1) How will the system handle cases where an idea is stolen from an employee by a corporation or by another party?
You probably don't have to worry about a corporation "stealing" an idea from an employee. Most corporations explicitly claim that any work you do and any IP you create is the property of the corporation. If you tried to patent it yourself, you would actually be "stealing" from the corporation!
Yes exactly. It can't be as biased in favor of the horde as people say if such a high ratio of people still prefer Alliance. People would switch if the advantages were stacked that heavily with the Horde.
The problem with this argument is that people have already spent a great deal of time on their characters before they begin playing BG (or in many cases before BG was even released). Initially, more people played as the Alliance because people tend to choose the "Good" races over the "evil" ones (take a look at SWG or EQ for another example of this). Now that a person has their level 60 alliance character, they are just going to throw that one away to start playing as Horde because they have the advantage? I find that rather hard to believe. I know many players who have started Horde characters on other realms, but it really is starting from scratch. If you play on a PvP server, you can't even create a horde character on the same server as your alliance character. And if you don't play on a PvP server, you can't (easily) give resources from your one character to your other.
In the child of the sister of this post (I guess that would be the niece?) I've discuessed why the Horde tends to be more organized than the Alliance. However, it is not just strategy that makes BG so unbalanced. The difference comes due to the class makeup of the teams. In general, the two best classes for BG are druids and shamans. Almost no one plays druids (because they're not that great at PvE or straight-up PvP), and only Horde can have shamans. The reason why druids and shamans are the best is because they are good flag capturers, able to increase their speed through travel form or ghost wolf form. In my BG experiences, we're lucky if we have a druid on the Alliance side, while the Horde usually have at least 5 shamans. Shamans also are doubly effective because they can slow down EVERYONE through totems, and they can also heal.
I don't know how many times I've played BG without a single healer on our team, and often if we do have a healer, it's a Palladin. Since the vast majority of Alliance are Mages and Rogues, the makeup of our group is usually something like 3 mages, 3 rogues, 2 hunters, a warrior, and a warlock (I'm the warlock). This is a terrible group for BG, but it often is what we're stuck with. As a result, I'd say we win 1/20 BG games we play. The only success I've heard for Alliance on our server has been one guild, Kaizen, who pretty much exclusively play with each other and usually have the right makeups for their groups.
Granted, good strategy on the Alliance can defeat an unorganized Horde team, but even a halfway-decent Horde team will defeat even the best Alliance teams.
My guild has noticed that the Horde tend to be much more organized players as well. Anyone have any idea why this phenomenon exists?
On my server (Boulderfist) I actually think the ratio of alliance to horde is fairly even. However, I have noticed that the Horde tend to be much better organized as well. I believe it has to do with two things:
1) The Horde has an advantage to begin with since Shamans are very useful in BG (they have both things to slow down opponents and speed up themselves, and speed is key in BG), and Pallys (lacking any sort of speed-up or slow-down aside from a few-second stun every minute if you're lucky enough to get in melee range) are fairly useless except as a support class. This causes many Alliance team members to not worry about winning the match, and instead just try to rack up as many HK's as possible.
2) People who are just starting the game tend to flock toward the "good" side as opposed to the "evil" side (see SWG as another example). The more hard-core people are the ones who usually end up playing the "evil" side, which in this case is the Horde. Therefore, you have a lot of bad players on the Alliance, while the average quality of players on Horde is slightly higher. Lastly, with a smaller population people are more likely to play with the same people over and over again, which will result in a stronger team play. For instance, almost every time I have played in BG, it's often been against the same group of Horde (especially Keita, who ALWAYS manages to capture the flag, often flying solo).
Re:I liked this game better when it was called...
on
Rate Your IM Popularity
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Except that with BuddyZoo, you had to upload your buddy list to the site, so it could only calculate based on the data that users voluntarily uploaded. This site, on the other hand, was done by AOL and therefore has access to ALL buddy lists!
An interesting note on BuddyZoo and degrees of separation -- it was created by one of the creators of Synapse, the other co-creator being the creator of thefacebook.com, with whom I worked on a small project several years ago.
They WONT cancel becuase a freaking window FELL OFF of the shuttle (because it was TAPED on incorrectly...)
It was a window cover, which is placed to protect the windows while the shuttle is sitting on the pad. The cover is removed before liftoff...nature just decided to remove it a little early.
I guess I'll just stick to writing some social network things until it finally happens for me.
I know the creator of thefacebook.com, and he was getting girls long before thefacebook. While something like that might marginally help, if you have 0 social skills it won't make any difference.
