It may sound outrageous, but do a search on lighting hitting people inside houses.
One of the interesting things that can be seen is that some houses, especially in many of the southern states (I know it is true of most Texas homes), are built on a slab of concrete. No basement, just that slab of concrete.
This slab is sometimes filled with wire mesh, or has steel cables pulled through it. Those cables or mesh will conduct the electricity of the lightning through the floor, and people get hit.
Now, I don't know about you, but when I see folks unplug something due to an impending electrical storm, what do they do with the cord? Yep, drop the damn thing on the floor. Usually close to the outlet, too.
Besides, I again point out that the electrical charge has jumped from the cloud to the ground. (For a house strike, I don't think you would see a ground to cloud strike on a home.) It was able to overcome the resistance of the air and travel over a mile to hit the home. It doesn't need the wires and/or metal pipes to travel through a house. It just takes those paths because it is easiest. And that power cord laying less than a foot from the outlet is a prime target.
Add to that the fact that houses with basements have pipes and wires running just under the floor, and it adds up to unplugged electronics getting popped. Not every day, but it *does* happen.
Why is it BS because it isn't on Google? Has Google become the all-encompassing fact factory? Just about anything you search for still generates a 25% porn hit scenario!
Go talk to some career FF, and see what you find out. It usually doesn't take long to find guys that have heard it all, and seen it with their own eyes. Heck, I only did it for 6 years, and I saw it a few times. No real fires in the house, but unplugged electronics are fried.
Heck, I get some our telephones knocked off-line by electrical storms that have no nearby strikes. You have to leave the phone unplugged for a day or so before it resets, sometimes.
Let's be honest about it. With books, movies, and games that involve a fictional setting such as sci-fi or fantasy, you have a "reasonable suspension of disbelief" factor. Once you cross that line, things start to bog down. The problem is, that line is different based on people's education on the areas around the disbelief portion.
I have a fairly good knowledge of medical areas, from my time working in a pharmacy and studying to be a paramedic. I can already tell that the new TNT network show "Saved" is going to be a major flop with paramedics everywhere. On one of their commercials, they show one paramedic telling the other one "If you shock her one more time, you may kill her." Um, guys? If you are shocking someone, they already have a heart rhythm incompatable with life. (Pacing is not considered shocking, and you don't use the paddles to do it, but pads that adhere to the chest.) This is a reverse from what you got with E.R., which tried to be factually accurate about medical details, and thus had credibility, making a reasonable suspension of disbelief not necessary.
How does this apply to games as well as books and movies? Well, once you go past that point, the viewer/reader starts to mentally question everything else the author/producer is telling us. It becomes a distraction from the entertainment factor. The more distractions, the less you are entertained, until you are staying "enough is enough" and stop participating.
I've played a few games where they try to mix up the laws of physics, or have magic and technology both flourish. It depends on the setting and how it is used. City of Heroes/Villians had both magic, genetic mutations, science, and natural abilities all working easily together, because it was about comic book heroes/villians. We've been given forever to accept that this is a fantasy world, so we can fit in things that don't make a great deal of practical sense and enjoy the game.
As for games that didn't work for me, they have been so immemorable that I don't recall their names. I think the rule of thumb applies more to books and video, since they have a more controlled storyline. For games, it is more often a case of stupid mechanics or dumb ideas.
While pulling the plug may help save your electical equipment, if you have a direct strike, you are probably hosed, even if they are unplugged.
I mean, think about it. A bolt of basically pure energy just reached a few miles from the sky to the ground to hit your house. Do you really think not having the plug in the wall is going to save your equipment? Just like those UPS's of yours that died, those unplugged devices are going to be toast, too.
I've seen it happen even in near strikes. Went to one house that was brand new, and the appliances and electronics had been put in, but not plugged in yet. 2 big sceen TVs, one PC, and a bunch of smaller electronics all bought the farm when lightning struck a tree 25' from the house. None of them were plugged in.
It's happened to me in an apartment, even. Lost one DVD player that was plugged in. The older one that was in the closet and not plugged in had it's circuit board singed to the point it didn't work, either. First time I've seen a fuse shatter in a device not plugged in.
Unplugging helps for some near misses. UPS's help for minor surges coming down the line. But if your house is going to be struck, your electronics are mostly toast, and you will get lucky to not have some smouldering in the walls where the electrical wires can fry, and the crappy wood they use to build houses nowadays seems to ignite easily.
Maybe next time, Atari and the game creators will listen to the beta testers, who blasted DDO for lack of content and the dreaded "lack of solo content". (Though you don't play Dungeons & Dragons solo, so why should the MMO have it in it????)
I was in the beta for a long time, and I knew every dungeon by heart. So did everyone else that played it for a while. It's hard to find a game riveting when you know where all the traps are, what all the encounters look like, and which ones were more worth repeating.
And repeating you did. Ugh!
Maybe a really good first (free) expansion will help the game out. It sounds like they are looking to give players the stuff the beta testers told them they really needed. And the DDO beta community was a really polite one, for the most part. Not like the Vangaard one we are hearing such bad things about. I know my DDO guild was active in the Vangaard beta for a while, and they universally hated the direction the game is moving into.
I hate cell phones, too. But, I work from home, so I made a cell phone be my work phone, so I could run little errands during the day without interrupting my work, since I do technical support for an application. So, it is a necessary evil, and a godsend to a new parent when they want to make those quick shopping runs without the spouse and baby.
However, if you look at these phones, I can't help but see a nice parallel relationship to PDAs.
How many people do you know that bought a PDA, and walked around like they were important simply because they had it? PDAs became a status symbol to the tech crowd and the tech geek wannabes. From what I saw, over 75% of those that had a PDA didn't come close to needing one, but they pulled one out during meetings to make themselves look important.
