The problem is they did something like this back in the day, and it burned them hard on two fronts.
When they took effectively infinite preorders before launch, Microsoft screwed up and screwed them over with the Xbox 360, causing a lot of ire from customers who preordered and engendering a lot of anger toward the irresponsible retailers.
When they had waiting lists, customers would irresponsibly list themselves on multiple lists, grab the first one available, and ignored all the others. The overhead in clearing through these overly bloated lists and potentially overbooked orders effectively made it unprofitable.
So between irresponsible retailers and irresponsible customers there effectively aren't waiting lists for anything you'd actually have to wait for.
1) Only insanely well geared people saw most of the endgame content before BC. 2) BC raiding is more casual friendly than pre-BC raiding. 3) Heroic Dungeons were a good idea implemented badly. 3b) The development resources used to create Heroic Dungeons wouldn't have been enough to create a new raid (they're probably separate teams anyway). 4) There's plenty of fun to be had already, and Blizzard looks poised to improve further still.
Personally, I loved Hellfire Peninsula. The first time I walked through the portal, heard the music, saw the rampaging demons and the spacious sky I was simply awed.
Then I got squished by a Fel Reaver a half dozen times and became paranoid. I remember weeping once when I watched a line of Alliance and Horde questers get squished one after the other as they fought quest mobs, oblivious to the shaking ground.
I think you, naturally, haven't been keeping up on WoW. That probably shows you're an intelligent individual, unlike myself.
It's been months since it was more efficient to grind than quest, and while each class has its nemesis and victim there isn't a single class that gets a free ride in PvP, or has it overly difficult. If you're referencing Arenas, it's certain class combinations that are overpowered rather than specific classes.
70, 70, 70, 70, 67, 59 + more here. Glad to see I'm not the only altaholic.
I agree that it is saddening to see the elites go, but it was necessary. Unless you were lucky with your server choice, it was becoming increasingly impossible to get groups going for elite quests or instances. It was more time efficient to pay a level 70 to do the hard work for you, or skip the quests. Otherwise you could spend days or weeks unsuccessfully looking for a group.
However, that's not why people fail to know their class by level 70. People have been that way since before the Burning Crusade. The lack of knowledge is a combination of an unwillingness to learn with an unwillingness to teach.
Some players simply wouldn't learn how to DPS/heal/tank properly if Blizzard opened an education center on the subject with free enrollment. On the other hand, most players can't be bothered to try and give other players a helpful suggestion. They assume immediately that the player is bad and will always be bad, rather than trying at least once to see if they are receptive to criticism and suggestion.
There will always be players who insist they are already masters of their class even while they bottom out on DPS meters, let the tank die to critters, or fail to hold aggro for any longer than taunt is up. But there are a number of players who simply aren't given the chance.
It's been my experience that raiding is what you make of it. If you're there to mechanically destroy bosses and await your lottery winnings then it is deeply repetitive and boring. If you're there to push yourself to your in-game limits and have a blast with friends, it's grand time every week.
The loot is the dessert of raiding, and too often people skip the main course looking to satisfy their sweet tooth. I've done it before and it's not a fun time. But if you can listen to Yoda and keep your mind on where you are and what you're doing, you'll enjoy the journey as much as the destination.
Throwing a ball into the air not a challenge. I think we can agree on this fact. It's not hard to get a ball, and throwing it vertically is equally easy.
Throwing a ball to a particular spot isn't a challenge either. Initial accuracy will vary, but generally people can be reasonably close to the target.
Catching a ball can be somewhat trickier, but so long as the initial throw was accurate and there aren't any mitigating factors this is also relatively easy.
Combine those three simple actions and we can now play catch with ourselves, not very difficult at all. However, multiply that two or four times and now we're juggling.
Juggling isn't difficult with practice, though it takes some time to get the hang of. However, it is a challenge until you nail it down.
In order to make it more challenging, we'll add some odd shaped objects; bowling pins, flaming torches, coke bottles, knives, and maybe a gerbil. It takes more work to get used to juggling any of these individually, but with some effort you can get used to juggling just about any combination of items, although there's always a warming up period before you get your groove going.