The last set of points are rather far-fetched IMHO. Especially the compiler one.
I believe AMD's claim is that the compiler specifically won't use advanced instruction sets (such as SSE2) if the processor isn't a genuine Intel processor, even if the processor supports such instruction sets.
So it's not that the compiler is optimized for Intel (which is fine), it's that it's specifically de-optimized for non-Intel chips for no good reason other than to artificially bloat Intel's numbers.
CounterStrike's bots show up as actual players in the browser. What's up with that?? It's kind of frustrating to join servers to discover you are the only "real" player.
Yeah, but the player party doesn't have to "follow the aggro", so why should monsters?
Because most people wouldn't want to play a game where they died 50% of the time or more. If you took your average group of players through an instance, and the monsters always targetted the healers first and then the mages/warlocks, all the instances would be nearly unbeatable by similar-leveled characters.
The game and the dungeons were designed to be challenging to a well-balanced group that handled aggro well. I'd say 90% of our wipes in the instances I've played have been because our soft targets got the aggro, and the other 10% are when we pulled too many monsters at a time. If the monsters automatically targetted the healers first, the entire game would have to be rebalanced to make it possible to make it through a dungeon.
Are there some other reasons this would be problematic?
You also have the whole issue of aggro control then. A great deal of a group's success in an instance is making sure the monsters are hitting the tank(s). If a player is controlling a monster, how are you going to force them to follow the aggro? And if you do force them to follow aggro, that really takes a lot of the fun out of playing the monster.
Besides, I'm not really sure what fun you'd have playing as a monster against other real people when you could play as yourself in PvP.
I have always wondered if Blizzard would get smart and have a couple of dungeon instances where players could _volunteer_ to control monsters.
I seem to recall that EQ did this a very long time ago, and it lasted all of about 1 day until they took it out again because of all the exploits that it opens up. What's to prevent someone from purposely sucking as a monster to allow someone else to get more xp faster? I agree -- it would be a lot of fun to control the monsters in a dungeon -- but it would be too hard to implement without causing tons of problems.
Warlocks, along with having to deal with Will of the Forsaken going through their only decent crowd control spell (fear) also have to put up with farming soul shards to PvP.
My main character is a warlock on a PvP server, and I haven't had much trouble in solo PvP, and in group PvP, I can often be output the most damage (due to putting DOT's on multiple characters). The undead often beat me straight up since I can't fear, but if I can get surprise someone, I've landed 4 DOT's before they even turn to face me, and then I drain life tank and hit them with a shadow bolt when nightfall procs (usually once or twice a fight). And now, you get soul shards through PvP if it's an honorable kill. And I rarely use my soul shard spells in PvP anyway.
Instead of improving classes, Blizzard has shown that they would rather swing the nerf bat. This is the wrong way to go about balancing a MMO.
I could not disagree with you more. You have to remember that you're not only balancing the classes against each other, but also against the environment. If you improve everyone else to the level of the overpowerful class, then everyone is overpowerful in PvE. To balance that, you would need to then power up the mobs, which would end up in a relative "Nerf" to the overpowered class to begin with. And more often than not, when you power up a class (or especially multiple classes at once), you make that class too powerful, and are stuck at square one again.
Additionally, people are going to complain if their relative power to others goes down regardless whether it is because your class got nerfed or the other classes got powered up. In the end, the result is the same -- more balance (which means you've lost your superiority), so people aren't going to be happy if they are the ones who lost power relative to the other classes or environment.
Overall, I think right now the game is really well balanced in PvE, which is what WoW is first and foremost. I think the PvP balance is coming along, and more and more tweaks are coming along to make it even closer to balance. Lastly, if you're in a group of 3 or more people (of different classes) fighting against the same number of people, the game is very closely balanced and usually then comes down to skill (or occasionally luck in the form of a big proc/crit/miss/resist).
I have an HDTV, and I'd have to agree with you mostly. Some shows, even though they are standard 480i, don't look so bad, but there are many which don't look very good on my HDTV. However, my cable box does a fairly good job upconverting these to 480p and it doesn't look too terrible (but if I go directly using the built-in TV tuner it doesn't look that great).
I used to own a Toshiba 52HM84 but I returned it for a Panasonic 50DL54 just because non-progressive scan games look so bad.
I have the same Toshiba, and I only have my xbox hooked up to the TV (the PS2 is broken and I left the GC with my sister when I moved into my apartment), and the games look beautiful. I haven't hooked up any non-progressive stuff to it, however, so I have no idea how they would look. But playing MVP Baseball 2005 in 720p widescreen is awesome -- I played the same game on the xbox on a standard TV at a local Best Buy, and man, the difference is incredible.
