There are a lot of really cool things that SL brings to the table. I really love being able to do 3D object building and texturing and animation and scripting. Take that stuff to another level and add some really compelling gameplay, and I think you will have something extremely compelling.
Personally I think the whole lockout thing is stupid to begin with. There's not really a good reason you shouldn't be able to run an instance or reset, as often as you want, within reason (server load balance, etc.) The reason they do it is to artificially limit resources to make things rare. The effect it has though is to encourage a culture of total douchebags.
West Virginia backcountry is extraordinarily nice. Fields of wild orchids. Cranberry glades. Warm springs. Relatively mild weather year round. Easy to find woods or open spaces where you will encounter *no one*.
I wouldn't want to live there, due to politics and economic considerations, and I wouldn't be interested in going to any WV cities. But it's some nice country for hiking and camping.
If you think you could make Cable TV operate profitably without commercials, you should be presenting your business plan to the board of directors, not posting on slashdot.
>My decision was easier, as my friends started dropping out of WoW following a series of "lets start over, but on a (Normal, PvP, or RP) server as (Alliance or Horde)!" bits.
On every realm where I've played, I found significant amounts of chat indicating that the grass is greener on some other realm. Either someplace else doesn't have as many total douchebags as here (yeah right). Or some realm is more "progressed" (which just means a lot of players are finished with the game and those that are left don't need *you*).
Sometimes the assertions are legitimate (e.g., Wintergrasp balance). But usually you can find the same argument ("want to transfer off this fail server and go to _REALMX_") where they say the exact same thing about"REALMX"...
The only times I've had better experiences on some realms than others, has been when I have actual real-life friends who play, and where there was a guild that just happened to schedule its raids at times that worked for me in my time zone. But other than that, I have found the same flavors of ridiculous attitudes pretty consistently, everywhere I've played. The fact that I must be willing to make teams from among this pool of players in order to progress, just turns me off the whole game. I realize there are mature people playing the game who I'd love to group with, but I don't find them very often and they don't find me, and certainly not in the kind of numbers you need to run 25-man content (e.g., you need a high level of interest, and you really need enough to overbook 2x or 3x, so that you have at least two or three separate groups running ICC each week. Most guilds stop short of overbooking, lucky enough to have 25 players at-level and capable of running ICC at all.)
A cause that rises to the level of being termed "revolutionary" will tend also to divide the military itself into factions, as well as dividing the political and economic basis on which that military stands. The idea that a revolution is a modern mechanized army fighting peasants with farm implements is romantic, but what really happens is that the army itself will split along the same political or ideological lines as the rest of the revolution. The side with "peasants and farm implements" would *also* have relatively intact chains of command, industrial production and raw materials, control of bases and airfields, and a political structure that considers itself equally legitimate to the other factions it opposes. The next civil war and/or revolution in the USA would have two factions (or more) who *both* have air, navy and nuclear capabilities.
The idea that we have anything remotely resembling a revolutionary cause today is a romantic delusion enjoyed by a tiny lunatic fringe.
In a directory hierarchy, find files with the extension ".ftl" that have been modified since the last SVN revision, and containing the expression "${inventoryItem.qoh}", and for each of these, substitute "${inventoryItem.atp}".
I'd love to see GUI's that can facilitate the kinds of work I do on a constant basis, but since there's no such thing, I've become something of a Unix shell power user over the past couple of decades.
>Who grinds at this game? If you do, you are playing wrong. Most people level up through PvP or through 5-man dungeons...
5-man dungeon leveling is pretty good for Protection (tank) specs and maybe healers, but the real experience path is through individual quests. There are many, many paths to take but there is some optimization that can be done in terms of selecting which quests to do, which quests to not do, and when to drop one zone for another, and where to go next.
1-80 is maybe 40 hours of game play for a completely unspoiled newbie who isn't really trying all that hard, and is about 20 hours for an experienced veteran who has heirloom gear and gold from another toon. (Don't bother commenting that you did 1-80 in 7 hours, I know it probably can be done, but I don't care.)
>I would have to kill seventy trillion boars instead of forty trillion?
They stop giving experience *at all* once you pass the threshold. You can't really gain levels by killing any number of low level monsters, but you knew that.
>Call me when the game isn't a boring single-path grindfest.
I have a role-play guild that is 100% focused on the Cooking profession, with the objective being to give players the "Chef" title, and of course providing buff food for raids. There's a certain amount of fishing that goes on, since that's needed to level the cooking profession.