The cell phone has become the same thing, especially to today's young crowd. They simply HAVE to have one, and the more features it has, the cooler they are. Remember (if you are old enough) when the pager stopped being a drug dealer's friend, and became a status symbol? Remember how girls started coming up with stupid page numbers to indicate things, like 143 being "I love you"? Well, today's young people can't live without text messaging and a camera, plus internet access and 50 different downloaded ringtones.
Lets look at some of the features on today's phones.
Text messaging: I've only met one person over the age of 35 who used this. It seems to have the sole purpose of sending messages silently without tipping off teachers/administrators in a school setting. Apparently, passing a piece of paper with a hand-written note is too lame. Really, why pay extra to spend all that time "typing" that message in when you could say it in a few seconds? Oh, yeah... These kids burn too many minutes, and can't get to the point and end the conversation.
Camera phone: If this is the best you can do for taking pictures, dear god are you hopeless. While the newer camera phones do produce better images than a webcam from a few years ago, those pictures are mostly stuck on your phone, unless you want to pay to transfer the file. Me, I'll stick with my real camera.
Email/Internet: Ok, just another fancy way to hit kids up for silent messaging and stuff they really don't need. This isn't Blackberry, it's cheesy AOL/Yahoo! or whatever. And the amount of spam that tends to get through those accounts makes it worthless.
So, to sum it all up, today's cell phone makers have targetted one audience, teenage girls. The problem is, they don't really make nice cell phones for the rest of us that just want a cell phone that can store numbers and speed dial them.
Man, do I miss my last cell phone, that did just that! But, it started to lose reception because they were cutting back the signals for older digital models, so I had to upgrade. My new cell has a camera in it, and it is too easy to activate, impairing with my scrolling through numbers backwards. The only reason I got it was because all the simple "I'm a phone with only phone and phone # memory" phones were pieces of crap, or cost 3x more than the Nokia I got.
So, let some phone maker come up with a nicely made phone that is just a phone for the non teenage girl crowd, PLEASE?!?!
The article sums itself up by saying that they don't understand why people would cheat and artificially inflate their rating.
Duh! To be at the top!
How many times do you see on gaming forums some clown posting "FIRST!" or "First Page!", like it matters. Just about every Blizzard post on their forums has that stupidity going on, and you even see it happening on non-competition sites like the forums for Order of the Stick webcomic.
It's all about having bragging rights, or as I like to call it, "showing off the size of your e-penis".
It's almost homo-erotic at this point. (Not that there is anything wrong with being gay, btw.) Before the computer game evolution, guys usually tried to have bragging rights in some sport, and a lot of the hot "cheerleader" type chicks dug the guy with the letterman jacket. The guys tended to get buff, be athletic, and do something worthy of praise. (They also tended to be morons, but that's besides the point.) They competed with each other to gain the attention of women, mostly.
Now, we have the same behavior going on, but with computer gamers. They have to be the best, be the coolest, etc. Except, there aren't a lot of chicks out there that will drool all over them. What they get is other guys wishing to be like them, instead of chicks wanting to be with them. There isn't a big call from girls to date the guy with a high Halo2 ranking, but the H.S. quarterback still gets a hot chick more often than not.
I don't know about you, but when I was in H.S. or college, I didn't want the adulation of other guys. I wanted to be noticed by chicks. But hey, that was just me.
Yep, hitting 60 rang the bell for the wife and I, and within 2 weeks we were struggling to find a reason to keep playing. Alts were ok, but since our 60's where Alliance, it was a sense of "been there, done that" to it all. We tried Horde, but after a while, the quests again started to repeat themselves, and the new classes we tried just weren't as fun.
The real problem Vangaard is going to run into is it is aiming for that really small niche market that is the hardcore gamer. Those folks that don't like to sleep, date, have sex, get married, have a family, or even go out to dinner or see a movie. They want to exist at their PC, and nowhere else.
I've known an UO widow (divorced her husband after he wouldn't spend time with her, but played UO from the time he got home til the time he fell asleep at the PC) and an EQ widow (same thing) that were both incredible women. Major hotties that married some geek, only to see them prefer a computer game to sex with their spouse. (And that UO widow was a dynamo in the bedroom... Ah, the memories!) And when both games came to a realistic close, they found out they were without the company of said hottie, and felt like idiots.
I was seriously interested in Vangaard, but the whole corpse run thing seriously bothered me. I enjoyed CoH/V and WoW because they were time friendly. You could play for an hour and accomplish something most of the time, even solo. EQ wasn't that solo friendly, and EQ2 was awful to solo in. I don't like soloing, but I want it to be an option, especially at lower levels.
Timesinks as a base game design are destined to fail. Vangaard is basing their design on timesinks. I think that says it all.
The fact that several game companies, including a major studio like UbiSoft, has dropped StarForce due to CD drive problems, is a major sign that the company is in trouble.
At this point, even if they could prove beyond a shadow of doubt that their protection methods don't cause any harm, their reputation is effectively ruined. Enough game players are savvy enough to find out if the StarForce protection is on a desired game, and avoid that title if it is present. And game publishers are figuring this out.
The industry may be a multi-billion dollar one, but these guys aren't about to kiss off customers over a single protection scheme, when there are so many others out there. They will lose more revenue from potential paying customers than they will lose to customers that are soley interested in a pirated copy.
Besides, just about all games are released with enough bugs that a patch is pretty much a necessity. Look at how Stardock handled Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. No copy protection, but if you want to update that game, you better enter a serial #. Any pirated CD is basically a demo, and once you patch it, it is the full version.
At this point, I'm just happy with any game that doesn't want the CD/DVD in the drive. I switch games too often.
