Sure they do. WoW uses what, about 1-2k per second, if that? You might get lag in big cities, and you definitely don't want to run some addons that swap massive amounts of information around (like CTRA or whatever the kids use these days), but the game itself will run fine on dial-up.
On the other hand, I would dread downloading a patch file over a modem. It'd take days.
No, actually, most people cannot "connect online and play"
I presume he thinks the WoW stats prove otherwise - and frankly I have to agree with him, given the 12 million or more who are playing it. If there were large amounts of people who could not play WoW, I'm sure he would have heard about them, and would have moved to appease them, before SC2 even came up.
We often have LAN parties at my work.
Your work has enough PCs for a LAN party, but no broadband connection? Right. Your network statement doesn't hold water, because why would non-employees be allowed into a secured meeting room? And you could just bring a network hub and proxy them through one PC, limiting their access.
Guess what, I have broadband and I STILL won't be buying the game for the simple fact I *HAVE* to have a WAN connection to have a LAN party.
I'm afraid that files you under "crazy and weird and living in a closet".
Quite frankly, I'll likely drop WCIII from the list of games we play for the simple fact that I don't want to support blizzard in any way, shape, or form after this debacle.
TBC had flying around quests (bombing runs, exploratory), even the original game had temporary mounts early on, and there were several that took place during large battles. The basic mechanics are still the same. You may think they are basic tenets of MMOs, you may or may not be right. But if you're willing to buy the same thing over and over again with a different coloured shell...
Having been there, since the open beta, until WotLK came out, I have to disagree with you. I found the content, quests, locations and overall experience of the first 60 levels better than TBC and WotLK (what I saw of it, which wasn't the entire thing I'll grant you. I got 5 70s in TBC, took a couple to 75, then stopped).
Saying the old content is simple and mundane is naive, the new content is *exactly the same*, find 6 of these, kill 8 of these, escort this npc... etc etc. Trying to make out that the new content is superior is disingenuous, the game's lack of ingenuity is what put off a lot of those who did leave.
This is where WoW's problem lies - they have to add new stuff to keep people interested, but they shouldn't do this at the expense of the old content. After all, that is the stuff that got the first 10 million players in, it's worth noting WoW's figures haven't massively increased since that first surge. Surely to entice new players, they would want to showcase *all* the content they have, to tell people there is so much they can play. To skip through all the old content and miss the development (and IMHO, the lore and atmosphere was FAR better projected by 1-60 than 60-80 content) is selling it short. The achievements thing does go some way to help this, but it's a difficult question - how do you keep new players interested when they are so far behind the end game, as the game is now so much bigger?
When I think of the good times I had in WoW, they are generally featured around the game pre-TBC. Scarlet Monastery, Westfall, MC and BWL runs (didn't finish Naxx!), Dire Maul King runs, opening of AQ, barrens chat, Tier 1.5 quests, helping guildies with their Onyxia chain prequests... The game seemed more cohesive then. I think it's a pity people are encouraged to skip through all that not paying attention, now.
I'm 35, weigh more than I should (or at more than I used to)... however I'm not depressed. Gaming maybe gets in the way of doing some of the things I ought to, which also accounts for the weight gain, it just means I should play less 2 and go down the gym/compose music more.
Not in the UK, it doesn't - see other thread above. The message it displays is "This is not viewable outside the US", implying to me that they've tried to restrict it to US only and failed, letting some additional countries through:)
I was really looking forward to WAR when it came out (got the collectors edition), played it avidly in the beta and when it launched, and REALLY enjoyed it. Got toward the level cap... felt a bit of a grind... got to 40, had some fun, it was good again. Then got bored. My subscription expired yesterday, hadn't played in about 2 months.
The good:
The world is very well rendered, very "Warhammer". The quests and NPCs have a devilish sense of humour in them at times (what other game could give you a quest called Uncontrollable Flagellants?) The classes are quite varied and play differently, good mechanics there. Playing low level is a blast, Tier 2 in particular with the first keeps, always seemed busy with alts and was good fun. Playing at 40 and locking/unlocking zones and assaulting fortresses was brilliant, when it went well. The unique bosses from low levels onwards were quite a nice touch.