Finally, let's add another person in. Team juggling is a challenge, because if one person is out of sync with the other the whole thing comes crashing down. Again, with time, patience, and practice the challenge is overcome.
But wait, "the challenge is overcome"? Where'd the challenge come from?
None of the components of what is being done, taken individually, is challenging. It's not a challenge to catch, throw, or find a ball. It's not hard to get another person involved. It's not hard to find three balls. Every individual component of the complex action is simple and easy. However, added together you end up with a complicated function that is, indeed, challenging.
WoW may or may not be as complicated or challenging as multi-person juggling, but the same principle still applies. Raiding is more than just right clicking, pressing movement keys, and hitting buttons. It's more than just knowing a strategy, your role, and the current situation. Raiding is a complex function of many simple tasks that, in aggregate, make a challenge.
One could continually pull out specific elements and decry them as unchallenging, but I don't believe doing so is particularly honest or helpful in this case.
I see what you mean now. I can understand morning the loss of that manner of raiding hijinx. While people often threaten to misdirect a boss to insert raider here no one actually does it.
But I don't agree with you that everyone's wearing the same gear. Once guilds get past Karazhan, the identical Holy Paladins with the Triptych Shield of the Ancients on their backs become a thing of the past.
This is a common argument, but as a raider I find it dishonest. Yes, casual players can now get T6 level gear. No, this isn't a slap in the face, here's why.
1) You can't get a full set of T6 level gear from badges. Take cloth for example, there are three pieces of healing gear at the T6 iLevel. That's not even half the armor class restricted slots.
2) It isn't easy for casual players to get badges. They don't already have T6 geared people to destroy Heroics with, or to burn through Kara in under 2.5 hours. At the highest end of the casual spectrum, they might be able to muster one upgrade for themselves a month.
3) Experience counts. You can't ebay 25 T6 toons, wowwiki a strat, then waltz into BT and kill Illidan. Skipping progression like that is like skipping grades in school. You're either extremely smart or extremely stupid.
There is nothing challenging about waiting until you collect all the right gear to be able to do something, don't delude yourself otherwise. There is nothing challenging about waiting until you collect all the right gear to be able to paint the Mona Lisa, don't delude yourself otherwise.
There is nothing challenging about waiting until you collect all the right gear to be able to win the Tour de France, don't delude yourself otherwise.
There is nothing challenging about waiting until you collect all the right gear to be able to run a successful video game company, don't delude yourself otherwise.
I contest the notion that in order to be entertaining you have to be dead weight. There's plenty of time between wipes and during trash for skilled people to jest, joke, and have a blast.
Besides, most of the dead weight I've seen isn't particulary entertaining.
My understanding was that it wasn't the higher ups but more recent members who'd joined to fill spots left empty by raiders bored of continually farming Illidan. When faced with actual progression, many of the untested players proved to be undisciplined in dealing with the adversity.
To make a gross oversimplification, religion and science are generally dealing with completely segregated fields, the supernatural and the natural. So long as one doesn't try to cross the streams, nothing bad will happen.
But yes, anytime a religion attempts to claim it is based in science or that science is wrong (astrology and creationism respectively) they need a good smacking.
The sad thing is, should you encounter any woman who would engage you in the same manner, the chance remains 0% for relational consummation as you will both be too busy bringing up studies concerning the subject to actually complete the act. At least your studies will show her chances for STDs are near zero.
I'd actually argue the contrary concerning the Xbox.
Online gaming was perfected far before the Xbox. PC gamers will point to any number of titles which offered far more online options and freedom. For everything that Xbox Live did, the PC gamers had already been experiencing it in better, more refined forms for years prior.
What Xbox Live accomplished was the first steps toward bringing that to consoles. Halo 2's Live interface may have felt confining compared to the freedom of Counterstrike or B.Net, but it was on a console. Despite Nintendo's early attempts with the NES, no one had successfully pulled off a network like that before with a console. Thus, it's accurate to say that the Xbox (360) perfected onling gaming for consoles, but not in general.
