Question: "How does this impact D3?" Answer: "It doesn't." Ditto for WoW and Starcraft.
Blizzard Entertainment is retaining all of its own staff; no one's going anywhere.
The actual merger is more akin to "Vivendi-Activision", but Vivendi doesn't have as strong a brand as Blizzard, so they slapped Blizzard's name on it instead.
>You first have to get other gear that gives you the bonus points you pretty much need >to even stand a chance in other dungeons. WoW is now, IIRC, at "Tier 6". I.e. you do >that whole thing six times before you're at the top.
Just a point of clarification: WoW's tiered systems work in conjunction with a "gear reset" (or "mudflation", if you prefer the negative term) each expansion. Quest rewards from each expansion will roughly equal the tiered rewards you earn from raiding previously.
For example: In classic WoW, a level 60 player might go to MC, BWL, and Naxx (raid dungeons), and get Tier 1-3 armor. In BC (the first expansion), a level 60 player can still go to the old raid dungeons for gear, OR they can do solo/small group quests for similar rewards (while simultaneously leveling to 70). If you do many quests and dungeons, you will be wearing gear that is similar to Tier 3 once you arrive at level 70, and be ready immediately for Tier 4 content, even if they've never set foot in any of the previous Tiers (raids) before.
Blizz has already said the same sort of gear reset will occur for WotLK. A new level 80 player in WotLK will be wearing Tier 6-equivalent quested gear, and will be immediately ready for Tier 7 content.
The rating mechanic changes were known prior to today, but S4 arena's start date hadn't been announced (other than the notion that the ubiquitous "We'll give you a 2 week warning"). While it's hardly gaming "news", it is "new" and WoW players have been expecting this announcement for some time.
Customs agents (US and Japanese) stopped me several times over the years to inspect my laptop. In every case that I can remember I was able to dodge "inspection" by simply saying that I couldn't turn my laptop on because no battery was installed (which was the truth). I would only carry a power cord in my laptop case, no batteries.
My battery was actually located in a separate carry-on; a backpack or a suitcase or some such.
I guess if they were really interested in the laptop they could've plugged it in to a wall outlet and gotten into it that way.. but they never asked to do that.
>Thus far the Japanese animeka's and mangaka's have never protested.
Unfortunately, this is wrong, and the opinions of Japan's "inaction" are entirely based on ignorance. On multiple occasions, Japanese companies, staff, creators, and spokespeople have asked fansubbers to stop distributing various anime titles. Off the top of my head, there are three notable instances of Japanese companies directly asking for the stop of unlicensed titles via the Internet.
The anime industry's legal collaboration, J.A.I.L.E.D., also made one or two busts of major bootleg operations -- selling duplicated commercial tapes and fansubs -- in the 90s. I don't have sources for them, but you could probably find documentation of them via Usenet (rec.arts.anime or r.a.a.misc).
If the flow of games were more natural (either because the games were in the same genre, or because the comparisons between the games made sense), that'd've probably helped a bit.
how does this compare in terms of state liquor laws? do shops ALWAYS have to ID customers when buying liquor? or do stores get to make the call on when to ID?
Has anyone considered writing an MMO where scripting up the client and making bots is part of the game. It seems so many people just play to be the l33t357 (did I spell that right?), and they get to there by botting, so why not have a game where that is the aim.
But, see... Most people don't want to MAKE bots, they just want to USE them. To that end, I suggest a game that pre-includes everything necessary to fire-and-forget: http://www.progressquest.com/
until you have to be reasonably intelligent to survive these encounters a bot will be successful.
This is why the bots only focus on the mobs that have little or no scripting, no special abilities, and generally are vulnerable to any sort of attack.
Actually, your suggestion won't work in the Real World (TM).
>Example of a script, automatically look for characters raking in huge amounts >of loot/cash. Then automatically narrow those down to the ones who are
Individuals sometimes buy additional characters/accounts just for the sake of additional storage, some of which is used for AH'ing, some of which is used for general item storage. Of course these characters/accounts will have items flowing cheaply to (and from) them. This isn't illegal. Also, this would potentially cover guilds, which you mention below:
>make a whitelist of guilds.
And so the farmers will form 'legitimate' guilds and play together. They only need 1 generally-english-speaking representative to approach the GMs to 'prove' they are legitimate. Instead of eliminating farmers, this would INCORPORATE them further. GG.
>Finally, look for suspicious usage patterns. Regular people can't play for 24 >hours a day.
I knew a guy who played for 40 hours in a row, then he'd sleep for 8 hours and repeat. Once the account hit 60, he'd sell it on ebay/IGE/whatever. Point was, he was a one-man operation. He could have just as easily been a millionaire with no need to work, ever, and just liked playing 40 hours at a time with small breaks in-between.
