that they should get rewards based purely on the amount of time they spend in game. They also suggest that no skill is required to raid successfully - any monkey could do it given a strategy guide.
I was talking to a group of players on the weekend who have exisiting L60 characters who were talking about how easy levelling their second (or 3rd, etc...) characters were, even on different servers where twinking was not possible. A large part of this was the skill they now had in knowing how to fight various mobs, no longer fearing dying, understanding the impact of being on low health, mana management tactics, etc...
I've also been in pick up raid groups where the raid leader was experienced and knew the instance well, but people weren't following instructions and it was an absolute mess.
There is plenty of skill to be displayed in WoW, they're just not the skills you think they are - it's risk assessment, team work/leadership, ability to adapt to a changing situation, resource maanagement. It's not being able to hit a particular sequence of keys in a inhumanly timely manner, or to aim a mouse/cursor with incredible precision.
Actually, the biggest problem I had with WindWaker was with the PAL conversion for the Australia release messed up the timer for some of the 'race' events. This problem isn't specific to WindWaker though, it is common to many NTSC->PAL converted games where there is a small speed up in the internal timer on the game, making it nearly impossible to complete 'against the clock' events. One day I'll beat that bloody penguin in Mario 64. And let's not mention Sphinx and the obstacle course there, where an absolutely flawless performance was required to beat the first race, let alone any of the later ones.
This issues has been widely discussed on Australian game forums, and is not merely an example of incompetence on my behalf. Failing all the jumping games, now THAT is an example of personal incompetence.
The reason they don't want them scanned is the paper is fragile, exposure to light or being handled is likely to accellerate the decay.
They are trying to preserve the record so it is available to be viewed by generations of people at a later date. 'Covert scanning' as you propose is a form of vandalism and exactly the type of attitude that causes these sort of items to be placed in closed collections.
Paperless office - hrmmm, that old myth. We use more paper since the advent of computers than we did previously. A significant use of which is printing out email.
While I work for a business which provides digital archiving solutions, personally I still request bills and bank statements in hardcopy.
Hardcopy can provide a trigger to pay the bill, I can write a recipt number on it, file it for referring to later, fax it to someone should there be a dispute. Digital files tend to either be untrusted (too easy to edit) or overly large (image file).
Paper lasts. Until we have truely universal file systems which are platform indepenant and stable long term storage media, paper is a highly stable and efficient method of storing critical information. Digital is a fabulous way to distribute information, not so good for retining it for perpetuity.
On the topic of scanners - when it comes to scanning, I want the largest possible scan area I can get my hands on - I routinely use an A3 scanner - rather than have to patchwork an image together, having to ensure I got the whole image in the first place, the colour levels are the same, the image is aligned correctly, etc...
The OFLC has their head up their [censored] in more ways than this. They have attempted to apply their ruling of outright banning sexual violence as it is applied to film to video games, without the capacity to fully test the content. The wording on their guidelines for film content is that *any reasonable adult* should be able to view whatever they wish. However their definition of a *reasonable adult* appears to be a methodist eunuch with no urges of any kind.
Someone recently referred to raid healing in WoW as "health-bar whack-a-mole". You spend several hours staring intently at one small section of your screen, clicking a mouse button in response to changing colours. and they wonder why healers go a little crazy with the DPS occasionally.
One of the companies I worked at as a service technician used to regularly do work for local TV 'celebrities'. Some of them were fine to work for, but many of them had utterly inflated opinions of their importance and/or abilities.
There as one particular radio 'star' whom we used to palm off on the apprentices because she was so annoying and overbearing to deal with. There was one 'leading man', whose powerbook kept coming back because he would delete stuff seemingly at random. The service recptioninst would swoon eveytime he came in, I would hide out back and hope no one would find me so I wouldn't have to fix his POS again.
And when I was a kid, we jumped out of trees pretending to be super-heros from the saturday morning cartoons. It doesn't make cartoons eveil, it makes us kids. Lack of judgement is the reason why there is an age of consent and restriction on when you can legally get a drivers licence or buy alcohol or watch 'mature rated' movies.
Today's quote seems particularly appropriate.
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. -- Clive James
Oddly enough, I'm just back from a 4 day games convention (Arcanacon in Melbourne, Australia) and I was commenting on the increase in female gamers this year. The overall ratio was probably 60% male 40% female. I remember when I started attending conventions over 10 years ago, the ration was closer to 90% male, 10% female.
I also remember scaring the heck out of a group of tenage boys when I ended up in a scratch team of Macho Women with Guns, I think it was the first time they had gamed with a girl from the way they were reacting.
Re:Obesity comes from a simple condition...
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 1
I doubt this a great deal. How many people who work out extensively and eat healthy are obese? I suspect very few.
The period in my life where I had the greatest weight/mass/size gain in the shortest period of time was at a period where I was doing 5 aerobics classes per week and running to and from the gym and catching public transport and eating a mostly vegetarian diet.
At a BMI around 32 currently, I still do aerobics a minimum of once per week - less time now that I work full time and commute to work rather than being a university student - and at a recent work mandated health check up got a clean bill of health on all categories regarding bloodwork, heart rate, blodd pressure (I tend towards low blood pressure), etc...
