Actually, I could see it becoming interesting if it were made smaller-scale and efficient enough to have individual fuel producing systems for rural and distant suburban dwellers. Enhance public transit in cities (reducing the need for cars) where land is scarce, and it might be very well worth it for places where driving is essential and the grid is less reliable.
Another (small but important) contribution to the many different ways we can kick fossil fuel dependence and go with renewable sources.
I was pretty brief in my initial response. Let me elaborate:
It isn't just that you picked them up. It's that the interviewer is trained to notice things during all of the interviews and put them together into a larger whole. So, let's say 30 years ago you had wonderful vision - I'm going to venture a guess that you would therefore not have shown any signs of having difficulty seeing things 1 meter away, would not have been squinting when trying to look at the cards or when looking at other items in the other measures. Similarly, when chatting with the assessor and giving a brief medical history, you likely wouldn't have mentioned any vision problems.
Flash forward 30 years and now your vision isn't very good. It's not, actually, all that hard to notice when people are struggling to see things - especially if you're a trained observer who is paying rather close attention to the interviewee. So now the interviewer sees that you are squinting a bit from time to time when trying to read things, has certainly asked you if you need glasses or have any other vision issues, and generally is going to have a reasonably good idea of whether or not you can see the materials in front of you.
Now, you might also object and say "Well, maybe I'm being honest, but just a bit vain about my vision, so that's why I don't pick up the cards!" And my response to that is that over the course of an interview lasting several hours, there will be enough other data points to give a reasonably good assessment of what's going on - vanity or intentionally faking, or whatever. What was your affect like when you responded? Your rate of speech? Posture? How did it change from one segment of the interview to the next? How does it change when you're voicing approval vs. disapproval of something? How does it change when you're engaged in a timed task vs. one where there's no stress or pressure? When are you making eye contact, when are you not? The list goes on and on.
People who conduct these interviews are trained for years, to the point where there is very little difference between how one assessor or another will encode each specific measure, and where, ideally, the overall assessment of the interviewee will be the same. It's actually really amazing how much information people share about themselves when you actually take the time to *watch* them closely, and ESPECIALLY in a situation that is outside the normal rules of conduct where there is a script that everyone follows.
tl;dr version: over the course of a multi-hour interview that investigates several domains, any half-decent interviewer will have a pretty good idea why you did/didn't pick things up and what it means.
For example, it may be considered an indicator that you're providing honest answers if you make an attempt to compensate for poor vision vs. letting them sit there, answering without caring about the details before providing a response. I may be wrong, but I'd say most people would agree that having evidence indicating whether or not a person's answers were honest or not could have just a little bit of value in a diagnostic interview.
My favorite encoding is whether or not the respondent picks the card up and looks at it edge on, as if to test to see if it's three dimensional or to see if the inkblots rise off of the cardstock. When you see that, it's a pretty good indicator that the respondent has likely experienced visual hallucinations or has learned not to trust his or her vision.
Many of the criticisms leveled against this tool in this thread are coming from people who very obviously have no understanding of it other than what they've seen in films or tv shows; their criticisms have about as much validity as mine would carry if I were to bitch about geological surveys based on my having watched The Core. What's really amusing is that they complain that it's unscientific, and yet they don't even have the faintest notion of how it's actually used - so their criticisms are basically "I don't understand how this works, therefore it isn't valid!" which is something that I'm willing to bet they hear from other people all the time.
The Rorschach is simply a tool - one of many - that can yield data points that may or may not be particularly useful, when properly used. Anyone who thinks that it's the only tool being used or is the lynchpin of a diagnostic assessment is being ridiculous.
There are so many different sources for information to be had out there, so many more science programs, than there were when Sagan was big, that I think there will be many more low-to-medium-grade "scilebrities" vs. just one or two superstars.
Other than Bill Nye, I'd say take a look at some of The Universe episodes (though they might be a bit intense for younger kids), and there are some really interesting BBC shows featuring Michio Kaku.
Mythbusters is fun stuff, and a nice sort of vicarious "making shit to blow it up" kind of thing, but it doesn't do a good job with the science (nor does it really try to, I don't think.)
I'm going to say sci-fi or horror (pleasepleasePLEASE be a Zombie theme!). Though, horror might be too close to fantasy for some.
An interesting easter egg from WoW: in some of the skins for certain devices (shredders and other things like that), there seems to be a part that looks sort of like a display, and Kerrigan is shown repeatedly.