It's not so cut-and-dry as one might hope. Farming is, in no case, against the rules of any MMO.. only when the farmers sell their gains for real world cash does it become illegal.
So, okay, WoW has a series of 'endgame' raid dungeons. By this, we mean 10+ players investing their time and effort into a single dungeon until they beat it.
When my guild started working on Upper Blackrock Spire (a 15 player dungeon) in March 2005, it took us 6 hours to reach the last boss and we didn't even beat him. A few weeks later, we were beating it in 4 hours, then 3 hours, and now we can do it in a little over 1 hour. Each time we played through the dungeon, we got better gear, and we became more knowledgeable about the environment.
Once we got UBRS worked out, we started in on Molten Core (40 player dungeon) at the end of May, and devoted 4 hours to it on Tuesdays and Sundays. We started killing the first boss, then the first two bosses, then three, four, etc. Last week, we changed our raid schedule to clear MC in a single day instead of over two days. We'll get MC down to 2 hours in due time.
Some of us started working on Onyxia in September, and we eventually attracted enough attention to beat her in October. It wasn't a requirement, but people saw our progress and wanted to take a part in it.
Now we're working on Blackwing Lair, the second 'endgame' dungeon. We devote 4 hours to it on Tuesdays, and we'll beat it, too.
So who are we? We're a middle-of-the-road guild, 15th on the server to kill Ragnaros. We field 2 separate MC raids per week because there's enough interest in the guild, and we have new players join and old players leave all the time.
We don't require attendence, daily logins or certain amounts of raid 'points'. We don't require people to level to 60 within a certain frame of time. We do require maturity, a minute amount of intelligence, and the desire to avoid causing inter-guild (and intra-guild) drama.
"He created a comedy series called ''Red vs. Blue,'' a sort of sci-fi version of ''M*A*S*H.'' In ''Red vs. Blue,'' the soldiers rarely do any fighting; they just stand around insulting one another and musing over the absurdities of war, sounding less like patriotic warriors than like bored, clever video-store clerks."
M*A*S*H was a war comedy about a medical unit during the Korean War -- wounded soldiers were flown/driven to their location, operated on, and sent back into the war. They were rarely under fire, and rarely carried weapons, although I recall several different "tense" episodes where Bad Things(TM) were going on, and the unit had to evacuate/move to the front lines/etc.
The very core of the show was about the doctors, and quite a few scenes were shot with the docs quibbling to one another over a patient's body. Some episodes, naturally, dealt less with medical situations than others, but even in its more comedic seasons, you would find a large number of episodes involving either patients or the practice of being a doctor.
It's disingenuous to compare Red and Blue to M*A*S*H because "the soldiers rarely do any fighting". M*A*S*H's doctors did do their job. It's just that their job wasn't fighting.
D2 was a game that also happened to have free online play. No significant profit was made (or lost) from providing the battle.net service to anyone, thus they didn't feel the need to crack down as harshly on dupers. Of course, they still eliminated thousands of accounts for using keygens, duping, maphacking, etc.
Recall that D2 was one of the first games to aggressively deal with duplication -- and that was for a free service. Blizzard is quite familiar with duping techniques, and given that WoW is a pay-to-play game, I suspect they've gone all-out to make sure that as many styles of duping as possible will be caught.
Until Blizz announces which actions they'll be taking (if any) I think it's a bit premature to claim that this is the end of WoW.
Heck, there might not even be the need for a rollback. With enough logging, it might be possible to eliminate the dupers (and their immediate launderings) without affecting anyone else. Depending on how much is logged, they could even undo auctions on duped items ("hmm, Innocent Person A bought Duped Item from Duper B. Let's eliminate the duped item and give them back the money they spent.") or trades. Sure, you might lose your spiffy new boots, but you'll have your money back. Is that a loss?
well, there *are* 'unique' items (where any player can only have 1). the method of duping involves handing loot to another character.. so the two characters would only be able to dupe 1 of a unique item... but, see, the unique tag tends to be used to prevent people from equipping two of the same type of weapon, or the same type of ring or trinket.
most items are NOT unique, so that a player can have >1 item. epic drops (like glowing brightwood staff, krol blade, etc) are typically NOT unique, and bind-on-equip (i.e. anyone can have as many as they want, but once they're equipped, they can't be traded to anyone else).
the internal serial# is a separate issue, one which (hopefully) blizzard will be capable of checking -- i would expect that the dupe method keeps items with the same serial#... and even if it somehow creates a new serial# for the item:
to the best of my knowledge (based on forum posts), blizzard DOES log trades and mail, so it should be easy to spot large repeated transactions in the vicinities of instances.
