That's because Caltech has a notoriously brutal curriculum. Consequently, grades are lower than other schools of that caliber, and Caltech has the lowest freshmen retention rate of any "top tier" school. There was a rumor going around that it was possible to do two years of a physics degree at Caltech, transfer to Harvard as a senior physics major, graduate and be back at Caltech for grad school in physics while your classmates were still undergrads. Supposedly someone did this - although they were probably taking the same classes as their former undergraduate classmates when they returned.
This was also very evident at the annual job fair. Several companies from the Bay Area that drew a large amount of employees from Stanford wouldn't even talk to anyone that didn't have a 4.0 GPA at Caltech. Other companies that employed a large number of Caltech alums openly admitted to students that they would mentally add a full 1.0 to a Caltech GPA when looking at a student's resume.
FWIW the vast majority of classes at Caltech use takehome exams. The "weeder" EE course switched to an oral exam when I was there, but that was 11 years ago and I don't know if they still do that.
Disclaimer: I attended Caltech for undergrad but did not graduate, and my wife has a Ph.D. from Caltech.
Although it was about traveling outside the country.
He was teaching the Networking course, and during a brief section on security and encryption he mentioned how he had recently been traveling (he wouldn't say where, but he was born in India) and stayed at a five-star hotel while he was out of the country. He then pointed out how he had requested a new/temporary credit card from his bank for the trip, which he only used to pay for the hotel, and he canceled the card as soon as he was back in the US.
By the time he had gotten back to the states, the card had already been stolen/compromised.
They offer a free 14-day trial, the game has a very well done "Tutorial" which will get any new player comfortable with the game, and there are very real and brutal consequences for death and loss.
EVE is the most complex MMO that I have played, and the sheer breadth of available options is staggering.
Mythic has extensive experience with PvP and has put controls in to remove the griefing of lower level players as much as possible.
The game is divided up into four "tiers." The level ranges for the tiers are (roughly, I'm not positive) 1 through 11, 12 through 21, 22 through 31, and 32 to 40. If a Level 12 players enters a Tier 1 zone and goes looking for some Level 2 warrior to gank, he won't succeed. The level 12 player will be "chickened." He will literally be transformed into a chicken with 1 hit point and an attack that does 1 damage.
Even on the open PvP servers where you are always "flagged" for RvR (there are no safe PvE zones like on the Core ruleset servers) they have kept a reduced form of the "chickening" mechanic. It's just been extended down a tier, so a level 15 character can go into the tier 1 zone without being chickened, but a level 23 character WILL be turned into a chicken in the tier 1 zone (but not in tier 2).
There is also the "starter" area, which is a subset of the tier 1 area, where anyone from a higher tier will be turned into a chicken regardless, to allow the newest players time to level up to 2 or 3 before going out and fighting.
That's not true at all. There is one alliance (Goonswarm) that was founded on the basis that new players can be useful and helpful immediately. And it has worked quite well for them.
I used to be represented by Louise Slaughter - NY (D). Now I'm represented by some guy who lives 90 miles away in a different city because the districts in New York were redrawn to benefit the Republicans. It's absolutely astounding to look at the shape of the district I'm in, it's most of Syracuse with a tiny strip stretching all the way across the southern border of Lake Ontario and stopping just west of Rochester. It's like a pot with a meter long handle.
My Theory of Computation professor had her own definition for a computer. There were four main conditions:
Stored program Separation of processing and memory Turing Machine Programmable
At least that's the best that I can remember, I don't seem to have it in any notes handy. I'm sure that by this definition though, the PS3 is a computer. Of course, so are all the other game consoles. There's definitely some stored microcode in there, processing and memory are separated, and given the complexity of the games the programming languages are surely Turing complete.
Of course that's the theoretical definition, which really isn't what this is talking about.
"No, the software industry was big and healthy and patentless before the mid-nineties."
Ugh, no. There were many patent disputes in the 1980's. The Cadtrak XOR patent is one of the most famous ones. Cadtrak collected millions of dollars during the 1980s from companies that it found infringing on the patent.
Ironically, I am also the victim of one of the most notorius software patents: The infamous "XOR Cursor" patent, #4,197,590, filed in 1978 and granted in 1980. Way back in 1976, while a student at UC Davis, I built a computer terminal for NASA that used an XOR to move the cursor around the screen. The work was published in an obscure NASA journal. Only recently did I learn that Cadtrak has collected large sums of money and successfully defended patent #4,197,590 against a number of claims, on something I invented as a sophomore computer-engineering student. Talk about "obvious to anyone versed in the art." Had our work for NASA been more widely published, or if I'd worked in a job where I might have run into the Cadtrak controversy, Cadtrak would probably have lost the patent. Instead, I only found out about the XOR patent last year, after it had expired.
