Four days played is the current legit non-powerleveled 1-60 record. For only $20 you can buy a very exciting 20 hour sped-up video of it.
The whole questing > grinding thing is a bit misleading -- the "optimal" leveling paths involve doing a lot of quests, but not in the way that any new player would do them. For some zones, it's literally "Go to hub, get pile of quests, then go in a big circle around the zone killing every mob you see until you get back to the quest hub, and turn in the pile of quests you happened to complete while grinding". There's very few quests pre-outland that are actually worth going significantly out of your way to do.
Seriously, two weeks is more than enough time to place, time, and detonate a massive coordinated terror situation. One person could do it alone without needing to contact anyone else, give themselves away, or otherwise do anything that might alert the authorities prior to pressing the "all hell breaks loose" button. Heck, you could be on a plane to your favorite foreign country a week before the devices were timed to go off.
If it's so trivial, the fact that it hasn't happened means one of two things: The terrorists are incompetant, or despite what the government is trying to tell us, there aren't piles of terrorists in the US trying to kill us. Both of these make me feel far safer than no terrorists attacks due to CONSTANT VIGILANCE would.
The first 10 hours of Oblivion were some of the best 10 hours of game I've ever played. If I'd played those 10 hours and then stopped, I'd have absolutly no problem calling it the best game of the year (if I wasn't opposed to saying that sort of thing about games I'd only played for 10 hours). Thanks to mods and such, I'd say I easily got 50-60 hours of great gameplay out of Oblivion. The problem is that 50 hours is nowhere close to enough time to "beat" Oblivion. It was when I started gaining significant levels that I realized how broken the leveling system is, when I started clearing the dungeons scattered across the map that I realized that there were only two dungeons, with a bunch of copies (sometimes filled with different monsters, often not) spread around, when I started trying to level Merchantile that I stopped being able to tolerate the UI... and so on. None of these happened in the time frame that a reviewer would actually spend on Oblivion before writing about it, which makes the awards and reviews perfectly understandable.
That's strange. I seem to remember DOM support in Opera 7, back in early 2002. In fact, it was one of the major new features of O7's new rendering engine. Also, there's this strange option to switch to small-screen rendering mode. Contrary to what you seem to think, not only the vast majority of pages are perfectly usable with it on, but they're often more usable than with it off.
The character in Scenario 1 wouldn't be "weak" in combat. It'll be completly unable to survive an encounter with a random wolf that's supposed to be a trivial fight. At level 40, you probably wouldn't be able to survive one hit with the difficulty at the minimum (1/6 incoming damage). With the exact same character at level 1, the fight would be no problem. After playing Oblivion for a few hours, I realized that just never sleeping would make the game a completly joke, as you never level up if you don't sleep (although a few quests require sleeping, and the main quest requires that you level up a few times). After playing the game for a week or so with Obscuro's patch (where the character in Scenario 1 would still be awful at combat, but not get even worse ever time you leveled up), I realized that the game system was so trivial to break that the only way to make the game challenging was to go out of my way to avoid breaking it. Random examples I stumbled on without looking for broken things:
Drain Life with high damage and low duration. Costs basically no mana, and the fact that it wears off after a few seconds doesn't matter if the target is already dead. If I hadn't been using OOO, I would have been able to 1-shot every creature in the game when I first got it.
Once you're a member of a guild, you can take all of the guild's stuff. And then sell it back to them, completly removing any gold concerns for the rest of the game.
Charm. Speechcraft is meaningless for a mage.
100% Chameleon. Stupidly easy to get, and the game might as well declare you the winner when you get it.
I don't mind optional things you can do to make the game easier. I think fast travel was a great idea, as it's easy to simply not use if it offends you, as would the walkthrough arrow if you could turn it off without a mod. However, I shouldn't have to stop and think before doing something "Will this horribly break the game and completly remove all challenge?"
To the best of my knowledge, no one has successfully botted 40-man raids (and people have tried). Some of the earlier stuff would probably be doable if someone was interested enough, but I don't think any of the raids added since release could be done by bots on the level of complexity of the current WoW bots.