A possible take on matters is that school teaches us to be slow by forcing us to multi-task. That is, while we're "focused" in one hour blocks on a specific subject the rest of the time we're forced to juggle homework assignments, projects, exams etc. It's not as pronounced in high school as it is in college, but it exists in both levels of education.
Anecdotally, I find that my ability to focus is not a matter of multi-tasking versus single-tasking so much as it is a matter of what kind of feedback I can get from a given task. Tasks where there's a quick, tangible input from my output easily keep my interest. Ones which involve a lot of work without any visible result tend to lose interest quickly. If I'm addicted to anything, it's feedback/response.
Personally I found the advanced maps disappointing. At times they were good, but for the most part they felt less like puzzles are more like lessons in how ridiculously hard and obtuse the developers could have made the levels if they'd wanted to screw up the game.
There wasn't the same sense of satisfaction as with the original, because I didn't feel like I solved anything. Rather, I felt like I abused game mechanics.
For example, in one "puzzle" you need to bounce an energy ball into a receptacle using the companion sphere. The issue is there's a short wall between the two, and the ball is fired at a right angle to the receptacle. Using a non-flat surface, you need to bounce a periodically fired object over a wall and into the receptacle. This isn't easy, in fact I never once felt as though I had much if any control over where the energy ball went. When I got the energy ball into the receptacle, I didn't feel like I'd accomplished anything other than to show I could get lucky once in a while.
I could give other examples, but they'd be more difficult to explain and highlight.
I'll agree that you should be aware of what's going on all around your car as opposed to only what's in front, but I think you're trivializing the problem.
Firstly, it can be tough to make a judgement call on whether you are going to be hit or not. A lot of people, at least in my state, leave the bulk of the deceleration for a light towards the end. They effectively zoom up behind you and stop (God only knows why, it's not like the light is going to go anywhere, and even if it did the cars waiting at the light can only accelerate so quickly). Sometimes it will be clear as day, but sometimes it won't.
Secondly, there are situations where there isn't any "safe" exit. If you're behind one car in the middle lane of three lanes and a car is coming up behind you, where do you go? There are cars on your left, cars on your right, cars in front of you, and the big problem behind you. Ultimately, all you can do is thank your lucky stars you were smart enough to put some distance between you and the car in front of you so you aren't faulted for rear ending them in turn.
It's true that to some extent you're legally at fault for not avoiding, but I'd argue that in a very significant number of cases, if not most, it's unreasonable to expect the level of precognisance required to make the avoiding maneuver (should one be available).
Portal could work as a movie, but it would be a very different movie than the game.
Part of the game's excellent story came from the fact that you were the lab rat. You could watch GlaDOS peering at you, waiting for you to complete an objective before voicing her sarcasm laden approval of your success.
Another part of the game's excellence is how it was about learning. You had to continually learn how to use this nifty device you were given. This was, of course, backed up by the lab rat atmosphere.
How do you translate these things into a movie?
The answer: You can't, directly. At best you can indirectly translate the game by putting a similar character into the same situation, and somehow compel the audience to feel involved as that character runs around solving the mystery. That is to say, something that would be very, very easy to screw up.
And that points to something about all games, they don't have to involve their audience in the same way movies do. The audience for games already wants to be involved, by default you have something every Hollywood film dreams of. You lose that something the instant you translate back.
I resisted getting a cellphone, but not because I was afraid of them.
Quite simply, I saw hundreds of my fellow college students unable to disconnect from the things. Even when professors implored them to sit down for 45 minutes and focus on learning, they'd invariably interrupt class with a tinny version of the William Tell Overture.
I well understood the benefits of cellphones, and I have one now. Before I was simply disgusted that everyone who had a cellphone couldn't bring themselves to put it away whenever the situation called for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Worldwide Nintendo passed them ages ago. It's just that in the US specifically, where the 360 is strongest, they had yet to.
I suppose the constrained US supply is partially responsible.
The problem is they did something like this back in the day, and it burned them hard on two fronts.