There are many other examples of software patent disputes in that first decade of software patents. Refac shut down Apple's HyperCard program because of a patent dispute, and there was a dispute between AT&T and the X Consortium about the "backing store" method, which was developed and used at MIT.
The League of Programming Freedom (http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/) is a good resource for information on software patents.
The software industry was growing very quickly before 1981 without software patents, so the point is still valid, although the parent's timeline is a bit off. Currently the largest companies all have so many software patents that there is almost a situation of mutually assured destruction preventing any of the "big names" from filing lawsuits against each other.
This is the court case that allowed for software patents. Although it was just a reversal of a decision that allowed for a computer to be used in a patentable process, the USPTO took this as a signal to allow all software patents. While recommendations for software patents may not have been actually codified until 1995, software patents were being issued after the 1981 Diamond v Diehr case.
Seriously, in one of the Star Trek:TNG novels (I forget which one), the businessman from that first season episode had been made the Federation Ambassador to the Ferengi.
Since no one else in the future utopia could understand them, this 20th century businessman was all set for it! It was really quite fantastic. He was all dressed up in a tuxedo (with tails), top hat, and a walking stick with a massive (fake) diamond on the handle. And all of his gear was tricked out James Bond style, like a saw in the brim of the top hat, and a locator device/communicator in the walking stick.
Care to tell me what exactly is wrong with the lever based voting machines that New York has used for the last 40 years?
Unfortunately, the company (or companies) that manufactured the lever based voting machines used in NY no longer exist. Parts for the machines are also no longer being manufactured. So unless someone were to re-create these companies to produce the machines and parts again, we're out of luck.
The main thing is that bosses (like Mephisto/High Council/Baal) have the same drops in a 1 person game as they do in an 8 person game. You lose drops on the way there with fewer people in the game, but with the High Council it's not a huge issues, nor is it that much of an issue with Mephisto (since it's so easy to get to both of them).
But you're right, repeated runs of say, the Bloody Foothills looking for items is FAR more profitable in an 8 person game than in a 1 person game, but doing Mephisto runs or high Council runs are better in a 1 person game because you can go faster since the bosses have fewer hit points.
Since Telekinesis is the only way for the sorceress to grab dropped items in a multiplayer game with other players competing for the drops, she has gone from "uber" (grabbing every item via telekinesis before other players can pick them up) to nothingness. Now she has to walk over to the item and click on them, which is nearly impossible to do - the sorceress is the "stand back and fire spells" character, while most of the other ones are "walk up to the monster and clobber it" characters. And when the monster dies, the items drop where it falls down. Now guess who will be first to grab the items, considering the egoistical "me first" behaviour of most gamers...
This is why most of the hardcore treasure hunters don't look for loot in MP games. They make password games (or limit the # of people in a game to 1) and do repeated Mephisto/High Council/Baal runs on Nightmare or Hell. So you don't have the inflated hit points from multiple people in the game and Boss drops are not affected by the number of people in the game.
Besides, the problem you described also applies to bowazons and necros. None of them are close enough to the action to pick up the drops before the tanks. Sorcs have an advantage over zons and necros because they can teleport in...but in the end it's still impractical to treasure-hunt in games with other people.
Unless you're lucky enough to play with people you know and trust. If you are, I envy you.
Both of these items were created because of bugs on battle.net's closed servers. Blizzard has stated that these items WILL BE DELETED when the bugs are fixed. They're also most likely prone to random morphing and other such strange occurances as Blizzard changes game code server side.
So you have people paying real money for items that are guaranteed to go away.
More on the buggy items at Diabloii.net. Including this quote: "Blizzard is aware of these buggy items, and there are plans to wipe them from the realms in the future, so it's not a real good idea to trade big for one, since it might vanish at any time.
I haven't seen that, I must be in the wrong areas. Or I have colossally bad luck;-)
But yea, that explains why the economy suddenly went to hell over the past week. A huge influx of new, powerful items with no increase in the amount of currency. That easily makes the currency unit skyrocket in value, or makes everything else drop drastically in value. Probably mostly the value of everything else dropping, since the rate of SOJ's coming into the game since the expansion came out has been effectively constant (at a rate relatively tiny to the previous rate).
You're right; I don't play Diablo II. I played the demo and was sufficiently turned off that I didn't even try the full version.
You don't talk about how a game plays if you've only played the demo. Honestly, I would say you shouldn't talk about how Diablo 2: LOD *works* unless you've gotten characters to level 70+. Pre-LOD I would have said 50+, but you can get to that point now without ever leaving normal difficulty. You're simply not going to understand the overall picture without having invested enough time into the game to do so, or had someone who *has* invested that much time distill down the relevant points for you.
But the argument that you present here isn't an argument in favor of buying those neato magic toys to leapfrog over the lower levels. Instead, you've presented an argument to avoid Diablo II entirely.
No, the main argument I was presenting was that you shouldn't classify a huge group of people as "lamers" because they enjoy things that you don't.