The bad: Not enough instances. WoW really does have this sealed up - it gives you plenty of instances to play while you're levelling up. You may only do each one once, but once you have, you're ready in level/gear for the next one. It gives a level of epic feel to it, and helps you learn to work as a group. Group quests helped here a little, but they should have been a great addition, rather than a poor replacement. For that matter, the instances at high 30s/40 were a bit boring. The controls felt a bit sluggish compared to WoW. Not sure exactly why. Terrible lag on large endgame fights (which is what the game is really about) Population imbalances were common, and only exacerbated themselves - people would leave the underpopulated side, making it worse. An endemic flaw with the system. Capital cities were empty and sort of pointless. Nothing compared to the huge social hubs WoW's cities were.
Could have been a great game, and what makes me think is why I bothered with the WoW endgame for years, when the WAR endgame was, on paper at least, better. Was it the community? The polish of WoW? I think the game was ultimately undermined by its lack of focus on "carebear" social stuff, which even for those who aren't much part of it, helps pull the game together into one cohesive whole.
Given the rate of infection is much higher in the, ahem, receiver of bodily fluids, than the giver, it is much more likely that it wasn't the human who had the predatory sexual instincts.
Yikes.:/ Raped by a gorilla and given Simian aids.
I presume not anymore they're not - I don't know if there was something about a legal precedent a while ago (certainly the community was up in arms about windows license refunds, but I can't remember the details), but back in the 90s, OEMs would only offer systems with windows pre-installed, being coerced by MS threatening to withdraw their license to sell preinstalls at all if they tried to sell any without.
Hopefully someone will come by with some citation. Oh where are you when we need you, slashdot legal experts? Don't make me turn on the bat-signal!
The issue is the OEMs being strongarmed into forcing it into builds whether people want it or not. Imagine whenever you bought a car, from any manufacturer, you got beaded seat covers in them. And you hate beaded seat covers. And you still had to pay for them, even if you threw them away immediately. You tried to get them to sell you the car without beaded seat covers to save $40, and they refused, because if they didn't, the beaded seat cover manufacturers would stop licensing them to sell them, then they couldn't sell cars to the other people who DID want beaded seat covers.
Sounds a bit ridiculous that way, huh? Despite the fact 95% of people dislike beaded seat covers I'm sure:)
The problem is, historically at least, Microsoft strong-arms the OEMs into ONLY supplying machines with Windows - if they refuse, MS refuse to provide them with a license. Yes, anticompetitive and probably illegal, but that's the way it was for a long time.
OEMs won't upset 95% of their business to appease the other 5%, and most of the people who want Windows want it preinstalled, so the OEM needs the license to do so. OEMs who offer non-Windows installs are much the minority right now, but at least it's a foot in the door.
The interesting difference between SSDs and platter based drive, is a write failure is not a warning sign that your heads are about to crash and you're going to lose the whole drive, it's just a failure of that one sector. Given extreme use over an extended period, the sectors would start to fail one by one, but no data should be lost, the drive capacity would start to shrink but the rest of the drive would be fine. Head crashes will be a thing of the past, thank god.
Even when the entire device's writes are used up, one should still be able to read all the data from it!:)
One assumes they are MLC which are still good for about 10,000 write cycles. SLCs for 100,000.
The controller does a very good job of cycling "sectors" used, so the whole disk gets good use, rather than the same areas being overwritten constantly. The MTBF for SSDs is much higher than for conventional drives as a result, although the figure is less relevant as it's much more down to usage than anything else.
Keep enough free space on the drive for the controller to do its cycling, don't use it for constant writes (torrents are a good example of what not to use it for - as for swap file, I don't know), and the drive will last longer than you'll use it for.
I have been using the radio channels and artist radio primarily, which i agree aren't great, and that's probably why I wasn't getting a great experience out of it.
Perhaps the UI isn't great, which is why I've not been finding this better functionality, I'll give it another try!
Could you elaborate on why you think it's that good? I've used last.fm a bit, and spotify a bit. neither have large collections of the music I like, it seems.