All that being said, I believe that the Revolution will at least support 480p so the quality on a HDTV shouldn't be too bad. If it's only 480i I definitely won't touch the Revolution with a 10 foot pole.
insert Google things in cars. Employee e-mail, calendar, document management, and search by Google, Google maps and yellow pages in the cars, etc.
Right...so now I'm not only driving on the same road as people talking on their cell phones, reading the newspaper, sending e-mail on their blackberry, doing makeup, and shaving...now I've got to deal with people surfing the web too...
I do however, have concerns regarding the large influx of players that have no concept of "staying in character" or have names like joekiller34.
I also played Gemstone IV (and Gemstone III before it). The GMs were very good at recognizing good roleplaying, and I never heard any complaints about GM favoritism or anything along those lines. I also share your concern -- when Gemstone III was linked up with the Zone, they offered a free trial which drastically increased the number of players for a few months -- during these times, the RP got pretty bad at times, but soon the "1337" newbs left and things settled back down. My guess is that they got tired of the slow advancement and the lack of graphics.
Re:Two things wrong with that article...
on
10 Gateway Games
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Secondly, you don't want to introduce your s.o. to Animal Crossing if you ever want to get near your Gamecube again.
And this is a perfect example of how Slashdot is full of nerds (no offense to the OP). Instead of being worried that you'll never get near your GF again, you're worried that you'll never get near your GC again.
Unfortunately, there are a ton of people who simply live off of the earnings from previous inventions and works. Or earnings from deceased relatives' works.
I'm not disputing that. However, I think that the number of people who no longer invent because they have enough financial security is far outweighed by the number of people who are encouraged to invent because of that promise of financial security.
Actually, the best innovaters probably aren't driven by financial incentives, so maybe it doesn't matter much.
Wow... are you trying to be willfully ignorant? Information about the prevalance of prison rape is pretty wide spread.
I never said it wasn't. Are you trying to willfully misinterpret what I said?
One in five men sent to prison gets raped.
And while I agree that this is a number that I wouldn't want to take a chance on, 21% is hardly a certainty, which the original poster seemed to claim.
I base my comments on descriptions of prison life both in the US and the former USSR, as written by inmates who have survived.
I have no doubt that such things go on in prisons in the US and around the world. But I really wonder on the frequency of them. From your post, it seems like you think these sorts of things happen to everyone who goes to prison for a certain period of time or more. That may be the only accounts of prison that you read, but have you ever thought that it is because the inmates who weren't raped, defeated psychologically, or otherwise greatly harmed didn't have anything to write about? Those sorts of accounts (avoiding the word stories because I do believe that they are true and stories has a fictional stigma attached to it) that you have read are things that people will pick up and read (and therefore be willing to spend money on). On the other hand, your average white-collar criminal who spent 3 uneventful years behind bars probably won't have much to write about -- who wants to read about prison life if nothing happens?
All that being said, Martha Stewart will probably come out with such a book and make millions off of it...
Slashdot Mirror
You probably don't have to worry about a corporation "stealing" an idea from an employee. Most corporations explicitly claim that any work you do and any IP you create is the property of the corporation. If you tried to patent it yourself, you would actually be "stealing" from the corporation!
I think jails outdate MUDs by ... oh say a few millenia...
But without China, who is going to sell me the sword of uberness and 500 gold on Ebay?
The problem with this argument is that people have already spent a great deal of time on their characters before they begin playing BG (or in many cases before BG was even released). Initially, more people played as the Alliance because people tend to choose the "Good" races over the "evil" ones (take a look at SWG or EQ for another example of this). Now that a person has their level 60 alliance character, they are just going to throw that one away to start playing as Horde because they have the advantage? I find that rather hard to believe. I know many players who have started Horde characters on other realms, but it really is starting from scratch. If you play on a PvP server, you can't even create a horde character on the same server as your alliance character. And if you don't play on a PvP server, you can't (easily) give resources from your one character to your other.
In the child of the sister of this post (I guess that would be the niece?) I've discuessed why the Horde tends to be more organized than the Alliance. However, it is not just strategy that makes BG so unbalanced. The difference comes due to the class makeup of the teams. In general, the two best classes for BG are druids and shamans. Almost no one plays druids (because they're not that great at PvE or straight-up PvP), and only Horde can have shamans. The reason why druids and shamans are the best is because they are good flag capturers, able to increase their speed through travel form or ghost wolf form. In my BG experiences, we're lucky if we have a druid on the Alliance side, while the Horde usually have at least 5 shamans. Shamans also are doubly effective because they can slow down EVERYONE through totems, and they can also heal.