The reason that your second scenario is more fun is because there's challenge. It's not that you're playing at a higher level. Your first scenario has no challenge. What possible source of enjoyment could that have?
Simply because something isn't challenging doesn't mean it provides no enjoyment. It does not logically hold, nor is it backed up by any facts.
A properly designed game maintains the same level of challenge regardless of a player's level. Different level characters merely encounter different types of situations. But relative to the characters' own skills, the challenge is the same. Any game that falls short of that is faulty.
That would make EverQuest faulty, right? The game is ridiculously easy at the low levels, and insanely hard in the end game. Unless you're going to tell me that 70 person raids of 60th (or near 60) level characters to kill one mob is the same level of challenge that a 1st level character has trying to kill things?
And I'm doubtful that a "properly designed game" would have the same challenge level regardless of a player's experience level or position in the game. I'm having trouble thinking of a game that follows such a challenge curve, every game I can think of starts off easy to allow you to become accustomed to the game environment and typically pushes all of your skills to the utmost during the endgame (while still remaining beatable).
Then again, I'm not a game designer, so I really shouldn't be commenting too much on what a "properly designed game" is, since I don't know that much about it. Imagine that, refraining from commenting on something I don't know much about.
"Um, that's perfect topazes, not diamonds. Current reports suggest that a magic find percentage over 200 doesn't do much good, so there's no need to go overboard."
In the most recent patch (v1.09) Blizzard implemented a Diminishing returns formula for items that added a % chance to find magic items (magic find). A full explanation of magic find is here at Blizzard's official strategy site. Items can drop normal (white colored), magical (blue), rare (yellow), part of an item set (green) or unique (gold). The diminishing returns formula is not posted on that site, but basically diminishing returns kick in bigtime for unique items around 200% increased MF, kick in later for set items and even later for rare items. If you're wearing items that give you a 400% increased chance to find a magical item, you only get like, a 220-230% increased chance of getting a unique.
Blizzard probably implemented this because with the previous patch (1.08), magic find worked on all monsters, including bosses (who always drop at least magical items), so characters were loading themselves down with MF gear and "farming" the bosses over and over to get rares, sets and uniques to drop. (Normal monsters don't always drop, so it's simply more reliable to farm bosses for drops). So since people were abusing magic find, it was decreased in potency ("nerfed").
"And they 'balanced' telekenesis so that you can only pick up minor items (like potions). This is very annoying in single player mode, where there is no one to steal drops from..."
Actually, telekinesis (TK) was changed because someone (or a group of someones) wrote an "item-grabber" hack. The hack basically was a packet sniffer/sender, and when it registered that a rare, set, or unique item had dropped on the ground, it send a packet to the server saying "I picked that item up." Of course, the program could be configured to also grab gold, potions, scrolls, runes, anything. I don't recall if Blizzard broke the functionality of the hack in a patch before deciding to kill Telekinesis to solve the problem...but if they did it most likely took about two days for the people writing the hack to figure out the new packets and re-write the program. The program still works, but since TK is broken it only lets characters pick items up if they are right next to it (I think, there were rumors that players could send packets to make the server think they walked over to an item and picked it up when they didn't move, but that sounds fishy).
"Some moderately valuable items (like the Stone of Jordan ring or perfect skulls) became the new currency for a while. SoJs have become much more rare these days, and aren't used as currency as much."
The Stone of Jordan (SOJ) became a currency because it was a useful item, took up one inventory slot, and was relatively easy to get if you had enough gold (prior to patch 1.08 you could "gamble" for items. The Stone of Jordan is a unique ring. There are two other unique rings, but since before 1.08 uniques couldn't generate if one was already in the game, you could hold the other two rings and spend lots of easily obtainable gold gambling on rings and makes lots of SOJ's).
"Pskulls are an interesting currency, because they are constantly being generated, but also constantly being used up"
PSkulls used to be currency before patch 1.08. PSkulls could be used to "re-roll" the stats on a rare item (rare items have up to 6 modifiers, magic items only 2), and this reroll could produce ANY stat available, with better stats possible than any drop you could get from a monster. PSkulls were also rare, since gems dropped *very* infrequently from monsters, and the highest quality gem that could drop was a normal (3 normals make a flawless, 3 flawless make a perfect, or a gem shrine makes 1 normal go to 1 flawless, etc. there are also chipped and flawed under normal). Now, in 1.09, flawless gems (skulls are gems, technically) can drop, and do drop quite frequently, so they are much more common. Also, the main reason PSkulls plummeted in price was that the way to use 6 PSkulls and a Rare to reroll the rare had it's power decreased GREATLY. It can now produce items with stats 40% as powerful as the previous max (item level of 100 previously possible, max level of 40 available now).
Interestingly, gold (the currency inside the game) isn't often used for trading, because it isn't valuable enough!