When they took effectively infinite preorders before launch, Microsoft screwed up and screwed them over with the Xbox 360, causing a lot of ire from customers who preordered and engendering a lot of anger toward the irresponsible retailers.
When they had waiting lists, customers would irresponsibly list themselves on multiple lists, grab the first one available, and ignored all the others. The overhead in clearing through these overly bloated lists and potentially overbooked orders effectively made it unprofitable.
So between irresponsible retailers and irresponsible customers there effectively aren't waiting lists for anything you'd actually have to wait for.
He could be a fire or elementalist mage. Blazing Speed is a pretty frequent proc against fast attacking Rogues.
A few points:
1) Only insanely well geared people saw most of the endgame content before BC.
2) BC raiding is more casual friendly than pre-BC raiding.
3) Heroic Dungeons were a good idea implemented badly.
3b) The development resources used to create Heroic Dungeons wouldn't have been enough to create a new raid (they're probably separate teams anyway).
4) There's plenty of fun to be had already, and Blizzard looks poised to improve further still.
Personally, I loved Hellfire Peninsula. The first time I walked through the portal, heard the music, saw the rampaging demons and the spacious sky I was simply awed.
Then I got squished by a Fel Reaver a half dozen times and became paranoid. I remember weeping once when I watched a line of Alliance and Horde questers get squished one after the other as they fought quest mobs, oblivious to the shaking ground.
Good times.
I think you, naturally, haven't been keeping up on WoW. That probably shows you're an intelligent individual, unlike myself.
It's been months since it was more efficient to grind than quest, and while each class has its nemesis and victim there isn't a single class that gets a free ride in PvP, or has it overly difficult. If you're referencing Arenas, it's certain class combinations that are overpowered rather than specific classes.
Just a friendly update.
I believe both EVE and WoW have free trials. In WoW's case you only have to purchase the game if you want to keep playing after the trial.
70, 70, 70, 70, 67, 59 + more here. Glad to see I'm not the only altaholic.
I agree that it is saddening to see the elites go, but it was necessary. Unless you were lucky with your server choice, it was becoming increasingly impossible to get groups going for elite quests or instances. It was more time efficient to pay a level 70 to do the hard work for you, or skip the quests. Otherwise you could spend days or weeks unsuccessfully looking for a group.
However, that's not why people fail to know their class by level 70. People have been that way since before the Burning Crusade. The lack of knowledge is a combination of an unwillingness to learn with an unwillingness to teach.
Some players simply wouldn't learn how to DPS/heal/tank properly if Blizzard opened an education center on the subject with free enrollment. On the other hand, most players can't be bothered to try and give other players a helpful suggestion. They assume immediately that the player is bad and will always be bad, rather than trying at least once to see if they are receptive to criticism and suggestion.
There will always be players who insist they are already masters of their class even while they bottom out on DPS meters, let the tank die to critters, or fail to hold aggro for any longer than taunt is up. But there are a number of players who simply aren't given the chance.
It's been my experience that raiding is what you make of it. If you're there to mechanically destroy bosses and await your lottery winnings then it is deeply repetitive and boring. If you're there to push yourself to your in-game limits and have a blast with friends, it's grand time every week.
The loot is the dessert of raiding, and too often people skip the main course looking to satisfy their sweet tooth. I've done it before and it's not a fun time. But if you can listen to Yoda and keep your mind on where you are and what you're doing, you'll enjoy the journey as much as the destination.
Factitious answers aside, you're vastly oversimplifying matters.
Throwing a ball into the air not a challenge. I think we can agree on this fact. It's not hard to get a ball, and throwing it vertically is equally easy.
Throwing a ball to a particular spot isn't a challenge either. Initial accuracy will vary, but generally people can be reasonably close to the target.
Catching a ball can be somewhat trickier, but so long as the initial throw was accurate and there aren't any mitigating factors this is also relatively easy.
Combine those three simple actions and we can now play catch with ourselves, not very difficult at all. However, multiply that two or four times and now we're juggling.
Juggling isn't difficult with practice, though it takes some time to get the hang of. However, it is a challenge until you nail it down.
