It reminds me of the "awesome changes" that they made, which pretty much ruined the Warrior class for several months.
It seems any time Blizzard has caved to the fanbase and made dramatic changes, it's caused things to become more imbalanced than balanced. It usually takes a couple of patches to fix things back up.
Content isn't the same team as development. Most content is just a few scripts to set up a new quest, and things like instances should have dev tools to create them. A few devs shifted wouldn't effect content.
Whoops. Completely correct, something that I usually catch. However there are also bugs and new features that do need coding work.
Marketing? 0 cost- announce it on the website, add it to the cd (or just downloadable with cd key). This is linux- anyone interested will find out from the slashdot post and 7 dupes:)
True, however there have been some other posters in this thread who complained about lack of marketing.
Support is bigger, but wouldn't be that much more than the mac version, I'm sure. Given the high average technical skills of linux users, I'd be willing to bet support dollar/user would be lower on linux than any other OS.
I'm not so sure. There are tons of different Linux distributions out there, and I would imagine that this would cause many headaches in support.
I'm sure there are many other considerations to make. For one, adding Linux support into the code base creates potential for new bugs, at a time when they're still trying to work on old ones.
Let's also remember that the majority of people that would play WoW on Linux are already playing it through Wine or on a Windows partition. Blizzard is already getting money from them. I'm fairly sure that Blizzard would not shoot down a Linux version if they seriously thought that there was money to be had. I think the problem is that the estimated costs associate it outweigh the estimated revenue.
Its easy for nerds such as ourselves to forget about all the other things it takes to release and support a shrink-wrapped game such as WoW.
Well, you're making the mistake in thinking that developement is the only issue at stake. There's also marketing and support, which is a larger issue in MMORPGs than in normal 1 player games.
As for a team of 2-3 hacking it out in 3 months, well, thats 2-3 team members that won't be working on fixing bugs and adding new content for 3 months. WoW is already having problems keeping up with player demand, and they don't need to aggravate things by taking on a porting project. I'd argue that if a port was going to happen, it needed to happen before launch.
To be fair, the few times the developers have tried to come out of their ivory towers and address the community, they have largely been met with insults and belligerence. The CMs have to deal with every day. I honestly don't blame the developers.
Well, to be somewhat fair to the developers, its generally because them personally responding to the player base is usually met with insults, personal attacks, and whining from people who feel that they are more informed about the the game than the people who actually made it. The amount of immaturity there is staggering. You'd have to pay me huge stacks of cash to make me take a job as a Blizzard CM.
When people complain about eBay, they're usually talking about people selling gold on eBay. MMORPGs in general spawn a large market for gold and in-game items on eBay, which the majority of players consider to be a very bad thing.
Its because that question has been asked over and over ad nauseum, and the answer is always the same. Its always "Linux doesn't have enough of a marketshare in the gamer market to justify a port." And this is almost always met with indignation and argument by Linux fans. Then the Windows fans usually come in and start flamewars.
So in short. Its already been asked, and answered, and its really not worth asking again.
How common is Direct Play anyway? I was under the impression that the vast majority rolled their own network code rather than used it. Several of the books on game developement I have read specifically mentioned that you shouldn't use Direct Play even.
I don't think its officially being supported in DirectX anymore either.
Well, as a religious person myself, I'll answer your question.
Simply because saying "Its because of God," leads us to a dead end. If we attributed everything to God, then our scientific progress would be halted. In fact, you can see the results of this type of thinking in our own history. It's called the Dark Ages.
Science has to take an agnostic stance in order to work. We have to take an agnostic stance in human knowledge in order to progress. If we depend on daddy (God) to give us all the answers, then we will never grow up.
Japan? Cheap? Are you talking about popular music? Because last time I went to Japan, a popular new release could run anywhere from $20-30, which is much more expensive here. Most of the cheap CD's I found were used.
I just did a google search for "worldwide console sales," and came up with some forum discussions, that compiled some numbers and put the Gamecube ahead of the XBox. Not exactly reliable, but promising.
Not if its a web application. We use this system at my work place, with the addition of generating an RSS feed from the emails. Basically, when we put the app on production, we just have to change the smtp server property in our web.config to point to the correct smtp server.
If you're running an actual local application, then you'll run into problems. But if you have clients that work in one area (say, a custom in-house application), then the exception reporting works beautifully. Its really quite a good system for the majority of applications.