That's because you lose a set percentage of your gold when you die, and you can only carry a certain amount of gold. There are other smaller reasons, but those are the main ones.
All in all, it's not too easy to base your economy on factors (like rarity) that can be changed at the whim of some programmers.
Then the programmers deliberately try to affect the economy. Right now new SOJ's are going up because no new ones are coming into the game, and all other items are being produced at an alarming rate. A few more weeks of this and the SOJ currency *might* break, but I doubt it, it's too ingrained in people's minds.
That's about all I can think of about the subject. Hope it helped.
"The game/is/ the suffering and stress and paranoia of the lower levels"
That couldn't be farther from the truth.
Diablo 2 (with expansion, since that's what most people on the Closed Battle.net realms* use these days) has 3 difficulty levels and 5 acts. The difficulty levels are normal, nightmare and hell. You must beat each act in sequence progress to the next difficulty level.
Normal is easy. Normal is *ridiculously* easy. The ONLY way to make normal SLIGHTLY difficult is to play a sick variant character (like a sorceress that doesn't use spells and tries to compete in melee combat).
Normal is also boring. There's no fear of dying. The first act plays the same every single time, and it's damn slow.
Never mind that each character class will generally play the same way through normal. It normally isn't until you reach mid nightmare or hell that a specific character is developed enough (with skill distribution and equipment) for you to start being able to use strategies you've developed or had in mind for the character.
"Sure, I'll accept that the overwhelming majority of players out there don't appreciate the pleasure of struggling at the low power levels. These guys just hate that low level crap and want to get over to wailing on critters so large that only its ankle appears on their monitors."
Perhaps there's a reason for this? Why do people play video games. In most cases it's to have fun, right? What would most people consider to be more fun, tromping around a small grassy field with a disk of wood strapped to one forearm and a small pointy piece of metal strapped to the other, poking zombies that are so slow they routinely die before they can even take a swing at you...or running (or teleporting) around wearing a powerful set of armor you wrested from the cold body of some vile demon, wielding a magical weapon you had to work long and hard to acquire, fighting hordes of demons that *will* kill you if you falter? There are reasons most people like the mid-to-end-game more than the early game. What's wrong with that?
"Let these guys waste their money robbing themselves of the true pleasure of the game. It doesn't do anything to reduce my pleasure, and it removes these weenies from my immediate surroundings."
Obviously you think something is wrong with that. They're "weenies" and "robbing themselves of the true pleasure of the game." This is the "true pleasure" defined by you, right? Where no one else could really be enjoying the game as much as you are because they aren't playing the game the way that gives you the most enjoyment?
"They're doing what they want and giving me a reason to call them lamers. I like that. Everyone wins."
What reason is that? The fact that they:
a. don't enjoy playing the game the way you do
b. do what they want and not what you want
I'm not convinced those are reasons enough to call people lamers. Sorry, take your rant elsewhere.
Density is defined as d = m/v (m is mass, v is volume.)
The volume of a singularity (the object at the center of a black hole) is effectively zero, so the density of the singularity is undefined (though commonly said to be infinite).
When the diameter of a black hole is referred to, they are most often talking about the Event Horizon, the boundary around the singularity from which nothing can escape, not even light.
Note that the distance of the event horizon from the singularity is determined by the mass of the black hole, not the density or volume (since density and volume for ALL singularities are effectively equal). Gravity is still dependent on mass, and the event horizon is simply the region of space where the escape velocity from the singularity's gravitational pull exceeds the speed of light.
(on a side note, since the only real requirement for a black hole is to have zero volume, anything could become a black hole if compressed enough.)
~Moller
Road Runner does more than turn a blind eye
on
Broadband Crackdown
·
· Score: 2
I convinced my parents to get Road Runner while I was home from school. We had three computers set up while I was home, two after I left. Both needed internet access. Road Runner charges an extra $6/month for another IP address. Their TOS specifically forbid running a router or DHCP server off of their line (says so in black and white on the contract). I called up customer service to ask about this, they were clueless about what a DHCP server was, and forwarded me to tech support. Tech support was clueless about the contract, and finally I got piped through to some manager. The manager specifically told me to buy a router (you know, one of those little boxes with a DHCP server in it) and hook that up instead of paying for the extra IP address.
So they don't just turn a blind eye, they actively encourage users to violate the contract signed when procuring the cable modem service.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in undergrad everyone referred to Calculus - Vol I and II by Tom M. Apostol as the mathematician's bible.
That's because Caltech has a notoriously brutal curriculum. Consequently, grades are lower than other schools of that caliber, and Caltech has the lowest freshmen retention rate of any "top tier" school. There was a rumor going around that it was possible to do two years of a physics degree at Caltech, transfer to Harvard as a senior physics major, graduate and be back at Caltech for grad school in physics while your classmates were still undergrads. Supposedly someone did this - although they were probably taking the same classes as their former undergraduate classmates when they returned.