Needless to say, there are very, very few players who are genuinely interested in it. Most people *want* that grind through the 12 bosses of ICC, and want that week after week grind of running the same raid for the small chance of getting another Best-in-Slot item so that they can be exactly like all the other toons with Best-in-Slot items.
There's a lot you can do other than the "single path grindfest" but very little of it is very interesting to very many players. Of *course* they are going to choose the path that leads to their character being the statistically optimal badass, whatever that may be at any point in the expansion. And there is always going to be a pack that reaches that point, a diminishing herd that reaches that point later, and a whole lot of people who won't reach that point because they started too late and so many other players already burned out. (It's not typical to get to the end game and then make a sincere effort to seek out and assist new players... worse, if you *do* want to do that, it's very hard to actually *find* those new players, because they are few and far between in reality).
The entirety of Blizzard is barely significant to Activision. They consider WoW to be a distant third, in some quarters tied with the Tony Hawk and Shrek franchises for third after Call of Duty and Guitar Hero. There wasn't a Guitar Hero release in the last quarter so the current quarterly report makes more of a mention of WoW, but a lot of WoW players assume or delude themselves into thinking that ATVI thinks far more of it than they do.
A lot of people quit during the "RealID" debacle and didn't return. They had all kinds of reasons, but they needed a catalyst.
One big reason, though, is that a lot of players are burned out. While I realize that not everybody reached that point, it's pretty common to have gotten to the point where there's not really anything to get that is meaningful to your character. I reached that point with the 10-man game a long time ago, and my motivation to go further in the 25-man game decreases with the amount of downright hostile and antisocial behavior that I run into every time I join or form a group.
I played the Cata beta and enjoyed the Worgen starting zone, but I don't see the things in Cata that would hook me.
What I really wanted (expected) to see was a great deal more character customization possibility, even world customization, something like I imagine if Second Life and World of Warcraft had a baby. Instead of your character's avatar being defined by its gear, it could be completely customized (or maybe customized with a range of provided textures and shapes, in order to maintain some consistency of the theme). Instead of a few dungeons, there could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of player-designed dungeons. Instead of a segmented world with a few thousand players in the same gameplay universe as you, there could be one really huge interconnected world so that your options weren't so limited.
It's a real problem when you need a 25 man team, on a server with maybe 1500 characters who can run the content, who already have 40 guilds competing for them. It actually becomes extremely (artificially!) difficult to put a group together.
Cataclysm brings nothing to the table to fix any of the problems in the game, and doesn't bring anything that can be characterized as new or innovative except maybe in marketing terms. Of course that wasn't its purpose. Blizzard needs to do something to drive a few quarters of growth in order to keep the interest of investors. Sure, Blizz has a ton of subscribers but that makes them a parking place for money, not really an attractive investment. Entertainment companies are really not a great place to park money, they are a place to risk money if you think you're betting on growth.
Cataclysm, SC2, and some of the Activision console offerings should provide a couple of quarters of growth for the company, but Cata isn't exactly breathing new life into WoW.
There's some premise here that not many people understand how things work, but there are enough people who do that there's some pretty stiff competition for technical and mechanical jobs, so I'm unable to see the problem.
"The interesting fact is more modern cars with the same basic systems PLUS computers are LESS reliable, and always generating system problems and failures."
A few infamous failures aside, I think I'd confront you on our assertion that contemporary cars are less reliable in general than previous ones. You'd need to be specific.
>The 1980s arcade games with vector graphics (not raster/bitmap) displays were ahead of their time. Now that we have Flash and SVG that can specify graphics in vector format, >we could use display HW that can render with vectors instead of pixels, for even smoother and better looking displays.
It's still extremely hard to get a convincing "Tempest", "Lander" or "Asteroids" on a PC display. There is some real subtlety to the vector system.
I had a Blip, a larger similar mechanical pong, and a Mattel Football, all around the same time. I loved these games - they were my favorite games until I got my first computer (TRS-80 the following year.)
Come on. Who else here remembers when chemistry sets gave you truly dangerous stuff to work with? Not just toxic stuff, not just stuff that could make rapid oxidizers... who here ever had a chemistry set that came with a spinthariscope and a radium source? (Or the really old ones that had a shard of Uranium?)
The closest thing to this I've ever had was a broken Luminous Dial watch. The most dangerous thing I ever had in a chemistry set was a sample of Mercury. That was fun and is hopefully the reason I'm insane today.