I've worked with Anime News Network for 5 years in a number of positions. Currently I'm a translator, although I used to be in a number of other positions. Due to my positions and the required knowledge of the medium, I watched over 1,000 different series and films during that time.
To the best of my knowledge, there are currently about 1500 distinct anime films/series licensed for distribution in the US, and another 1000 that were licensed but whose licenses have expired or have vanished into obscurity. If that's 1% of the total commercial anime output in Japan, then there must be something like 250,000 different series in Japan since the birth of modern "anime" with Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atom (Astroboy).. that was in 1963. That means Japan needed to make around 6000 titles PER YEAR.
Uh.. No, that's definitely not true.
Even including the lost experimental/pre-war material, anime didn't become a profitable commercial venture until the 1950s in the form of feature films. Anime didn't air on TV until the 1960s, and the direct-to-video market didn't begin until the 1980s. The 80s saw a boom in direct-to-video production, but that collapsed in the 1990s. TV animation blossomed in the 1990s because computers replaced painters and in-betweeners.
If you look at anime seasons in Japan, about 2/3rds of current shows will be licensed and released within the next 2 years. Within 5 years, we should expect over 80% of *currently airing* series to be released in the States.
Surely you can't say 99% hasn't ever been seen in the US. Whoever said that number was either delusional, or misleading. I wonder who the source is...
Actually, no, they didn't know WoW was going to be selling like hotcakes. For the Release party at Fry's Electronics, they knew a few things: 1. When Warcraft III came out, 700 fans came to buy copies and meet the staff. 2. Warcraft III had a good deal of hype, and had great reviews. 3. World of Warcraft was also getting great reviews. 4. The US Open Beta limited itself to 500,000 ("free") accounts.
IIRC (but don't have any sources), analysts were suspecting 40-50% of the beta accounts would roll over to purchase the game (== 200k-250k, over the first 3 months). Knowing those things, they prepared to (optimistically) sell 2500 copies of the game. Instead, _5000_ people showed up to the release party. Oops.
They broke their sales expectations for the _year_ in the first _two weeks_. They doubled their number of servers in a _month_. They've upgraded hardware for the largest servers SEVERAL times now, and are still constantly getting pushed against the ceiling.
I would be inclined to call WoW's sales as a catastrohpic success.
As for their performance... well, dumping 12 months of server rollouts and upgrades into a 1 month period ain't half bad. Now they're playing catch-up with other aspects of the game.
Let's see.. The whole bnetd thing started in early 2002, so it should be at least 5 games and 3 Blizzard-produced expansions (assuming the poster uses a PC):
Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal Starcraft Starcraft: Broodwar Diablo Diablo II Diablo II: Lords of Darkness (a mid-2001 release)
(and maybe some of the console games, like Lost Vikings)
The poster did not purchase: Warcraft III (mid-2002) Warcraft III: Frozen Throne World of Warcraft
Warriors were being looked at. You can't expect the Blizzard devs to just look at the drivel in the forums and instantly assume, "Oh, because a tiny number of kids are complaining about warriors, they're obviously broken!"
First, players need to understand that Blizzard is a massive company. Blizzard has hired managers and moderators to filter out the noise to try and find meaningful posts. The devs may read the forums, but the moderators are supposed to organize the meaningful posts into reports, showing the issues and cultivating a positive atmosphere on the forums.
A post suggesting that Blizzard "nerf pallies" is quickly followed up by an equally uninformative post suggesting that the devs "buff warriors!" -- with inaccurate, undetailed and subjective posts like that, OF COURSE the Devs won't take action. The unintelligible posts, meanwhile, continued to accumulate, and ultimately generated the motivation for the march. Apparently some players are too stupid to be able to figure out that if THEY aren't being understood, that maybe the problem is on THEIR end.
Meanwhile, a handful of intelligable players wrote out their list of greviences and, in some cases, actually managed to get the moderators attention.. thus they KNEW the devs were actually, actively evaluating the issue.
Gee. Maybe it pays to realize that the world does not (yet) use AIM-speech as a standard of communication.
Please mod the parent off-topic, overrated and/or uninsightful.
First of all, it's not a real research project at any real university. Secondly, the 'trick' to this appears to have more to do with numbers and powers than anything else:
The vast majority of English words are 4-6 letters long, in dictionary form. By subtracting the first and last letter, we're typically left with 2! (2), 3! (6) or 4! (24) possible word orders. Our brains simply search until a rough match is found.
Context may also provide a clue as to what the proper response should be.
Additionally, lengthier words tend to have predictable prefix/suffix morphology (pre-, astro-, dis-, -ed, -ing, -ally, etc). Because we are told that these patterns are correct, our brains tend to gravitate towards them when decyphering scrambled words.