Yeah, I have had the same problem with Dell desktops and their Windows XP install CD. They are idiots and don't give you network adapter drivers, then tell you to download them from their website. Good thing I have 2 PCs up and running in the house!
The bottom line is, they call it BETA for a reason. It's not done yet. They want people to play with it and find problems.
Nobody ships anything out of the box that works 100%, even for a gold release. Why should a BETA release surprise us in that it has bugs?
I'm almost 40 years old, now. My wife and I just had our first child last week. I barely have time to log into here to catch the news, much less any inclination for paying that much money for a console to play inferior games to what you get on the PC.
The console market is in trouble, but they don't really want us to know it. They want to hope for a perfect storm of entertainment, and unfortunately for the, the holy grail is realistic and affordable VR gaming. As the author said, we thought we'd have that by now, and we are still a decade or more away.
Life catches up to you, and while game makers talk about the target demographic being 18-35 male, most of them are H.S. and college kids. Those kids don't have a ton of disposable income. Once they hit the real world, they don't have the time to devote. The more involved in the real world they get (you know, girls, work, girls, hobbies, girls, sex, girls) the less they devote to games.
When H.S. and college guys can afford the game systems and the games, then you might have something. With the PS3, that isn't going to be the case for a majority. That's a problem.
"Blizzard's content team is also designing out-of-the-way pockets of content and monster camps to be discovered by adventurous players who don't mind exploring the new areas"
I don't know about you guys, but Blizzard has a policy of banning people from going to places they aren't supposed to go. So, now they are adding content that you have to work hard to get to via exploring. And while Blizzard has said that they mark spots you aren't supposed to get to clearly, I know they would get mad at people going to the gnome airport, until they finally fixed it so you couldn't.
Who wants to bet that some Blizzard GMs whip out their ban sticks when people end up in spots they aren't supposed to get to? And that they used their new fancy mounts to get there, too?
You aren't sure why the Horde generally beats the Alliance no matter what server? Damn, that's a simple one.
Prior to the (dis)Honor system and Battlegrounds, on most (especially PvP) servers, the Alliance used a lot of zerging to beat the Horde, and keep them from rising up in levels. The Horde would fight back, and once the numbers came close to a balance, the Alliance would run away because they had too much chance of dying.
Then came the (dis)Honor system. And the Alliance started to camp several key locations in places the Horde needed to go to level. How many level 50-60 Alliance toons does it take to crush the Crossroads? Seems the average # is about 30. Gotta gank those lvl 10-15 Hordelings! After that, they would move on to Tarren Mill, and do the same. I still remember Alliance folks complaining that the guards respawned too fast early on, and it made their ganking harder. So, zerging had now become the primary tactic for many Alliance players. Horde players had to think strategy, and learn to coordinate both offensive and defensive tactics.
Then came the Battlefields, and suddenly the Alliance people found they had to play with equal numbers. Add to that, and they couldn't play as often in a battlefield instance, because they had huge queues, while many/most horde players could get into a new instance within 15 minutes, if not immediately. All that practice surviving overwhelming odds, as well as a lot more familiarity with which tactics worked best in each battlefield, and the Horde players stomped the crap out of the Alliance.
People will generally take the path of least resistance. Playing Alliance made a lot of things easier, especially for PvP. When things became challenging, many Alliance players failed to raise their game. The Horde players, meanwhile, had been forced to bring their A game for months, and because of the population inbalances, they can play in a battlefield more frequently to work on tactics and become a better player.
This isn't to paint all Alliance players as idiots, and all Horde players as tactical genuises. It simply is a cause-effect relationship.
I quit playing a while ago. Does the Alliance still gank folks at both Tarren Mill and Crossroads on the non-PvP servers? It was an all day event on Uther for months. Hard as hell to complete quests when your quest givers were dead.
Yeah, but this is old news. Just try to reach the forums when it is server maintenance day, and you will see that they cannot handle the number of people that are bored and want to check the forums.
So, it is no surprise that their forums are slashdot'ed.
Most of the time, what I want to do is find out where some obscure mob is to be found, or find out what their idiotic spawn rate is.
Forgive me for having a family, but I don't find the idea to sit in a zone/area for hours/days on end waiting for a freakin' mob to spawn so I can kill him to advance some quest. And since the damn thing spawns so infrequently, I want to know WHERE he spawns, so I have a chance to find it.
In WoW, at worst, most of the quest mobs spawned right away, or in some cases you had to wait an hour. (That stupid tiger in SV that spawns only once an hour comes to mind, and fighting through Hunters that wanted it as a pet before they nerfed its speed some, was a chore.) In EQ, though, it really helped to know where that mob spawned, and WHEN it spawned. Nothing like trying to time Phinny just right while working on one of 4 different epics. Dummest idea ever, 1 mob that was a required kill with poor loot chances, but 4 different clases needed him.
This is the part of the grind I don't like. I don't want to wait hours/days/weeks and even months to get some quest completed, even if it is an uber quest. It's not fun. And this is why people sell items and currency.
It took a few months for me to kill Phinny for my wizard epic in EQ, and he was a 12hr spawn! I think I downed that fish more than 15 times! Grrr. Nobody liked going into KK to kill Phinny. It was a PITA to make sure everyone could breath underwater, and to navigate it. I didn't mind killing Phinny 3-4 times. After more than 10 (including a few solo kills), I was more than fed up, and when a friend got the staff off of him while helping a bard on his attempt, I decided that I wasn't too proud to MQ that damn quest.
There's grind, and then there's GRIND. I can deal with a little grind, but that major GRIND just wears me out. I don't have the time or the willingness to try to be at my PC every 12hrs to kill one freaking mob. And with the wife about to pop out a baby, I'll have even less. I love the interaction with others and the fun of working together to complete a task, but for now, MMOs have come off my current game playing list.