The barcode scanning potential of the iPhone doesn't come close to what we need. The Apple Stores have a version that has scanning (and I believe RFID scanning as well) but they don't sell it, even to industrial clients. I can't really say much more than this, since my bosses read slashdot and know who I am;-)
Not long ago on Interstate 10, I saw a driver in a truck who had a TV on his dashboard. It wasn't even an LCD tv, it just looked like a relatively old portable TV just sitting on the dashboard between the steering wheel and the windshield, where it surely blocked his view. It kind of freaked me out. Another thing that freaks me out a little, is seeing guys wearing big cowboy hats inside cars, where it seriously obstructs the view of the driver.
But then, I've seen a lot of crazy stuff in commuter traffic. Eating? I've seen more than one person with a plate on their lap, eating with a fork, not just "a sandwich". I've seen countless women with their car mirrors turned toward them, putting on makeup with ZERO attention being paid to the road. I've seen motorcyclists splitting traffic at amazing speeds (and one particularly arrogant case where the guy on the bike wiped right into the accident that was the cause of the traffic jam he was splitting.)
I won't say I've seen everything, because I'm sure that on my way home today, I'll see something else.
I take photos of everything that I ship out, before during and after packing. The photo is stored in my ERP system. The phone with integrated camera turns out to be a *great* tool for this. If only the iPhone had a barcode scanner, I'd be in heaven.
>It is a bleeding shame to see these historical artifacts left in the junk-yard like they are
Aerospace graveyards have a distinct beauty.
For years, my route to work took me through the Aircraft Boneyard in Tucson AZ. It's an incredible sight, and I never got tired of seeing it. A few (too few) times I had the privilege of going out there to obtain parts.
>Bullshit. You can sell ebooks for less than $3 and make a profit.
I'd have to see an honest accounting before I could call Bullshit though. "Honest" as in, the questions you answer when you are the investor and the executive deciding whether to shut down the operation, not "honest" as in the reports you give to the other investors. Unless one of us is actually in that position, we can't know whether it's profitable, breaking even, or what.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a safe bet he doesn't have incriminating photos of a MP on there.
>Please never let second life corrupt WoW.
I don't mean to literally merge the two.
There are a lot of really cool things that SL brings to the table. I really love being able to do 3D object building and texturing and animation and scripting. Take that stuff to another level and add some really compelling gameplay, and I think you will have something extremely compelling.
Personally I think the whole lockout thing is stupid to begin with. There's not really a good reason you shouldn't be able to run an instance or reset, as often as you want, within reason (server load balance, etc.) The reason they do it is to artificially limit resources to make things rare. The effect it has though is to encourage a culture of total douchebags.
West Virginia backcountry is extraordinarily nice. Fields of wild orchids. Cranberry glades. Warm springs. Relatively mild weather year round. Easy to find woods or open spaces where you will encounter *no one*.
I wouldn't want to live there, due to politics and economic considerations, and I wouldn't be interested in going to any WV cities. But it's some nice country for hiking and camping.
If you think you could make Cable TV operate profitably without commercials, you should be presenting your business plan to the board of directors, not posting on slashdot.
>My decision was easier, as my friends started dropping out of WoW following a series of "lets start over, but on a (Normal, PvP, or RP) server as (Alliance or Horde)!" bits.
On every realm where I've played, I found significant amounts of chat indicating that the grass is greener on some other realm. Either someplace else doesn't have as many total douchebags as here (yeah right). Or some realm is more "progressed" (which just means a lot of players are finished with the game and those that are left don't need *you*).
Sometimes the assertions are legitimate (e.g., Wintergrasp balance). But usually you can find the same argument ("want to transfer off this fail server and go to _REALMX_") where they say the exact same thing about"REALMX"...
The only times I've had better experiences on some realms than others, has been when I have actual real-life friends who play, and where there was a guild that just happened to schedule its raids at times that worked for me in my time zone. But other than that, I have found the same flavors of ridiculous attitudes pretty consistently, everywhere I've played. The fact that I must be willing to make teams from among this pool of players in order to progress, just turns me off the whole game. I realize there are mature people playing the game who I'd love to group with, but I don't find them very often and they don't find me, and certainly not in the kind of numbers you need to run 25-man content (e.g., you need a high level of interest, and you really need enough to overbook 2x or 3x, so that you have at least two or three separate groups running ICC each week. Most guilds stop short of overbooking, lucky enough to have 25 players at-level and capable of running ICC at all.)