It's trivial, BTW, to produce sentences that fool the brain into mixing up words -- sometimes providing results that don't end with the same letter or that aren't the same length.
ICRTABIRTH (I couldn't read the article but I read the headline). YMMV.
Java is uncool because whenever I load up a program coded in Java, it eats up between 40 and 60mb of memory, whereas a similar program coded in C++ takes up 20mb.
Java is uncool because the C++ program is faster on EVERY platform than Java.
Java is uncool because although it's supposed to be supported equally on all platforms, it STILL isn't, and you'll get oddities that only affect Windows or Mac or *nix, so instead of coding for one platform, you're coding for all three AND writing code to handle exceptions on each. In comparison, C++ could be written for Windows and be ported to Mac without having to worry about the Windows-specific bugs.
I'm not trying to troll, but I avoid Java programs whenever I have the chance, because typical Java programs make Windows itself look quick and lean by comparison.
Doesn't mean I don't use Java... in many cases it's inevitable (I play Go online, and my preferred server only released a Java client)... but if I ever had a choice between Java and C++/ASM/whatever, I'd pick C++/ASM/Whatever instead.. so long as "whatever" is Turing-complete (I've yet to see an infinite loop in Malbolge, so it doesn't count.)
It's not just skin colors. It's also how you dress and what you look like.
I would regularly travel as part of my job.. going on the cheap seats and usually ending up with a layover or two, just so I could save $20 ("Is it good for the company?"). I also had long hair (==down to the middle of my back).
As such, I went through security quite a number of times... and from 2001 through this past May, I received additional security checks about 75% of the time during my travels, comprising about 20 separate trips (a total of about 40 flights). I was asked to go through additional security even when I was IN the gate, waiting for my plane. When the airports stopped doing at-boarding baggage checks, I would still sometimes be stopped and asked to do baggage checks or some additional form of security. Occasionally, they would wipe some sort of cloth on me to test for drugs.
I cut my hair short this past May, and I've traveled 4 times since, for a total of about 10 flights.
Was I just "unlucky" for 3 years? I'd like to think that it was harassment, because I haven't had any extra security (not even a "mandatory" shoe check) since I cut my hair.
I hope someone tells the author that ZoneAlarm, if uninstalled on a Win9X box, has a tendency to delete certain files that are essential to internet usage. What's worse is, a typical Win98 "System Restore" via the Win98 CD won't actually recover the files. Removing and re-adding the appropriate network hardware won't recover the files, either.
No, the only (guranteed) means of recovering them and having the net settings restored is to use a pre-ZA Win98 directory backup, or else WIPE THE DRIVE and reinstall from scratch.
All-in-all, this guy has (a) no idea what went wrong with his computer, and (b) no inclination to find out what went wrong with his computer. The "Digital Doctor" sounds like he's not very handy with older OS's either. Reinstalling Win98 is certainly an easy thing to do, but there are plenty of other steps he should've taken before the wipe and reinstall.
For starters, there's a command-line FTP program, which could've been used to acquire Mozilla, which would've given him the necessary net access to grab the latest virus definitions manually. He could've also downloaded Isarn Taskinfo or some other utility to better monitor what's in memory (since Win98's CTRL-ALT-DEL menu doesn't display everything). At that point, he'd have some grasp as to the severity of the situation, as well as (hopefully) some running, up-to-date AV software to nuke anything unwanted in the system.
Next he'd need to take a quick trip through REGEDIT to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Run and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run and other similar registry keys, noting files that appear like they shouldn't be there, and tracking them down. Next, a trip through C:\Windows\System would be beneficial, if you know what to look for. Win.ini, System.ini, autoexec.bat, and config.sys are also places to look for at-boot problems.
C'mon. I can do better than that. Whoever hired Glenn, fire him and hire me instead.:p
Slashdot Mirror
Question: "How does this impact D3?" Answer: "It doesn't."
Ditto for WoW and Starcraft.
Blizzard Entertainment is retaining all of its own staff; no one's going anywhere.
The actual merger is more akin to "Vivendi-Activision", but Vivendi doesn't have as strong a brand as Blizzard, so they slapped Blizzard's name on it instead.
>You first have to get other gear that gives you the bonus points you pretty much need
>to even stand a chance in other dungeons. WoW is now, IIRC, at "Tier 6". I.e. you do
>that whole thing six times before you're at the top.
Just a point of clarification:
WoW's tiered systems work in conjunction with a "gear reset" (or "mudflation", if you prefer the negative term) each expansion. Quest rewards from each expansion will roughly equal the tiered rewards you earn from raiding previously.
