It should be noted that even with perfectly healthy parents that are actually attempting to get pregnant, and having sex at least once a day during the fertile period of a woman's menstral cycle, there is only a 20% chance per month of actual conception taking hold in the uterus. i.e. An actual fertilized egg attaching to the uterine wall (or even to the fallopian tubes.)
20%. That's it.
I got that figure from the fertility doctor the wife and I saw last year. Hard to believe the number is that small. You'd think it would be so much higher, but nope.
Actually, the number of elective abortions went through the roof during the months after Chernobyl, all across Eurpope. Even countries that weren't expected to have much fallout due to weather patterns had a dramatic increase in elective abortions.
I'd like to see that study you speak of. I never heard it before, and the percentage you gave is through the roof. Could this have been it? Effects in Finland ??? That isn't giving any numbers like you did. Interestingly enough, Finland didn't see a notable increase in induced abortions after Chernobyl, as some countries did.
I've seen estimates (with no concrete numbers to back it up) that about 100,000 elective abortions were peformed shortly after Chernobyl throughout Europe and the former Soviet Union. Wikipedia didn't have any numbers at all.
As for my numbers, here are some examples:
Numbers for Greece, a country not considered at even moderate risk: Greece figures
Rolemaster was at times brilliant and a headache. Making a character the first time as you went through the rules could take hours. But, they had a rule for just about every situation you could think of, so both players and GMs know what to expect.
It was similiar with Space Opera, one of the less known games out there. You could spend a lot of time designing a character and a ship. Combat was slow at times, because you had to have everyone understanding the rules.
I think one of the reasons that DnD, AD&D, and the 2.0 rules did so well was that the system was pretty easy to figure out for most intelligent people. Once you understood the basic concepts, it seemed to flow fairly well.
Now, if they had just taught most players about the invention of soap, shampoo, and deoderant, things would have been great!
One of my happier game moments recently was reloading NWN on my PC after a HD crash, and finding out it didn't need a CD in the HD to play... EVER!
*does a little happy dance*
Now if the fine folks at Funcom would realize that their copy protection on Sacred is just silly (only requires the CD at startup) is effectively worthless in a 2 PC house when you want to play a game with the wife, I'd be set!
No matter what the game companies do, people that desire to cheat are going to break through, sooner or later. And usually sooner.
I remember when SOE decided to update their encryption on the server-client transactions to defeat ShowEQ. ShowEQ was a packet sniffing application that people would run on a Linux box, and it would supply area maps, mob info, etc. (The plane of Hate had a few invisible, untargetable mobs that were named "ShowEQ Users Suck". Only people who used it or knew about the program knew about those mobs.)
SOE went to either a 64-bit or 128-bit encryption with this new version, and were changing it with every client patch. They figured they had quite a bit of time on their hands, and ShowEQ would be disabled for quite some time.
I do believe they hacked the encryption in 2 days, and really less than 24hrs. And the coders for ShowEQ made it so you could put a.dll on your machine (and everyone named it differently so SOE couldn't detect a common name) that would pass the encryption code to the Linux machine.
All they did was increase the entrance requirements, which had become a joke. At one point, to use ShowEQ, you had to know enough to set up a Linux box, compile the ShowEQ programs from source, and keep it updated with each patch. Then folks started to sell pre-installed Linux boxes that auto-updated themselves, auto-compiled the program, and there was only a dollar amount entry fee. SOE took that back, but the smart people kept on going.
Mind you, ShowEQ really wasn't THAT great. The biggest thing was having maps for zones that you couldn't have in-game maps for. Once SOE gave us a mapping function for all but a few zones, it wasn't worth keeping updated. But people still did it, and other folks complained about the competitive disadvantage of maps.
So, people will find a way, and use it. Heck, there were people out there wanting to use Sony's flawed DRM stuff to hide hacks from Blizzard. 'Nuff said.
Actually, speaking as a former firefighter, it isn't common for folks to misunderstand how dangerous a fire can be. Most folks freak completely out. They panic, and make mistakes they should know better than to do.
Small grease fires take out a whole kitched because the panicked homeowner throws water on it, instead of something like flour.
It's simple Fight or Flight syndrome. Most folks run for it (flight), but without applying a thought process to what they are doing. Those that try to deal (fight) with it aren't usually trained to deal with it properly. Sometimes even those that ARE trained get caught by something they didn't expect.
Fires are nothing to mess around with. Those that have a healthy respect for them can deal with it once they are properly trained. Those that don't, tend to die, even with training. Just check out the number of firefighters that die each year due to really dumb things like buildings falling on them.
Most firefighter deaths (that aren't due to traffic accidents or heart attacks) were completely preventable. There's usually a cover-up, for the officers in charge, all the way down to even the victim's themselves. Nobody wants to tarnish a hero's legacy, even if said "hero" had their head up their ass and was in a place they should have known better than to be, or was doing something they shouldn't have done. The public doesn't end up knowing, but most of it ends up getting caught on tape by some bystander, and then the government ends up buying the tape rights so that it doesn't get on the 11 o'clock news. Then, they show it as training video, and tell us "See, these guys are dumbfucks, and so is their commanding officer". And yet, more than half the class would still make the same mistake.
All email servers do this, unless it is your privately owned server. Backups are routinely made, and even if you hadn't pulled it from the server yet and viewed it, it could have been backed up.
Considering all the unsolicted email we all get, they could make a case that all of us are probably penis enlarging, low-cost XP buying, Nigerian investing, sexual deviants.
Better fix your tinfoil hat. The space rays are getting through!
Not only that, but the guy even had the audacity to put in a message indicating that he really wasn't paying attention to the game, because he was watching a movie. I mean, why not just write "I'm botting, and I'm not a Chinese farmer!"
Let's face it, the guy did a dumb thing, and got busted for it. The in-game macro functions do not allow you to program the level of complexity that he utilized to do what he was doing. There's a reason for that. All games that have allowed bots have become crap in no time. UO allowed botting for the longest time, and people could make a 6 score 100 toon in less than 4 days. Ohhh, the joy!
As someone else posted, if he's a 24yr old network engineer, he should have enough brain power to understand that he was effectively botting the game. He didn't want to spend the time to raise weapon skills to 300 from 250-275 level, so he made it so his toon could do it. And it's so easy for even a priest to raise weapon skills, that one or two sessions of a couple of hours would have probably accomplished it for him, if he grouped. Instead, he botted.
Yes, the game has only been live for a short period of time, but the article is pretty accurate.