The same ratings re-do could be done for a whole lot of games. I haven't seen "The Sims" or "The Sims2" being re-rated. Those were all rated T for Teen, and it won't take anyone more than a few minutes to Google for mods to have nude characters. This includes males skins with jutting erections.
The ESRB would have to re-rate literally dozens of games for this. This is a really bad precedent.
Now, where did I put my copy of NWN with the modded Aribeth model???? Put that new skin with that voice... Hubba Hubba!
For pure griefing fun, if you can't steal the car, you make it so the owner can't drive it, either. You are doing the same microwaving that ECU.
I had a car that folks tried to steal at least 3 times. The first two failed, and broke something off in the ignition, forcing me to pay for a window and the ignition repair. The third failed, and may have gone and done a little joyriding, but by that time the turbocharger was going on the engine, so the police believe they actually brought it back.
Let's not give some enterprising folks the idea of running around and shorting out the ECUs of cars everywhere.
Besides, I wonder if something like this foils Lo-Jack. If not, no biggie. I mean, if you spend more than $25K on a car/truck, or have a vehicle that is high on the stolen list, and don't have Lo-Jack (at least if it is available) you are asking for it.
It works so well, most car theives steal a car and simply move it a few blocks, park it, and leave it for 24hrs. If nobody picks it up, then they take it to the chop-shop. That 24hrs is to keep from having the chop-shop raided. That's their method of stoping Lo-Jack. Which is why they usually recover the car in decent condition within 15 minutes most of the time.
I was in the closed beta, and there was no appreciable loot lag. The open beta, there was, but then they didn't really add much in the way of servers at that point, so we all kind of expected it.
They did some tweaks, and at initial launch, there was no appreciable loot lag. It wasn't until a few weeks in that things started to fall apart. And when it fell, it fell hard.
You are quite correct, just about every game has had these kind of problems, especially if they break new ground in subscription numbers. EQ had a lot of problems at launch, and for the first year or so. UO did have problems, as well. Blizzard certainly blew away everyone with it's subscription numbers with WoW.
However, Blizzard has really dragged their feet when it comes to fixing things. The article makes it sound like this is a recent phenomenom for WoW, but it has been around since the game was first released.
Granted, they didn't anticipate quite the initial subscription numbers they got, but within weeks we saw login queues show up, and Blizzard hastily added more servers. In fact, I do believe the more servers they added happened to be all that they had originally contracted for, and they used up that "growth servers" room right away. Now they have maxed their server capacity with their ISP, and they were sorta screwed at that point. Not that they couldn't have thrown money at the issue, but this is a game company owned by a media company. Throw money at the problem? Bwahahahaha
Heck, I was on one of the original "terrible 20" servers; Uther. It was down so much it was scary. I think I ended up with more than 2 weeks of free play time for service outtages, and probably closer to a full month.
Also, this whole thing about "a patch caused a new set of problems" is also not new for Blizzard and WoW. Every patch they did for the first several months would break half the server lag fixes they put in. Loot lag was so bad you could be stuck for more than a minute looting a corpse. From launch to when I quit playing 9 months later, they still had the problem of ore nodes and/or harvest nodes that would lock your toon up because it had nothing on it but failed to clear. I suspect that bug is still in place, but I don't care anymore. After a while, things got better, but as the queues came back, so did the content breaking patches, and the wife and I got out. Heck, we were 60, and bored.
What is different is that most of these game companies have had their act together after 1 year, give or take a few months. It's been what, about 16 months since WoW was first released? They should really have their act together about now, or damn close to it. But they don't.
Forget StarForce, or any other copy protection. What works is releasing a game that you know has serious bugs in it, and then applying a patch or two that will fix them. Viola, the CD/DVD rippers that love to get original CD images are now hosed up a bit, due to the fact that those bugs have to be patched. Apply patch, fix copy protection that requires the CD to be in the drive. Each patch restores it, and may even check a different spot on the CD surface. Busts up those NoCD cracks pretty quick.
That means that people that are ripping the game have to look for new cracks, which is a journey fraught with viruses and the like.
Sure, game companies are inherently lazy and rush product to the shelves. But, now they have added incentive to make us buy unfinished games. And they know that most game players want to have it NOW, so they will live with it. What's to stop them?
And I can't say I'm different. I can certainly see myself buying NWN2 when it comes out this summer.
Considering the fact that a large portion of underage nude modeling comes from former Soviet countries, how exactly is the U.S. government going to shut them down? We can't control drugs in our own country, but we are going to knock out kiddie porn?
Also, what are they defining as child porn? I still remember the one woman here in Texas that was arrested, along with her husband, for taking a picture of her play-nursing her 1yr old and 16yrs old are probably crossing a line that shouldn't be crossed. But, there is no international law that we can all fix our hat onto, and until there is, I say that nothing will happen that is effective.
Besides, go into Usenet in almost any binary group, and someone will eventually spam some underage pictures to it advertising some website that we still haven't taken off the net. It's hard to take down a server in Russia or whatever that the country's mafia is running, when you don't have jurisdiction, and that country's government is afraid of them.
Slashdot Mirror
It may sound outrageous, but do a search on lighting hitting people inside houses.
One of the interesting things that can be seen is that some houses, especially in many of the southern states (I know it is true of most Texas homes), are built on a slab of concrete. No basement, just that slab of concrete.
This slab is sometimes filled with wire mesh, or has steel cables pulled through it. Those cables or mesh will conduct the electricity of the lightning through the floor, and people get hit.
