I can hit Alt (or Ctrl) F1-F12 with my eyes closed, no problem. Alt (or Ctrl) + F1-F5 (up to F7 on Alt) I can do with a single hand, very little interruption.
Try being a gamer some time, where such things are practiced with remarkable regularity. The only time I EVER need to look at my keyboard is when I accidentally DROP the damn thing, as my room arrangement leaves the keyboard pretty much permanently in my lap.
Which goes to show that, for some people who aren't super-techy/admin types, Linux works great. That group is pretty much limited to people who use the computer for the email and web browsing -- these people are ultra-casual users of computers, and in their case Linux often can work well because it removes one of the biggest hazards (malware) without having to deal with things they don't understand (ad-block, noscript, etc.).
But the moment you move beyond the people who want nothing more than a web browser, e-mail client, word processor, or possibly a media player, Linux is no longer user-friendly. There's a large 'middle-class', so-to-speak, that want to do more with their machines, but don't have the know-how to deal with Linux in the capacity they would need to run the applications THEY want -- assuming such applications even work on Linux in ANY configuration.
Point 2 happens entirely automatically just by playing the game while online at least once every 30 days. It's a valid complaint, but hardly one I'm concerned with -- it's trivially easy to just install the game on 10-15 PCs, and given that the entire campaign can be played offline, I don't blame Blizzard for trying to ensure that people aren't just giving free installs to everyone else.
Do you care to clarify on 3 and 4?
3 is false in my experience, unless I'm reading it wrong. I can play in offline mode using my battle.net account without any issues, and the only thing that I miss out on is achievements (which require being online at the point they are earned). I'm not forced to use a guest account at all.
4 is a worthless argument entirely without details.
5 actually does irritate me, and is far and away my largest complaint with SC2 -- I would prefer that it allows you to play LAN play as long as each machine was activated in the last 30 days using a different BNet account. This would effectively accomplish keeping people from wanton copying while still giving people a way to play networked offline.
... I really hope Blizzard actually gets this release out on time. Past history doesn't give me much hope. I would love to be playing it this year, but...
I'm not sure why this was modded insightful -- there's nothing insightful about it. It's either a blatant troll attempt (hey guys, I hate on the popular fads cause it makes me look superior!), or borne of complete ignorance.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I was incredibly underwhelmed by Minecraft, but saying it has poor graphics is like saying your novel doesn't have enough pictures - Minecraft was never intended to look pretty, and if you went into expecting it to look pretty... well, you're a fool.
Similarly, while the 'game' part of minecraft essentially boils down to crafting and a simple combat simulator, if you went into it expecting more than that, you must have been buying blind.
But if you want to see why Minecraft is as popular as it is, it's not hard. You just have to stop thinking of it as a game (because as a game, it is lacking), and more as a world where you can create something -- in that regard, it is much more akin to playing with legos... with hostile critters.
It has a unique style that's easily recognizable, which makes parodies fun (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uyxVmdaJ-w). It can generate some interesting landscapes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwkVTuHcuHQ). And some people just enjoy making stuff (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOpkpW1tDAM).
I don't have the patience to make anything interesting, and got bored with it in about a week, but I can certainly see it's appeal.
How wonderfully hypocritical of you. Either the mouse lives and dies by it's merits, or it lives or dies by the creators reputation, but you can't say it should live and die by it's merits, and then pass on it for reasons unrelated.
I would have to disagree. Non-standard controller types, by and large, are nothing more than gimmicks. The success of a gimmick can vary -- The various guitar/music games have mostly held a fair degree of success, but they're also dying off from public view into a niche genre, and the Wii, while massively successful from a sales standpoint, is not utilized to the same degree as the more traditional consoles.
The jury is still out on Kinect and PlayStation Move, but I would wager that, much like the Wii, they will have their time in the limelight, and then the majority of games and game sales are going to be right back in the hands of the traditional games.
Don't get me wrong, I love the creativity and ingenuity of the new controller concepts, and in the short term, they are most definitely going to have an impact, but I do not think they are going to drive the industry in the long term by any means.