I actually enjoyed the combat that came along with DDO as opposed to EQ or WoW. And the mob AI is probably the best I have seen in any of the MMOs I have played in. Those kobolds jumping around mean that you have to chase them, and that's a -4 to hit unless you used a Feat to offset it. They don't make themselves easy to kill. That's refreshing.
While some of the powergamers will hit lvl 10 fairly quick, this game isn't designed around the power gamer, imo. And there is nothing wrong with that. Power gamers will enjoy V:SoH in all likelyhood. If the author only played for a month, I am not sure how many levels they got with a single character. My highest in beta with over a month of time put in on that toon, playing most nights for 4 or more hours, was lvl 6.4, a cleric. Lack of content and the moving of game worlds for the last few weeks hurt grouping, but lvl 7.x would have been my best attempt.
The real problem is the lack of other quests to do, and the diminishing returns you get on repeating quests. There is no way to get to level 10 without repeating many quests. That is just poor planning. I am sure most players that had extended beta time like I did, knew every nook and cranny of the WaterWorks dungeons. We knew all the trap locations. We knew all the secret doors. We knew if we needed a certain stat at a certain score to open a certain door. That's a problem. Just having random traps would have made a world of difference for some of it. The game is too static for its quests and layouts.
I don't mind the lack of solo content. Really, you are playing a MMO game. Why do people have this overwhelming need to go online and play a game where thousands of other people are playing, and not work with any of them? What's the point of it? And who played D&D in whatever form (D&D, AD&D, 2e, 3, 3.5, whatever) with just one DM and one person playing one toon? I wouldn't have wasted my time as a DM creating content for a single person and a single toon. And I hate to see MMO developers waste time creating solo content for a game designed to have thousands of toons online simultaneously. Also, solo content tends to get abused by multiple player groups doing the content because it's easy. I say, no thanks.
Having said that, being with a regular group of people to group with will make the gameplay outstanding. The game is designed with a 4 person group as the standard, but takes up to 6. Get yourself a cleric, rogue, front line fighter, and a caster, throw in 2 of any class as a regular group, and you will quickly become a cohesive fighting group. I found having a 2nd cleric made the game go really fast, especially when you started hitting a lot of undead.
This is no different from WoW or EQ, as well as most other games. Those people that form regular groups with people they know and have learned to trust, get a better gameplay experience. It's the same reason military units train in squads with the same people. In order to be a team, you have to work as one. So, criticizing DDO for not having solo content seems a little odd, when it's the way it *should* be.
One thing the article didn't mention was the different way that loot is handled in DDO. Semi-similar to the COH/V model, you don't get a choice of what loot you get, and you don't roll on it. Unlike COH/V, you can see what others got in a chest if you look fast enough, but you can't say "I want that, I'm gonna roll on it" and have a chance to win it. You have to ask for something, the other person has to loot it, and then you have to trade. Lack of loot hassles made the game a lot more enjoyable. Add in no "bind on pickup/bind on equip" for items (that I ever saw) and you have a lot less arguing. Pickup groups were less hostile due to this feature alone.
It shall be interesting to see how the time goes. I was in the beta for more than 2 months, and purchased the game. I haven't played much due to the stork being close to showing up, but I have enjoyed my time in it. No game is perfect, but DDO got a lot more right than it got wrong, imo.
To me, this game seems a bit like Sim Earth, a 1990 release by Maxis. In Sim Earth, you controlled a planet to develop various microbes into life forms, and see what life form became the dominant one.
Sure, this game is going to focus more on the life form than the planet, but it has a certain ring to it.
Sim Earth was fun, if tedious. The Maxis website has a tiny mention of it being released in 1990, but they don't list the game for sale today, even though it goes to the EAstore.com website.
They work, and you won't get the drowzy effect that many over-the-counter medications will give you, such as Dramamine (meclizine hcl). They also aren't very expensive, and there are a few knock-off brands around. If your local pharmacy doesn't sell them, ask them to order you a pair.
It's a simple accupressure band that has a small knot-like area that fits over the inside of your wrist, about 1" up from your hand.
An easy way to see if it will work for you is to have someone else play the game while you sit as you normally would while you were playing it. Twist your wrists like you are prentending you are a monk with his arms inside his wrist sleeves. Use your middle finger to press down on the opposite wrist, about 1" away from that crease where your wrist meets your hand, over those tendons. You don't have to press really hard; light pressure will do. Move your fingers around a little if it doesn't work right away, but it is pretty obvious and has a dramatic effect when you find it.
If it helps while a friend is playing the game for you, great. If not, don't think it still may not work, as the motion sickness may be due to your controlling the game, and your body expecting the motions to happen in a certain way, and they don't.
You can also make the same bands with sweatbands and a pencil eraser, if you really want to.
Lastly, if games make you sick to play them, you probably shouldn't. You may want to play it badly, but it's not worth it.
I think the big reason so many people want to play a cracked version is that way too many games SUCK!
I've spent good money on more crap games than I care to admit. Games that didn't have a demo, or had demos that weren't actually reflective of actual game play. Ever played a flawless demo that was pretty decent, and then bought the game and found it to be bug laden crap? Yeah, me too.
That, and some of the games use TOO much protection. I remember playing Morrowind the first time. The game would lurch around as the damn thing spun the CD again and again. It was pointless to play without a NOCD crack, as it made the game suck. Once that was in place, the game was awesome.
With online modes becoming more of the "in thing", a lot of copy protection just isn't needed. Those online serial #'s attached to your name means that you can't use a cracked copy, unless it is a LAN type session.
Take Sacred (or in my case, the Sacred Gold edition) as a copy protected game. You have to have the original game CD in your HD when you start the game. It checks for daemon tools, something I use so when I play an older game, I don't have to go to my bookshelf looking for the game CD.
Well, once Sacred starts, you don't need the CD anymore. And if you don't go online to play, but stick to a LAN game, you can start as many copies as you want, as long as the CD is there to start.
Copy protection cracking is a game itself to several groups. They get a certain joy in cracking them, and beating other groups to the "release" of the crack. No matter what the protection is, someone will eventually decide it would be fun to beat it, and they will.
I tried a cracked version of Sacred, and liked it so much, I bought it, due to the many bugs in the original game CD. Imagine my surprise when the Gold version of the game, which contains the last patch that Encore appears willing to publish, is still bug laden. Those bugs are the reason I won't buy my wife a copy of the game to play, but will use the one CD to launch both our game sessions.
I recall that Blizzard often had its servers listed as UP when they were DOWN, too.
I'm no SOE fanboi, nor am I a Blizzard fanboi. I played WoW for nearly a year before I gave up on it. I played EQ2 for about 2 months before I was sure how bad it was.