This was also very evident at the annual job fair. Several companies from the Bay Area that drew a large amount of employees from Stanford wouldn't even talk to anyone that didn't have a 4.0 GPA at Caltech. Other companies that employed a large number of Caltech alums openly admitted to students that they would mentally add a full 1.0 to a Caltech GPA when looking at a student's resume.
FWIW the vast majority of classes at Caltech use takehome exams. The "weeder" EE course switched to an oral exam when I was there, but that was 11 years ago and I don't know if they still do that.
Disclaimer: I attended Caltech for undergrad but did not graduate, and my wife has a Ph.D. from Caltech.
Although it was about traveling outside the country.
He was teaching the Networking course, and during a brief section on security and encryption he mentioned how he had recently been traveling (he wouldn't say where, but he was born in India) and stayed at a five-star hotel while he was out of the country. He then pointed out how he had requested a new/temporary credit card from his bank for the trip, which he only used to pay for the hotel, and he canceled the card as soon as he was back in the US.
By the time he had gotten back to the states, the card had already been stolen/compromised.
They offer a free 14-day trial, the game has a very well done "Tutorial" which will get any new player comfortable with the game, and there are very real and brutal consequences for death and loss.
EVE is the most complex MMO that I have played, and the sheer breadth of available options is staggering.
Mythic has extensive experience with PvP and has put controls in to remove the griefing of lower level players as much as possible.
The game is divided up into four "tiers." The level ranges for the tiers are (roughly, I'm not positive) 1 through 11, 12 through 21, 22 through 31, and 32 to 40. If a Level 12 players enters a Tier 1 zone and goes looking for some Level 2 warrior to gank, he won't succeed. The level 12 player will be "chickened." He will literally be transformed into a chicken with 1 hit point and an attack that does 1 damage.
Even on the open PvP servers where you are always "flagged" for RvR (there are no safe PvE zones like on the Core ruleset servers) they have kept a reduced form of the "chickening" mechanic. It's just been extended down a tier, so a level 15 character can go into the tier 1 zone without being chickened, but a level 23 character WILL be turned into a chicken in the tier 1 zone (but not in tier 2).
There is also the "starter" area, which is a subset of the tier 1 area, where anyone from a higher tier will be turned into a chicken regardless, to allow the newest players time to level up to 2 or 3 before going out and fighting.
That's not true at all. There is one alliance (Goonswarm) that was founded on the basis that new players can be useful and helpful immediately. And it has worked quite well for them.
I used to be represented by Louise Slaughter - NY (D). Now I'm represented by some guy who lives 90 miles away in a different city because the districts in New York were redrawn to benefit the Republicans. It's absolutely astounding to look at the shape of the district I'm in, it's most of Syracuse with a tiny strip stretching all the way across the southern border of Lake Ontario and stopping just west of Rochester. It's like a pot with a meter long handle.
Of course I generally vote Green anyways.
My Theory of Computation professor had her own definition for a computer. There were four main conditions:
Stored program
Separation of processing and memory
Turing Machine
Programmable
At least that's the best that I can remember, I don't seem to have it in any notes handy. I'm sure that by this definition though, the PS3 is a computer. Of course, so are all the other game consoles. There's definitely some stored microcode in there, processing and memory are separated, and given the complexity of the games the programming languages are surely Turing complete.
Of course that's the theoretical definition, which really isn't what this is talking about.
"No, the software industry was big and healthy and patentless before the mid-nineties."
4 101107275739
d emo for more on the backing store.
Ugh, no. There were many patent disputes in the 1980's. The Cadtrak XOR patent is one of the most famous ones. Cadtrak collected millions of dollars during the 1980s from companies that it found infringing on the patent.
Ironically, I am also the victim of one of the most notorius software patents: The infamous "XOR Cursor" patent, #4,197,590, filed in 1978 and granted in 1980. Way back in 1976, while a student at UC Davis, I built a computer terminal for NASA that used an XOR to move the cursor around the screen. The work was published in an obscure NASA journal. Only recently did I learn that Cadtrak has collected large sums of money and successfully defended patent #4,197,590 against a number of claims, on something I invented as a sophomore computer-engineering student. Talk about "obvious to anyone versed in the art." Had our work for NASA been more widely published, or if I'd worked in a job where I might have run into the Cadtrak controversy, Cadtrak would probably have lost the patent. Instead, I only found out about the XOR patent last year, after it had expired.
From: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=200
There are many other examples of software patent disputes in that first decade of software patents. Refac shut down Apple's HyperCard program because of a patent dispute, and there was a dispute between AT&T and the X Consortium about the "backing store" method, which was developed and used at MIT.
See: http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/pike.
The League of Programming Freedom (http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/) is a good resource for information on software patents.