You have to post occasionally, but posting too much pushes you over median very quickly. This will be my 25th post in the last 18 months, which is apparently fairly close to median, as I generally get mod points multiple times a week.
The addons aren't DRMed in any way. Once you download them, they're your's, and the only reason you wouldn't be able to use them in 15 years is if you no longer had a copy -- similar to that if you lose the install DVD, you won't be able to reinstall Oblivion when you feel like playing it 15 years from now, either.
Before you complain about it, try actually finding out how it works.
Kitchen knives (knives are only sharpened on one side.. a lot of righties don't realize this...)
Buy better knives? I'm right-handed and I still can't cut straight with those knives.
Potato peelers
Nearly always have blades on both sides.
Doors
On one side, the handle is on the right. On the other side, the handle is on the left. Am I missing something?
Laptops (why is the power button always on the right? Not to mention the CDROM drive.. it's a bitch to get CDs out sometimes..)
Do you not have a right hand? That's not the same thing as being left-handed. My laptop has the DVD drive on the left, and I've never been at all inconvenienced by that, and I'm not sure how you would.
My printer has its controls on the right (OTOH I compensate as all my hardware is on my left where I can easily reach it).
How does that matter? If anything, that sounds like it favors left-handed people. With the printer on the left side of the computer, the controls are convenient for a left-handed person. With it on the right side, a right-handed person has to reach across the printer to access the controls. If the printer is anywhere else, I have no idea how it could possibly matter.
That'd be quite amazing if, despite not having subscribers, GW somehow managed to have a million of them.
I don't have a job, but if I had a job it'd pay $1,000,000 per year!
Yes, I like gold farmers. The only reason why I can raid in WoW without buying gold is because the gold farmers exist. They've caused mass deflation in the value of many of the important consumables, reducing the moneysinks.
In WoW the farmers mostly focus on farming items to sell for gold, rather than farming the gold directly, so they actually remove money from the economy rather than adding it.
The vast majority of competative play occurs in formats that allow only cards from the last 2-5 for precisly this reason. The larger the card pool, the stupider things get, and the harder it is to get the cards required to win.
Casual play is regulated in the same "stop playing that $%^$^ deck" as it has always been.
Not entirly a glass house, as the article isn't complaing about the quality of writing as much as that what they're writing is meaningless. The article is badly written, but at least has a point it is trying to get across, while typical game journalism wouldn't be worth reading even if it was well written.
Personally I didn't notice the sentence length the first time I read it. If you turn all of the punctuation into periods it's a bit more readable.
Hold down shift while doing basically anything in Opera (including hitting enter after typing in an address), and the result opens in a new page. Add ctrl, and the page opens in the background.
Slashdot Mirror
Why even have levels if they're nearly meaningless?
Four days played is the current legit non-powerleveled 1-60 record. For only $20 you can buy a very exciting 20 hour sped-up video of it.
The whole questing > grinding thing is a bit misleading -- the "optimal" leveling paths involve doing a lot of quests, but not in the way that any new player would do them. For some zones, it's literally "Go to hub, get pile of quests, then go in a big circle around the zone killing every mob you see until you get back to the quest hub, and turn in the pile of quests you happened to complete while grinding". There's very few quests pre-outland that are actually worth going significantly out of your way to do.
And how many hundreds of indie bands are complete shit? Giving a short list that are good doesn't refute that most of them aren't.
I have a Verizon phone, and had absolutly no difficulty buying a data cable for it. It uses my ringtones made from mp3s no problem.