I will say this, though, from my experience. SOE patched EQ2 nearly daily. SOE has nearly doubled the size of the "world" in EQ2. Blizzard patches monthly, and only hotfixes bugs that benefit the player. Blizzard hasn't added much of anything to its game, except battlefields and a poorly implemented "honor" system that has no honor to it.
Blizzard's patching of WoW is some of the worst I have seen for MMOs. CoH/V patches more frequently, as well. Minor bugs are fixed as often as major bugs are.
Blizzard still thinks it is patching Diablo II, I think. Every few months is ok, just to keep the copy protection valid.
I live in the North Texas area. Charter communications has been the big cable internet provider in this area for seemingly forever. And, in the last few months, they have had their service for cable internet degrade horribly.
Many of my neighbors used VoIP, and were unable for hours at a time to use their phones. It's the major reason I never went to VoIP.
Just about a month ago, Verizon threw down fiber optics, and within a few weeks, offered their FiOS service. For basically the same price as Charter's fastest service of 3Mb down / 384KB up, I got 15Mb down / 5Mb up. The best part is I have better stability of my internet service. In less than 2 weeks, 25% of all of Charter's customers in one neighborhood switched, and another 25% will go in the next month.
I am still seeing interruptions at times, making me wonder if something is going on with the backbone somewhere in this area. But everything is sure flying, now. And all my immediate neighbors say their VoIP is much better with the switch.
It took you this long to get tired of it?
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World of Queuecraft
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· Score: 1
If it took you this long to get tired of WoW's queues, consider yourself getting off easy.
How many folks were stuck on the original "Terrible 20" servers? Those servers that were constantly crashing, constantly lagging, and constantly down. I played almost exclusively on Uther. There were days that our server was down for more than 12hrs, if I remember correctly. Remember then refusing to offer us the ability to transfer servers to a new one being brought online, saying we would unbalance it? I don't think they allowed a server transfer from the "Terrible 20" until about 3-4 months after lanuch. By that time, things were semi-stable.
I swear that I got so much free blue XP from all their server downtime that I was in the blue from lvl 20 through lvl 40. I ended up with more than 2 free weeks of playtime due to all their server outtages.
Remember "loot lag"??? When you would go to loot a corpse, and have your toon effectively locked up? Remember how they would finally fix it on their end, and the next patch would bring it back even worse than before?
Remember the boats being bugged, and people either having their toons locked up, or getting dumped into the water so far away from land that you died? And the GMs wouldn't compensate you for lost gold for repairs and the like?
Remember one whole continent being down, while the other was up? Trying to use your Hearthstone or a boat and crashing the client because the other continent wasn't available? Unable to log into the game because one half of the game world was down? Remember it taking a half hour or longer for them to figure out that one whole continent (approximately 50% of all non-instanced game zones) was offline, with both the General and Realm specific forum flooded with messages? Remember them fixing it, and having it go down again in less than 24hrs?
I loved playing WoW, when I could. It really was a great game. My wife found it the MMO she has probably liked the most of all that we have played together. When my rogue and her druid hit 60, all the fun went out of the game. The queues were back, and we had both levelled our favorite class to 60. We tried playing alts for about 2 months before giving up. I couldn't see waiting anywhere from 15-45 minutes to play a toon that wasn't as fun as our originals. Needless to say, we stopped playing, and finally cancelled our account after almost 3 months of no activity. Yes, 3 months. That's how long we held out hope for it to improve. It got worse.
Blizzard knew it had problems prior to starting this latest "event". They went ahead, anyways, without preparing for what was going to happen. The writing was on the wall, but they didn't lock people out of creating toons on the server that was going to complete the "pre-war effort" first, and that server crashed repeatedly due to all the people logging in to create lvl 1 toons and try to run them over to where the event was going to happen.
I remember when Penny Arcade took back their "Game of the Year" award, due to the problems with the servers shortly after awarding it. Sure, Blizzard is facing nearly unprecedented success, but they have failed to meet the server uptime needs of their players consistently.
No, if it took you a year to realize this, consider yourself lucky. If you still haven't realized it, consider yourself blessed.
Great game, crappy server implementation. And as long as their subscription numbers keep going up, and people keep accepting mediocre server stability, why would Blizzard fix it?
My company has a 24hr support pager, and I am the poor slob that got it thrust on them. (Only U.S. employee left, and the pager # is reserved to the U.S., I guess.)
There is a Bed & Breakfast in the U.S. that has a horrible font used on it's phone #. The 3 in the # looks like an 8. Those 2 digits are the only ones that are different between my pager # and their phone #.
I receive about 10 pages a month from people looking to make registrations. I called both the B&B and the website designer, asking them to change the font. They refused.
I have been sorely tempted, as many friends have suggested, to simply start taking reservations, or call the people back and tell them the business is closed. I haven't, because the reservation part would require me to take their credit card #'s, and I'm not going there. (I can see the lawsuits from that stunt being brutal.) And the whole "We're closed of renovations" and the like just doesn't work for me.
Fortunately, none of my customers are currently in the surrounding area codes any longer, but for a while, I was making a lot of unnecessary LD calls because a webmaster chose an idiotic font.
Actually, the mob AI is really pretty damn good in DDO.
The mobs will attempt to evade your attacks. Mobs that cast will regularily hop backwards to create casting space. They select spells that are much to your detrement. The sometimes climb up on things to make reaching them harder, especially casters or archers.
This isn't EQ/EQII/WoW/CoH-V/DAoC (shall I go on???) or any of those other games where the mob stands in place and you beat on it. Their AI isn't limited to "kill the mob that is doing the most damage/healing aggro."
Sure, sometimes their AI pathing isn't the best, and they will make dumb decisions. Most notable is the penchant for throwing items at you where the natural arc required causes the projectile to hit the ceiling before it reaches you. Or the fact that they will walk into some traps. But that's really the only complaints I've had.
The low level caster mobs hitting people with Fear, rendering them unable to attack or heal. When you reach some of the tougher dungeons, and the Arcane Blackbone skeletons start throwing Cloudkill around, with it's LONG duration and penchant for instantly killing toons under lvl 6, it's impressive. When the group decides to take on a Hard level 2 quest and has half the party members end up Cursed (800gp for a potion, or a lvl 5 cleric to cast Remove Curse, or dying to remove) it is effective. The mobs that throw fireball at the bunched up party. The casters that hit you with Enfeeblement and render you nearly immobile. The Wight Clerics buffing itself as soon as it sees the party. Hold Person used liberally.
In a nutshell, most of the caster mobs have great AI. Better than I have ever seen in a MMO.