That's been entirely different from my experience - maybe it's a server thing? I've rolled alts on maybe 20 different servers since launch and generally people are reasonably helpful and friendly. If I want a group for a dungeon, I'll generally find people in about 10-20 minutes, tops (general chat if the zone is busy, in a nearby city if it isn't, but I do think they can make this less of an issue). There are often leveling guilds that advertise looking for recruits in the main cities. I guess I just don't experience that cliquishness - the only time people are less than welcoming is when you're a fresh level 80 and you're starting to do heroics/raid - some ridiculous people will insist that you link achievements pointing out that you've done the instance before or look your armory profile up. Personally I think that's absurd, and take it as a sign that I don't want to be in that group even if I do have whatever it is they're looking for.
Maybe it's a peak time vs. off time kind of thing? If I play at hours most people in the US are at work or in classes or asleep, then yeah, it's much slower.
1) New players and catching up: I'm not sure we're playing the same game. They announced Refer A Friend, wherein a veteran can refer a new player (well, a new account) and when they team up, both characters get a huge boost to their experience up to level 60. This lets new players get into the game, learn from their friends, and generally get to explore a lot of stuff. It also lets older players level that other class they've always thought about but never done. Plus, they also re-itemized the quest rewards for 1-60, cut the total amount of xp to level, and basically make that less agonizing than it was in vanilla WoW. In Outland, the leveling rate was substantially sped up, and I can only imagine the same thing will happen with the next expansion with regards to Lich King stuff.
2) Instances are a strange case. Some people REALLY like 'em, some people just don't care. Personally, I hope that the next major update to instances would be something like what they did to the battlegrounds - a way to let people within server clusters run instances together. Obviously there would need to be a lot of stuff done to make this workable and not exploitable or really miserable for people who like to grief other players, but it would be huge for people who want to run instances but cannot seem to find groups. Certainly even a less than perfect implementation of this would be better than nobody ever running the early instances at all.
3) They handle inflation in two ways: gear resets and adding different mechanics. The next patch looks like it's going to let even reasonably casual players catch (nearly) up to the hard-core raiders so they can see the new content too. I think Blizzard learned that the poop-sockers will beat any raid they make very quickly, and so aren't worried about the hard-core players as much as the almost certainly much larger casual raider group. They shift up the mechanics of how things work frequently that people who haven't played the game for 3 years will be able to start (kinda) at the same general level of understanding as people who've been playing since launch.
4) They have given newbies a LOT of really kickass gear and removed "heroics" (actually, I think you're thinking about "elite" mobs) from the old world. Any class should be able to handle any quest in the game in the old world using ONLY quest reward items. The only benefit that being an experienced player will give you is that you'll know the world and the quests already, and some items that might boost the speed with which you level by 20% or so. Special "twink" equipment is absolutely not necessary to be able to level - it's nice, but really overkill.
I agree with you that they need to keep new players coming in for WoW to continue being so successful. They seem to be doing exactly that: making the initial levels easier, giving mounts to players earlier (and cheaper) than before, making the early quests less difficult, and creating new tools (a built in quest map kind of thing that shows you where to go for your quests is HUGE for newbies) that will even the playing field a bit between vets and newbies. The only real difference between a vet and a newbie is the store of knowledge that vets have built up - where things are, how they work, etc. The only items that vets have that newbies cannot get are really more flavor items - stuff from the past - but they don't really give any kind of advantage. Of all the multiplayer games I've ever played, WoW is the most newbie friendly, and continues to get moreso as they go along.
The next MMO is, according to statements from Blizzard sources, to be a new IP - not based on any previous franchise. Given that 3 of their upcoming products are sequels or expansions (Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, next WoW expansion) it stands to reason that they might want to try to launch a new franchise - they need to keep the future markets in mind.
Yes, though for entirely different reasons. Parent/child relationships have staggering power imbalances - it is virtually impossible to imagine a parent/child relationship that would produce offspring that isn't at core an abuse of the powerless person by the powered one. Sibling relationships may not have the power imbalance, and might thus be less objectionable.
I can't speak to morality as I am cheerfully amoral (being an atheist and thus not having any kind of universal yardstick against which to measure my actions). On the ethical side of things, however, and using a definition of "balancing the most good to the most people with the least harm to the least people over the longest possible term" - then no, I can't seen an ethical issue with same-sex couples being able to both contribute biologically to their child assuming the health of the child is not at issue. I do see an issue with the parent/child offspring in that it's very hard to come up with situations where such a relationship wouldn't be abusive (and possibly lead to abuse of the offspring). I'm not sure if I see an ethical issue with siblings producing children together as I don't imagine that such a thing would happen often enough to lead to overall removing variety from the gene pool (harming humanity as a whole), but there could be some rather funky power dynamics going on.