Now, I don't know about you, but when I see folks unplug something due to an impending electrical storm, what do they do with the cord? Yep, drop the damn thing on the floor. Usually close to the outlet, too.
Besides, I again point out that the electrical charge has jumped from the cloud to the ground. (For a house strike, I don't think you would see a ground to cloud strike on a home.) It was able to overcome the resistance of the air and travel over a mile to hit the home. It doesn't need the wires and/or metal pipes to travel through a house. It just takes those paths because it is easiest. And that power cord laying less than a foot from the outlet is a prime target.
Add to that the fact that houses with basements have pipes and wires running just under the floor, and it adds up to unplugged electronics getting popped. Not every day, but it *does* happen.
Why is it BS because it isn't on Google? Has Google become the all-encompassing fact factory? Just about anything you search for still generates a 25% porn hit scenario!
Go talk to some career FF, and see what you find out. It usually doesn't take long to find guys that have heard it all, and seen it with their own eyes. Heck, I only did it for 6 years, and I saw it a few times. No real fires in the house, but unplugged electronics are fried.
Heck, I get some our telephones knocked off-line by electrical storms that have no nearby strikes. You have to leave the phone unplugged for a day or so before it resets, sometimes.
Let's be honest about it. With books, movies, and games that involve a fictional setting such as sci-fi or fantasy, you have a "reasonable suspension of disbelief" factor. Once you cross that line, things start to bog down. The problem is, that line is different based on people's education on the areas around the disbelief portion.
I have a fairly good knowledge of medical areas, from my time working in a pharmacy and studying to be a paramedic. I can already tell that the new TNT network show "Saved" is going to be a major flop with paramedics everywhere. On one of their commercials, they show one paramedic telling the other one "If you shock her one more time, you may kill her." Um, guys? If you are shocking someone, they already have a heart rhythm incompatable with life. (Pacing is not considered shocking, and you don't use the paddles to do it, but pads that adhere to the chest.) This is a reverse from what you got with E.R., which tried to be factually accurate about medical details, and thus had credibility, making a reasonable suspension of disbelief not necessary.
How does this apply to games as well as books and movies? Well, once you go past that point, the viewer/reader starts to mentally question everything else the author/producer is telling us. It becomes a distraction from the entertainment factor. The more distractions, the less you are entertained, until you are staying "enough is enough" and stop participating.
I've played a few games where they try to mix up the laws of physics, or have magic and technology both flourish. It depends on the setting and how it is used. City of Heroes/Villians had both magic, genetic mutations, science, and natural abilities all working easily together, because it was about comic book heroes/villians. We've been given forever to accept that this is a fantasy world, so we can fit in things that don't make a great deal of practical sense and enjoy the game.
As for games that didn't work for me, they have been so immemorable that I don't recall their names. I think the rule of thumb applies more to books and video, since they have a more controlled storyline. For games, it is more often a case of stupid mechanics or dumb ideas.
While pulling the plug may help save your electical equipment, if you have a direct strike, you are probably hosed, even if they are unplugged.
I mean, think about it. A bolt of basically pure energy just reached a few miles from the sky to the ground to hit your house. Do you really think not having the plug in the wall is going to save your equipment? Just like those UPS's of yours that died, those unplugged devices are going to be toast, too.
I've seen it happen even in near strikes. Went to one house that was brand new, and the appliances and electronics had been put in, but not plugged in yet. 2 big sceen TVs, one PC, and a bunch of smaller electronics all bought the farm when lightning struck a tree 25' from the house. None of them were plugged in.
It's happened to me in an apartment, even. Lost one DVD player that was plugged in. The older one that was in the closet and not plugged in had it's circuit board singed to the point it didn't work, either. First time I've seen a fuse shatter in a device not plugged in.
Unplugging helps for some near misses. UPS's help for minor surges coming down the line. But if your house is going to be struck, your electronics are mostly toast, and you will get lucky to not have some smouldering in the walls where the electrical wires can fry, and the crappy wood they use to build houses nowadays seems to ignite easily.
Maybe next time, Atari and the game creators will listen to the beta testers, who blasted DDO for lack of content and the dreaded "lack of solo content". (Though you don't play Dungeons & Dragons solo, so why should the MMO have it in it????)
I was in the beta for a long time, and I knew every dungeon by heart. So did everyone else that played it for a while. It's hard to find a game riveting when you know where all the traps are, what all the encounters look like, and which ones were more worth repeating.
And repeating you did. Ugh!
Maybe a really good first (free) expansion will help the game out. It sounds like they are looking to give players the stuff the beta testers told them they really needed. And the DDO beta community was a really polite one, for the most part. Not like the Vangaard one we are hearing such bad things about. I know my DDO guild was active in the Vangaard beta for a while, and they universally hated the direction the game is moving into.
Bingo!
I hate cell phones, too. But, I work from home, so I made a cell phone be my work phone, so I could run little errands during the day without interrupting my work, since I do technical support for an application. So, it is a necessary evil, and a godsend to a new parent when they want to make those quick shopping runs without the spouse and baby.
However, if you look at these phones, I can't help but see a nice parallel relationship to PDAs.
How many people do you know that bought a PDA, and walked around like they were important simply because they had it? PDAs became a status symbol to the tech crowd and the tech geek wannabes. From what I saw, over 75% of those that had a PDA didn't come close to needing one, but they pulled one out during meetings to make themselves look important.
The cell phone has become the same thing, especially to today's young crowd. They simply HAVE to have one, and the more features it has, the cooler they are. Remember (if you are old enough) when the pager stopped being a drug dealer's friend, and became a status symbol? Remember how girls started coming up with stupid page numbers to indicate things, like 143 being "I love you"? Well, today's young people can't live without text messaging and a camera, plus internet access and 50 different downloaded ringtones.
