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User: Tridus

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  1. Re:Anyone notice that black cat just now....deja v on Aion Servers To Merge, XP Grind Softened · · Score: 1

    They never said that. There just isn't much they can do about it, because it's a self-fulfilling problem. Server imbalance breeds more server imbalance. Short of flat out shutting off Horde character creation on the server and offering some crazy Alliance creation incentives, they're powerless to the fact that Alliance players don't want to play there.

  2. Not at all surprising on Aion Servers To Merge, XP Grind Softened · · Score: 1

    Aion went through the same thing every other overhyped MMO launch does: convince a ton of people to sign up inititally based on hype, and hope some of them stick around after 2 months.

    A bunch of people I play WoW with all quit to play Aion. Within six months, every single one was back. The game has way too much grinding and way too little serious endgame content, especially if you're not a PvP focused player. People got to the level cap, looked around, said "now what?", and quit.

  3. Can't they both lose? on Adobe Calls Out Apple With Ads In NY Times, WSJ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is a battle between purveyors of closed devices that exert outrageous amounts of control over what users can do with their devices, and purveyors of bug riddled crash prone propretary garbage who are misusing the word "open" as cover for a self-serving argument.

    Wouldn't it be nice if they both lost, somehow?

  4. Re:We Want to on Adobe Calls Out Apple With Ads In NY Times, WSJ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or view material from pulitizer prize winning journalists. Yeah, damn those bastards!

    Only Apple fanboys try to make this into a security argument. It's just another day in the life of the "you are allowed to use your device to what we say you can" shop.

  5. Re:cheating the laws on EA Introduces "Online Pass" To Get In On Used Games Market · · Score: 1

    With a rather large cut in the middle. Gamespot buys the game for $20 from one user, then sells it to another user at $45. User 1 gets $20 towards a new $50 game, User 2 saves $5, Gamestop makes $25. Game publisher only makes money off User 1.

    Obviously, the publishers would rather User 2 pay $5 more and buy a new copy, which gives them revenue instead of Gamestop.

  6. Re:This is what you get... on Vibration Killing Enterprise Disk Performance? · · Score: 1

    Denser? I don't see a lot of 2TB SSDs on the market.

  7. Re:HTML5 will be a screw job. on Why IE9 Will Not Support Codecs Other Than H.264 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wouldn't it be more like they were a workaround to the W3C's thing with spending years focusing on standards that nobody intends to implement or use?

  8. Re:#1 Rule, Don't use Java on What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic · · Score: 1

    1. Some of it is just inevitable backlash. Many moons ago Java was hyped as the greatest thing ever that would magically solve all our problems. Of course it didn't, and anytime something gets overhyped, there is pushback.

    2. Bad client experience. Java on the server is one thing, but client apps? Ugh. I've got four, and each one is picky about wanting its own version of the JRE. They're slow. They tend to look like Java apps rather then normal OS apps, so they don't really fit well and often don't follow conventions.

    Some of that is just programmers, but I've never used a client side Java app that wasn't slow. These people who keep saying "Java isn't slow" need to point me to their magical fast JRE. Or maybe they mean it's not slow, except when doing UI stuff, because I've NEVER seen a UI that wasn't sluggish compared to a normal app.

    3. It's not the shiny new thing anymore, and it's not buzzword compliant.

  9. Stop checking your email on Recourse For Draconian Encryption Requirements? · · Score: 1

    If they're going to insist on this type of software, then stop using your personal machines to connect to the network or check your email at home.

    If they really want you to check your email, demand that they provide hardware that meets with their approval to do so.

  10. Re:We scare our customers who run IE 6 & 7 on Corporate IT Just Won't Let IE6 Die · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now that's a good idea. You should post your infected image code, I'm sure people would love to do the same thing internally.

  11. Re:Non sense on Best Seating Arrangement For a Team of Developers? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Having separate offices does not in anyway cut down of non-work related conversations. "

    It does cut down on person A's chat with person B interrupting and annoying person C. The problem with groups of people together is that any two talking are interrupting the entire group.

    I could never get anything done in a setup like that, you can have my office door when you pry it from my cold, dead hand.

  12. Re:Gartner is wrong on Why Aren't SSD Prices Going Down? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wouldn't it be more newsworthy if Gartner was right?

    They're generally the most reliable source: bet on the opposite of whatever Gartner is saying.

  13. Re:Please let me use the same password on Please Do Not Change Your Password · · Score: 1

    We have the same thing at my work. Most of us get around it by using the same password and incrementing a number at the end of it. Technically I think this is against the rules, but it lets the assanine policy work while people have a password they might actually remember.

  14. Kills any business use on Google Gives the US Government Access To Gmail · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Last year Google gave a presentation to the government I work for (which is not in the US). They made a big pitch as a sizable part of that presentation to try to convince us to move off Exchange and to the commercial Gmail offering. There's some pretty good reasons why that's a good idea.