No, mob AI is a ton better than I have seen is most MMOs. There are other problems DDO will have, mostly related to lack of content. Mob AI won't be one of the problems, though.
We won't even begin to discuss how hard Beholders are to go after. Ugh!
Since SOE stopped posting numbers, and many game companies followed suit, numbers are ambigious at best. Besides, you get a Station pass, and you are now in all games. So, I bet their EQ, SW:G, EQII, and Planetside numbers are all the same.
But, Smedley's contention that SOE didn't release an "incomplete" product is based on your definition of incomplete. I am sure SOE thinks that if they finished the code and got it out the door, it's complete. We players like to see the code go through a beta process, or a test server.
The inherent problem is that many in the player base of any game think they know what would be better than the developers and designers. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes they are just plain insane. More than 90% of the ideas suggested in various forums to the WoW developers were just plain horrible. 9% had a little merit, but wouldn't work for various reasons. Maybe 1% of them made good sense. But of that 1%, 5% of that small number fit in with what the designers/developers had in mind for the class/quest/feature. The rest was discarded.
SOE made changes to try and attract more players, without getting real feedback from its existing player base. The burnt both ends of the bridge, and are now on an island by themselves, throwing ropes to the sides trying to pull players back. This has been a fine example of a game company not knowing its existing playerbase's desires for the future of the game.
SW:G probably won't be consider a MMO in a year's time. There won't be massive numbers of players online.
I mean, come on! Why play a MMO to solo all the time when the game is for groups? Why cry about lack of solo content, when solo content would be exploited by groups? You can't have it all ways with ease.
CoH/V was the closest to getting solo content viable, but it didn't work in non-instanced outdoor zones. You simply had to wait until you were higher level to take on groups of 10 or more mobs. So be it. And even their model was abused all the time. Have a single player go into an instance, and then invite a friend after it started. Same # of mobs, less difficulty, easy xp.
Many people DO like to play a game where they can group up with a few friends. Or a lot of friends. And for them, WoW hits the spot. And while most classes in WoW can solo up to 60, you miss out on some important events/dungeons.
Me, when I want solo play, or to duo with the wife, I play stuff like Diablo II, or Sacred. We don't have to worry about anyone else's schedule, ideas on gameplay, or whatever. We start when we want, we take a break when we want, and we divvy loot how we want. Zero hassles.
Frankly, TFA was a joke. You could take almost any aspect of life and prove that it teaches people poor behavior, based on some viewpoint.
I can still vividly remember my little brother, at the tender age of 3, playing on the swings while we were out in California for a year. This was back in 1974. He was so little, he couldn't sit on the swing, so he laid his stomach across it, and would run forward until he left the ground, swung back, and repeated as needed.
Why do I remember it so vividly?
Because the whole time he was on that swing, he sang "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK" at full volume, non-stop. 3 years old, and singing for all he was worth, and effectively screaming one of the most hated words amongst language minders.
He's 34 right now, almost 35. He still considers it one of his shining moments.
Me, I learned how to use it when it was appropriate. Being in the fire service as a volunteer, there are tons of times when dropping a well thought out curse just fit. See a 4 story apartment building engulfed in flame? "Holy fucking shit!" made perfect sense. Of course, it was immediately followed by "Damn, this is almost as good as sex. Grab a hose! We're going in!"
But, you also learned to have an innate sense of who was around you. That same "Holy fucking shit!" wouldn't escape most mouths if there were civilians around.
The problem with these online games is that there is an inherent "cool" factor people seem to think surrounds the use of this language. And it isn't just kids.
Back when MSN chats were free to everyone, I used to chat in ChatDallas, one of their city chats. The use of profanity would get you kicked by a bot, or banned by a mod. One enterprising individual created a private room for adults to chat in. Wanna guess what happened?
Folks from ages 18-50 sat in this private room and just used one profanity after another in all imaginable combinations. Because they could, and they felt they were being cool. And after 5 minutes in there, I felt like I was back in H.S. listening to guys in the locker room. It was all pointless.
So, until folks figure out how really lame they sound, they will keep doing it. There's no art to it. It's one thing to say "fuck you, you fag". Anyone can do that. It takes a little more creativity to drop a "listen, you dried up husk of a cunt, shut your yap and go away".
While there are quite a few gamers out there that long for the sheer daunting task that the orignal EQ was, I am not going to be one of them. I won't be alone, either.
I really don't mind a challenging game. I enjoy playing games like Half-Life/HL2 without using god mode, for the sheer challenge of succeeding. But MMOs tend to take up a lot more time, and you are dependent on others for the most part. You can't just save and walk away because the kid is throwing up, or the cat is climbing the curtains. You are stuck there, or you have a bad reputation.
I burnt many an entire evening or weekend on EQ. Ignoring the wife to the point she was ready to bitchslap me. Eating in a frenzied rush so I didn't miss anything. In a nutshell, acting like a total goober/asshole. But, I always pulled my head out of my ass and made it up to the wife.
I know several guys that lost a good wife to MMOs. Some to EQ, one to UO, and another to AC. Their wives called themselves EQ-widows, and it was like living with an alcoholic. The guys would literally blow their top if they were interrupted, even when it was for something important for RL. Years later, when they decided to grow up, they were always ashamed of how they acted. It's hard enough to find a wife that will let you play MMOs fairly often. Throwing one away because you HAVE to spend so much time in the game is just assinine.
EQ2 has enough hardships built into it that it wasn't a very lucrative game for most folks. There's a reason its subscription numbers are a joke compared to WoW. After a little over 2 months in the game, I was asking myself "why am I playing this? This game makes things harder than it needs to be to do anything." So, I quit.
Scoff all you want at the casual gamer, but there are a ton of parents out there, kids that care about getting decent grades, and folks with other commitments that simply love being able to play for an hour or two here or there. They enjoy not having to spend another 2 hours in game because one person died deep in the dungeon, and now a rescue mission is needed. They have well rounded lives, with the MMO just being a fun part of it.
Heck, the only real mistake WoW made was having 40-man raids needed for some content. Put it back to 20, and it would have been really perfect. 40 was just too much for most guilds and/or groups of friends to handle.
I am certainly not going back to the dark ages of MMOs. Corpse runs are for masochists.
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Ok, I can see where you are coming from.
It should be noted that even with perfectly healthy parents that are actually attempting to get pregnant, and having sex at least once a day during the fertile period of a woman's menstral cycle, there is only a 20% chance per month of actual conception taking hold in the uterus. i.e. An actual fertilized egg attaching to the uterine wall (or even to the fallopian tubes.)