Lets look at some of the features on today's phones.
Text messaging: I've only met one person over the age of 35 who used this. It seems to have the sole purpose of sending messages silently without tipping off teachers/administrators in a school setting. Apparently, passing a piece of paper with a hand-written note is too lame. Really, why pay extra to spend all that time "typing" that message in when you could say it in a few seconds? Oh, yeah... These kids burn too many minutes, and can't get to the point and end the conversation.
Camera phone: If this is the best you can do for taking pictures, dear god are you hopeless. While the newer camera phones do produce better images than a webcam from a few years ago, those pictures are mostly stuck on your phone, unless you want to pay to transfer the file. Me, I'll stick with my real camera.
Email/Internet: Ok, just another fancy way to hit kids up for silent messaging and stuff they really don't need. This isn't Blackberry, it's cheesy AOL/Yahoo! or whatever. And the amount of spam that tends to get through those accounts makes it worthless.
So, to sum it all up, today's cell phone makers have targetted one audience, teenage girls. The problem is, they don't really make nice cell phones for the rest of us that just want a cell phone that can store numbers and speed dial them.
Man, do I miss my last cell phone, that did just that! But, it started to lose reception because they were cutting back the signals for older digital models, so I had to upgrade. My new cell has a camera in it, and it is too easy to activate, impairing with my scrolling through numbers backwards. The only reason I got it was because all the simple "I'm a phone with only phone and phone # memory" phones were pieces of crap, or cost 3x more than the Nokia I got.
So, let some phone maker come up with a nicely made phone that is just a phone for the non teenage girl crowd, PLEASE?!?!
The article sums itself up by saying that they don't understand why people would cheat and artificially inflate their rating.
Duh! To be at the top!
How many times do you see on gaming forums some clown posting "FIRST!" or "First Page!", like it matters. Just about every Blizzard post on their forums has that stupidity going on, and you even see it happening on non-competition sites like the forums for Order of the Stick webcomic.
It's all about having bragging rights, or as I like to call it, "showing off the size of your e-penis".
It's almost homo-erotic at this point. (Not that there is anything wrong with being gay, btw.) Before the computer game evolution, guys usually tried to have bragging rights in some sport, and a lot of the hot "cheerleader" type chicks dug the guy with the letterman jacket. The guys tended to get buff, be athletic, and do something worthy of praise. (They also tended to be morons, but that's besides the point.) They competed with each other to gain the attention of women, mostly.
Now, we have the same behavior going on, but with computer gamers. They have to be the best, be the coolest, etc. Except, there aren't a lot of chicks out there that will drool all over them. What they get is other guys wishing to be like them, instead of chicks wanting to be with them. There isn't a big call from girls to date the guy with a high Halo2 ranking, but the H.S. quarterback still gets a hot chick more often than not.
I don't know about you, but when I was in H.S. or college, I didn't want the adulation of other guys. I wanted to be noticed by chicks. But hey, that was just me.
Yep, hitting 60 rang the bell for the wife and I, and within 2 weeks we were struggling to find a reason to keep playing. Alts were ok, but since our 60's where Alliance, it was a sense of "been there, done that" to it all. We tried Horde, but after a while, the quests again started to repeat themselves, and the new classes we tried just weren't as fun.
The real problem Vangaard is going to run into is it is aiming for that really small niche market that is the hardcore gamer. Those folks that don't like to sleep, date, have sex, get married, have a family, or even go out to dinner or see a movie. They want to exist at their PC, and nowhere else.
I've known an UO widow (divorced her husband after he wouldn't spend time with her, but played UO from the time he got home til the time he fell asleep at the PC) and an EQ widow (same thing) that were both incredible women. Major hotties that married some geek, only to see them prefer a computer game to sex with their spouse. (And that UO widow was a dynamo in the bedroom... Ah, the memories!) And when both games came to a realistic close, they found out they were without the company of said hottie, and felt like idiots.
I was seriously interested in Vangaard, but the whole corpse run thing seriously bothered me. I enjoyed CoH/V and WoW because they were time friendly. You could play for an hour and accomplish something most of the time, even solo. EQ wasn't that solo friendly, and EQ2 was awful to solo in. I don't like soloing, but I want it to be an option, especially at lower levels.
Timesinks as a base game design are destined to fail. Vangaard is basing their design on timesinks. I think that says it all.
The fact that several game companies, including a major studio like UbiSoft, has dropped StarForce due to CD drive problems, is a major sign that the company is in trouble.
At this point, even if they could prove beyond a shadow of doubt that their protection methods don't cause any harm, their reputation is effectively ruined. Enough game players are savvy enough to find out if the StarForce protection is on a desired game, and avoid that title if it is present. And game publishers are figuring this out.
The industry may be a multi-billion dollar one, but these guys aren't about to kiss off customers over a single protection scheme, when there are so many others out there. They will lose more revenue from potential paying customers than they will lose to customers that are soley interested in a pirated copy.
Besides, just about all games are released with enough bugs that a patch is pretty much a necessity. Look at how Stardock handled Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. No copy protection, but if you want to update that game, you better enter a serial #. Any pirated CD is basically a demo, and once you patch it, it is the full version.
At this point, I'm just happy with any game that doesn't want the CD/DVD in the drive. I switch games too often.
What is this law firm going to do next? Sue the poor guy for using his own name for things, since the law firm will want to trademark his name?
Since the only real winners of a class action lawsuit are the lawyers, you have to wonder why anyone tries to be a part of one.
Yeah, I have had the same problem with Dell desktops and their Windows XP install CD. They are idiots and don't give you network adapter drivers, then tell you to download them from their website. Good thing I have 2 PCs up and running in the house!