Ummm.... UBRS is 15 man - not 20. But I would agree that ZG is harder than MC, easier than BWL. IT's a good training instance for smaller guilds while they are building up for MC.
I don't have kids yet, but have made a point of collecting the EH Shepard illustrated versions of the AA Milne classics so that when I do they can xperience them in their oringial form. I even have a 1940's print of "When we were very young" that was my mother's.
I would say perhaps that at L60 the game changes significantly from a largely solo leveling experience to a team based faction rating/equipment gathering experince.
Some people enjoy the questing of L1-L60, some people enjoy the teamwork required to effectively raid. Some enjoy both.
Meanwhile, the continued success and acclaim of Eve Online goes unreported on Slashdot, despite yesterday having won 4 of 7 of MMORPG.com's top awards, including Best Graphics (which really are several notches above the competition), Best Company (2 *free*, major content expansions last year, and another one forthcoming), Best PvP (how many other games actually give you butterflies in the stomach from *traveling*?), and the big one, Favourite Game.
Out of curiosity, how many people play Eve Online. Compare with how many people play WoW - 5 million registered accounts worldwide from memory. What was the criteria for favourite game and is it truely representative?
It's not the number of frames in MC that's important (though the imps used to crash out my PowerBook), it's the framerate at Vael that's the best benchmark....
Slashdot Mirror
Open Eyes
Get out of Bed
Get Robe
Put on Robe
Look in pocket
Eat analgesic
Get toothbrush
Barley Sugar
I make sure I have some for any long car trip or plane flight.
In some strange joke, as a sufferer of sever motion sickness all my life, I was raised on one of the great scenic coastal drives in Australia. I used to get motion sick going to school everyday. I am expert at targetted vomiting, either through car windows or into the gutter from a moving car...
I don't personally ow anyone who has bought gold, and I know people who have thousands of in game gold in WoW who are not "farmers", they are hard-core raiders with too much time on their hands once they've been locked out for another week because we've already cleared MC, BWL and you can only handle dying in AQ40 for some many hours at a hit.
Surely this is the Big Red X...
Am I ever going to see your face again? No way, get.... oh, it's the radio version...
We haven't bought another game since installing WoW, we used to buy a new console game about once a month on average. In fact, I don't think the GameCube has even been switched on in 9 months - as opposed to daily pre-WoW (Animal Crossing encourages daily care and feeding).
For some reason, "don't like raiding" seems to equate to "casual" on the general forums. Anyone who complains that they play 20+ hours per week and still don't have any of the 'free epix' you get from raiding, isn't really casual in my books, but they seem to have adopted this label.
As someone who doesn't work in the computer games industry, but knows several poeple who do, and has been paid to design non-computer games, I think the take home message is that there are a number of roles in the game industry - game design as a role is not well catered to by games developer courses.
Why are people surprised by that? There are a number of roles in the building industry - an engineering degree will teach you how to design a structure which will stay up, or an air flow system, or the electricals, or water - it won't teach you how to design spaces that draw people to them. You do a degree in architecture or interior design to cover that skill set. And there are still the guys who actually build the structure.
No I didn't read the article, so I don't know if this is the only 'lesson' they cite.
This is the casual vs. raiders argument, as found all over the Blizzard general forum.
You could equally say that the lessons I learned from WoW were:
People, especially 'casual' gamers like to bandy around the idea that they should get rewards based purely on the amount of time they spend in game. They also suggest that no skill is required to raid successfully - any monkey could do it given a strategy guide.
I was talking to a group of players on the weekend who have exisiting L60 characters who were talking about how easy levelling their second (or 3rd, etc...) characters were, even on different servers where twinking was not possible. A large part of this was the skill they now had in knowing how to fight various mobs, no longer fearing dying, understanding the impact of being on low health, mana management tactics, etc...
I've also been in pick up raid groups where the raid leader was experienced and knew the instance well, but people weren't following instructions and it was an absolute mess.
There is plenty of skill to be displayed in WoW, they're just not the skills you think they are - it's risk assessment, team work/leadership, ability to adapt to a changing situation, resource maanagement. It's not being able to hit a particular sequence of keys in a inhumanly timely manner, or to aim a mouse/cursor with incredible precision.
Actually, the biggest problem I had with WindWaker was with the PAL conversion for the Australia release messed up the timer for some of the 'race' events. This problem isn't specific to WindWaker though, it is common to many NTSC->PAL converted games where there is a small speed up in the internal timer on the game, making it nearly impossible to complete 'against the clock' events. One day I'll beat that bloody penguin in Mario 64. And let's not mention Sphinx and the obstacle course there, where an absolutely flawless performance was required to beat the first race, let alone any of the later ones.
This issues has been widely discussed on Australian game forums, and is not merely an example of incompetence on my behalf. Failing all the jumping games, now THAT is an example of personal incompetence.
The reason they don't want them scanned is the paper is fragile, exposure to light or being handled is likely to accellerate the decay.