It seems pretty obvious to me. Why use a format that a clueless user coming to the site cannot open, if another format serves the same purpose? EFF needs all the support it can get. As much as I dislike closed formats, it's not going to benefit anyone to present information to the public in a way that many of them can't read it.
Some of us don't feel the need to hide it. Mine is clearly labeled, but I have no one that I need to hide it from, as my wife is fully aware of it and doesn't mind.
I'm not sure exactly why this would apply to Assange. US law, last I checked, doesn't allow for prosecution of an act committed while it was still legal.
"French Military Victories" has nothing to do with anything Google ever did, but is the result of a prank by Albino Sheep having the top search result and spoofing Google's search results page. Many other spoofs have been made along the same lines.
Have you ever played an FPS that is one giant corridor? That's what FF13's design is like. It's not just that it is linear in a broad sense, but linear in a literal sense as well. In this regard, your comparison has no point.
Blizzard specifically said they originally tried the same thing for WOW, but decided it was stupid and inverted it -- instead of punishing you with fatigue for playing too much, they gave you bonuses for taking breaks.
Even more amusing is that they didn't change anything. Initially, there was a 50% penalty for EXP earned beyond a certain point based on how long you were logged off. Players were outraged that playing too long was being penalized. So Blizzard doubled the EXP requirements across the board, gave players double EXP for being offline for a while, and retitled it as Rest EXP. It literally changed nothing aside from wrapping it as a positive benefit instead of a penalty. And the player base loved it.
If you look at many successful games, you'll find a lot of consistency, both MMO and non-MMO alike. I'm going to focus on UI here, because it's one of FFXIV's biggest flaws, and it's the easiest example.
A user interface needs to be designed in such a way that it communicates information clearly. Furthermore, the interface needs to be designed in such a way that accomplishing any particular task is straightforward, quick and intuitive.
The UI for Final Fantasy XIV is excruciatingly poorly designed and fails on all aspects of this. Everything is accessed through a main menu that has a mess of nested sub-menus. There are no assigning of simple hotkeys for most actions (though you can assign combat and skill related actions to 0-9), and the entire interface responds VERY slowly, often taking 3-5 seconds to open each sub-menu.
Changing options such as screen resolution, detail settings, or controller configuration (if you have a game pad) is done by closing down the client entirely, running a separate configuration utility, and relaunching the client when you are done. Running the game in full-screen prevents you from alt-tabbing, else you crash the client entirely. This is particularly bad because these are chief complaints people have had about their own previous MMORPG, so they should be painfully aware of them -- but they appear to have learned nothing.
Square-Enix is just not in touch with what makes a game good as a game. They have a knack for compelling stories, and they have a solid art-design team, but these aren't enough to make a good game.
So you clearly have no interest in MMORPGs. That doesn't mean those who like them can't be permitted to appreciate content updates. There is no law that says you have to play the game, but that doesn't mean the game should die. There's not exactly a shortage of games that have proper endings.
The laggy UI baffles me. Also, the entire UI is a mess. Like Oblivion, it just isn't made for a PC user and was clearly designed for use with a console. Unlike Oblivion, mouse support is not integrated well at all. All of the configuration options that actually matter require shutting down the game and using a secondary tool.
This is poor game design for the PC platform. Given that this was one of the more irritating aspects of FFXI, I was hoping it would be addressed. Instead, they have repeated many of the same mistakes. You still can't alt-tab without crashing the game if you're playing in full-screen -- one of the biggest things that plagued FFXI until the player base created a third-party utility that fixed it.
I fully agree with this. Final Fantasy games in the 8-bit and 16-bit era always had a little bit of a steampunk flavor in their settings, but never enough to remove the 'fantasy' feel from the game.
Final Fantasy VII dropped you in the middle of Midgar, and didn't feel like a fantasy at all until you were well outside of the city, approximately 1/3 of the way into the game. Even afterward, it never settled quite right with me.
Final Fantasy VIII had the gardens -- massive, mobile behemoth-cities that felt far too modernized compared to the majority of the game world's setting. The pseudo sci-fi last 25% of the game doesn't help in that regard either.