My view of Spotify was their basic "radio" channels suck (I really don't want to listen to rock, or hiphop, or jazz), though the way you can intersect and combine them is neat, (e.g., rock and hiphop only from the 80s). However, finding stuff in different genres means searching by band, finding similar bands etc. This to me isn't much better than using youtube and making playlists on there, what IS so good about Spotify?
That isn't their customer base, though. I play locally with friends often, and we just connect to the main servers and make a friends only game. With achievements and the like you really need a central server to authenticate stuff these days.
Aside from the piracy concerns, I can see them wanting to create a unified experience for gamers, and to treat marginal cases - e.g. where most people are on a LAN but a couple are connecting remotely.
In this day and age I don't see no LAN games as a big deal - every gaming computer can/should have/does have internet access (if you're about to post that you don't, get into the 21st century). Making a friends-only game is an easy way to create the same experience - Left4Dead makes this work with small numbers of players too. The fact the game is initiated through the net is immaterial once you're up and running.
Starcraft benefited from LAN games in the way Doom et al did, but the technology landscape now is very different, and omitting it is only a lost for nostalgia, it won't have any practical impact.
More to the point, the headline should be "Record companies seek to club to death yet another new technology they are scared of, rather than try to embrace it".
In the UK, Spotify is a reasonable alternatiev (I think, never got to use Pandora, but this does much the same thing)
The market was for "compact, high capacity music players" and has been there for decades.
The original iPod was not the first mp3 player, not even the first harddisk based mp3 player (not by a long shot), there was already a market for it.
What Apple did was market the hell out of a good product and raise awareness of a whole new way to store and carry music. The market was already there.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess what, people with dial-up don't play WoW.
Sure they do. WoW uses what, about 1-2k per second, if that? You might get lag in big cities, and you definitely don't want to run some addons that swap massive amounts of information around (like CTRA or whatever the kids use these days), but the game itself will run fine on dial-up.
On the other hand, I would dread downloading a patch file over a modem. It'd take days.
No, actually, most people cannot "connect online and play"
I presume he thinks the WoW stats prove otherwise - and frankly I have to agree with him, given the 12 million or more who are playing it. If there were large amounts of people who could not play WoW, I'm sure he would have heard about them, and would have moved to appease them, before SC2 even came up.
We often have LAN parties at my work.
Your work has enough PCs for a LAN party, but no broadband connection? Right. Your network statement doesn't hold water, because why would non-employees be allowed into a secured meeting room? And you could just bring a network hub and proxy them through one PC, limiting their access.
Guess what, I have broadband and I STILL won't be buying the game for the simple fact I *HAVE* to have a WAN connection to have a LAN party.
I'm afraid that files you under "crazy and weird and living in a closet".
Quite frankly, I'll likely drop WCIII from the list of games we play for the simple fact that I don't want to support blizzard in any way, shape, or form after this debacle.
Wow, ragequit. You sure you don't play WoW? ;)
TBC had flying around quests (bombing runs, exploratory), even the original game had temporary mounts early on, and there were several that took place during large battles. The basic mechanics are still the same. You may think they are basic tenets of MMOs, you may or may not be right. But if you're willing to buy the same thing over and over again with a different coloured shell...
I think Penny Arcade summed it up pretty well:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20081114.jpg
If you really think the differences you mentioned are significant changes, well... good for you, have fun, I suppose.
Having been there, since the open beta, until WotLK came out, I have to disagree with you. I found the content, quests, locations and overall experience of the first 60 levels better than TBC and WotLK (what I saw of it, which wasn't the entire thing I'll grant you. I got 5 70s in TBC, took a couple to 75, then stopped).
Saying the old content is simple and mundane is naive, the new content is *exactly the same*, find 6 of these, kill 8 of these, escort this npc... etc etc. Trying to make out that the new content is superior is disingenuous, the game's lack of ingenuity is what put off a lot of those who did leave.