    Unfortunately, stuff like this kills the idea entirely. There is absolutely no sales pitch that will convince people here that we really want to turn over our government email to the US government. (Hell, with the way things are going now we don't even allow people to take laptops with anything on them across the border, even if they're encrypted.)

  15. Re:Code, meet data on No JavaScript Needed For New Adobe Exploits · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Because some genius thought that it was a great idea to put a launch command in the PDF spec.

    Seems like it's working as intended.

  16. Re:I've.never.used.groovy.so.I.have.a.question. on The Struggle To Keep Java Relevant · · Score: 1

    [quote]ArrayList myList = new ArrayList()[/quote]

    Hell, even VB.net has a shorthand for that: dim myList as new ArrayList(of SomeObject)

  17. Re:Spinning drives are already obsolete on SSD Price Drops Signaling End of Spinning Media? · · Score: 1

    Storage space?

    I can get a 2TB hard drive, right now. 2TB of SSD storage is unrealistically expensive, if you can even find a way to get that much in one system.

    Software, games, and media are ever increasing in size. Drastically reducing the size of drives is not realistic in peoples computers.

  18. Oy on Microsoft Docs Indicate Future Xbox 360 Support For USB Storage · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So you can connect an external storage unit, but it'll only use 16GB of it? That's a bit less then the size of the smallest 360 hard drive, which they don't even sell anymore.

    I guess they don't want to cannibalize their outrageously priced upgrade drive business.

  19. Re:Mortal Online on Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? · · Score: 1

    "is very user unfriendly at the moment"

    Doomed to a niche or worse, then. That's all I need to know about it. If there is only one lesson MMO developers need to take away from WoW, it's how important being user friendly is. Without it, the game will never compete successfully against similar games that are user friendly.

  20. Re:They've become games not worlds on Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? · · Score: 1

    People have been saying that since Vanilla. It's never held up. People like you just whine because the "casuals" now have a way to advance to keep up.

    In fact, the recent changes were good. I saw a lot of people who had stopped playing come back, because they had something to do. WoW now has multiple paths to advancement, including one that doesn't require raiding. In the past, you'd hit a wall and then simply raid or quit, because the game ended.

    Since an awful lot of people don't like the nonsense that is hardcore raiding (and I was a hardcore raider for years until 5 days ago), having something for them to do is good for the game and not bad for it.

    Much like people said Wrath wouldn't sell because it catered to casuals and much like BC wouldn't sell because it catered to casuals, Cataclysm will sell just fine as long as people find it fun.

  21. Re:Casual gamers on Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? · · Score: 1

    Which is exactly why games made like that do poorly in the market compared to games that don't allow it. Most people wind up as victims, the victims don't find that very fun, and when it comes to games it is very easy for them to take their business elsewhere.

    Compounding that is that most griefers don't like the idea of being victims themselves. They don't want a level playing field. That's all world PvP in WoW is, for example. It's just level 80s picking on level 30s who are completely incapable of defending themselves. In games like UO where the victim stands to lose a lot, the problem is even worse.

    The problem is these type of griefers are small in number but disproportionaly loud on MMO forums, so people think that's what the market wants. That isn't what the overwhelming majority of the market wants.

  22. Re:UO wasn't that much fun really on Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? · · Score: 1

    That's interesting, but also not really on topic. The top guilds are a microscopic fraction of the WoW playerbase. The whole problem with a game oriented around UO style thieving and such is that there aren't enough players to support a game based on it for very long. The top guilds fit that bill perfectly, there isn't enough of them to sustain a game based on them either. :)

  23. Re:UO wasn't that much fun really on Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, this. Griefing and thieving only work as gameplay when there are lots of victims. Unfortunately, for the victims it isn't very fun. Those people stop playing when it happens enough times to frustrate them.

    Game companies tend to dislike it when people stop playing, and the victim pool massively outnumbers the jerk pool. So naturally they make games friendlier to that group.

    Face up to reality. The number of people who actually want to do this type of anti-social behavior simply isn't large enough to support a big game on its own, and nobody else but those people actually likes it. Being killed and robbed is not fun for most players. Thus, most players go find games that are fun.

  24. Re:the way i see it on Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? · · Score: 1

    What's in it for them, other then absolutely nothing?

    That's kind of the problem here. Blizzard has no reason to do that. They have enough developers, artists, and money that if they want to do something and it's technically doable with their infrastructure, they can. Things that aren't in the game are likely not there for a reason.

    All you'd get with them releasing the code is more pirate servers, and people adding stuff to the open source version that Blizzard wouldn't add back into the main game anyway.

  25. Re:UO wasn't that much fun really on Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Throughout the entire history of WoW all the way from release until today, PvP realms as a whole have been less popular then PvE realms.

    That was true before battlegrounds, arenas, wintergrasp, and even before the gear discrepency between a level 30 and a max level character was so high that "world pvp" wasn't just a one shot affair. (Calling what goes on in STV these days PvP is a joke.)

    The reality is that the number of people who find being griefed fun is smaller then the number of people who don't.