The software industry was growing very quickly before 1981 without software patents, so the point is still valid, although the parent's timeline is a bit off. Currently the largest companies all have so many software patents that there is almost a situation of mutually assured destruction preventing any of the "big names" from filing lawsuits against each other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Diehr/
This is the court case that allowed for software patents. Although it was just a reversal of a decision that allowed for a computer to be used in a patentable process, the USPTO took this as a signal to allow all software patents. While recommendations for software patents may not have been actually codified until 1995, software patents were being issued after the 1981 Diamond v Diehr case.
The Ferengi!
Seriously, in one of the Star Trek:TNG novels (I forget which one), the businessman from that first season episode had been made the Federation Ambassador to the Ferengi.
Since no one else in the future utopia could understand them, this 20th century businessman was all set for it! It was really quite fantastic. He was all dressed up in a tuxedo (with tails), top hat, and a walking stick with a massive (fake) diamond on the handle. And all of his gear was tricked out James Bond style, like a saw in the brim of the top hat, and a locator device/communicator in the walking stick.
Care to tell me what exactly is wrong with the lever based voting machines that New York has used for the last 40 years?
Unfortunately, the company (or companies) that manufactured the lever based voting machines used in NY no longer exist. Parts for the machines are also no longer being manufactured. So unless someone were to re-create these companies to produce the machines and parts again, we're out of luck.
go OT enough ;-)
The main thing is that bosses (like Mephisto/High Council/Baal) have the same drops in a 1 person game as they do in an 8 person game. You lose drops on the way there with fewer people in the game, but with the High Council it's not a huge issues, nor is it that much of an issue with Mephisto (since it's so easy to get to both of them).
But you're right, repeated runs of say, the Bloody Foothills looking for items is FAR more profitable in an 8 person game than in a 1 person game, but doing Mephisto runs or high Council runs are better in a 1 person game because you can go faster since the bosses have fewer hit points.
~Moller
All of the people that "worked" on the buildings were Tyler's people, so they all knew about it and were elsewhere when the buildings went down.
So it's 0 lives lost in the buildings being destroyed in "Fight Club" (not counting other deaths in the movie).
~Moller
Since Telekinesis is the only way for the sorceress to grab dropped items in a multiplayer game with other players competing for the drops, she has gone from "uber" (grabbing every item via telekinesis before other players can pick them up) to nothingness. Now she has to walk over to the item and click on them, which is nearly impossible to do - the sorceress is the "stand back and fire spells" character, while most of the other ones are "walk up to the monster and clobber it" characters. And when the monster dies, the items drop where it falls down. Now guess who will be first to grab the items, considering the egoistical "me first" behaviour of most gamers ...
This is why most of the hardcore treasure hunters don't look for loot in MP games. They make password games (or limit the # of people in a game to 1) and do repeated Mephisto/High Council/Baal runs on Nightmare or Hell. So you don't have the inflated hit points from multiple people in the game and Boss drops are not affected by the number of people in the game.
Besides, the problem you described also applies to bowazons and necros. None of them are close enough to the action to pick up the drops before the tanks. Sorcs have an advantage over zons and necros because they can teleport in...but in the end it's still impractical to treasure-hunt in games with other people.
Unless you're lucky enough to play with people you know and trust. If you are, I envy you.
~Moller
$700 Diablo 2 II USWest LOD INSANE 344% MF BOW?!
$500 Diablo 2 II USWest Pally Paladin +6 Ring +6! [ebay.com]
Both of these items were created because of bugs on battle.net's closed servers. Blizzard has stated that these items WILL BE DELETED when the bugs are fixed. They're also most likely prone to random morphing and other such strange occurances as Blizzard changes game code server side.
So you have people paying real money for items that are guaranteed to go away.
More on the buggy items at Diabloii.net. Including this quote: "Blizzard is aware of these buggy items, and there are plans to wipe them from the realms in the future, so it's not a real good idea to trade big for one, since it might vanish at any time.
~Moller
I haven't seen that, I must be in the wrong areas. Or I have colossally bad luck ;-)
But yea, that explains why the economy suddenly went to hell over the past week. A huge influx of new, powerful items with no increase in the amount of currency. That easily makes the currency unit skyrocket in value, or makes everything else drop drastically in value. Probably mostly the value of everything else dropping, since the rate of SOJ's coming into the game since the expansion came out has been effectively constant (at a rate relatively tiny to the previous rate).
~Moller
You're right; I don't play Diablo II. I played the demo and was sufficiently turned off that I didn't even try the full version.
You don't talk about how a game plays if you've only played the demo. Honestly, I would say you shouldn't talk about how Diablo 2: LOD *works* unless you've gotten characters to level 70+. Pre-LOD I would have said 50+, but you can get to that point now without ever leaving normal difficulty. You're simply not going to understand the overall picture without having invested enough time into the game to do so, or had someone who *has* invested that much time distill down the relevant points for you.
