As the Penguin said (I paraphrase), never underestimate the power of scotch tape and lots of free time. Someone with an axe to grind will make the time to piece together scaldalous information, whether it's easily aggregatable or not. This feature just makes it easier for people who were mildly curious, rather than obsessed, to see things like this.
What happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?
I believe the "wants to be free" phrase really means, "information posted at all tends not to stay private". We don't want our information to be free. I don't want yours to be, either, generally, but if it's avaiable, it tends to stay that way permanently.
How likely is Janet* to Friend Marsha*? And then browse her wall until she finds that? It's possible, but seems unlikely, unless Janet already thinks you'd be talking trash about her.
What would be the ramifications about Janet cursing you out? (Just curious.)
If you lose your job in a manner that makes you say "well I was better off without those jerks", you're still unemployed. Sour grapes don't pay the bills.
Some kids might never realize that they ARE motorheads, or woodworkers, or savvy mechanics if they don't get exposed to it in school. I actually enjoyed my woodshop class in junior high school tremendously. If I'd taken a metal shop class in high school, I might be more able to do things like make my own bits and pieces for projects.
Perhaps because the last few times we've seen political action to enforce a relative parity of wealth, we've seen Russia and China become places that nearly no American would want to live. Some of this is due to propaganda (zomg, Socialism!), and some of it is due to the massively authoritarian nightmares and abuses of human rights that we've seen them devolve into.
It's possible that our belief that it's better here is a delusion. I doubt that, though.
At the time (when I was a kid), I hated ESB. No happy ending, Luke gets his hand cut off, Han gets his ass kicked, and Luke's Jedi training seemed... meh.
Watching it later, I like it much more. It sets up the big surprises in the movie (holy shit, he's his dad!? Vader wants to overthrow the emperor?), shows Luke growing from Hot Shot Pilot Kid into a more experienced veteran, and shows much more of the romance between Han and Leia. (In ANH, you could kindof go either way if you were trying to imagine Leia ending up with one of them.) The story has much more depth, in many ways. It has betrayals, "I had no choice" moments, and so on, which ANH and RotJ didn't have.
Return of the Jedi had some more depth, in some ways, than ANH, but seemed notable (to me) more for the fact that it wrapped things up, gave the happy ending, and had the good guys kicking ass all over town. I'm not saying I LOVE Empire Strikes Back, but I have a lot more respect for it now than I did when I was a kid. I'd probably enjoy watching it more than ANH, in many ways, but that may be because I've seen them all so many times that it all runs together. ("Wait, they're on the Death Star already? Did I fall asleep or something?")
Or a more concrete example: I have hard drives full of code, documents, and random crap from the past three computers laying about. Some of that is likely stuff I'd wish I had, if I knew about it... but finding those gems is so much work that I tend to leave the volumes unmounted.
I think that is generally translateable as "I want to write back-end code that is awesome, and do not feel that writing a slick UI is a good use of my time". One involves lots of juicy problems to solve in creative ways, and the other is perceived by many as "Can we lay this info out differently?" or "Can we have a button that shows this table, and has automatic input-verification?". All is important, some are less fun for some people.
Many developers may feel that they're good at creating minimally-functionaly UIs, but are not confident (or knowledgeable) at creating really good user interfaces, and thus might not even be asking the users the right questions.
To be fair, I didn't know what Plainsrunning was originally implemented as. That sounds kindof neat. I'd only ever heard it as "Taurens run instead of using a mount", and assumed it was otherwise identical to mount mechanics.
Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't add it as a non-combat upgrade to Travel form for druids.
Any game that has measurable performance will have SOME people who want to know how to Do it Better. Whether that's figuring out how to max their levels in a crafting skill, or do it for the least cost, or whether it's how to kill bad guys faster or heal people more efficiently or minimize the damage they take, someone will ALWAYS be making spreadsheets, simulations, or looking at (or making) logs of combat or experience gain.
On a side note, Recount has more utility than merely being an e-peen measuring tool. The "Deaths" page lets one see a timeline of all the damage (and healing) that someone took before dying. It's extremely helpful to identify whether someone failed to avoid something bad, or wasn't healed soon enough, or didn't get a bad guy taunted off of him quickly enough. It's one of the most informative screens. When looking at damage meters, it also lets you compare a rough breakdown of your skill use (by percent) with someone else's -- which lets me see that I'm doing things differently than the guy that did 20% more damage than me, even if I can't see exactly why that is. (e.g., is he prioritizing X skill over Y, or am I not capitalizing on Z procs?)
When leveling a new character, I was amazed at the disparity of performance between new people and veterans playing alts (alternate characters). People like me start a new character and already have Recount and threat meters running, and look carefully for optimal ways of doing things. New people don't even have a convenient way of knowing that they're performing poorly, because they don't even know that damage meters EXIST. All most people notice is the flashing numbers over the target's head, and more big numbers is better.
Damage meters let you, when grouped with someone of your class, see that "hey, he does 2x the damage I do", and then ask them how they do it. Sure, not everyone wants to do that, but it'd be nice if that capability were built in to the interface. Even more so if players got a tutorial blurb about "You can compare your performance to others by enabling the Damage Meter (Options->Interface->[x]Damage meter)" which showed when they entered a dungeon for the first time, or joined a group. That would at least enable motivated (but inexperienced) players to find out how well they were doing, without needing to start googling on the hunch that they could do better.