20%. That's it.
I got that figure from the fertility doctor the wife and I saw last year. Hard to believe the number is that small. You'd think it would be so much higher, but nope.
Actually, the number of elective abortions went through the roof during the months after Chernobyl, all across Eurpope. Even countries that weren't expected to have much fallout due to weather patterns had a dramatic increase in elective abortions.
I'd like to see that study you speak of. I never heard it before, and the percentage you gave is through the roof. Could this have been it? Effects in Finland ??? That isn't giving any numbers like you did. Interestingly enough, Finland didn't see a notable increase in induced abortions after Chernobyl, as some countries did.
I've seen estimates (with no concrete numbers to back it up) that about 100,000 elective abortions were peformed shortly after Chernobyl throughout Europe and the former Soviet Union. Wikipedia didn't have any numbers at all.
As for my numbers, here are some examples:
Numbers for Greece, a country not considered at even moderate risk: Greece figures
Rolemaster was at times brilliant and a headache. Making a character the first time as you went through the rules could take hours. But, they had a rule for just about every situation you could think of, so both players and GMs know what to expect.
It was similiar with Space Opera, one of the less known games out there. You could spend a lot of time designing a character and a ship. Combat was slow at times, because you had to have everyone understanding the rules.
I think one of the reasons that DnD, AD&D, and the 2.0 rules did so well was that the system was pretty easy to figure out for most intelligent people. Once you understood the basic concepts, it seemed to flow fairly well.
Now, if they had just taught most players about the invention of soap, shampoo, and deoderant, things would have been great!
Three words for you: Sony Station Pass.
All of their subscriptions seem to run together via that. And a lot of folks have signed up for that, just so they can play whatever game they want.
It would be nice if they did, that's for sure.
One of my happier game moments recently was reloading NWN on my PC after a HD crash, and finding out it didn't need a CD in the HD to play... EVER!
*does a little happy dance*
Now if the fine folks at Funcom would realize that their copy protection on Sacred is just silly (only requires the CD at startup) is effectively worthless in a 2 PC house when you want to play a game with the wife, I'd be set!
No matter what the game companies do, people that desire to cheat are going to break through, sooner or later. And usually sooner.
.dll on your machine (and everyone named it differently so SOE couldn't detect a common name) that would pass the encryption code to the Linux machine.
I remember when SOE decided to update their encryption on the server-client transactions to defeat ShowEQ. ShowEQ was a packet sniffing application that people would run on a Linux box, and it would supply area maps, mob info, etc. (The plane of Hate had a few invisible, untargetable mobs that were named "ShowEQ Users Suck". Only people who used it or knew about the program knew about those mobs.)
SOE went to either a 64-bit or 128-bit encryption with this new version, and were changing it with every client patch. They figured they had quite a bit of time on their hands, and ShowEQ would be disabled for quite some time.
I do believe they hacked the encryption in 2 days, and really less than 24hrs. And the coders for ShowEQ made it so you could put a
All they did was increase the entrance requirements, which had become a joke. At one point, to use ShowEQ, you had to know enough to set up a Linux box, compile the ShowEQ programs from source, and keep it updated with each patch. Then folks started to sell pre-installed Linux boxes that auto-updated themselves, auto-compiled the program, and there was only a dollar amount entry fee. SOE took that back, but the smart people kept on going.
Mind you, ShowEQ really wasn't THAT great. The biggest thing was having maps for zones that you couldn't have in-game maps for. Once SOE gave us a mapping function for all but a few zones, it wasn't worth keeping updated. But people still did it, and other folks complained about the competitive disadvantage of maps.
So, people will find a way, and use it. Heck, there were people out there wanting to use Sony's flawed DRM stuff to hide hacks from Blizzard. 'Nuff said.
Actually, speaking as a former firefighter, it isn't common for folks to misunderstand how dangerous a fire can be. Most folks freak completely out. They panic, and make mistakes they should know better than to do.
Small grease fires take out a whole kitched because the panicked homeowner throws water on it, instead of something like flour.
It's simple Fight or Flight syndrome. Most folks run for it (flight), but without applying a thought process to what they are doing. Those that try to deal (fight) with it aren't usually trained to deal with it properly. Sometimes even those that ARE trained get caught by something they didn't expect.
Fires are nothing to mess around with. Those that have a healthy respect for them can deal with it once they are properly trained. Those that don't, tend to die, even with training. Just check out the number of firefighters that die each year due to really dumb things like buildings falling on them.
Most firefighter deaths (that aren't due to traffic accidents or heart attacks) were completely preventable. There's usually a cover-up, for the officers in charge, all the way down to even the victim's themselves. Nobody wants to tarnish a hero's legacy, even if said "hero" had their head up their ass and was in a place they should have known better than to be, or was doing something they shouldn't have done. The public doesn't end up knowing, but most of it ends up getting caught on tape by some bystander, and then the government ends up buying the tape rights so that it doesn't get on the 11 o'clock news. Then, they show it as training video, and tell us "See, these guys are dumbfucks, and so is their commanding officer". And yet, more than half the class would still make the same mistake.
I hate to say "Yeah, SO????", but c'mon!
All email servers do this, unless it is your privately owned server. Backups are routinely made, and even if you hadn't pulled it from the server yet and viewed it, it could have been backed up.
Considering all the unsolicted email we all get, they could make a case that all of us are probably penis enlarging, low-cost XP buying, Nigerian investing, sexual deviants.
Better fix your tinfoil hat. The space rays are getting through!
I completely agree.
Not only that, but the guy even had the audacity to put in a message indicating that he really wasn't paying attention to the game, because he was watching a movie. I mean, why not just write "I'm botting, and I'm not a Chinese farmer!"
Let's face it, the guy did a dumb thing, and got busted for it. The in-game macro functions do not allow you to program the level of complexity that he utilized to do what he was doing. There's a reason for that. All games that have allowed bots have become crap in no time. UO allowed botting for the longest time, and people could make a 6 score 100 toon in less than 4 days. Ohhh, the joy!
As someone else posted, if he's a 24yr old network engineer, he should have enough brain power to understand that he was effectively botting the game. He didn't want to spend the time to raise weapon skills to 300 from 250-275 level, so he made it so his toon could do it. And it's so easy for even a priest to raise weapon skills, that one or two sessions of a couple of hours would have probably accomplished it for him, if he grouped. Instead, he botted.
Yes, the game has only been live for a short period of time, but the article is pretty accurate.