Of the single-player games, Final Fantasy IX was probably the heaviest on the 'fantasy' scale after the SNES era, but it suffered from generally unlikable characters, a story that was passable but nothing spectacular, and a final boss that didn't seem to make any coherent sense in the context of the plot.
Final Fantasy X left a bizarre disconnect between various aspects of it's plot -- it seems to have modern technology mixed in with a lot of magic -- which is alright, I suppose, but it never 'felt' fantasy-like to me. The additional mind-screw of a storyline didn't help it one bit.
Final Fantasy XI played high fantasy pretty much completely straight, had an epic storyline that shamed all of the recent Final Fantasy offerings, and no one cared because it was an MMORPG that took several hundreds of hours to actually experience the plots it offered. Based on my experiences with the beta of XIV, it appears to be the same way.
Final Fantasy XII was a decent attempt at making a fantasy game again in places, but giant fleets of modern-looking mechanical airships ruined it, even if those airships are supposedly powered by magic. The airships in the older Final Fantasy offerings were more like zeppelins than aircraft.
Final Fantasy XIII... ugh. See FFVII.
It's not impossible that I'm just getting jaded, but it feels like the fantasy left this series a long time ago.
Final Fantasy XI initially launched in a pretty dismal state, but has improved vastly over the years, and is still getting fairly solid content updates.
But Final Fantasy XIV certainly is not ready to compete in today's MMORPG market. I'm not about to pay money to continue a beta test. I would guess it needs about 6 more months of development, at a minimum, before it's really ready to compete. Furthermore, Square-Enix needs to do some serious market research and learn what players actually want from a game.
Also a tester here. I agree completely. It's marginally better than the existing d-pads, but it does not solve any of the fundamental problems with the d-pad. I'll stick with my PC and PS3 for fighters still.
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I can hit Alt (or Ctrl) F1-F12 with my eyes closed, no problem. Alt (or Ctrl) + F1-F5 (up to F7 on Alt) I can do with a single hand, very little interruption.
Try being a gamer some time, where such things are practiced with remarkable regularity. The only time I EVER need to look at my keyboard is when I accidentally DROP the damn thing, as my room arrangement leaves the keyboard pretty much permanently in my lap.
Which goes to show that, for some people who aren't super-techy/admin types, Linux works great. That group is pretty much limited to people who use the computer for the email and web browsing -- these people are ultra-casual users of computers, and in their case Linux often can work well because it removes one of the biggest hazards (malware) without having to deal with things they don't understand (ad-block, noscript, etc.).
But the moment you move beyond the people who want nothing more than a web browser, e-mail client, word processor, or possibly a media player, Linux is no longer user-friendly. There's a large 'middle-class', so-to-speak, that want to do more with their machines, but don't have the know-how to deal with Linux in the capacity they would need to run the applications THEY want -- assuming such applications even work on Linux in ANY configuration.
...EA has followed suit and it's neigh-on impossible to find a modern AAA shooter...
A My Little Pony fan, or just a case of confusion ... we will never know.
Point 2 happens entirely automatically just by playing the game while online at least once every 30 days. It's a valid complaint, but hardly one I'm concerned with -- it's trivially easy to just install the game on 10-15 PCs, and given that the entire campaign can be played offline, I don't blame Blizzard for trying to ensure that people aren't just giving free installs to everyone else.
Do you care to clarify on 3 and 4?
3 is false in my experience, unless I'm reading it wrong. I can play in offline mode using my battle.net account without any issues, and the only thing that I miss out on is achievements (which require being online at the point they are earned). I'm not forced to use a guest account at all.
4 is a worthless argument entirely without details.
5 actually does irritate me, and is far and away my largest complaint with SC2 -- I would prefer that it allows you to play LAN play as long as each machine was activated in the last 30 days using a different BNet account. This would effectively accomplish keeping people from wanton copying while still giving people a way to play networked offline.
... I really hope Blizzard actually gets this release out on time. Past history doesn't give me much hope. I would love to be playing it this year, but ...