The bottom line is, they call it BETA for a reason. It's not done yet. They want people to play with it and find problems.
Nobody ships anything out of the box that works 100%, even for a gold release. Why should a BETA release surprise us in that it has bugs?
I think the author of TFA got it just right.
I'm almost 40 years old, now. My wife and I just had our first child last week. I barely have time to log into here to catch the news, much less any inclination for paying that much money for a console to play inferior games to what you get on the PC.
The console market is in trouble, but they don't really want us to know it. They want to hope for a perfect storm of entertainment, and unfortunately for the, the holy grail is realistic and affordable VR gaming. As the author said, we thought we'd have that by now, and we are still a decade or more away.
Life catches up to you, and while game makers talk about the target demographic being 18-35 male, most of them are H.S. and college kids. Those kids don't have a ton of disposable income. Once they hit the real world, they don't have the time to devote. The more involved in the real world they get (you know, girls, work, girls, hobbies, girls, sex, girls) the less they devote to games.
When H.S. and college guys can afford the game systems and the games, then you might have something. With the PS3, that isn't going to be the case for a majority. That's a problem.
"Blizzard's content team is also designing out-of-the-way pockets of content and monster camps to be discovered by adventurous players who don't mind exploring the new areas"
I don't know about you guys, but Blizzard has a policy of banning people from going to places they aren't supposed to go. So, now they are adding content that you have to work hard to get to via exploring. And while Blizzard has said that they mark spots you aren't supposed to get to clearly, I know they would get mad at people going to the gnome airport, until they finally fixed it so you couldn't.
Who wants to bet that some Blizzard GMs whip out their ban sticks when people end up in spots they aren't supposed to get to? And that they used their new fancy mounts to get there, too?
You aren't sure why the Horde generally beats the Alliance no matter what server? Damn, that's a simple one.
Prior to the (dis)Honor system and Battlegrounds, on most (especially PvP) servers, the Alliance used a lot of zerging to beat the Horde, and keep them from rising up in levels. The Horde would fight back, and once the numbers came close to a balance, the Alliance would run away because they had too much chance of dying.
Then came the (dis)Honor system. And the Alliance started to camp several key locations in places the Horde needed to go to level. How many level 50-60 Alliance toons does it take to crush the Crossroads? Seems the average # is about 30. Gotta gank those lvl 10-15 Hordelings! After that, they would move on to Tarren Mill, and do the same. I still remember Alliance folks complaining that the guards respawned too fast early on, and it made their ganking harder. So, zerging had now become the primary tactic for many Alliance players. Horde players had to think strategy, and learn to coordinate both offensive and defensive tactics.
Then came the Battlefields, and suddenly the Alliance people found they had to play with equal numbers. Add to that, and they couldn't play as often in a battlefield instance, because they had huge queues, while many/most horde players could get into a new instance within 15 minutes, if not immediately. All that practice surviving overwhelming odds, as well as a lot more familiarity with which tactics worked best in each battlefield, and the Horde players stomped the crap out of the Alliance.
People will generally take the path of least resistance. Playing Alliance made a lot of things easier, especially for PvP. When things became challenging, many Alliance players failed to raise their game. The Horde players, meanwhile, had been forced to bring their A game for months, and because of the population inbalances, they can play in a battlefield more frequently to work on tactics and become a better player.
This isn't to paint all Alliance players as idiots, and all Horde players as tactical genuises. It simply is a cause-effect relationship.
I quit playing a while ago. Does the Alliance still gank folks at both Tarren Mill and Crossroads on the non-PvP servers? It was an all day event on Uther for months. Hard as hell to complete quests when your quest givers were dead.
The link for "not working" that goes to the DancingRobots site came up with the Exploit-WMF trojan according to McAfee.
Great, slashdot sending us to trojan infested sites!?!?
Someone was kind enough to make up a website that has this sort of information available...
Age of Consent
Hey, don't look at me like that! I needed the info for a report in psych class! I may be a pervert, but not THAT kind of pervert!
Yeah, but this is old news. Just try to reach the forums when it is server maintenance day, and you will see that they cannot handle the number of people that are bored and want to check the forums.
So, it is no surprise that their forums are slashdot'ed.
I have to agree with you.
Most of the time, what I want to do is find out where some obscure mob is to be found, or find out what their idiotic spawn rate is.
Forgive me for having a family, but I don't find the idea to sit in a zone/area for hours/days on end waiting for a freakin' mob to spawn so I can kill him to advance some quest. And since the damn thing spawns so infrequently, I want to know WHERE he spawns, so I have a chance to find it.
In WoW, at worst, most of the quest mobs spawned right away, or in some cases you had to wait an hour. (That stupid tiger in SV that spawns only once an hour comes to mind, and fighting through Hunters that wanted it as a pet before they nerfed its speed some, was a chore.) In EQ, though, it really helped to know where that mob spawned, and WHEN it spawned. Nothing like trying to time Phinny just right while working on one of 4 different epics. Dummest idea ever, 1 mob that was a required kill with poor loot chances, but 4 different clases needed him.
This is the part of the grind I don't like. I don't want to wait hours/days/weeks and even months to get some quest completed, even if it is an uber quest. It's not fun. And this is why people sell items and currency.
It took a few months for me to kill Phinny for my wizard epic in EQ, and he was a 12hr spawn! I think I downed that fish more than 15 times! Grrr. Nobody liked going into KK to kill Phinny. It was a PITA to make sure everyone could breath underwater, and to navigate it. I didn't mind killing Phinny 3-4 times. After more than 10 (including a few solo kills), I was more than fed up, and when a friend got the staff off of him while helping a bard on his attempt, I decided that I wasn't too proud to MQ that damn quest.