The absolutely last thing I'll say on this subject is this: Just because someone else was told by their cleric that consenting adults who are harming no-one are icky and bad, and just because these people are extremely vocal about it doesn't actually translate into a real ethical puzzle. Back before studies had been done about the effects of having 2 same-sex parents (either adoptive, or one is bio), it might have been reasonable to be skeptical about the wisdom of allowing same-sex couples to be parents. But the research has been done, there isn't any negative effect, so there are no rational reasons to be bothered by it and no rational basis for ethical concern.
I'm not at all saying that old-school games have better storylines and that newer ones don't - just that it's easier to hide a stinker nowadays. Back in the day, I can't really think of any truly *bad* games that were popular despite being bad because of graphics, but nowadays I can think of several that really, really suck but sell due to the shiny.
For my money, Bioshock, the entire Fallout series (though FO1 & 2 aren't exactly "new" and didn't have any of the really shiny graphical stuff) and many others are proof that modern games can be fantastic, too - I'm glad I never gave up gaming.
What's the site for the Wasteland group? I'd be interested in some nostalgia:)
Back in the day of less impressive graphics, immersion had to come about by superior storytelling and game design. When I played Wasteland, for example, even though the graphics were simple tiles and the combat system was a pokemon like "pick an option for everyone and then it'll just say what you did later" kind of thing, I got sucked in to certain parts. There was one bit where one of your characters got their mind transferred into a nightmare inside a cybernetic brain and you had to find your way out - it's been 20 years at least since I played it, and I can still remember some of the experiences from that, and I only played that sequence 2 times. I was also a wee child then, so that probably made it easier to get into it.
With really great graphics now, immersion is much, much easier to achieve, so storytelling and game design aren't as necessary. Sometimes we get lucky - Bioshock had great graphics and great storytelling and design. I had to stop playing it with the lights out - my roommate insisted she heard me shrieking profanity at 3 in the morning when I'd get spooked. Sometimes we don't get so lucky - Fable II had *brilliant* graphics, but it was, in may ways, hard to play it as anything other than a simulation - I didn't care about the characters, I just wanted to see the stupid things I could get them to do. I think, for example, I was *supposed* to care about my spouse and child and companions in the game, but they just weren't fleshed out well. Playing as an adult, who is resistant to being sucked in to some extent, I'd say that the better graphics nowadays are probably necessary to getting me really sucked in, but it's still the storytelling and gameplay that do it.
We have demonstrated that you can have truly amazing gaming experiences with low quality graphics as long as there's great stories backing it up - can we have great gaming experiences with truly amazing graphics but no story? I don't think so. At least, I don't think they'd be anything but amusing tech demos that are quickly forgotten, but maybe other people really like the shiny.
Infertile heterosexual couples can't currently conceive children. This could grant that ability. That's huge. So how is the sexual orientation of the couple relevant?
If the OP had said "This will allow people who couldn't have conceived the ability to have children, this opens up a can of worms" then sure - but he (and you) specifically mention the sexual orientation of the couples as being relevant. I'm just trying to understand why.
Is it because gay people would be able to have children that share the dna from 2 same-sex parents? Is it because gay people having kids is an ethical concern? Is it squeamishness about gay folks being able to have children?
How is it any more a "big can of worm" than infertile hetero couples having children? Are you suggesting that there is some kind of ethical or moral problem with homosexuals having children with this tech that would not apply to heterosexual couples?
It must absolutely suck to be you, to work with you, or to have you as a customer. Maybe you should look into a different line of work.
I love my job and I have a great time doing it. I work with people I genuinely like. When I go home at the end of the day I feel like I accomplished something meaningful with the 1/3rd (or more) of my day I spent earning a living. Why wouldn't I want a huge fraction of my life to be as enjoyable as possible? What benefit is there in making it some kind of soulless, cold experience?
One of the studies we're doing in my lab is an intervention with (currently) HIV- youth who engage in frequent risk behaviors (most are sex workers, a little under a third are IV drug users, a very small portion just have risky sex because that's what they do). As part of the study, we do HIV testing every 3 months. We have an "expected" rate of conversion (obtained from other studies) and then we compare our actual rate of conversion to see whether our intervention is having an impact. While I'm no biostatician, I imagine the process is similar for a vaccine trial as for an educational intervention - you get people who are extremely likely to convert, vaccinate them, and if fewer convert (hopefully none of them!) despite engaging in risky activities, you can say that there's very likely been an effect.
Stand at your desk rather than sit. Do pushups every couple of hours. Do crunches during a 5 minute break. Do stretches as you can get 1-2 minutes. If there are stairs at the office, run up and down a flight of them for 10 minutes during a break.