The first 10 hours of Oblivion were some of the best 10 hours of game I've ever played. If I'd played those 10 hours and then stopped, I'd have absolutly no problem calling it the best game of the year (if I wasn't opposed to saying that sort of thing about games I'd only played for 10 hours). Thanks to mods and such, I'd say I easily got 50-60 hours of great gameplay out of Oblivion. The problem is that 50 hours is nowhere close to enough time to "beat" Oblivion. It was when I started gaining significant levels that I realized how broken the leveling system is, when I started clearing the dungeons scattered across the map that I realized that there were only two dungeons, with a bunch of copies (sometimes filled with different monsters, often not) spread around, when I started trying to level Merchantile that I stopped being able to tolerate the UI... and so on. None of these happened in the time frame that a reviewer would actually spend on Oblivion before writing about it, which makes the awards and reviews perfectly understandable.
That's strange. I seem to remember DOM support in Opera 7, back in early 2002. In fact, it was one of the major new features of O7's new rendering engine. Also, there's this strange option to switch to small-screen rendering mode. Contrary to what you seem to think, not only the vast majority of pages are perfectly usable with it on, but they're often more usable than with it off.
- Drain Life with high damage and low duration. Costs basically no mana, and the fact that it wears off after a few seconds doesn't matter if the target is already dead. If I hadn't been using OOO, I would have been able to 1-shot every creature in the game when I first got it.
- Once you're a member of a guild, you can take all of the guild's stuff. And then sell it back to them, completly removing any gold concerns for the rest of the game.
- Charm. Speechcraft is meaningless for a mage.
- 100% Chameleon. Stupidly easy to get, and the game might as well declare you the winner when you get it.
I don't mind optional things you can do to make the game easier. I think fast travel was a great idea, as it's easy to simply not use if it offends you, as would the walkthrough arrow if you could turn it off without a mod. However, I shouldn't have to stop and think before doing something "Will this horribly break the game and completly remove all challenge?"To the best of my knowledge, no one has successfully botted 40-man raids (and people have tried). Some of the earlier stuff would probably be doable if someone was interested enough, but I don't think any of the raids added since release could be done by bots on the level of complexity of the current WoW bots.
You have to post occasionally, but posting too much pushes you over median very quickly. This will be my 25th post in the last 18 months, which is apparently fairly close to median, as I generally get mod points multiple times a week.
The addons aren't DRMed in any way. Once you download them, they're your's, and the only reason you wouldn't be able to use them in 15 years is if you no longer had a copy -- similar to that if you lose the install DVD, you won't be able to reinstall Oblivion when you feel like playing it 15 years from now, either.
Before you complain about it, try actually finding out how it works.
That'd be quite amazing if, despite not having subscribers, GW somehow managed to have a million of them. I don't have a job, but if I had a job it'd pay $1,000,000 per year!
Guild Wars has zero subscribers, due to that they don't have an option to subscribe.
shiny + backspace + leaked = shinleaked
shiny^Wleaked = leaked
http://www.somethingawful.com/hentai/+ games
http://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=adult+video
Uh, yeah.
As someone who has never bought gold:
Yes, I like gold farmers. The only reason why I can raid in WoW without buying gold is because the gold farmers exist. They've caused mass deflation in the value of many of the important consumables, reducing the moneysinks.
In WoW the farmers mostly focus on farming items to sell for gold, rather than farming the gold directly, so they actually remove money from the economy rather than adding it.
So it takes three left slanted groups just to balance out Fox News?
Err, last 2-5 years, that is.
The vast majority of competative play occurs in formats that allow only cards from the last 2-5 for precisly this reason. The larger the card pool, the stupider things get, and the harder it is to get the cards required to win.
Casual play is regulated in the same "stop playing that $%^$^ deck" as it has always been.
Congratulations, you missed the entire point of the parent.
Not entirly a glass house, as the article isn't complaing about the quality of writing as much as that what they're writing is meaningless. The article is badly written, but at least has a point it is trying to get across, while typical game journalism wouldn't be worth reading even if it was well written.
Personally I didn't notice the sentence length the first time I read it. If you turn all of the punctuation into periods it's a bit more readable.
Uh...
29.96 + 16.98 = 46.94
The price is the same for the bundle and non-bundle.
Hold down shift while doing basically anything in Opera (including hitting enter after typing in an address), and the result opens in a new page. Add ctrl, and the page opens in the background.