For example:
In classic WoW, a level 60 player might go to MC, BWL, and Naxx (raid dungeons), and get Tier 1-3 armor.
In BC (the first expansion), a level 60 player can still go to the old raid dungeons for gear, OR they can do solo/small group quests for similar rewards (while simultaneously leveling to 70). If you do many quests and dungeons, you will be wearing gear that is similar to Tier 3 once you arrive at level 70, and be ready immediately for Tier 4 content, even if they've never set foot in any of the previous Tiers (raids) before.
Blizz has already said the same sort of gear reset will occur for WotLK. A new level 80 player in WotLK will be wearing Tier 6-equivalent quested gear, and will be immediately ready for Tier 7 content.
The rating mechanic changes were known prior to today, but S4 arena's start date hadn't been announced (other than the notion that the ubiquitous "We'll give you a 2 week warning"). While it's hardly gaming "news", it is "new" and WoW players have been expecting this announcement for some time.
someone should just file a copyright claim against the offending terrorist videos.
;p
i mean, what's al qaeda going to do? file a counterclaim and provide Bin Laden's mailing address?
Customs agents (US and Japanese) stopped me several times over the years to inspect my laptop. In every case that I can remember I was able to dodge "inspection" by simply saying that I couldn't turn my laptop on because no battery was installed (which was the truth). I would only carry a power cord in my laptop case, no batteries.
My battery was actually located in a separate carry-on; a backpack or a suitcase or some such.
I guess if they were really interested in the laptop they could've plugged it in to a wall outlet and gotten into it that way.. but they never asked to do that.
Source seems to be:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/-/HQpress/112007%20education%20plan%201.pdf
barackobama.com, of course, being the official Barack Obama website.
This link then redirects to the 3cdn hosting site, where the PDF is located.
WoW and SC2 have completely separate developers, art teams, etc. I wouldn't worry too much about WoW impacting SC2 (or, vice-versa SC2 impacting WoW).
>Thus far the Japanese animeka's and mangaka's have never protested.
Unfortunately, this is wrong, and the opinions of Japan's "inaction" are entirely based on ignorance. On multiple occasions, Japanese companies, staff, creators, and spokespeople have asked fansubbers to stop distributing various anime titles. Off the top of my head, there are three notable instances of Japanese companies directly asking for the stop of unlicensed titles via the Internet.
1999:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/1999-01-20/digital-anime-distribution-threatened-by-letter-from-sony
Sony asks Digital Anime Distribution to cease distribution of Rurouni Kenshin fansubs via their website. This was prior to Media Blaster's announcement of the North American rights to the series.
2002:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2002-12-06/production-i.g-calls-for-moderation-in-fan-subbing
Yoshiki Sakurai (writer) speaking on Production IG's company website, asked English-speaking anime fans to buy licensed anime products instead of downloading fansubs.
2004:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2004-12-09/media-factory-makes-request-to-stop-fansubbing
Media Factory demands AnimeSuki (a fansub bittorrent website) stop distributing their works. This was also sent to several of the groups that made the fansubs -- most of whom complied with the demands.
The anime industry's legal collaboration, J.A.I.L.E.D., also made one or two busts of major bootleg operations -- selling duplicated commercial tapes and fansubs -- in the 90s. I don't have sources for them, but you could probably find documentation of them via Usenet (rec.arts.anime or r.a.a.misc).
If the flow of games were more natural (either because the games were in the same genre, or because the comparisons between the games made sense), that'd've probably helped a bit.
how does this compare in terms of state liquor laws? do shops ALWAYS have to ID customers when buying liquor? or do stores get to make the call on when to ID?
Has anyone considered writing an MMO where scripting up the client and making bots is part of the game. It seems so many people just play to be the l33t357 (did I spell that right?), and they get to there by botting, so why not have a game where that is the aim.
But, see... Most people don't want to MAKE bots, they just want to USE them. To that end, I suggest a game that pre-includes everything necessary to fire-and-forget:
http://www.progressquest.com/
until you have to be reasonably intelligent to survive these encounters a bot will be successful.
This is why the bots only focus on the mobs that have little or no scripting, no special abilities, and generally are vulnerable to any sort of attack.
Actually, your suggestion won't work in the Real World (TM).
>Example of a script, automatically look for characters raking in huge amounts
>of loot/cash. Then automatically narrow those down to the ones who are
Individuals sometimes buy additional characters/accounts just for the sake of additional storage, some of which is used for AH'ing, some of which is used for general item storage. Of course these characters/accounts will have items flowing cheaply to (and from) them. This isn't illegal. Also, this would potentially cover guilds, which you mention below:
>make a whitelist of guilds.