A cause that rises to the level of being termed "revolutionary" will tend also to divide the military itself into factions, as well as dividing the political and economic basis on which that military stands. The idea that a revolution is a modern mechanized army fighting peasants with farm implements is romantic, but what really happens is that the army itself will split along the same political or ideological lines as the rest of the revolution. The side with "peasants and farm implements" would *also* have relatively intact chains of command, industrial production and raw materials, control of bases and airfields, and a political structure that considers itself equally legitimate to the other factions it opposes. The next civil war and/or revolution in the USA would have two factions (or more) who *both* have air, navy and nuclear capabilities.
The idea that we have anything remotely resembling a revolutionary cause today is a romantic delusion enjoyed by a tiny lunatic fringe.
In a directory hierarchy, find files with the extension ".ftl" that have been modified since the last SVN revision, and containing the expression "${inventoryItem.qoh}", and for each of these, substitute "${inventoryItem.atp}".
I'd love to see GUI's that can facilitate the kinds of work I do on a constant basis, but since there's no such thing, I've become something of a Unix shell power user over the past couple of decades.
>Who grinds at this game? If you do, you are playing wrong. Most people level up through PvP or through 5-man dungeons...
5-man dungeon leveling is pretty good for Protection (tank) specs and maybe healers, but the real experience path is through individual quests. There are many, many paths to take but there is some optimization that can be done in terms of selecting which quests to do, which quests to not do, and when to drop one zone for another, and where to go next.
1-80 is maybe 40 hours of game play for a completely unspoiled newbie who isn't really trying all that hard, and is about 20 hours for an experienced veteran who has heirloom gear and gold from another toon. (Don't bother commenting that you did 1-80 in 7 hours, I know it probably can be done, but I don't care.)
>I would have to kill seventy trillion boars instead of forty trillion?
They stop giving experience *at all* once you pass the threshold. You can't really gain levels by killing any number of low level monsters, but you knew that.
>Call me when the game isn't a boring single-path grindfest.
I have a role-play guild that is 100% focused on the Cooking profession, with the objective being to give players the "Chef" title, and of course providing buff food for raids. There's a certain amount of fishing that goes on, since that's needed to level the cooking profession.
Needless to say, there are very, very few players who are genuinely interested in it. Most people *want* that grind through the 12 bosses of ICC, and want that week after week grind of running the same raid for the small chance of getting another Best-in-Slot item so that they can be exactly like all the other toons with Best-in-Slot items.
There's a lot you can do other than the "single path grindfest" but very little of it is very interesting to very many players. Of *course* they are going to choose the path that leads to their character being the statistically optimal badass, whatever that may be at any point in the expansion. And there is always going to be a pack that reaches that point, a diminishing herd that reaches that point later, and a whole lot of people who won't reach that point because they started too late and so many other players already burned out. (It's not typical to get to the end game and then make a sincere effort to seek out and assist new players... worse, if you *do* want to do that, it's very hard to actually *find* those new players, because they are few and far between in reality).
The entirety of Blizzard is barely significant to Activision. They consider WoW to be a distant third, in some quarters tied with the Tony Hawk and Shrek franchises for third after Call of Duty and Guitar Hero. There wasn't a Guitar Hero release in the last quarter so the current quarterly report makes more of a mention of WoW, but a lot of WoW players assume or delude themselves into thinking that ATVI thinks far more of it than they do.
A lot of people quit during the "RealID" debacle and didn't return. They had all kinds of reasons, but they needed a catalyst.
One big reason, though, is that a lot of players are burned out. While I realize that not everybody reached that point, it's pretty common to have gotten to the point where there's not really anything to get that is meaningful to your character. I reached that point with the 10-man game a long time ago, and my motivation to go further in the 25-man game decreases with the amount of downright hostile and antisocial behavior that I run into every time I join or form a group.
I played the Cata beta and enjoyed the Worgen starting zone, but I don't see the things in Cata that would hook me.
What I really wanted (expected) to see was a great deal more character customization possibility, even world customization, something like I imagine if Second Life and World of Warcraft had a baby. Instead of your character's avatar being defined by its gear, it could be completely customized (or maybe customized with a range of provided textures and shapes, in order to maintain some consistency of the theme). Instead of a few dungeons, there could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of player-designed dungeons. Instead of a segmented world with a few thousand players in the same gameplay universe as you, there could be one really huge interconnected world so that your options weren't so limited.
It's a real problem when you need a 25 man team, on a server with maybe 1500 characters who can run the content, who already have 40 guilds competing for them. It actually becomes extremely (artificially!) difficult to put a group together.