Basically, incorporate a little activity into your day while you're at work. It won't turn you into an elite athlete, but it'll help you not totally blob out.
I don't disagree that it could have been a more informative original question, but I don't know that I think being bad at asking questions necessarily equates to not being serious about the question asked; more that the Asker was keeping it short and isn't very good at prioritizing.
I thought slashdot was actually about showing off your wow characters and coming up with sigs that invite conversation:)
I don't think "most" of WoW's charm was due to mounts, but if you feel "most" of the charm comes from touring around the world, I guess that's your right:)
And there is some danger - if you're not careful you can get assaulted by various large flying things in many areas, and they'll either dismount you (dropping you to your death unless you're a mage or priest or paladin) or beat you to death since they're rather powerful.
Fortunately, you have to wait to at least level 78 when you're in Northrend to get flying out there, and you should by then already have entered most of the zones on a land mount and explored a bit. The last 2 levels are designed around you being able to fly, and there's PLENTY of epic stuff (the giant helicarrier and the cities up in the mountains did it for me).
Ive actually quit WoW over lack of instant movement. Waiting 30 minutes for group to ssemble is not fun, neither well spent time. When you spend more time afking game and reding book while you wait for someone than playing, something is very wrong...
In WoW there are at least 2 options for getting other players to a dungeon virtually instantly - the meeting stones (requires 2 players be there already) and warlock teleporting (requires 3 players be at the desired location). If you're at a level where you're doing content that doesn't have a meeting stone (raids, pretty much) you are going to have the ability to travel to any location in the world in much less than 30 minutes, at most about 10 minutes, and that would be the most extreme possible case I can think of. The *only* time there is a longer trip involved is when you're first exploring an area with a given character. If you don't have the flight paths connecting one point to another, then prepare for World of Walking - but at the level where you're still getting flight paths it isn't like you're raiding or doing dungeons much, so waiting for people for a raid isn't happening.
People take so long to get to instances and raids not because of travel times, but because they are doing other things before the raid, like selling stuff, repairing, getting potions etc. ready for the raid, chatting, whatever. If travel time were the real determinant of how long it takes to get a raid together, the wait times would be down to 10 minutes, 15 minutes tops.
Further, WoW has done quite a bit to change the way you have to travel:
Original WoW had mounts that you could get at level 40 that would boost your speed by 60% for 100 gold (a decent amount of money back then) and 1000 gold at level 60 (the maximum level) would get you 100% movement speed increase. You could boost that another 2-3% by getting a trinket that would speed you up.
Then they added the Burning Crusade expansion with flying mounts. The level 40 mounts dropped to 60 (I think?) gold, the level 60 mounts dropped to 640 (I think?) gold, and the flying mounts were now 1000 gold for the riding skill (easy to get along the way to level 70) for a 60% speed flying mount and 5000 gold (about as hard to get as the old 1000g mount) for a 280% speed increase - as fast as the flighpaths, but quicker because you could do this point to point kind of travel rather than take the long way with flight paths that swooped around. You could boost those numbers by 10% or so by getting new trinkets.
In addition, they added Shattrath which has portals in it to every major city in the game. You could set your hearthstone to Shattrath and teleport to either continent in the old world (and close to other travel options) instantly.
Then they added Wrath of the Lich King. The level 40 mounts now unlock at level 30. There's a new city - Dalaran - that has a set of portals to all major cities. Cooldowns on hearth stones and other similar abilities were reduced to 30 minutes from an hour. 5000g for the VERY fast flying mounts is now pretty easy to get.
It isn't instant travel, but it's not 30 minutes, either. And if you're really impatient to get around, roll a mage or deathknight. Mages can teleport to many places in the world inside of 10 seconds, and deathknights have special abilities that make their mounted speed quite a bit faster than usual - it feels pretty peppy.
Guild Wars also uses a different model from WoW. They actually make more money if you buy the game and then stop playing because it's a pay once (and pay for expansions) kind of thing. WoW is a pay per month set up. Guild Wars doesn't really require timesinks for their business model in the same way WoW does. I think WoW does a pretty good job of varying the timesinks and even making them a little more entertaining (the people on boats can be fun to talk to; flying under your own control you can find interesting places) all things considered - and certainly the rest of the game is more than fun enough (for people who still play) to compensate for the travel stuff.
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Actually, I could see it becoming interesting if it were made smaller-scale and efficient enough to have individual fuel producing systems for rural and distant suburban dwellers. Enhance public transit in cities (reducing the need for cars) where land is scarce, and it might be very well worth it for places where driving is essential and the grid is less reliable.
Another (small but important) contribution to the many different ways we can kick fossil fuel dependence and go with renewable sources.