I don't know how many times I've played BG without a single healer on our team, and often if we do have a healer, it's a Palladin. Since the vast majority of Alliance are Mages and Rogues, the makeup of our group is usually something like 3 mages, 3 rogues, 2 hunters, a warrior, and a warlock (I'm the warlock). This is a terrible group for BG, but it often is what we're stuck with. As a result, I'd say we win 1/20 BG games we play. The only success I've heard for Alliance on our server has been one guild, Kaizen, who pretty much exclusively play with each other and usually have the right makeups for their groups.
Granted, good strategy on the Alliance can defeat an unorganized Horde team, but even a halfway-decent Horde team will defeat even the best Alliance teams.
On my server (Boulderfist) I actually think the ratio of alliance to horde is fairly even. However, I have noticed that the Horde tend to be much better organized as well. I believe it has to do with two things:
1) The Horde has an advantage to begin with since Shamans are very useful in BG (they have both things to slow down opponents and speed up themselves, and speed is key in BG), and Pallys (lacking any sort of speed-up or slow-down aside from a few-second stun every minute if you're lucky enough to get in melee range) are fairly useless except as a support class. This causes many Alliance team members to not worry about winning the match, and instead just try to rack up as many HK's as possible.
2) People who are just starting the game tend to flock toward the "good" side as opposed to the "evil" side (see SWG as another example). The more hard-core people are the ones who usually end up playing the "evil" side, which in this case is the Horde. Therefore, you have a lot of bad players on the Alliance, while the average quality of players on Horde is slightly higher. Lastly, with a smaller population people are more likely to play with the same people over and over again, which will result in a stronger team play. For instance, almost every time I have played in BG, it's often been against the same group of Horde (especially Keita, who ALWAYS manages to capture the flag, often flying solo).
An interesting note on BuddyZoo and degrees of separation -- it was created by one of the creators of Synapse, the other co-creator being the creator of thefacebook.com, with whom I worked on a small project several years ago.
Phil Mickelson will now haunt my dreams for eternity! Thanks a lot!
It was a window cover, which is placed to protect the windows while the shuttle is sitting on the pad. The cover is removed before liftoff...nature just decided to remove it a little early.
Which is all the more reason to start putting monkeys at typewriters.
So who beat NASA to the punch? Aliens? The Russians?
I know the creator of thefacebook.com, and he was getting girls long before thefacebook. While something like that might marginally help, if you have 0 social skills it won't make any difference.
I believe AMD's claim is that the compiler specifically won't use advanced instruction sets (such as SSE2) if the processor isn't a genuine Intel processor, even if the processor supports such instruction sets.
So it's not that the compiler is optimized for Intel (which is fine), it's that it's specifically de-optimized for non-Intel chips for no good reason other than to artificially bloat Intel's numbers.
It's a great way to inflate your stats though!
Looks like EQ will be doing this again. See today's article.
Because most people wouldn't want to play a game where they died 50% of the time or more. If you took your average group of players through an instance, and the monsters always targetted the healers first and then the mages/warlocks, all the instances would be nearly unbeatable by similar-leveled characters.
The game and the dungeons were designed to be challenging to a well-balanced group that handled aggro well. I'd say 90% of our wipes in the instances I've played have been because our soft targets got the aggro, and the other 10% are when we pulled too many monsters at a time. If the monsters automatically targetted the healers first, the entire game would have to be rebalanced to make it possible to make it through a dungeon.
You also have the whole issue of aggro control then. A great deal of a group's success in an instance is making sure the monsters are hitting the tank(s). If a player is controlling a monster, how are you going to force them to follow the aggro? And if you do force them to follow aggro, that really takes a lot of the fun out of playing the monster.
Besides, I'm not really sure what fun you'd have playing as a monster against other real people when you could play as yourself in PvP.
I seem to recall that EQ did this a very long time ago, and it lasted all of about 1 day until they took it out again because of all the exploits that it opens up. What's to prevent someone from purposely sucking as a monster to allow someone else to get more xp faster? I agree -- it would be a lot of fun to control the monsters in a dungeon -- but it would be too hard to implement without causing tons of problems.