I actually enjoyed the combat that came along with DDO as opposed to EQ or WoW. And the mob AI is probably the best I have seen in any of the MMOs I have played in. Those kobolds jumping around mean that you have to chase them, and that's a -4 to hit unless you used a Feat to offset it. They don't make themselves easy to kill. That's refreshing.
While some of the powergamers will hit lvl 10 fairly quick, this game isn't designed around the power gamer, imo. And there is nothing wrong with that. Power gamers will enjoy V:SoH in all likelyhood. If the author only played for a month, I am not sure how many levels they got with a single character. My highest in beta with over a month of time put in on that toon, playing most nights for 4 or more hours, was lvl 6.4, a cleric. Lack of content and the moving of game worlds for the last few weeks hurt grouping, but lvl 7.x would have been my best attempt.
The real problem is the lack of other quests to do, and the diminishing returns you get on repeating quests. There is no way to get to level 10 without repeating many quests. That is just poor planning. I am sure most players that had extended beta time like I did, knew every nook and cranny of the WaterWorks dungeons. We knew all the trap locations. We knew all the secret doors. We knew if we needed a certain stat at a certain score to open a certain door. That's a problem. Just having random traps would have made a world of difference for some of it. The game is too static for its quests and layouts.
I don't mind the lack of solo content. Really, you are playing a MMO game. Why do people have this overwhelming need to go online and play a game where thousands of other people are playing, and not work with any of them? What's the point of it? And who played D&D in whatever form (D&D, AD&D, 2e, 3, 3.5, whatever) with just one DM and one person playing one toon? I wouldn't have wasted my time as a DM creating content for a single person and a single toon. And I hate to see MMO developers waste time creating solo content for a game designed to have thousands of toons online simultaneously. Also, solo content tends to get abused by multiple player groups doing the content because it's easy. I say, no thanks.
Having said that, being with a regular group of people to group with will make the gameplay outstanding. The game is designed with a 4 person group as the standard, but takes up to 6. Get yourself a cleric, rogue, front line fighter, and a caster, throw in 2 of any class as a regular group, and you will quickly become a cohesive fighting group. I found having a 2nd cleric made the game go really fast, especially when you started hitting a lot of undead.
This is no different from WoW or EQ, as well as most other games. Those people that form regular groups with people they know and have learned to trust, get a better gameplay experience. It's the same reason military units train in squads with the same people. In order to be a team, you have to work as one. So, criticizing DDO for not having solo content seems a little odd, when it's the way it *should* be.
One thing the article didn't mention was the different way that loot is handled in DDO. Semi-similar to the COH/V model, you don't get a choice of what loot you get, and you don't roll on it. Unlike COH/V, you can see what others got in a chest if you look fast enough, but you can't say "I want that, I'm gonna roll on it" and have a chance to win it. You have to ask for something, the other person has to loot it, and then you have to trade. Lack of loot hassles made the game a lot more enjoyable. Add in no "bind on pickup/bind on equip" for items (that I ever saw) and you have a lot less arguing. Pickup groups were less hostile due to this feature alone.
It shall be interesting to see how the time goes. I was in the beta for more than 2 months, and purchased the game. I haven't played much due to the stork being close to showing up, but I have enjoyed my time in it. No game is perfect, but DDO got a lot more right than it got wrong, imo.
To me, this game seems a bit like Sim Earth, a 1990 release by Maxis. In Sim Earth, you controlled a planet to develop various microbes into life forms, and see what life form became the dominant one.
Sure, this game is going to focus more on the life form than the planet, but it has a certain ring to it.
Sim Earth was fun, if tedious. The Maxis website has a tiny mention of it being released in 1990, but they don't list the game for sale today, even though it goes to the EAstore.com website.
They work, and you won't get the drowzy effect that many over-the-counter medications will give you, such as Dramamine (meclizine hcl). They also aren't very expensive, and there are a few knock-off brands around. If your local pharmacy doesn't sell them, ask them to order you a pair.
It's a simple accupressure band that has a small knot-like area that fits over the inside of your wrist, about 1" up from your hand.
An easy way to see if it will work for you is to have someone else play the game while you sit as you normally would while you were playing it. Twist your wrists like you are prentending you are a monk with his arms inside his wrist sleeves. Use your middle finger to press down on the opposite wrist, about 1" away from that crease where your wrist meets your hand, over those tendons. You don't have to press really hard; light pressure will do. Move your fingers around a little if it doesn't work right away, but it is pretty obvious and has a dramatic effect when you find it.
If it helps while a friend is playing the game for you, great. If not, don't think it still may not work, as the motion sickness may be due to your controlling the game, and your body expecting the motions to happen in a certain way, and they don't.
You can also make the same bands with sweatbands and a pencil eraser, if you really want to.
Lastly, if games make you sick to play them, you probably shouldn't. You may want to play it badly, but it's not worth it.
I think the big reason so many people want to play a cracked version is that way too many games SUCK!
I've spent good money on more crap games than I care to admit. Games that didn't have a demo, or had demos that weren't actually reflective of actual game play. Ever played a flawless demo that was pretty decent, and then bought the game and found it to be bug laden crap? Yeah, me too.
That, and some of the games use TOO much protection. I remember playing Morrowind the first time. The game would lurch around as the damn thing spun the CD again and again. It was pointless to play without a NOCD crack, as it made the game suck. Once that was in place, the game was awesome.
With online modes becoming more of the "in thing", a lot of copy protection just isn't needed. Those online serial #'s attached to your name means that you can't use a cracked copy, unless it is a LAN type session.
Take Sacred (or in my case, the Sacred Gold edition) as a copy protected game. You have to have the original game CD in your HD when you start the game. It checks for daemon tools, something I use so when I play an older game, I don't have to go to my bookshelf looking for the game CD.
Well, once Sacred starts, you don't need the CD anymore. And if you don't go online to play, but stick to a LAN game, you can start as many copies as you want, as long as the CD is there to start.
Copy protection cracking is a game itself to several groups. They get a certain joy in cracking them, and beating other groups to the "release" of the crack. No matter what the protection is, someone will eventually decide it would be fun to beat it, and they will.
I tried a cracked version of Sacred, and liked it so much, I bought it, due to the many bugs in the original game CD. Imagine my surprise when the Gold version of the game, which contains the last patch that Encore appears willing to publish, is still bug laden. Those bugs are the reason I won't buy my wife a copy of the game to play, but will use the one CD to launch both our game sessions.
I recall that Blizzard often had its servers listed as UP when they were DOWN, too.
I'm no SOE fanboi, nor am I a Blizzard fanboi. I played WoW for nearly a year before I gave up on it. I played EQ2 for about 2 months before I was sure how bad it was.