I was pretty brief in my initial response. Let me elaborate:
It isn't just that you picked them up. It's that the interviewer is trained to notice things during all of the interviews and put them together into a larger whole. So, let's say 30 years ago you had wonderful vision - I'm going to venture a guess that you would therefore not have shown any signs of having difficulty seeing things 1 meter away, would not have been squinting when trying to look at the cards or when looking at other items in the other measures. Similarly, when chatting with the assessor and giving a brief medical history, you likely wouldn't have mentioned any vision problems.
Flash forward 30 years and now your vision isn't very good. It's not, actually, all that hard to notice when people are struggling to see things - especially if you're a trained observer who is paying rather close attention to the interviewee. So now the interviewer sees that you are squinting a bit from time to time when trying to read things, has certainly asked you if you need glasses or have any other vision issues, and generally is going to have a reasonably good idea of whether or not you can see the materials in front of you.
Now, you might also object and say "Well, maybe I'm being honest, but just a bit vain about my vision, so that's why I don't pick up the cards!" And my response to that is that over the course of an interview lasting several hours, there will be enough other data points to give a reasonably good assessment of what's going on - vanity or intentionally faking, or whatever. What was your affect like when you responded? Your rate of speech? Posture? How did it change from one segment of the interview to the next? How does it change when you're voicing approval vs. disapproval of something? How does it change when you're engaged in a timed task vs. one where there's no stress or pressure? When are you making eye contact, when are you not? The list goes on and on.
People who conduct these interviews are trained for years, to the point where there is very little difference between how one assessor or another will encode each specific measure, and where, ideally, the overall assessment of the interviewee will be the same. It's actually really amazing how much information people share about themselves when you actually take the time to *watch* them closely, and ESPECIALLY in a situation that is outside the normal rules of conduct where there is a script that everyone follows.
tl;dr version: over the course of a multi-hour interview that investigates several domains, any half-decent interviewer will have a pretty good idea why you did/didn't pick things up and what it means.
Actually, yes, there are.
For example, it may be considered an indicator that you're providing honest answers if you make an attempt to compensate for poor vision vs. letting them sit there, answering without caring about the details before providing a response. I may be wrong, but I'd say most people would agree that having evidence indicating whether or not a person's answers were honest or not could have just a little bit of value in a diagnostic interview.
My favorite encoding is whether or not the respondent picks the card up and looks at it edge on, as if to test to see if it's three dimensional or to see if the inkblots rise off of the cardstock. When you see that, it's a pretty good indicator that the respondent has likely experienced visual hallucinations or has learned not to trust his or her vision.
Many of the criticisms leveled against this tool in this thread are coming from people who very obviously have no understanding of it other than what they've seen in films or tv shows; their criticisms have about as much validity as mine would carry if I were to bitch about geological surveys based on my having watched The Core. What's really amusing is that they complain that it's unscientific, and yet they don't even have the faintest notion of how it's actually used - so their criticisms are basically "I don't understand how this works, therefore it isn't valid!" which is something that I'm willing to bet they hear from other people all the time.
The Rorschach is simply a tool - one of many - that can yield data points that may or may not be particularly useful, when properly used. Anyone who thinks that it's the only tool being used or is the lynchpin of a diagnostic assessment is being ridiculous.
as opposed to one or two specific "heroes."
There are so many different sources for information to be had out there, so many more science programs, than there were when Sagan was big, that I think there will be many more low-to-medium-grade "scilebrities" vs. just one or two superstars.
Other than Bill Nye, I'd say take a look at some of The Universe episodes (though they might be a bit intense for younger kids), and there are some really interesting BBC shows featuring Michio Kaku.
Mythbusters is fun stuff, and a nice sort of vicarious "making shit to blow it up" kind of thing, but it doesn't do a good job with the science (nor does it really try to, I don't think.)
I wonder if the H1-B visa program here would accept "Has Ulduar experience" as a necessary technical skill?
The obvious answer is to completely uproot yourself and come to the US so you can use our servers, of course.
If you roll on Sentinels or any of the other servers I play on, I'll stake ya 100 gold to get started.
I'm going to say sci-fi or horror (pleasepleasePLEASE be a Zombie theme!). Though, horror might be too close to fantasy for some.
An interesting easter egg from WoW: in some of the skins for certain devices (shredders and other things like that), there seems to be a part that looks sort of like a display, and Kerrigan is shown repeatedly.