They are trying to preserve the record so it is available to be viewed by generations of people at a later date. 'Covert scanning' as you propose is a form of vandalism and exactly the type of attitude that causes these sort of items to be placed in closed collections.
Paperless office - hrmmm, that old myth. We use more paper since the advent of computers than we did previously. A significant use of which is printing out email.
While I work for a business which provides digital archiving solutions, personally I still request bills and bank statements in hardcopy.
Hardcopy can provide a trigger to pay the bill, I can write a recipt number on it, file it for referring to later, fax it to someone should there be a dispute. Digital files tend to either be untrusted (too easy to edit) or overly large (image file).
Paper lasts. Until we have truely universal file systems which are platform indepenant and stable long term storage media, paper is a highly stable and efficient method of storing critical information. Digital is a fabulous way to distribute information, not so good for retining it for perpetuity.
On the topic of scanners - when it comes to scanning, I want the largest possible scan area I can get my hands on - I routinely use an A3 scanner - rather than have to patchwork an image together, having to ensure I got the whole image in the first place, the colour levels are the same, the image is aligned correctly, etc...
The OFLC has their head up their [censored] in more ways than this. They have attempted to apply their ruling of outright banning sexual violence as it is applied to film to video games, without the capacity to fully test the content. The wording on their guidelines for film content is that *any reasonable adult* should be able to view whatever they wish. However their definition of a *reasonable adult* appears to be a methodist eunuch with no urges of any kind.
Someone recently referred to raid healing in WoW as "health-bar whack-a-mole". You spend several hours staring intently at one small section of your screen, clicking a mouse button in response to changing colours. and they wonder why healers go a little crazy with the DPS occasionally.
Ummm... Melbourne is in Victoria. Canberra is in ACT (Australian Capital Territory).
One of the companies I worked at as a service technician used to regularly do work for local TV 'celebrities'. Some of them were fine to work for, but many of them had utterly inflated opinions of their importance and/or abilities.
There as one particular radio 'star' whom we used to palm off on the apprentices because she was so annoying and overbearing to deal with. There was one 'leading man', whose powerbook kept coming back because he would delete stuff seemingly at random. The service recptioninst would swoon eveytime he came in, I would hide out back and hope no one would find me so I wouldn't have to fix his POS again.
The current "rare" item category is "Legendary", these have their name in orange text. How many have you seen?
Disclaimer: our guild have 3 - but that's also rare.
And when I was a kid, we jumped out of trees pretending to be super-heros from the saturday morning cartoons. It doesn't make cartoons eveil, it makes us kids. Lack of judgement is the reason why there is an age of consent and restriction on when you can legally get a drivers licence or buy alcohol or watch 'mature rated' movies.
Today's quote seems particularly appropriate.
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. -- Clive James
Oddly enough, I'm just back from a 4 day games convention (Arcanacon in Melbourne, Australia) and I was commenting on the increase in female gamers this year. The overall ratio was probably 60% male 40% female. I remember when I started attending conventions over 10 years ago, the ration was closer to 90% male, 10% female.
I also remember scaring the heck out of a group of tenage boys when I ended up in a scratch team of Macho Women with Guns, I think it was the first time they had gamed with a girl from the way they were reacting.
I doubt this a great deal. How many people who work out extensively and eat healthy are obese? I suspect very few.
The period in my life where I had the greatest weight/mass/size gain in the shortest period of time was at a period where I was doing 5 aerobics classes per week and running to and from the gym and catching public transport and eating a mostly vegetarian diet.
At a BMI around 32 currently, I still do aerobics a minimum of once per week - less time now that I work full time and commute to work rather than being a university student - and at a recent work mandated health check up got a clean bill of health on all categories regarding bloodwork, heart rate, blodd pressure (I tend towards low blood pressure), etc...
Fit and Fat IS possible.
Ummm.... UBRS is 15 man - not 20. But I would agree that ZG is harder than MC, easier than BWL. IT's a good training instance for smaller guilds while they are building up for MC.
I don't have kids yet, but have made a point of collecting the EH Shepard illustrated versions of the AA Milne classics so that when I do they can xperience them in their oringial form. I even have a 1940's print of "When we were very young" that was my mother's.
I would say perhaps that at L60 the game changes significantly from a largely solo leveling experience to a team based faction rating/equipment gathering experince.
Some people enjoy the questing of L1-L60, some people enjoy the teamwork required to effectively raid. Some enjoy both.
Meanwhile, the continued success and acclaim of Eve Online goes unreported on Slashdot, despite yesterday having won 4 of 7 of MMORPG.com's top awards, including Best Graphics (which really are several notches above the competition), Best Company (2 *free*, major content expansions last year, and another one forthcoming), Best PvP (how many other games actually give you butterflies in the stomach from *traveling*?), and the big one, Favourite Game.
Out of curiosity, how many people play Eve Online. Compare with how many people play WoW - 5 million registered accounts worldwide from memory. What was the criteria for favourite game and is it truely representative?
It's not the number of frames in MC that's important (though the imps used to crash out my PowerBook), it's the framerate at Vael that's the best benchmark....