And so the farmers will form 'legitimate' guilds and play together. They only need 1 generally-english-speaking representative to approach the GMs to 'prove' they are legitimate. Instead of eliminating farmers, this would INCORPORATE them further. GG.
>Finally, look for suspicious usage patterns. Regular people can't play for 24
>hours a day.
I knew a guy who played for 40 hours in a row, then he'd sleep for 8 hours and repeat. Once the account hit 60, he'd sell it on ebay/IGE/whatever. Point was, he was a one-man operation. He could have just as easily been a millionaire with no need to work, ever, and just liked playing 40 hours at a time with small breaks in-between.
It's not so cut-and-dry as one might hope. Farming is, in no case, against the rules of any MMO.. only when the farmers sell their gains for real world cash does it become illegal.
So, okay, WoW has a series of 'endgame' raid dungeons. By this, we mean 10+ players investing their time and effort into a single dungeon until they beat it.
When my guild started working on Upper Blackrock Spire (a 15 player dungeon) in March 2005, it took us 6 hours to reach the last boss and we didn't even beat him. A few weeks later, we were beating it in 4 hours, then 3 hours, and now we can do it in a little over 1 hour. Each time we played through the dungeon, we got better gear, and we became more knowledgeable about the environment.
Once we got UBRS worked out, we started in on Molten Core (40 player dungeon) at the end of May, and devoted 4 hours to it on Tuesdays and Sundays. We started killing the first boss, then the first two bosses, then three, four, etc. Last week, we changed our raid schedule to clear MC in a single day instead of over two days. We'll get MC down to 2 hours in due time.
Some of us started working on Onyxia in September, and we eventually attracted enough attention to beat her in October. It wasn't a requirement, but people saw our progress and wanted to take a part in it.
Now we're working on Blackwing Lair, the second 'endgame' dungeon. We devote 4 hours to it on Tuesdays, and we'll beat it, too.
So who are we? We're a middle-of-the-road guild, 15th on the server to kill Ragnaros. We field 2 separate MC raids per week because there's enough interest in the guild, and we have new players join and old players leave all the time.
We don't require attendence, daily logins or certain amounts of raid 'points'. We don't require people to level to 60 within a certain frame of time. We do require maturity, a minute amount of intelligence, and the desire to avoid causing inter-guild (and intra-guild) drama.
We think things've worked out pretty well.
"He created a comedy series called ''Red vs. Blue,'' a sort of sci-fi version of ''M*A*S*H.'' In ''Red vs. Blue,'' the soldiers rarely do any fighting; they just stand around insulting one another and musing over the absurdities of war, sounding less like patriotic warriors than like bored, clever video-store clerks."
M*A*S*H was a war comedy about a medical unit during the Korean War -- wounded soldiers were flown/driven to their location, operated on, and sent back into the war. They were rarely under fire, and rarely carried weapons, although I recall several different "tense" episodes where Bad Things(TM) were going on, and the unit had to evacuate/move to the front lines/etc.
The very core of the show was about the doctors, and quite a few scenes were shot with the docs quibbling to one another over a patient's body. Some episodes, naturally, dealt less with medical situations than others, but even in its more comedic seasons, you would find a large number of episodes involving either patients or the practice of being a doctor.
It's disingenuous to compare Red and Blue to M*A*S*H because "the soldiers rarely do any fighting". M*A*S*H's doctors did do their job. It's just that their job wasn't fighting.
D2 was a game that also happened to have free online play. No significant profit was made (or lost) from providing the battle.net service to anyone, thus they didn't feel the need to crack down as harshly on dupers. Of course, they still eliminated thousands of accounts for using keygens, duping, maphacking, etc.
Recall that D2 was one of the first games to aggressively deal with duplication -- and that was for a free service. Blizzard is quite familiar with duping techniques, and given that WoW is a pay-to-play game, I suspect they've gone all-out to make sure that as many styles of duping as possible will be caught.
Until Blizz announces which actions they'll be taking (if any) I think it's a bit premature to claim that this is the end of WoW.