That's been entirely different from my experience - maybe it's a server thing? I've rolled alts on maybe 20 different servers since launch and generally people are reasonably helpful and friendly. If I want a group for a dungeon, I'll generally find people in about 10-20 minutes, tops (general chat if the zone is busy, in a nearby city if it isn't, but I do think they can make this less of an issue). There are often leveling guilds that advertise looking for recruits in the main cities. I guess I just don't experience that cliquishness - the only time people are less than welcoming is when you're a fresh level 80 and you're starting to do heroics/raid - some ridiculous people will insist that you link achievements pointing out that you've done the instance before or look your armory profile up. Personally I think that's absurd, and take it as a sign that I don't want to be in that group even if I do have whatever it is they're looking for.
Maybe it's a peak time vs. off time kind of thing? If I play at hours most people in the US are at work or in classes or asleep, then yeah, it's much slower.
1) New players and catching up: I'm not sure we're playing the same game. They announced Refer A Friend, wherein a veteran can refer a new player (well, a new account) and when they team up, both characters get a huge boost to their experience up to level 60. This lets new players get into the game, learn from their friends, and generally get to explore a lot of stuff. It also lets older players level that other class they've always thought about but never done. Plus, they also re-itemized the quest rewards for 1-60, cut the total amount of xp to level, and basically make that less agonizing than it was in vanilla WoW. In Outland, the leveling rate was substantially sped up, and I can only imagine the same thing will happen with the next expansion with regards to Lich King stuff.
2) Instances are a strange case. Some people REALLY like 'em, some people just don't care. Personally, I hope that the next major update to instances would be something like what they did to the battlegrounds - a way to let people within server clusters run instances together. Obviously there would need to be a lot of stuff done to make this workable and not exploitable or really miserable for people who like to grief other players, but it would be huge for people who want to run instances but cannot seem to find groups. Certainly even a less than perfect implementation of this would be better than nobody ever running the early instances at all.
3) They handle inflation in two ways: gear resets and adding different mechanics. The next patch looks like it's going to let even reasonably casual players catch (nearly) up to the hard-core raiders so they can see the new content too. I think Blizzard learned that the poop-sockers will beat any raid they make very quickly, and so aren't worried about the hard-core players as much as the almost certainly much larger casual raider group. They shift up the mechanics of how things work frequently that people who haven't played the game for 3 years will be able to start (kinda) at the same general level of understanding as people who've been playing since launch.
4) They have given newbies a LOT of really kickass gear and removed "heroics" (actually, I think you're thinking about "elite" mobs) from the old world. Any class should be able to handle any quest in the game in the old world using ONLY quest reward items. The only benefit that being an experienced player will give you is that you'll know the world and the quests already, and some items that might boost the speed with which you level by 20% or so. Special "twink" equipment is absolutely not necessary to be able to level - it's nice, but really overkill.
I agree with you that they need to keep new players coming in for WoW to continue being so successful. They seem to be doing exactly that: making the initial levels easier, giving mounts to players earlier (and cheaper) than before, making the early quests less difficult, and creating new tools (a built in quest map kind of thing that shows you where to go for your quests is HUGE for newbies) that will even the playing field a bit between vets and newbies. The only real difference between a vet and a newbie is the store of knowledge that vets have built up - where things are, how they work, etc. The only items that vets have that newbies cannot get are really more flavor items - stuff from the past - but they don't really give any kind of advantage. Of all the multiplayer games I've ever played, WoW is the most newbie friendly, and continues to get moreso as they go along.
The next MMO is, according to statements from Blizzard sources, to be a new IP - not based on any previous franchise. Given that 3 of their upcoming products are sequels or expansions (Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, next WoW expansion) it stands to reason that they might want to try to launch a new franchise - they need to keep the future markets in mind.
Yes, though for entirely different reasons. Parent/child relationships have staggering power imbalances - it is virtually impossible to imagine a parent/child relationship that would produce offspring that isn't at core an abuse of the powerless person by the powered one. Sibling relationships may not have the power imbalance, and might thus be less objectionable.
I can't speak to morality as I am cheerfully amoral (being an atheist and thus not having any kind of universal yardstick against which to measure my actions). On the ethical side of things, however, and using a definition of "balancing the most good to the most people with the least harm to the least people over the longest possible term" - then no, I can't seen an ethical issue with same-sex couples being able to both contribute biologically to their child assuming the health of the child is not at issue. I do see an issue with the parent/child offspring in that it's very hard to come up with situations where such a relationship wouldn't be abusive (and possibly lead to abuse of the offspring). I'm not sure if I see an ethical issue with siblings producing children together as I don't imagine that such a thing would happen often enough to lead to overall removing variety from the gene pool (harming humanity as a whole), but there could be some rather funky power dynamics going on.