Um, the MPAA isn't some wide-sweeping entity that cares about everyone's copyrights just because it is related to videos.
I'm not sure why this was modded insightful -- there's nothing insightful about it. It's either a blatant troll attempt (hey guys, I hate on the popular fads cause it makes me look superior!), or borne of complete ignorance.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I was incredibly underwhelmed by Minecraft, but saying it has poor graphics is like saying your novel doesn't have enough pictures - Minecraft was never intended to look pretty, and if you went into expecting it to look pretty ... well, you're a fool.
Similarly, while the 'game' part of minecraft essentially boils down to crafting and a simple combat simulator, if you went into it expecting more than that, you must have been buying blind.
But if you want to see why Minecraft is as popular as it is, it's not hard. You just have to stop thinking of it as a game (because as a game, it is lacking), and more as a world where you can create something -- in that regard, it is much more akin to playing with legos ... with hostile critters.
It has a unique style that's easily recognizable, which makes parodies fun (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uyxVmdaJ-w). It can generate some interesting landscapes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwkVTuHcuHQ). And some people just enjoy making stuff (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOpkpW1tDAM).
I don't have the patience to make anything interesting, and got bored with it in about a week, but I can certainly see it's appeal.
How wonderfully hypocritical of you. Either the mouse lives and dies by it's merits, or it lives or dies by the creators reputation, but you can't say it should live and die by it's merits, and then pass on it for reasons unrelated.
A line is two dimensions. One dimension is just a single point, thus the question of how movement (and thus heat and energy) can exist at that point.
At least you have the ability to remove tags of yourself from any photo.
I would have to disagree. Non-standard controller types, by and large, are nothing more than gimmicks. The success of a gimmick can vary -- The various guitar/music games have mostly held a fair degree of success, but they're also dying off from public view into a niche genre, and the Wii, while massively successful from a sales standpoint, is not utilized to the same degree as the more traditional consoles.
The jury is still out on Kinect and PlayStation Move, but I would wager that, much like the Wii, they will have their time in the limelight, and then the majority of games and game sales are going to be right back in the hands of the traditional games.
Don't get me wrong, I love the creativity and ingenuity of the new controller concepts, and in the short term, they are most definitely going to have an impact, but I do not think they are going to drive the industry in the long term by any means.
It seems pretty obvious to me. Why use a format that a clueless user coming to the site cannot open, if another format serves the same purpose? EFF needs all the support it can get. As much as I dislike closed formats, it's not going to benefit anyone to present information to the public in a way that many of them can't read it.
Some of us don't feel the need to hide it. Mine is clearly labeled, but I have no one that I need to hide it from, as my wife is fully aware of it and doesn't mind.
I'm not sure exactly why this would apply to Assange. US law, last I checked, doesn't allow for prosecution of an act committed while it was still legal.
I respectfully disagree. What if the outsourced worker needs money for leukemia treatments for a child? You can't simplify things so easily.
"French Military Victories" has nothing to do with anything Google ever did, but is the result of a prank by Albino Sheep having the top search result and spoofing Google's search results page. Many other spoofs have been made along the same lines.
Have you ever played an FPS that is one giant corridor? That's what FF13's design is like. It's not just that it is linear in a broad sense, but linear in a literal sense as well. In this regard, your comparison has no point.
Even more amusing is that they didn't change anything. Initially, there was a 50% penalty for EXP earned beyond a certain point based on how long you were logged off. Players were outraged that playing too long was being penalized. So Blizzard doubled the EXP requirements across the board, gave players double EXP for being offline for a while, and retitled it as Rest EXP. It literally changed nothing aside from wrapping it as a positive benefit instead of a penalty. And the player base loved it.
If you look at many successful games, you'll find a lot of consistency, both MMO and non-MMO alike. I'm going to focus on UI here, because it's one of FFXIV's biggest flaws, and it's the easiest example.
A user interface needs to be designed in such a way that it communicates information clearly. Furthermore, the interface needs to be designed in such a way that accomplishing any particular task is straightforward, quick and intuitive.