I will say this, though, from my experience. SOE patched EQ2 nearly daily. SOE has nearly doubled the size of the "world" in EQ2. Blizzard patches monthly, and only hotfixes bugs that benefit the player. Blizzard hasn't added much of anything to its game, except battlefields and a poorly implemented "honor" system that has no honor to it.
Blizzard's patching of WoW is some of the worst I have seen for MMOs. CoH/V patches more frequently, as well. Minor bugs are fixed as often as major bugs are.
Blizzard still thinks it is patching Diablo II, I think. Every few months is ok, just to keep the copy protection valid.
Apparently the website linked in TFA heard from SOE's lawyers, and pulled the comments based on the NDA.
So, literally, nothing to see here.
I live in the North Texas area. Charter communications has been the big cable internet provider in this area for seemingly forever. And, in the last few months, they have had their service for cable internet degrade horribly.
Many of my neighbors used VoIP, and were unable for hours at a time to use their phones. It's the major reason I never went to VoIP.
Just about a month ago, Verizon threw down fiber optics, and within a few weeks, offered their FiOS service. For basically the same price as Charter's fastest service of 3Mb down / 384KB up, I got 15Mb down / 5Mb up. The best part is I have better stability of my internet service. In less than 2 weeks, 25% of all of Charter's customers in one neighborhood switched, and another 25% will go in the next month.
I am still seeing interruptions at times, making me wonder if something is going on with the backbone somewhere in this area. But everything is sure flying, now. And all my immediate neighbors say their VoIP is much better with the switch.
If it took you this long to get tired of WoW's queues, consider yourself getting off easy.
How many folks were stuck on the original "Terrible 20" servers? Those servers that were constantly crashing, constantly lagging, and constantly down. I played almost exclusively on Uther. There were days that our server was down for more than 12hrs, if I remember correctly. Remember then refusing to offer us the ability to transfer servers to a new one being brought online, saying we would unbalance it? I don't think they allowed a server transfer from the "Terrible 20" until about 3-4 months after lanuch. By that time, things were semi-stable.
I swear that I got so much free blue XP from all their server downtime that I was in the blue from lvl 20 through lvl 40. I ended up with more than 2 free weeks of playtime due to all their server outtages.
Remember "loot lag"??? When you would go to loot a corpse, and have your toon effectively locked up? Remember how they would finally fix it on their end, and the next patch would bring it back even worse than before?
Remember the boats being bugged, and people either having their toons locked up, or getting dumped into the water so far away from land that you died? And the GMs wouldn't compensate you for lost gold for repairs and the like?
Remember one whole continent being down, while the other was up? Trying to use your Hearthstone or a boat and crashing the client because the other continent wasn't available? Unable to log into the game because one half of the game world was down? Remember it taking a half hour or longer for them to figure out that one whole continent (approximately 50% of all non-instanced game zones) was offline, with both the General and Realm specific forum flooded with messages? Remember them fixing it, and having it go down again in less than 24hrs?
I loved playing WoW, when I could. It really was a great game. My wife found it the MMO she has probably liked the most of all that we have played together. When my rogue and her druid hit 60, all the fun went out of the game. The queues were back, and we had both levelled our favorite class to 60. We tried playing alts for about 2 months before giving up. I couldn't see waiting anywhere from 15-45 minutes to play a toon that wasn't as fun as our originals. Needless to say, we stopped playing, and finally cancelled our account after almost 3 months of no activity. Yes, 3 months. That's how long we held out hope for it to improve. It got worse.
Blizzard knew it had problems prior to starting this latest "event". They went ahead, anyways, without preparing for what was going to happen. The writing was on the wall, but they didn't lock people out of creating toons on the server that was going to complete the "pre-war effort" first, and that server crashed repeatedly due to all the people logging in to create lvl 1 toons and try to run them over to where the event was going to happen.
I remember when Penny Arcade took back their "Game of the Year" award, due to the problems with the servers shortly after awarding it. Sure, Blizzard is facing nearly unprecedented success, but they have failed to meet the server uptime needs of their players consistently.
No, if it took you a year to realize this, consider yourself lucky. If you still haven't realized it, consider yourself blessed.
Great game, crappy server implementation. And as long as their subscription numbers keep going up, and people keep accepting mediocre server stability, why would Blizzard fix it?
Dude, didn't you ever watch Saturday morning cartoons back in the 70's and 80's?
The Bill is sitting on the steps to Congress singing his own version of the blues...
"I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a bill, and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill..."
I hear ya.
My company has a 24hr support pager, and I am the poor slob that got it thrust on them. (Only U.S. employee left, and the pager # is reserved to the U.S., I guess.)
There is a Bed & Breakfast in the U.S. that has a horrible font used on it's phone #. The 3 in the # looks like an 8. Those 2 digits are the only ones that are different between my pager # and their phone #.
I receive about 10 pages a month from people looking to make registrations. I called both the B&B and the website designer, asking them to change the font. They refused.
I have been sorely tempted, as many friends have suggested, to simply start taking reservations, or call the people back and tell them the business is closed. I haven't, because the reservation part would require me to take their credit card #'s, and I'm not going there. (I can see the lawsuits from that stunt being brutal.) And the whole "We're closed of renovations" and the like just doesn't work for me.
Fortunately, none of my customers are currently in the surrounding area codes any longer, but for a while, I was making a lot of unnecessary LD calls because a webmaster chose an idiotic font.
Actually, the mob AI is really pretty damn good in DDO.
The mobs will attempt to evade your attacks. Mobs that cast will regularily hop backwards to create casting space. They select spells that are much to your detrement. The sometimes climb up on things to make reaching them harder, especially casters or archers.
This isn't EQ/EQII/WoW/CoH-V/DAoC (shall I go on???) or any of those other games where the mob stands in place and you beat on it. Their AI isn't limited to "kill the mob that is doing the most damage/healing aggro."
Sure, sometimes their AI pathing isn't the best, and they will make dumb decisions. Most notable is the penchant for throwing items at you where the natural arc required causes the projectile to hit the ceiling before it reaches you. Or the fact that they will walk into some traps. But that's really the only complaints I've had.
The low level caster mobs hitting people with Fear, rendering them unable to attack or heal. When you reach some of the tougher dungeons, and the Arcane Blackbone skeletons start throwing Cloudkill around, with it's LONG duration and penchant for instantly killing toons under lvl 6, it's impressive. When the group decides to take on a Hard level 2 quest and has half the party members end up Cursed (800gp for a potion, or a lvl 5 cleric to cast Remove Curse, or dying to remove) it is effective. The mobs that throw fireball at the bunched up party. The casters that hit you with Enfeeblement and render you nearly immobile. The Wight Clerics buffing itself as soon as it sees the party. Hold Person used liberally.