In order to make it more challenging, we'll add some odd shaped objects; bowling pins, flaming torches, coke bottles, knives, and maybe a gerbil. It takes more work to get used to juggling any of these individually, but with some effort you can get used to juggling just about any combination of items, although there's always a warming up period before you get your groove going.
Finally, let's add another person in. Team juggling is a challenge, because if one person is out of sync with the other the whole thing comes crashing down. Again, with time, patience, and practice the challenge is overcome.
But wait, "the challenge is overcome"? Where'd the challenge come from?
None of the components of what is being done, taken individually, is challenging. It's not a challenge to catch, throw, or find a ball. It's not hard to get another person involved. It's not hard to find three balls. Every individual component of the complex action is simple and easy. However, added together you end up with a complicated function that is, indeed, challenging.
WoW may or may not be as complicated or challenging as multi-person juggling, but the same principle still applies. Raiding is more than just right clicking, pressing movement keys, and hitting buttons. It's more than just knowing a strategy, your role, and the current situation. Raiding is a complex function of many simple tasks that, in aggregate, make a challenge.
One could continually pull out specific elements and decry them as unchallenging, but I don't believe doing so is particularly honest or helpful in this case.
I see what you mean now. I can understand morning the loss of that manner of raiding hijinx. While people often threaten to misdirect a boss to insert raider here no one actually does it.
But I don't agree with you that everyone's wearing the same gear. Once guilds get past Karazhan, the identical Holy Paladins with the Triptych Shield of the Ancients on their backs become a thing of the past.
This is a common argument, but as a raider I find it dishonest. Yes, casual players can now get T6 level gear. No, this isn't a slap in the face, here's why.
1) You can't get a full set of T6 level gear from badges. Take cloth for example, there are three pieces of healing gear at the T6 iLevel. That's not even half the armor class restricted slots.
2) It isn't easy for casual players to get badges. They don't already have T6 geared people to destroy Heroics with, or to burn through Kara in under 2.5 hours. At the highest end of the casual spectrum, they might be able to muster one upgrade for themselves a month.
3) Experience counts. You can't ebay 25 T6 toons, wowwiki a strat, then waltz into BT and kill Illidan. Skipping progression like that is like skipping grades in school. You're either extremely smart or extremely stupid.
There is nothing challenging about waiting until you collect all the right gear to be able to win the Tour de France, don't delude yourself otherwise.
There is nothing challenging about waiting until you collect all the right gear to be able to run a successful video game company, don't delude yourself otherwise.
This is a fun mad lib.
I contest the notion that in order to be entertaining you have to be dead weight. There's plenty of time between wipes and during trash for skilled people to jest, joke, and have a blast.
Besides, most of the dead weight I've seen isn't particulary entertaining.
My understanding was that it wasn't the higher ups but more recent members who'd joined to fill spots left empty by raiders bored of continually farming Illidan. When faced with actual progression, many of the untested players proved to be undisciplined in dealing with the adversity.
To make a gross oversimplification, religion and science are generally dealing with completely segregated fields, the supernatural and the natural. So long as one doesn't try to cross the streams, nothing bad will happen.
But yes, anytime a religion attempts to claim it is based in science or that science is wrong (astrology and creationism respectively) they need a good smacking.
The sad thing is, should you encounter any woman who would engage you in the same manner, the chance remains 0% for relational consummation as you will both be too busy bringing up studies concerning the subject to actually complete the act. At least your studies will show her chances for STDs are near zero.
I'd actually argue the contrary concerning the Xbox.
Online gaming was perfected far before the Xbox. PC gamers will point to any number of titles which offered far more online options and freedom. For everything that Xbox Live did, the PC gamers had already been experiencing it in better, more refined forms for years prior.
What Xbox Live accomplished was the first steps toward bringing that to consoles. Halo 2's Live interface may have felt confining compared to the freedom of Counterstrike or B.Net, but it was on a console. Despite Nintendo's early attempts with the NES, no one had successfully pulled off a network like that before with a console. Thus, it's accurate to say that the Xbox (360) perfected onling gaming for consoles, but not in general.