The UI for Final Fantasy XIV is excruciatingly poorly designed and fails on all aspects of this. Everything is accessed through a main menu that has a mess of nested sub-menus. There are no assigning of simple hotkeys for most actions (though you can assign combat and skill related actions to 0-9), and the entire interface responds VERY slowly, often taking 3-5 seconds to open each sub-menu.
Changing options such as screen resolution, detail settings, or controller configuration (if you have a game pad) is done by closing down the client entirely, running a separate configuration utility, and relaunching the client when you are done. Running the game in full-screen prevents you from alt-tabbing, else you crash the client entirely. This is particularly bad because these are chief complaints people have had about their own previous MMORPG, so they should be painfully aware of them -- but they appear to have learned nothing.
Square-Enix is just not in touch with what makes a game good as a game. They have a knack for compelling stories, and they have a solid art-design team, but these aren't enough to make a good game.
So you clearly have no interest in MMORPGs. That doesn't mean those who like them can't be permitted to appreciate content updates. There is no law that says you have to play the game, but that doesn't mean the game should die. There's not exactly a shortage of games that have proper endings.
The laggy UI baffles me. Also, the entire UI is a mess. Like Oblivion, it just isn't made for a PC user and was clearly designed for use with a console. Unlike Oblivion, mouse support is not integrated well at all. All of the configuration options that actually matter require shutting down the game and using a secondary tool.
This is poor game design for the PC platform. Given that this was one of the more irritating aspects of FFXI, I was hoping it would be addressed. Instead, they have repeated many of the same mistakes. You still can't alt-tab without crashing the game if you're playing in full-screen -- one of the biggest things that plagued FFXI until the player base created a third-party utility that fixed it.
I fully agree with this. Final Fantasy games in the 8-bit and 16-bit era always had a little bit of a steampunk flavor in their settings, but never enough to remove the 'fantasy' feel from the game.
Final Fantasy VII dropped you in the middle of Midgar, and didn't feel like a fantasy at all until you were well outside of the city, approximately 1/3 of the way into the game. Even afterward, it never settled quite right with me.
Final Fantasy VIII had the gardens -- massive, mobile behemoth-cities that felt far too modernized compared to the majority of the game world's setting. The pseudo sci-fi last 25% of the game doesn't help in that regard either.
Of the single-player games, Final Fantasy IX was probably the heaviest on the 'fantasy' scale after the SNES era, but it suffered from generally unlikable characters, a story that was passable but nothing spectacular, and a final boss that didn't seem to make any coherent sense in the context of the plot.
Final Fantasy X left a bizarre disconnect between various aspects of it's plot -- it seems to have modern technology mixed in with a lot of magic -- which is alright, I suppose, but it never 'felt' fantasy-like to me. The additional mind-screw of a storyline didn't help it one bit.
Final Fantasy XI played high fantasy pretty much completely straight, had an epic storyline that shamed all of the recent Final Fantasy offerings, and no one cared because it was an MMORPG that took several hundreds of hours to actually experience the plots it offered. Based on my experiences with the beta of XIV, it appears to be the same way.
Final Fantasy XII was a decent attempt at making a fantasy game again in places, but giant fleets of modern-looking mechanical airships ruined it, even if those airships are supposedly powered by magic. The airships in the older Final Fantasy offerings were more like zeppelins than aircraft.
Final Fantasy XIII ... ugh. See FFVII.
It's not impossible that I'm just getting jaded, but it feels like the fantasy left this series a long time ago.
Final Fantasy XI initially launched in a pretty dismal state, but has improved vastly over the years, and is still getting fairly solid content updates.
But Final Fantasy XIV certainly is not ready to compete in today's MMORPG market. I'm not about to pay money to continue a beta test. I would guess it needs about 6 more months of development, at a minimum, before it's really ready to compete. Furthermore, Square-Enix needs to do some serious market research and learn what players actually want from a game.
I cannot stand sticks, so I use a pad, yes. Been doing so for years.
Also a tester here. I agree completely. It's marginally better than the existing d-pads, but it does not solve any of the fundamental problems with the d-pad. I'll stick with my PC and PS3 for fighters still.