This is where WoW's problem lies - they have to add new stuff to keep people interested, but they shouldn't do this at the expense of the old content. After all, that is the stuff that got the first 10 million players in, it's worth noting WoW's figures haven't massively increased since that first surge. Surely to entice new players, they would want to showcase *all* the content they have, to tell people there is so much they can play. To skip through all the old content and miss the development (and IMHO, the lore and atmosphere was FAR better projected by 1-60 than 60-80 content) is selling it short. The achievements thing does go some way to help this, but it's a difficult question - how do you keep new players interested when they are so far behind the end game, as the game is now so much bigger?
When I think of the good times I had in WoW, they are generally featured around the game pre-TBC. Scarlet Monastery, Westfall, MC and BWL runs (didn't finish Naxx!), Dire Maul King runs, opening of AQ, barrens chat, Tier 1.5 quests, helping guildies with their Onyxia chain prequests... The game seemed more cohesive then. I think it's a pity people are encouraged to skip through all that not paying attention, now.
I'm 35, weigh more than I should (or at more than I used to)... however I'm not depressed. Gaming maybe gets in the way of doing some of the things I ought to, which also accounts for the weight gain, it just means I should play less 2 and go down the gym/compose music more.
But hey, they're all fun, so it's good!
Not in the UK, it doesn't - see other thread above. The message it displays is "This is not viewable outside the US", implying to me that they've tried to restrict it to US only and failed, letting some additional countries through :)
For those outside the US, or who simply prefer Youtube (and it's a bigger version, too!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfeErZt3emc
Whereabouts in Europe? I'm in the UK, and it won't let me :(
I was really looking forward to WAR when it came out (got the collectors edition), played it avidly in the beta and when it launched, and REALLY enjoyed it. Got toward the level cap... felt a bit of a grind... got to 40, had some fun, it was good again. Then got bored. My subscription expired yesterday, hadn't played in about 2 months.
The good:
The world is very well rendered, very "Warhammer". The quests and NPCs have a devilish sense of humour in them at times (what other game could give you a quest called Uncontrollable Flagellants?)
The classes are quite varied and play differently, good mechanics there.
Playing low level is a blast, Tier 2 in particular with the first keeps, always seemed busy with alts and was good fun.
Playing at 40 and locking/unlocking zones and assaulting fortresses was brilliant, when it went well.
The unique bosses from low levels onwards were quite a nice touch.
The bad:
Not enough instances. WoW really does have this sealed up - it gives you plenty of instances to play while you're levelling up. You may only do each one once, but once you have, you're ready in level/gear for the next one. It gives a level of epic feel to it, and helps you learn to work as a group. Group quests helped here a little, but they should have been a great addition, rather than a poor replacement. For that matter, the instances at high 30s/40 were a bit boring.
The controls felt a bit sluggish compared to WoW. Not sure exactly why.
Terrible lag on large endgame fights (which is what the game is really about)
Population imbalances were common, and only exacerbated themselves - people would leave the underpopulated side, making it worse. An endemic flaw with the system.
Capital cities were empty and sort of pointless. Nothing compared to the huge social hubs WoW's cities were.
Could have been a great game, and what makes me think is why I bothered with the WoW endgame for years, when the WAR endgame was, on paper at least, better. Was it the community? The polish of WoW? I think the game was ultimately undermined by its lack of focus on "carebear" social stuff, which even for those who aren't much part of it, helps pull the game together into one cohesive whole.
Only if used to view your post on /.
Given the rate of infection is much higher in the, ahem, receiver of bodily fluids, than the giver, it is much more likely that it wasn't the human who had the predatory sexual instincts.
Yikes. :/ Raped by a gorilla and given Simian aids.
I presume not anymore they're not - I don't know if there was something about a legal precedent a while ago (certainly the community was up in arms about windows license refunds, but I can't remember the details), but back in the 90s, OEMs would only offer systems with windows pre-installed, being coerced by MS threatening to withdraw their license to sell preinstalls at all if they tried to sell any without.
Hopefully someone will come by with some citation. Oh where are you when we need you, slashdot legal experts? Don't make me turn on the bat-signal!