Cataclysm brings nothing to the table to fix any of the problems in the game, and doesn't bring anything that can be characterized as new or innovative except maybe in marketing terms. Of course that wasn't its purpose. Blizzard needs to do something to drive a few quarters of growth in order to keep the interest of investors. Sure, Blizz has a ton of subscribers but that makes them a parking place for money, not really an attractive investment. Entertainment companies are really not a great place to park money, they are a place to risk money if you think you're betting on growth.
Cataclysm, SC2, and some of the Activision console offerings should provide a couple of quarters of growth for the company, but Cata isn't exactly breathing new life into WoW.
There's some premise here that not many people understand how things work, but there are enough people who do that there's some pretty stiff competition for technical and mechanical jobs, so I'm unable to see the problem.
"The interesting fact is more modern cars with the same basic systems PLUS computers are LESS reliable, and always generating system problems and failures."
A few infamous failures aside, I think I'd confront you on our assertion that contemporary cars are less reliable in general than previous ones. You'd need to be specific.
>At the time, that consisted of rifles and pistols
And cannons.
>The 1980s arcade games with vector graphics (not raster/bitmap) displays were ahead of their time. Now that we have Flash and SVG that can specify graphics in vector format,
>we could use display HW that can render with vectors instead of pixels, for even smoother and better looking displays.
It's still extremely hard to get a convincing "Tempest", "Lander" or "Asteroids" on a PC display. There is some real subtlety to the vector system.
I played Lunar Lander a lot, but I always kind of had a grudge because I knew they stole the idea -- I really enjoyed playing this: http://atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=106
I had a Blip, a larger similar mechanical pong, and a Mattel Football, all around the same time. I loved these games - they were my favorite games until I got my first computer (TRS-80 the following year.)
That's nothing. I have family on the Irish side that still hold a grudge for things that happened generations ago.
Come on. Who else here remembers when chemistry sets gave you truly dangerous stuff to work with? Not just toxic stuff, not just stuff that could make rapid oxidizers... who here ever had a chemistry set that came with a spinthariscope and a radium source? (Or the really old ones that had a shard of Uranium?)
The closest thing to this I've ever had was a broken Luminous Dial watch. The most dangerous thing I ever had in a chemistry set was a sample of Mercury. That was fun and is hopefully the reason I'm insane today.
The barcode scanning potential of the iPhone doesn't come close to what we need. The Apple Stores have a version that has scanning (and I believe RFID scanning as well) but they don't sell it, even to industrial clients. I can't really say much more than this, since my bosses read slashdot and know who I am ;-)
Not long ago on Interstate 10, I saw a driver in a truck who had a TV on his dashboard. It wasn't even an LCD tv, it just looked like a relatively old portable TV just sitting on the dashboard between the steering wheel and the windshield, where it surely blocked his view. It kind of freaked me out. Another thing that freaks me out a little, is seeing guys wearing big cowboy hats inside cars, where it seriously obstructs the view of the driver.
But then, I've seen a lot of crazy stuff in commuter traffic. Eating? I've seen more than one person with a plate on their lap, eating with a fork, not just "a sandwich". I've seen countless women with their car mirrors turned toward them, putting on makeup with ZERO attention being paid to the road. I've seen motorcyclists splitting traffic at amazing speeds (and one particularly arrogant case where the guy on the bike wiped right into the accident that was the cause of the traffic jam he was splitting.)
I won't say I've seen everything, because I'm sure that on my way home today, I'll see something else.
I take photos of everything that I ship out, before during and after packing. The photo is stored in my ERP system.
The phone with integrated camera turns out to be a *great* tool for this. If only the iPhone had a barcode scanner, I'd be in heaven.
I'd just close the pool during the brief period of the day that it's a problem.
>It is a bleeding shame to see these historical artifacts left in the junk-yard like they are
Aerospace graveyards have a distinct beauty.
For years, my route to work took me through the Aircraft Boneyard in Tucson AZ. It's an incredible sight, and I never got tired of seeing it. A few (too few) times I had the privilege of going out there to obtain parts.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=tucson+aircraft+boneyard
Good article with pictures of the hangar collapse here:
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/spacecraft/q0153.shtml
>Bullshit. You can sell ebooks for less than $3 and make a profit.
I'd have to see an honest accounting before I could call Bullshit though. "Honest" as in, the questions you answer when you are the investor and the executive deciding whether to shut down the operation, not "honest" as in the reports you give to the other investors. Unless one of us is actually in that position, we can't know whether it's profitable, breaking even, or what.