Heck, there might not even be the need for a rollback. With enough logging, it might be possible to eliminate the dupers (and their immediate launderings) without affecting anyone else. Depending on how much is logged, they could even undo auctions on duped items ("hmm, Innocent Person A bought Duped Item from Duper B. Let's eliminate the duped item and give them back the money they spent.") or trades. Sure, you might lose your spiffy new boots, but you'll have your money back. Is that a loss?
well, there *are* 'unique' items (where any player can only have 1). the method of duping involves handing loot to another character.. so the two characters would only be able to dupe 1 of a unique item. .. but, see, the unique tag tends to be used to prevent people from equipping two of the same type of weapon, or the same type of ring or trinket.
most items are NOT unique, so that a player can have >1 item. epic drops (like glowing brightwood staff, krol blade, etc) are typically NOT unique, and bind-on-equip (i.e. anyone can have as many as they want, but once they're equipped, they can't be traded to anyone else).
the internal serial# is a separate issue, one which (hopefully) blizzard will be capable of checking -- i would expect that the dupe method keeps items with the same serial#... and even if it somehow creates a new serial# for the item:
to the best of my knowledge (based on forum posts), blizzard DOES log trades and mail, so it should be easy to spot large repeated transactions in the vicinities of instances.
what? 99% doesn't make it to the US? Wow.
I've worked with Anime News Network for 5 years in a number of positions. Currently I'm a translator, although I used to be in a number of other positions. Due to my positions and the required knowledge of the medium, I watched over 1,000 different series and films during that time.
To the best of my knowledge, there are currently about 1500 distinct anime films/series licensed for distribution in the US, and another 1000 that were licensed but whose licenses have expired or have vanished into obscurity. If that's 1% of the total commercial anime output in Japan, then there must be something like 250,000 different series in Japan since the birth of modern "anime" with Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atom (Astroboy).. that was in 1963. That means Japan needed to make around 6000 titles PER YEAR.
Uh.. No, that's definitely not true.
Even including the lost experimental/pre-war material, anime didn't become a profitable commercial venture until the 1950s in the form of feature films. Anime didn't air on TV until the 1960s, and the direct-to-video market didn't begin until the 1980s. The 80s saw a boom in direct-to-video production, but that collapsed in the 1990s. TV animation blossomed in the 1990s because computers replaced painters and in-betweeners.
If you look at anime seasons in Japan, about 2/3rds of current shows will be licensed and released within the next 2 years. Within 5 years, we should expect over 80% of *currently airing* series to be released in the States.
Surely you can't say 99% hasn't ever been seen in the US. Whoever said that number was either delusional, or misleading. I wonder who the source is...
Actually, no, they didn't know WoW was going to be selling like hotcakes. For the Release party at Fry's Electronics, they knew a few things:
1. When Warcraft III came out, 700 fans came to buy copies and meet the staff.
2. Warcraft III had a good deal of hype, and had great reviews.
3. World of Warcraft was also getting great reviews.
4. The US Open Beta limited itself to 500,000 ("free") accounts.
IIRC (but don't have any sources), analysts were suspecting 40-50% of the beta accounts would roll over to purchase the game (== 200k-250k, over the first 3 months). Knowing those things, they prepared to (optimistically) sell 2500 copies of the game. Instead, _5000_ people showed up to the release party. Oops.
They broke their sales expectations for the _year_ in the first _two weeks_. They doubled their number of servers in a _month_. They've upgraded hardware for the largest servers SEVERAL times now, and are still constantly getting pushed against the ceiling.
I would be inclined to call WoW's sales as a catastrohpic success.
As for their performance... well, dumping 12 months of server rollouts and upgrades into a 1 month period ain't half bad. Now they're playing catch-up with other aspects of the game.
Still, they've got a lot of ground to cover.
Let's see.. The whole bnetd thing started in early 2002, so it should be at least 5 games and 3 Blizzard-produced expansions (assuming the poster uses a PC):
Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994)
Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness
Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal
Starcraft
Starcraft: Broodwar
Diablo
Diablo II
Diablo II: Lords of Darkness (a mid-2001 release)
(and maybe some of the console games, like Lost Vikings)
The poster did not purchase:
Warcraft III (mid-2002)
Warcraft III: Frozen Throne
World of Warcraft
Warriors were being looked at. You can't expect the Blizzard devs to just look at the drivel in the forums and instantly assume, "Oh, because a tiny number of kids are complaining about warriors, they're obviously broken!"
First, players need to understand that Blizzard is a massive company. Blizzard has hired managers and moderators to filter out the noise to try and find meaningful posts. The devs may read the forums, but the moderators are supposed to organize the meaningful posts into reports, showing the issues and cultivating a positive atmosphere on the forums.
A post suggesting that Blizzard "nerf pallies" is quickly followed up by an equally uninformative post suggesting that the devs "buff warriors!" -- with inaccurate, undetailed and subjective posts like that, OF COURSE the Devs won't take action. The unintelligible posts, meanwhile, continued to accumulate, and ultimately generated the motivation for the march. Apparently some players are too stupid to be able to figure out that if THEY aren't being understood, that maybe the problem is on THEIR end.
Meanwhile, a handful of intelligable players wrote out their list of greviences and, in some cases, actually managed to get the moderators attention.. thus they KNEW the devs were actually, actively evaluating the issue.