The issue is the OEMs being strongarmed into forcing it into builds whether people want it or not. Imagine whenever you bought a car, from any manufacturer, you got beaded seat covers in them. And you hate beaded seat covers. And you still had to pay for them, even if you threw them away immediately. You tried to get them to sell you the car without beaded seat covers to save $40, and they refused, because if they didn't, the beaded seat cover manufacturers would stop licensing them to sell them, then they couldn't sell cars to the other people who DID want beaded seat covers.
Sounds a bit ridiculous that way, huh? Despite the fact 95% of people dislike beaded seat covers I'm sure :)
The problem is, historically at least, Microsoft strong-arms the OEMs into ONLY supplying machines with Windows - if they refuse, MS refuse to provide them with a license. Yes, anticompetitive and probably illegal, but that's the way it was for a long time.
OEMs won't upset 95% of their business to appease the other 5%, and most of the people who want Windows want it preinstalled, so the OEM needs the license to do so. OEMs who offer non-Windows installs are much the minority right now, but at least it's a foot in the door.
The interesting difference between SSDs and platter based drive, is a write failure is not a warning sign that your heads are about to crash and you're going to lose the whole drive, it's just a failure of that one sector. Given extreme use over an extended period, the sectors would start to fail one by one, but no data should be lost, the drive capacity would start to shrink but the rest of the drive would be fine. Head crashes will be a thing of the past, thank god.
Even when the entire device's writes are used up, one should still be able to read all the data from it! :)
One assumes they are MLC which are still good for about 10,000 write cycles. SLCs for 100,000.
The controller does a very good job of cycling "sectors" used, so the whole disk gets good use, rather than the same areas being overwritten constantly. The MTBF for SSDs is much higher than for conventional drives as a result, although the figure is less relevant as it's much more down to usage than anything else.
Keep enough free space on the drive for the controller to do its cycling, don't use it for constant writes (torrents are a good example of what not to use it for - as for swap file, I don't know), and the drive will last longer than you'll use it for.
If I'd paid $20 for HL2 - Episode 3 6 years ago, and still didn't have it now, I'd be pretty pissed.
You used System 7 and never had an unresponsive system? Pff, now I know you're lying.
It's open source, go for it. :)
Thanks for the feedback.
I have been using the radio channels and artist radio primarily, which i agree aren't great, and that's probably why I wasn't getting a great experience out of it.
Perhaps the UI isn't great, which is why I've not been finding this better functionality, I'll give it another try!
Could you elaborate on why you think it's that good? I've used last.fm a bit, and spotify a bit. neither have large collections of the music I like, it seems.
My view of Spotify was their basic "radio" channels suck (I really don't want to listen to rock, or hiphop, or jazz), though the way you can intersect and combine them is neat, (e.g., rock and hiphop only from the 80s). However, finding stuff in different genres means searching by band, finding similar bands etc. This to me isn't much better than using youtube and making playlists on there, what IS so good about Spotify?
That isn't their customer base, though. I play locally with friends often, and we just connect to the main servers and make a friends only game. With achievements and the like you really need a central server to authenticate stuff these days.
Aside from the piracy concerns, I can see them wanting to create a unified experience for gamers, and to treat marginal cases - e.g. where most people are on a LAN but a couple are connecting remotely.
In this day and age I don't see no LAN games as a big deal - every gaming computer can/should have/does have internet access (if you're about to post that you don't, get into the 21st century). Making a friends-only game is an easy way to create the same experience - Left4Dead makes this work with small numbers of players too. The fact the game is initiated through the net is immaterial once you're up and running.
Starcraft benefited from LAN games in the way Doom et al did, but the technology landscape now is very different, and omitting it is only a lost for nostalgia, it won't have any practical impact.
More to the point, the headline should be "Record companies seek to club to death yet another new technology they are scared of, rather than try to embrace it".
In the UK, Spotify is a reasonable alternatiev (I think, never got to use Pandora, but this does much the same thing)
People actually pay for Windows?
Wow.
The market was for "compact, high capacity music players" and has been there for decades.
The original iPod was not the first mp3 player, not even the first harddisk based mp3 player (not by a long shot), there was already a market for it.
What Apple did was market the hell out of a good product and raise awareness of a whole new way to store and carry music. The market was already there.