The absolutely last thing I'll say on this subject is this: Just because someone else was told by their cleric that consenting adults who are harming no-one are icky and bad, and just because these people are extremely vocal about it doesn't actually translate into a real ethical puzzle. Back before studies had been done about the effects of having 2 same-sex parents (either adoptive, or one is bio), it might have been reasonable to be skeptical about the wisdom of allowing same-sex couples to be parents. But the research has been done, there isn't any negative effect, so there are no rational reasons to be bothered by it and no rational basis for ethical concern.
I'm not at all saying that old-school games have better storylines and that newer ones don't - just that it's easier to hide a stinker nowadays. Back in the day, I can't really think of any truly *bad* games that were popular despite being bad because of graphics, but nowadays I can think of several that really, really suck but sell due to the shiny.
For my money, Bioshock, the entire Fallout series (though FO1 & 2 aren't exactly "new" and didn't have any of the really shiny graphical stuff) and many others are proof that modern games can be fantastic, too - I'm glad I never gave up gaming.
What's the site for the Wasteland group? I'd be interested in some nostalgia :)
The only problem is this:
Back in the day of less impressive graphics, immersion had to come about by superior storytelling and game design. When I played Wasteland, for example, even though the graphics were simple tiles and the combat system was a pokemon like "pick an option for everyone and then it'll just say what you did later" kind of thing, I got sucked in to certain parts. There was one bit where one of your characters got their mind transferred into a nightmare inside a cybernetic brain and you had to find your way out - it's been 20 years at least since I played it, and I can still remember some of the experiences from that, and I only played that sequence 2 times. I was also a wee child then, so that probably made it easier to get into it.
With really great graphics now, immersion is much, much easier to achieve, so storytelling and game design aren't as necessary. Sometimes we get lucky - Bioshock had great graphics and great storytelling and design. I had to stop playing it with the lights out - my roommate insisted she heard me shrieking profanity at 3 in the morning when I'd get spooked. Sometimes we don't get so lucky - Fable II had *brilliant* graphics, but it was, in may ways, hard to play it as anything other than a simulation - I didn't care about the characters, I just wanted to see the stupid things I could get them to do. I think, for example, I was *supposed* to care about my spouse and child and companions in the game, but they just weren't fleshed out well. Playing as an adult, who is resistant to being sucked in to some extent, I'd say that the better graphics nowadays are probably necessary to getting me really sucked in, but it's still the storytelling and gameplay that do it.
We have demonstrated that you can have truly amazing gaming experiences with low quality graphics as long as there's great stories backing it up - can we have great gaming experiences with truly amazing graphics but no story? I don't think so. At least, I don't think they'd be anything but amusing tech demos that are quickly forgotten, but maybe other people really like the shiny.
Infertile heterosexual couples can't currently conceive children. This could grant that ability. That's huge. So how is the sexual orientation of the couple relevant?
If the OP had said "This will allow people who couldn't have conceived the ability to have children, this opens up a can of worms" then sure - but he (and you) specifically mention the sexual orientation of the couples as being relevant. I'm just trying to understand why.
Is it because gay people would be able to have children that share the dna from 2 same-sex parents? Is it because gay people having kids is an ethical concern? Is it squeamishness about gay folks being able to have children?
How is it any more a "big can of worm" than infertile hetero couples having children? Are you suggesting that there is some kind of ethical or moral problem with homosexuals having children with this tech that would not apply to heterosexual couples?
It must absolutely suck to be you, to work with you, or to have you as a customer. Maybe you should look into a different line of work.
I love my job and I have a great time doing it. I work with people I genuinely like. When I go home at the end of the day I feel like I accomplished something meaningful with the 1/3rd (or more) of my day I spent earning a living. Why wouldn't I want a huge fraction of my life to be as enjoyable as possible? What benefit is there in making it some kind of soulless, cold experience?
I'm an evangelical agnostic. I'll come to your door for no particular reason.
One of the studies we're doing in my lab is an intervention with (currently) HIV- youth who engage in frequent risk behaviors (most are sex workers, a little under a third are IV drug users, a very small portion just have risky sex because that's what they do). As part of the study, we do HIV testing every 3 months. We have an "expected" rate of conversion (obtained from other studies) and then we compare our actual rate of conversion to see whether our intervention is having an impact. While I'm no biostatician, I imagine the process is similar for a vaccine trial as for an educational intervention - you get people who are extremely likely to convert, vaccinate them, and if fewer convert (hopefully none of them!) despite engaging in risky activities, you can say that there's very likely been an effect.
Stand at your desk rather than sit. Do pushups every couple of hours. Do crunches during a 5 minute break. Do stretches as you can get 1-2 minutes. If there are stairs at the office, run up and down a flight of them for 10 minutes during a break.