But the argument that you present here isn't an argument in favor of buying those neato magic toys to leapfrog over the lower levels. Instead, you've presented an argument to avoid Diablo II entirely.
No, the main argument I was presenting was that you shouldn't classify a huge group of people as "lamers" because they enjoy things that you don't.
The reason that your second scenario is more fun is because there's challenge. It's not that you're playing at a higher level. Your first scenario has no challenge. What possible source of enjoyment could that have?
Simply because something isn't challenging doesn't mean it provides no enjoyment. It does not logically hold, nor is it backed up by any facts.
A properly designed game maintains the same level of challenge regardless of a player's level. Different level characters merely encounter different types of situations. But relative to the characters' own skills, the challenge is the same. Any game that falls short of that is faulty.
That would make EverQuest faulty, right? The game is ridiculously easy at the low levels, and insanely hard in the end game. Unless you're going to tell me that 70 person raids of 60th (or near 60) level characters to kill one mob is the same level of challenge that a 1st level character has trying to kill things?
And I'm doubtful that a "properly designed game" would have the same challenge level regardless of a player's experience level or position in the game. I'm having trouble thinking of a game that follows such a challenge curve, every game I can think of starts off easy to allow you to become accustomed to the game environment and typically pushes all of your skills to the utmost during the endgame (while still remaining beatable).
Then again, I'm not a game designer, so I really shouldn't be commenting too much on what a "properly designed game" is, since I don't know that much about it. Imagine that, refraining from commenting on something I don't know much about.
~Moller
"Um, that's perfect topazes, not diamonds. Current reports suggest that a magic find percentage over 200 doesn't do much good, so there's no need to go overboard."
In the most recent patch (v1.09) Blizzard implemented a Diminishing returns formula for items that added a % chance to find magic items (magic find). A full explanation of magic find is here at Blizzard's official strategy site. Items can drop normal (white colored), magical (blue), rare (yellow), part of an item set (green) or unique (gold). The diminishing returns formula is not posted on that site, but basically diminishing returns kick in bigtime for unique items around 200% increased MF, kick in later for set items and even later for rare items. If you're wearing items that give you a 400% increased chance to find a magical item, you only get like, a 220-230% increased chance of getting a unique.
Blizzard probably implemented this because with the previous patch (1.08), magic find worked on all monsters, including bosses (who always drop at least magical items), so characters were loading themselves down with MF gear and "farming" the bosses over and over to get rares, sets and uniques to drop. (Normal monsters don't always drop, so it's simply more reliable to farm bosses for drops). So since people were abusing magic find, it was decreased in potency ("nerfed").
"And they 'balanced' telekenesis so that you can only pick up minor items (like potions). This is very annoying in single player mode, where there is no one to steal drops from..."
Actually, telekinesis (TK) was changed because someone (or a group of someones) wrote an "item-grabber" hack. The hack basically was a packet sniffer/sender, and when it registered that a rare, set, or unique item had dropped on the ground, it send a packet to the server saying "I picked that item up." Of course, the program could be configured to also grab gold, potions, scrolls, runes, anything. I don't recall if Blizzard broke the functionality of the hack in a patch before deciding to kill Telekinesis to solve the problem...but if they did it most likely took about two days for the people writing the hack to figure out the new packets and re-write the program. The program still works, but since TK is broken it only lets characters pick items up if they are right next to it (I think, there were rumors that players could send packets to make the server think they walked over to an item and picked it up when they didn't move, but that sounds fishy).
"Some moderately valuable items (like the Stone of Jordan ring or perfect skulls) became the new currency for a while. SoJs have become much more rare these days, and aren't used as currency as much."
The Stone of Jordan (SOJ) became a currency because it was a useful item, took up one inventory slot, and was relatively easy to get if you had enough gold (prior to patch 1.08 you could "gamble" for items. The Stone of Jordan is a unique ring. There are two other unique rings, but since before 1.08 uniques couldn't generate if one was already in the game, you could hold the other two rings and spend lots of easily obtainable gold gambling on rings and makes lots of SOJ's).
"Pskulls are an interesting currency, because they are constantly being generated, but also constantly being used up"
PSkulls used to be currency before patch 1.08. PSkulls could be used to "re-roll" the stats on a rare item (rare items have up to 6 modifiers, magic items only 2), and this reroll could produce ANY stat available, with better stats possible than any drop you could get from a monster. PSkulls were also rare, since gems dropped *very* infrequently from monsters, and the highest quality gem that could drop was a normal (3 normals make a flawless, 3 flawless make a perfect, or a gem shrine makes 1 normal go to 1 flawless, etc. there are also chipped and flawed under normal). Now, in 1.09, flawless gems (skulls are gems, technically) can drop, and do drop quite frequently, so they are much more common. Also, the main reason PSkulls plummeted in price was that the way to use 6 PSkulls and a Rare to reroll the rare had it's power decreased GREATLY. It can now produce items with stats 40% as powerful as the previous max (item level of 100 previously possible, max level of 40 available now).