In a nutshell, most of the caster mobs have great AI. Better than I have ever seen in a MMO.
No, mob AI is a ton better than I have seen is most MMOs. There are other problems DDO will have, mostly related to lack of content. Mob AI won't be one of the problems, though.
We won't even begin to discuss how hard Beholders are to go after. Ugh!
Since SOE stopped posting numbers, and many game companies followed suit, numbers are ambigious at best. Besides, you get a Station pass, and you are now in all games. So, I bet their EQ, SW:G, EQII, and Planetside numbers are all the same.
But, Smedley's contention that SOE didn't release an "incomplete" product is based on your definition of incomplete. I am sure SOE thinks that if they finished the code and got it out the door, it's complete. We players like to see the code go through a beta process, or a test server.
The inherent problem is that many in the player base of any game think they know what would be better than the developers and designers. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes they are just plain insane. More than 90% of the ideas suggested in various forums to the WoW developers were just plain horrible. 9% had a little merit, but wouldn't work for various reasons. Maybe 1% of them made good sense. But of that 1%, 5% of that small number fit in with what the designers/developers had in mind for the class/quest/feature. The rest was discarded.
SOE made changes to try and attract more players, without getting real feedback from its existing player base. The burnt both ends of the bridge, and are now on an island by themselves, throwing ropes to the sides trying to pull players back. This has been a fine example of a game company not knowing its existing playerbase's desires for the future of the game.
SW:G probably won't be consider a MMO in a year's time. There won't be massive numbers of players online.
Then again, it wasn't that great to begin with.
I mean, come on! Why play a MMO to solo all the time when the game is for groups? Why cry about lack of solo content, when solo content would be exploited by groups? You can't have it all ways with ease.
CoH/V was the closest to getting solo content viable, but it didn't work in non-instanced outdoor zones. You simply had to wait until you were higher level to take on groups of 10 or more mobs. So be it. And even their model was abused all the time. Have a single player go into an instance, and then invite a friend after it started. Same # of mobs, less difficulty, easy xp.
Many people DO like to play a game where they can group up with a few friends. Or a lot of friends. And for them, WoW hits the spot. And while most classes in WoW can solo up to 60, you miss out on some important events/dungeons.
Me, when I want solo play, or to duo with the wife, I play stuff like Diablo II, or Sacred. We don't have to worry about anyone else's schedule, ideas on gameplay, or whatever. We start when we want, we take a break when we want, and we divvy loot how we want. Zero hassles.
Frankly, TFA was a joke. You could take almost any aspect of life and prove that it teaches people poor behavior, based on some viewpoint.
I can still vividly remember my little brother, at the tender age of 3, playing on the swings while we were out in California for a year. This was back in 1974. He was so little, he couldn't sit on the swing, so he laid his stomach across it, and would run forward until he left the ground, swung back, and repeated as needed.
Why do I remember it so vividly?
Because the whole time he was on that swing, he sang "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK" at full volume, non-stop. 3 years old, and singing for all he was worth, and effectively screaming one of the most hated words amongst language minders.
He's 34 right now, almost 35. He still considers it one of his shining moments.
Me, I learned how to use it when it was appropriate. Being in the fire service as a volunteer, there are tons of times when dropping a well thought out curse just fit. See a 4 story apartment building engulfed in flame? "Holy fucking shit!" made perfect sense. Of course, it was immediately followed by "Damn, this is almost as good as sex. Grab a hose! We're going in!"
But, you also learned to have an innate sense of who was around you. That same "Holy fucking shit!" wouldn't escape most mouths if there were civilians around.
The problem with these online games is that there is an inherent "cool" factor people seem to think surrounds the use of this language. And it isn't just kids.
Back when MSN chats were free to everyone, I used to chat in ChatDallas, one of their city chats. The use of profanity would get you kicked by a bot, or banned by a mod. One enterprising individual created a private room for adults to chat in. Wanna guess what happened?
Folks from ages 18-50 sat in this private room and just used one profanity after another in all imaginable combinations. Because they could, and they felt they were being cool. And after 5 minutes in there, I felt like I was back in H.S. listening to guys in the locker room. It was all pointless.
So, until folks figure out how really lame they sound, they will keep doing it. There's no art to it. It's one thing to say "fuck you, you fag". Anyone can do that. It takes a little more creativity to drop a "listen, you dried up husk of a cunt, shut your yap and go away".
Ah, but there will always be sheep.
While there are quite a few gamers out there that long for the sheer daunting task that the orignal EQ was, I am not going to be one of them. I won't be alone, either.
I really don't mind a challenging game. I enjoy playing games like Half-Life/HL2 without using god mode, for the sheer challenge of succeeding. But MMOs tend to take up a lot more time, and you are dependent on others for the most part. You can't just save and walk away because the kid is throwing up, or the cat is climbing the curtains. You are stuck there, or you have a bad reputation.
I burnt many an entire evening or weekend on EQ. Ignoring the wife to the point she was ready to bitchslap me. Eating in a frenzied rush so I didn't miss anything. In a nutshell, acting like a total goober/asshole. But, I always pulled my head out of my ass and made it up to the wife.
I know several guys that lost a good wife to MMOs. Some to EQ, one to UO, and another to AC. Their wives called themselves EQ-widows, and it was like living with an alcoholic. The guys would literally blow their top if they were interrupted, even when it was for something important for RL. Years later, when they decided to grow up, they were always ashamed of how they acted. It's hard enough to find a wife that will let you play MMOs fairly often. Throwing one away because you HAVE to spend so much time in the game is just assinine.
EQ2 has enough hardships built into it that it wasn't a very lucrative game for most folks. There's a reason its subscription numbers are a joke compared to WoW. After a little over 2 months in the game, I was asking myself "why am I playing this? This game makes things harder than it needs to be to do anything." So, I quit.
Scoff all you want at the casual gamer, but there are a ton of parents out there, kids that care about getting decent grades, and folks with other commitments that simply love being able to play for an hour or two here or there. They enjoy not having to spend another 2 hours in game because one person died deep in the dungeon, and now a rescue mission is needed. They have well rounded lives, with the MMO just being a fun part of it.
Heck, the only real mistake WoW made was having 40-man raids needed for some content. Put it back to 20, and it would have been really perfect. 40 was just too much for most guilds and/or groups of friends to handle.
I am certainly not going back to the dark ages of MMOs. Corpse runs are for masochists.