Gee. Maybe it pays to realize that the world does not (yet) use AIM-speech as a standard of communication.
Please mod the parent off-topic, overrated and/or uninsightful.
First of all, it's not a real research project at any real university. Secondly, the 'trick' to this appears to have more to do with numbers and powers than anything else:
The vast majority of English words are 4-6 letters long, in dictionary form. By subtracting the first and last letter, we're typically left with 2! (2), 3! (6) or 4! (24) possible word orders. Our brains simply search until a rough match is found.
Context may also provide a clue as to what the proper response should be.
Additionally, lengthier words tend to have predictable prefix/suffix morphology (pre-, astro-, dis-, -ed, -ing, -ally, etc). Because we are told that these patterns are correct, our brains tend to gravitate towards them when decyphering scrambled words.
It's trivial, BTW, to produce sentences that fool the brain into mixing up words -- sometimes providing results that don't end with the same letter or that aren't the same length.
ICRTABIRTH (I couldn't read the article but I read the headline). YMMV.
Java is uncool because whenever I load up a program coded in Java, it eats up between 40 and 60mb of memory, whereas a similar program coded in C++ takes up 20mb.
Java is uncool because the C++ program is faster on EVERY platform than Java.
Java is uncool because although it's supposed to be supported equally on all platforms, it STILL isn't, and you'll get oddities that only affect Windows or Mac or *nix, so instead of coding for one platform, you're coding for all three AND writing code to handle exceptions on each. In comparison, C++ could be written for Windows and be ported to Mac without having to worry about the Windows-specific bugs.
I'm not trying to troll, but I avoid Java programs whenever I have the chance, because typical Java programs make Windows itself look quick and lean by comparison.
Doesn't mean I don't use Java... in many cases it's inevitable (I play Go online, and my preferred server only released a Java client)... but if I ever had a choice between Java and C++/ASM/whatever, I'd pick C++/ASM/Whatever instead.. so long as "whatever" is Turing-complete (I've yet to see an infinite loop in Malbolge, so it doesn't count.)
It's not just skin colors. It's also how you dress and what you look like.
I would regularly travel as part of my job.. going on the cheap seats and usually ending up with a layover or two, just so I could save $20 ("Is it good for the company?"). I also had long hair (==down to the middle of my back).
As such, I went through security quite a number of times... and from 2001 through this past May, I received additional security checks about 75% of the time during my travels, comprising about 20 separate trips (a total of about 40 flights). I was asked to go through additional security even when I was IN the gate, waiting for my plane. When the airports stopped doing at-boarding baggage checks, I would still sometimes be stopped and asked to do baggage checks or some additional form of security. Occasionally, they would wipe some sort of cloth on me to test for drugs.
I cut my hair short this past May, and I've traveled 4 times since, for a total of about 10 flights.
Was I just "unlucky" for 3 years? I'd like to think that it was harassment, because I haven't had any extra security (not even a "mandatory" shoe check) since I cut my hair.
Sorry. OT, I'm just rambling.
I hope someone tells the author that ZoneAlarm, if uninstalled on a Win9X box, has a tendency to delete certain files that are essential to internet usage. What's worse is, a typical Win98 "System Restore" via the Win98 CD won't actually recover the files. Removing and re-adding the appropriate network hardware won't recover the files, either.
e ntVersion\Run and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run and other similar registry keys, noting files that appear like they shouldn't be there, and tracking them down. Next, a trip through C:\Windows\System would be beneficial, if you know what to look for. Win.ini, System.ini, autoexec.bat, and config.sys are also places to look for at-boot problems.
:p
No, the only (guranteed) means of recovering them and having the net settings restored is to use a pre-ZA Win98 directory backup, or else WIPE THE DRIVE and reinstall from scratch.
All-in-all, this guy has (a) no idea what went wrong with his computer, and (b) no inclination to find out what went wrong with his computer. The "Digital Doctor" sounds like he's not very handy with older OS's either. Reinstalling Win98 is certainly an easy thing to do, but there are plenty of other steps he should've taken before the wipe and reinstall.
For starters, there's a command-line FTP program, which could've been used to acquire Mozilla, which would've given him the necessary net access to grab the latest virus definitions manually. He could've also downloaded Isarn Taskinfo or some other utility to better monitor what's in memory (since Win98's CTRL-ALT-DEL menu doesn't display everything). At that point, he'd have some grasp as to the severity of the situation, as well as (hopefully) some running, up-to-date AV software to nuke anything unwanted in the system.
Next he'd need to take a quick trip through REGEDIT to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr
C'mon. I can do better than that. Whoever hired Glenn, fire him and hire me instead.
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