There's grind, and then there's GRIND. I can deal with a little grind, but that major GRIND just wears me out. I don't have the time or the willingness to try to be at my PC every 12hrs to kill one freaking mob. And with the wife about to pop out a baby, I'll have even less. I love the interaction with others and the fun of working together to complete a task, but for now, MMOs have come off my current game playing list.
Incredible article, and thank you very much for sharing.
Um...wow. Well, there goes any future Allakhazam subscriptions. IGE is the devil!
Bingo! Thank you for pointing this out.
The same ratings re-do could be done for a whole lot of games. I haven't seen "The Sims" or "The Sims2" being re-rated. Those were all rated T for Teen, and it won't take anyone more than a few minutes to Google for mods to have nude characters. This includes males skins with jutting erections.
The ESRB would have to re-rate literally dozens of games for this. This is a really bad precedent.
Now, where did I put my copy of NWN with the modded Aribeth model???? Put that new skin with that voice... Hubba Hubba!
All very valid comments. However...
For pure griefing fun, if you can't steal the car, you make it so the owner can't drive it, either. You are doing the same microwaving that ECU.
I had a car that folks tried to steal at least 3 times. The first two failed, and broke something off in the ignition, forcing me to pay for a window and the ignition repair. The third failed, and may have gone and done a little joyriding, but by that time the turbocharger was going on the engine, so the police believe they actually brought it back.
Let's not give some enterprising folks the idea of running around and shorting out the ECUs of cars everywhere.
Besides, I wonder if something like this foils Lo-Jack. If not, no biggie. I mean, if you spend more than $25K on a car/truck, or have a vehicle that is high on the stolen list, and don't have Lo-Jack (at least if it is available) you are asking for it.
It works so well, most car theives steal a car and simply move it a few blocks, park it, and leave it for 24hrs. If nobody picks it up, then they take it to the chop-shop. That 24hrs is to keep from having the chop-shop raided. That's their method of stoping Lo-Jack. Which is why they usually recover the car in decent condition within 15 minutes most of the time.
I was in the closed beta, and there was no appreciable loot lag. The open beta, there was, but then they didn't really add much in the way of servers at that point, so we all kind of expected it.
They did some tweaks, and at initial launch, there was no appreciable loot lag. It wasn't until a few weeks in that things started to fall apart. And when it fell, it fell hard.
You are quite correct, just about every game has had these kind of problems, especially if they break new ground in subscription numbers. EQ had a lot of problems at launch, and for the first year or so. UO did have problems, as well. Blizzard certainly blew away everyone with it's subscription numbers with WoW.
However, Blizzard has really dragged their feet when it comes to fixing things. The article makes it sound like this is a recent phenomenom for WoW, but it has been around since the game was first released.
Granted, they didn't anticipate quite the initial subscription numbers they got, but within weeks we saw login queues show up, and Blizzard hastily added more servers. In fact, I do believe the more servers they added happened to be all that they had originally contracted for, and they used up that "growth servers" room right away. Now they have maxed their server capacity with their ISP, and they were sorta screwed at that point. Not that they couldn't have thrown money at the issue, but this is a game company owned by a media company. Throw money at the problem? Bwahahahaha
Heck, I was on one of the original "terrible 20" servers; Uther. It was down so much it was scary. I think I ended up with more than 2 weeks of free play time for service outtages, and probably closer to a full month.
Also, this whole thing about "a patch caused a new set of problems" is also not new for Blizzard and WoW. Every patch they did for the first several months would break half the server lag fixes they put in. Loot lag was so bad you could be stuck for more than a minute looting a corpse. From launch to when I quit playing 9 months later, they still had the problem of ore nodes and/or harvest nodes that would lock your toon up because it had nothing on it but failed to clear. I suspect that bug is still in place, but I don't care anymore. After a while, things got better, but as the queues came back, so did the content breaking patches, and the wife and I got out. Heck, we were 60, and bored.
What is different is that most of these game companies have had their act together after 1 year, give or take a few months. It's been what, about 16 months since WoW was first released? They should really have their act together about now, or damn close to it. But they don't.
Forget StarForce, or any other copy protection. What works is releasing a game that you know has serious bugs in it, and then applying a patch or two that will fix them. Viola, the CD/DVD rippers that love to get original CD images are now hosed up a bit, due to the fact that those bugs have to be patched. Apply patch, fix copy protection that requires the CD to be in the drive. Each patch restores it, and may even check a different spot on the CD surface. Busts up those NoCD cracks pretty quick.
That means that people that are ripping the game have to look for new cracks, which is a journey fraught with viruses and the like.
Sure, game companies are inherently lazy and rush product to the shelves. But, now they have added incentive to make us buy unfinished games. And they know that most game players want to have it NOW, so they will live with it. What's to stop them?
And I can't say I'm different. I can certainly see myself buying NWN2 when it comes out this summer.
Considering the fact that a large portion of underage nude modeling comes from former Soviet countries, how exactly is the U.S. government going to shut them down? We can't control drugs in our own country, but we are going to knock out kiddie porn?
Also, what are they defining as child porn? I still remember the one woman here in Texas that was arrested, along with her husband, for taking a picture of her play-nursing her 1yr old and 16yrs old are probably crossing a line that shouldn't be crossed. But, there is no international law that we can all fix our hat onto, and until there is, I say that nothing will happen that is effective.
Besides, go into Usenet in almost any binary group, and someone will eventually spam some underage pictures to it advertising some website that we still haven't taken off the net. It's hard to take down a server in Russia or whatever that the country's mafia is running, when you don't have jurisdiction, and that country's government is afraid of them.
George "Orwell" Bush is with us. Be very afraid!