A possible take on matters is that school teaches us to be slow by forcing us to multi-task. That is, while we're "focused" in one hour blocks on a specific subject the rest of the time we're forced to juggle homework assignments, projects, exams etc. It's not as pronounced in high school as it is in college, but it exists in both levels of education.
Anecdotally, I find that my ability to focus is not a matter of multi-tasking versus single-tasking so much as it is a matter of what kind of feedback I can get from a given task. Tasks where there's a quick, tangible input from my output easily keep my interest. Ones which involve a lot of work without any visible result tend to lose interest quickly. If I'm addicted to anything, it's feedback/response.
That assumes the person would be doing anything useful in their leisure time anyway.
If I spend 20 hours playing WoW versus 20 hours watching inane TV, it's not an easy call to say if I've gained or lost anything.
Personally I found the advanced maps disappointing. At times they were good, but for the most part they felt less like puzzles are more like lessons in how ridiculously hard and obtuse the developers could have made the levels if they'd wanted to screw up the game.
There wasn't the same sense of satisfaction as with the original, because I didn't feel like I solved anything. Rather, I felt like I abused game mechanics.
For example, in one "puzzle" you need to bounce an energy ball into a receptacle using the companion sphere. The issue is there's a short wall between the two, and the ball is fired at a right angle to the receptacle. Using a non-flat surface, you need to bounce a periodically fired object over a wall and into the receptacle. This isn't easy, in fact I never once felt as though I had much if any control over where the energy ball went. When I got the energy ball into the receptacle, I didn't feel like I'd accomplished anything other than to show I could get lucky once in a while.
I could give other examples, but they'd be more difficult to explain and highlight.
I'll agree that you should be aware of what's going on all around your car as opposed to only what's in front, but I think you're trivializing the problem.
Firstly, it can be tough to make a judgement call on whether you are going to be hit or not. A lot of people, at least in my state, leave the bulk of the deceleration for a light towards the end. They effectively zoom up behind you and stop (God only knows why, it's not like the light is going to go anywhere, and even if it did the cars waiting at the light can only accelerate so quickly). Sometimes it will be clear as day, but sometimes it won't.
Secondly, there are situations where there isn't any "safe" exit. If you're behind one car in the middle lane of three lanes and a car is coming up behind you, where do you go? There are cars on your left, cars on your right, cars in front of you, and the big problem behind you. Ultimately, all you can do is thank your lucky stars you were smart enough to put some distance between you and the car in front of you so you aren't faulted for rear ending them in turn.
It's true that to some extent you're legally at fault for not avoiding, but I'd argue that in a very significant number of cases, if not most, it's unreasonable to expect the level of precognisance required to make the avoiding maneuver (should one be available).
Portal could work as a movie, but it would be a very different movie than the game.
Part of the game's excellent story came from the fact that you were the lab rat. You could watch GlaDOS peering at you, waiting for you to complete an objective before voicing her sarcasm laden approval of your success.
Another part of the game's excellence is how it was about learning. You had to continually learn how to use this nifty device you were given. This was, of course, backed up by the lab rat atmosphere.
How do you translate these things into a movie?
The answer: You can't, directly. At best you can indirectly translate the game by putting a similar character into the same situation, and somehow compel the audience to feel involved as that character runs around solving the mystery. That is to say, something that would be very, very easy to screw up.
And that points to something about all games, they don't have to involve their audience in the same way movies do. The audience for games already wants to be involved, by default you have something every Hollywood film dreams of. You lose that something the instant you translate back.
Personally, I find D&D's rules cryptic and laborious.
I resisted getting a cellphone, but not because I was afraid of them.
Quite simply, I saw hundreds of my fellow college students unable to disconnect from the things. Even when professors implored them to sit down for 45 minutes and focus on learning, they'd invariably interrupt class with a tinny version of the William Tell Overture.
I well understood the benefits of cellphones, and I have one now. Before I was simply disgusted that everyone who had a cellphone couldn't bring themselves to put it away whenever the situation called for it.