Basically, incorporate a little activity into your day while you're at work. It won't turn you into an elite athlete, but it'll help you not totally blob out.
I haven't raided since vanilla - good to know that they have stones there too.
I wonder if they'll ever make a REALLY fast (150? 280? like epic flying) land mount that would work in Azeroth to mitigate the lack of flying there.
Thanks for posting that - I had no idea it was being changed, and I have a bunch of alts who need it :)
I don't disagree that it could have been a more informative original question, but I don't know that I think being bad at asking questions necessarily equates to not being serious about the question asked; more that the Asker was keeping it short and isn't very good at prioritizing.
I thought slashdot was actually about showing off your wow characters and coming up with sigs that invite conversation :)
I don't think "most" of WoW's charm was due to mounts, but if you feel "most" of the charm comes from touring around the world, I guess that's your right :)
And there is some danger - if you're not careful you can get assaulted by various large flying things in many areas, and they'll either dismount you (dropping you to your death unless you're a mage or priest or paladin) or beat you to death since they're rather powerful.
Fortunately, you have to wait to at least level 78 when you're in Northrend to get flying out there, and you should by then already have entered most of the zones on a land mount and explored a bit. The last 2 levels are designed around you being able to fly, and there's PLENTY of epic stuff (the giant helicarrier and the cities up in the mountains did it for me).
Ive actually quit WoW over lack of instant movement. Waiting 30 minutes for group to ssemble is not fun, neither well spent time. When you spend more time afking game and reding book while you wait for someone than playing, something is very wrong ...
In WoW there are at least 2 options for getting other players to a dungeon virtually instantly - the meeting stones (requires 2 players be there already) and warlock teleporting (requires 3 players be at the desired location). If you're at a level where you're doing content that doesn't have a meeting stone (raids, pretty much) you are going to have the ability to travel to any location in the world in much less than 30 minutes, at most about 10 minutes, and that would be the most extreme possible case I can think of. The *only* time there is a longer trip involved is when you're first exploring an area with a given character. If you don't have the flight paths connecting one point to another, then prepare for World of Walking - but at the level where you're still getting flight paths it isn't like you're raiding or doing dungeons much, so waiting for people for a raid isn't happening.
People take so long to get to instances and raids not because of travel times, but because they are doing other things before the raid, like selling stuff, repairing, getting potions etc. ready for the raid, chatting, whatever. If travel time were the real determinant of how long it takes to get a raid together, the wait times would be down to 10 minutes, 15 minutes tops.
Further, WoW has done quite a bit to change the way you have to travel:
Original WoW had mounts that you could get at level 40 that would boost your speed by 60% for 100 gold (a decent amount of money back then) and 1000 gold at level 60 (the maximum level) would get you 100% movement speed increase. You could boost that another 2-3% by getting a trinket that would speed you up.
Then they added the Burning Crusade expansion with flying mounts. The level 40 mounts dropped to 60 (I think?) gold, the level 60 mounts dropped to 640 (I think?) gold, and the flying mounts were now 1000 gold for the riding skill (easy to get along the way to level 70) for a 60% speed flying mount and 5000 gold (about as hard to get as the old 1000g mount) for a 280% speed increase - as fast as the flighpaths, but quicker because you could do this point to point kind of travel rather than take the long way with flight paths that swooped around. You could boost those numbers by 10% or so by getting new trinkets.
In addition, they added Shattrath which has portals in it to every major city in the game. You could set your hearthstone to Shattrath and teleport to either continent in the old world (and close to other travel options) instantly.
Then they added Wrath of the Lich King. The level 40 mounts now unlock at level 30. There's a new city - Dalaran - that has a set of portals to all major cities. Cooldowns on hearth stones and other similar abilities were reduced to 30 minutes from an hour. 5000g for the VERY fast flying mounts is now pretty easy to get.
It isn't instant travel, but it's not 30 minutes, either. And if you're really impatient to get around, roll a mage or deathknight. Mages can teleport to many places in the world inside of 10 seconds, and deathknights have special abilities that make their mounted speed quite a bit faster than usual - it feels pretty peppy.
Guild Wars also uses a different model from WoW. They actually make more money if you buy the game and then stop playing because it's a pay once (and pay for expansions) kind of thing. WoW is a pay per month set up. Guild Wars doesn't really require timesinks for their business model in the same way WoW does. I think WoW does a pretty good job of varying the timesinks and even making them a little more entertaining (the people on boats can be fun to talk to; flying under your own control you can find interesting places) all things considered - and certainly the rest of the game is more than fun enough (for people who still play) to compensate for the travel stuff.