Interestingly, gold (the currency inside the game) isn't often used for trading, because it isn't valuable enough!
That's because you lose a set percentage of your gold when you die, and you can only carry a certain amount of gold. There are other smaller reasons, but those are the main ones.
All in all, it's not too easy to base your economy on factors (like rarity) that can be changed at the whim of some programmers.
Then the programmers deliberately try to affect the economy. Right now new SOJ's are going up because no new ones are coming into the game, and all other items are being produced at an alarming rate. A few more weeks of this and the SOJ currency *might* break, but I doubt it, it's too ingrained in people's minds.
That's about all I can think of about the subject. Hope it helped.
~Moller
"The game /is/ the suffering and stress and paranoia of the lower levels"
That couldn't be farther from the truth.
Diablo 2 (with expansion, since that's what most people on the Closed Battle.net realms* use these days) has 3 difficulty levels and 5 acts. The difficulty levels are normal, nightmare and hell. You must beat each act in sequence progress to the next difficulty level.
Normal is easy. Normal is *ridiculously* easy. The ONLY way to make normal SLIGHTLY difficult is to play a sick variant character (like a sorceress that doesn't use spells and tries to compete in melee combat).
Normal is also boring. There's no fear of dying. The first act plays the same every single time, and it's damn slow.
Never mind that each character class will generally play the same way through normal. It normally isn't until you reach mid nightmare or hell that a specific character is developed enough (with skill distribution and equipment) for you to start being able to use strategies you've developed or had in mind for the character.
"Sure, I'll accept that the overwhelming majority of players out there don't appreciate the pleasure of struggling at the low power levels. These guys just hate that low level crap and want to get over to wailing on critters so large that only its ankle appears on their monitors."
Perhaps there's a reason for this? Why do people play video games. In most cases it's to have fun, right? What would most people consider to be more fun, tromping around a small grassy field with a disk of wood strapped to one forearm and a small pointy piece of metal strapped to the other, poking zombies that are so slow they routinely die before they can even take a swing at you...or running (or teleporting) around wearing a powerful set of armor you wrested from the cold body of some vile demon, wielding a magical weapon you had to work long and hard to acquire, fighting hordes of demons that *will* kill you if you falter? There are reasons most people like the mid-to-end-game more than the early game. What's wrong with that?
"Let these guys waste their money robbing themselves of the true pleasure of the game. It doesn't do anything to reduce my pleasure, and it removes these weenies from my immediate surroundings."
Obviously you think something is wrong with that. They're "weenies" and "robbing themselves of the true pleasure of the game." This is the "true pleasure" defined by you, right? Where no one else could really be enjoying the game as much as you are because they aren't playing the game the way that gives you the most enjoyment?
"They're doing what they want and giving me a reason to call them lamers. I like that. Everyone wins."
What reason is that? The fact that they:
a. don't enjoy playing the game the way you do
b. do what they want and not what you want
I'm not convinced those are reasons enough to call people lamers. Sorry, take your rant elsewhere.
~Moller
Or approximately infinite.
Density is defined as d = m/v (m is mass, v is volume.)
The volume of a singularity (the object at the center of a black hole) is effectively zero, so the density of the singularity is undefined (though commonly said to be infinite).
When the diameter of a black hole is referred to, they are most often talking about the Event Horizon, the boundary around the singularity from which nothing can escape, not even light.
Note that the distance of the event horizon from the singularity is determined by the mass of the black hole, not the density or volume (since density and volume for ALL singularities are effectively equal). Gravity is still dependent on mass, and the event horizon is simply the region of space where the escape velocity from the singularity's gravitational pull exceeds the speed of light.
(on a side note, since the only real requirement for a black hole is to have zero volume, anything could become a black hole if compressed enough.)
~Moller
I convinced my parents to get Road Runner while I was home from school. We had three computers set up while I was home, two after I left. Both needed internet access. Road Runner charges an extra $6/month for another IP address. Their TOS specifically forbid running a router or DHCP server off of their line (says so in black and white on the contract). I called up customer service to ask about this, they were clueless about what a DHCP server was, and forwarded me to tech support. Tech support was clueless about the contract, and finally I got piped through to some manager. The manager specifically told me to buy a router (you know, one of those little boxes with a DHCP server in it) and hook that up instead of paying for the extra IP address.
So they don't just turn a blind eye, they actively encourage users to violate the contract signed when procuring the cable modem service.
~Moller
Courtesy of Fargo at Gamespy (who is a very, very funny man).
Preparing for Star Wars Galaxies
Personally, I'm waiting for Neverwinter Nights
Moller
I'm not familiar with the YHBT YHL HAND acronym. What is it? Thanks.
Moller
here, mod this down too.