So because Ballmer acts like a tool its ok for a self-proclaimed representative of the open source world to act like one as well? Aren't you guys supposed to be better than that?
Yes because I'm sure that Bush really could have reversed decades of environmental damage caused by previous administrations in a matter of 5 years. This is assuming that global warming even "caused" Katrina in the first place, which is doubtful.
There's always the bully who decides he'd rather take the ball than share it.
You can't rule out greed from humanity. Its part of our nature. Capatilism works better than other solutions because instead of trying to fight greed it harnesses to productive ends.
I think saying that we've nearly made ourselves extinct on Earth is a bit of an overreaction. 6 billion people isn't "nearly extinct," and short of meteors falling on earth, it doesn't look like anything is going to wipe us out anytime soon, not even global warming.
The planet, as I stated. Are you fimiliar with the term 'personification'? Nobody lives in the ocean on this planet, does that mean it is ok to pillage it of it's natural resources?
So what you're saying is its wrong to take minerals from what amounts to a giant rock floating in space? Why is that? You basically say that we're robbing form the planet, but the planet isn't a living thing, and thus doesn't care about what we do to it. It sounds like more of a religious argument than one based on logic.
Aside from religious preconceptions, the only reason to not mine Mars is if it somehow makes our survival less likely, and I really don't see how mining Mars will accomplish that.
Because its not a virus, just some plain old-fashioned social engineering.
A good rule of thumb is never disclose personal information to a web page you follow through an email link. You always always navigate to the page manually (type in www.paypal.com), and if there aren't instructions on how to find the page manually, then its a phishing email.
At this point I think that setting up more projects for locating survivors would be a bad thing. Wouldn't it be better to congregate the searches into a few places, so they don't have to look all over?
I find its usually the way that Linux advocates make these requests. Invariably, they call into question the programmer's coding expertise ("Well if you coded it right then it shouldn't be a problem"), and often demand rather than ask. When given a response they're usually belligerent about it or try to start arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
It reminds me of the "awesome changes" that they made, which pretty much ruined the Warrior class for several months.
It seems any time Blizzard has caved to the fanbase and made dramatic changes, it's caused things to become more imbalanced than balanced. It usually takes a couple of patches to fix things back up.
Content isn't the same team as development. Most content is just a few scripts to set up a new quest, and things like instances should have dev tools to create them. A few devs shifted wouldn't effect content.
:)
Whoops. Completely correct, something that I usually catch. However there are also bugs and new features that do need coding work.
Marketing? 0 cost- announce it on the website, add it to the cd (or just downloadable with cd key). This is linux- anyone interested will find out from the slashdot post and 7 dupes
True, however there have been some other posters in this thread who complained about lack of marketing.
Support is bigger, but wouldn't be that much more than the mac version, I'm sure. Given the high average technical skills of linux users, I'd be willing to bet support dollar/user would be lower on linux than any other OS. I'm not so sure. There are tons of different Linux distributions out there, and I would imagine that this would cause many headaches in support.
I'm sure there are many other considerations to make. For one, adding Linux support into the code base creates potential for new bugs, at a time when they're still trying to work on old ones.
Let's also remember that the majority of people that would play WoW on Linux are already playing it through Wine or on a Windows partition. Blizzard is already getting money from them. I'm fairly sure that Blizzard would not shoot down a Linux version if they seriously thought that there was money to be had. I think the problem is that the estimated costs associate it outweigh the estimated revenue.
Its easy for nerds such as ourselves to forget about all the other things it takes to release and support a shrink-wrapped game such as WoW.
Well, you're making the mistake in thinking that developement is the only issue at stake. There's also marketing and support, which is a larger issue in MMORPGs than in normal 1 player games.
As for a team of 2-3 hacking it out in 3 months, well, thats 2-3 team members that won't be working on fixing bugs and adding new content for 3 months. WoW is already having problems keeping up with player demand, and they don't need to aggravate things by taking on a porting project. I'd argue that if a port was going to happen, it needed to happen before launch.
Well, in the case of WoW, it works fine under Wine. Thats even less incentive to port it.
To be fair, the few times the developers have tried to come out of their ivory towers and address the community, they have largely been met with insults and belligerence. The CMs have to deal with every day. I honestly don't blame the developers.