My main character is a warlock on a PvP server, and I haven't had much trouble in solo PvP, and in group PvP, I can often be output the most damage (due to putting DOT's on multiple characters). The undead often beat me straight up since I can't fear, but if I can get surprise someone, I've landed 4 DOT's before they even turn to face me, and then I drain life tank and hit them with a shadow bolt when nightfall procs (usually once or twice a fight). And now, you get soul shards through PvP if it's an honorable kill. And I rarely use my soul shard spells in PvP anyway.
Instead of improving classes, Blizzard has shown that they would rather swing the nerf bat. This is the wrong way to go about balancing a MMO.
I could not disagree with you more. You have to remember that you're not only balancing the classes against each other, but also against the environment. If you improve everyone else to the level of the overpowerful class, then everyone is overpowerful in PvE. To balance that, you would need to then power up the mobs, which would end up in a relative "Nerf" to the overpowered class to begin with. And more often than not, when you power up a class (or especially multiple classes at once), you make that class too powerful, and are stuck at square one again.
Additionally, people are going to complain if their relative power to others goes down regardless whether it is because your class got nerfed or the other classes got powered up. In the end, the result is the same -- more balance (which means you've lost your superiority), so people aren't going to be happy if they are the ones who lost power relative to the other classes or environment.
Overall, I think right now the game is really well balanced in PvE, which is what WoW is first and foremost. I think the PvP balance is coming along, and more and more tweaks are coming along to make it even closer to balance. Lastly, if you're in a group of 3 or more people (of different classes) fighting against the same number of people, the game is very closely balanced and usually then comes down to skill (or occasionally luck in the form of a big proc/crit/miss/resist).
I have an HDTV, and I'd have to agree with you mostly. Some shows, even though they are standard 480i, don't look so bad, but there are many which don't look very good on my HDTV. However, my cable box does a fairly good job upconverting these to 480p and it doesn't look too terrible (but if I go directly using the built-in TV tuner it doesn't look that great).
I used to own a Toshiba 52HM84 but I returned it for a Panasonic 50DL54 just because non-progressive scan games look so bad.
I have the same Toshiba, and I only have my xbox hooked up to the TV (the PS2 is broken and I left the GC with my sister when I moved into my apartment), and the games look beautiful. I haven't hooked up any non-progressive stuff to it, however, so I have no idea how they would look. But playing MVP Baseball 2005 in 720p widescreen is awesome -- I played the same game on the xbox on a standard TV at a local Best Buy, and man, the difference is incredible.
All that being said, I believe that the Revolution will at least support 480p so the quality on a HDTV shouldn't be too bad. If it's only 480i I definitely won't touch the Revolution with a 10 foot pole.
Right...so now I'm not only driving on the same road as people talking on their cell phones, reading the newspaper, sending e-mail on their blackberry, doing makeup, and shaving...now I've got to deal with people surfing the web too...
I also played Gemstone IV (and Gemstone III before it). The GMs were very good at recognizing good roleplaying, and I never heard any complaints about GM favoritism or anything along those lines. I also share your concern -- when Gemstone III was linked up with the Zone, they offered a free trial which drastically increased the number of players for a few months -- during these times, the RP got pretty bad at times, but soon the "1337" newbs left and things settled back down. My guess is that they got tired of the slow advancement and the lack of graphics.
And this is a perfect example of how Slashdot is full of nerds (no offense to the OP). Instead of being worried that you'll never get near your GF again, you're worried that you'll never get near your GC again.
I'm not disputing that. However, I think that the number of people who no longer invent because they have enough financial security is far outweighed by the number of people who are encouraged to invent because of that promise of financial security.
Actually, the best innovaters probably aren't driven by financial incentives, so maybe it doesn't matter much.
I never said it wasn't. Are you trying to willfully misinterpret what I said?
One in five men sent to prison gets raped.
And while I agree that this is a number that I wouldn't want to take a chance on, 21% is hardly a certainty, which the original poster seemed to claim.
I have no doubt that such things go on in prisons in the US and around the world. But I really wonder on the frequency of them. From your post, it seems like you think these sorts of things happen to everyone who goes to prison for a certain period of time or more. That may be the only accounts of prison that you read, but have you ever thought that it is because the inmates who weren't raped, defeated psychologically, or otherwise greatly harmed didn't have anything to write about? Those sorts of accounts (avoiding the word stories because I do believe that they are true and stories has a fictional stigma attached to it) that you have read are things that people will pick up and read (and therefore be willing to spend money on). On the other hand, your average white-collar criminal who spent 3 uneventful years behind bars probably won't have much to write about -- who wants to read about prison life if nothing happens?
All that being said, Martha Stewart will probably come out with such a book and make millions off of it...