Well, to be somewhat fair to the developers, its generally because them personally responding to the player base is usually met with insults, personal attacks, and whining from people who feel that they are more informed about the the game than the people who actually made it. The amount of immaturity there is staggering. You'd have to pay me huge stacks of cash to make me take a job as a Blizzard CM.
When people complain about eBay, they're usually talking about people selling gold on eBay. MMORPGs in general spawn a large market for gold and in-game items on eBay, which the majority of players consider to be a very bad thing.
Its because that question has been asked over and over ad nauseum, and the answer is always the same. Its always "Linux doesn't have enough of a marketshare in the gamer market to justify a port." And this is almost always met with indignation and argument by Linux fans. Then the Windows fans usually come in and start flamewars.
So in short. Its already been asked, and answered, and its really not worth asking again.
How common is Direct Play anyway? I was under the impression that the vast majority rolled their own network code rather than used it. Several of the books on game developement I have read specifically mentioned that you shouldn't use Direct Play even.
I don't think its officially being supported in DirectX anymore either.
Well, as a religious person myself, I'll answer your question.
Simply because saying "Its because of God," leads us to a dead end. If we attributed everything to God, then our scientific progress would be halted. In fact, you can see the results of this type of thinking in our own history. It's called the Dark Ages.
Science has to take an agnostic stance in order to work. We have to take an agnostic stance in human knowledge in order to progress. If we depend on daddy (God) to give us all the answers, then we will never grow up.
Japan? Cheap? Are you talking about popular music? Because last time I went to Japan, a popular new release could run anywhere from $20-30, which is much more expensive here. Most of the cheap CD's I found were used.
I just did a google search for "worldwide console sales," and came up with some forum discussions, that compiled some numbers and put the Gamecube ahead of the XBox. Not exactly reliable, but promising.
Not if its a web application. We use this system at my work place, with the addition of generating an RSS feed from the emails. Basically, when we put the app on production, we just have to change the smtp server property in our web.config to point to the correct smtp server.
If you're running an actual local application, then you'll run into problems. But if you have clients that work in one area (say, a custom in-house application), then the exception reporting works beautifully. Its really quite a good system for the majority of applications.
So because Ballmer acts like a tool its ok for a self-proclaimed representative of the open source world to act like one as well? Aren't you guys supposed to be better than that?
I don't call flying off the handle and delusions of grandeur social skills.
Yes because I'm sure that Bush really could have reversed decades of environmental damage caused by previous administrations in a matter of 5 years. This is assuming that global warming even "caused" Katrina in the first place, which is doubtful.
The Kyoto Accords were made to prevent solar flares?
...
It makes me weep on the inside that so many people didn't realize it was a joke.
There's always the bully who decides he'd rather take the ball than share it.
You can't rule out greed from humanity. Its part of our nature. Capatilism works better than other solutions because instead of trying to fight greed it harnesses to productive ends.
I think saying that we've nearly made ourselves extinct on Earth is a bit of an overreaction. 6 billion people isn't "nearly extinct," and short of meteors falling on earth, it doesn't look like anything is going to wipe us out anytime soon, not even global warming.
But you make good points.
The planet, as I stated. Are you fimiliar with the term 'personification'? Nobody lives in the ocean on this planet, does that mean it is ok to pillage it of it's natural resources?
So what you're saying is its wrong to take minerals from what amounts to a giant rock floating in space? Why is that? You basically say that we're robbing form the planet, but the planet isn't a living thing, and thus doesn't care about what we do to it. It sounds like more of a religious argument than one based on logic.
Aside from religious preconceptions, the only reason to not mine Mars is if it somehow makes our survival less likely, and I really don't see how mining Mars will accomplish that.
WHOOOSH
Because its not a virus, just some plain old-fashioned social engineering.
A good rule of thumb is never disclose personal information to a web page you follow through an email link. You always always navigate to the page manually (type in www.paypal.com), and if there aren't instructions on how to find the page manually, then its a phishing email.
At this point I think that setting up more projects for locating survivors would be a bad thing. Wouldn't it be better to congregate the searches into a few places, so they don't have to look all over?
I find its usually the way that Linux advocates make these requests. Invariably, they call into question the programmer's coding expertise ("Well if you coded it right then it shouldn't be a problem"), and often demand rather than ask. When given a response they're usually belligerent about it or try to start arguments.
I really can't blame them.