This only applies for completely new players to MMOs, or to people who have never played at "high levels". Non-veterans, as it were. When I played Aion (briefly), the first things I researched were how to optimally play my class (Templar), watched videos on weaving 2H strikes, and practiced it in game. A completely new player who picked it up at the store might never even THINK of doing that, unless they'd played an MMO before. The second thing I looked for was a damage meter, so that I could figure out whether I was doing it right. If I were to go play LOTR online, or the new Star Wars: The Old Republic game, I'd go looking for similar stuff too, and that already puts me ahead of a large portion of users.
You realize that World of Warcraft (an MMO, where by definition the servers need to be running the maps and encounter AI) is completely different from Starcraft II (both Blizzard products), right? There is no meaningful "LAN" play for WoW, whereas it might have been nice for SC2 and Diablo 3.
On the other hand, they've been mass-banning people for pointing out (or even asking nicely about) the extreme similarity between the Worgen (wolf people)'s "mount" (the wolf runs on all fours, sans-mount) and the Discarded and Never Implemented Tauren "Plainsrunning" (where the cow-people would do basically the same). If they're adding one, it can't be a tremendous amount of work to add it for the other -- and yet even mentioning it is enough to get a ban on their forums.
It's puzzling, but most players chalk it up as "Oh, Blizzard's so crazy, and no one reads the official forums anyway".
If a game is too easy, you need to play it on the harder settings. Unless you're Very Good at these games, the harder settings will likely be hard enough.
I also don't think that the games are substantially easier. Having played from Doom through COD4, all of the games have parts that are just trash-clearing, and other sequences that end up as tedious quick-load marathons for me. And yet, I'm a better player than I once was, because I have fifteenish years of FPS experiences. I no longer have to think about the process of the shooting or moving. (Now, if only I were more aware or had better reflexes or could aim better.)
In terms of multiplayer, I recall COD4 as a somewhat harsh experience as a newbie: most encounters, I'm on the floor, because hardcore means you die when you get shot. In balance, though, the games tend to be well-balanced (barring bugs and cheaters) and most guns are similarly effective. It's not like Quake where you were fodder if you didn't have a railgun or rockets, for example. In terms of single player, the AI still cheats, and there are still sections stacked against you.
I should revise what I said before. Games are easier now, in that NOW they usually have a difficulty modifier. Default difficulty seems similar, but often there's an easier option available than there used to be, because many players want to play for the maps and story, rather than for the challenge. In return, the hard modes can be VERY hard. (There's a noticeable difference between the hardest and next-hardest difficulty in many games, from DOOM's nightmare mode to AvP's hard modes to COD's harder modes.)
Shouldn't choosing things be when one lets GO of the finger, rather than presses it, since that will prevent this entire class of errors? I bet user testing made people say they didn't like that.
If there hasn't been a guilty verdict, then in the eyes of the law, one should be considered not guilty. No exceptions. I don't care if it's because the police fumbled their warrant, or the lawyer is just extra good, or if the person is innocent in truth. It's our duty, if we respect rule of law (and don't want to be hypocrites), to treat it this way.
The alternative is that we get witch-hunts, where people get punished for being accused or something.
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As the Penguin said (I paraphrase), never underestimate the power of scotch tape and lots of free time. Someone with an axe to grind will make the time to piece together scaldalous information, whether it's easily aggregatable or not. This feature just makes it easier for people who were mildly curious, rather than obsessed, to see things like this.
What happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?
I believe the "wants to be free" phrase really means, "information posted at all tends not to stay private". We don't want our information to be free. I don't want yours to be, either, generally, but if it's avaiable, it tends to stay that way permanently.
How likely is Janet* to Friend Marsha*? And then browse her wall until she finds that? It's possible, but seems unlikely, unless Janet already thinks you'd be talking trash about her.
What would be the ramifications about Janet cursing you out? (Just curious.)
If you lose your job in a manner that makes you say "well I was better off without those jerks", you're still unemployed. Sour grapes don't pay the bills.
Some kids might never realize that they ARE motorheads, or woodworkers, or savvy mechanics if they don't get exposed to it in school. I actually enjoyed my woodshop class in junior high school tremendously. If I'd taken a metal shop class in high school, I might be more able to do things like make my own bits and pieces for projects.
Perhaps because the last few times we've seen political action to enforce a relative parity of wealth, we've seen Russia and China become places that nearly no American would want to live. Some of this is due to propaganda (zomg, Socialism!), and some of it is due to the massively authoritarian nightmares and abuses of human rights that we've seen them devolve into.
It's possible that our belief that it's better here is a delusion. I doubt that, though.
I thought the rule was that Highlander movies get odd numbers, and Trek movies use even numbers?
Ah, but they did! Unfortunately, the documentaries were transported here ... ;)
Awesome friends. I wish all my friends were so nerdy.
At the time (when I was a kid), I hated ESB. No happy ending, Luke gets his hand cut off, Han gets his ass kicked, and Luke's Jedi training seemed ... meh.
Watching it later, I like it much more. It sets up the big surprises in the movie (holy shit, he's his dad!? Vader wants to overthrow the emperor?), shows Luke growing from Hot Shot Pilot Kid into a more experienced veteran, and shows much more of the romance between Han and Leia. (In ANH, you could kindof go either way if you were trying to imagine Leia ending up with one of them.) The story has much more depth, in many ways. It has betrayals, "I had no choice" moments, and so on, which ANH and RotJ didn't have.
Return of the Jedi had some more depth, in some ways, than ANH, but seemed notable (to me) more for the fact that it wrapped things up, gave the happy ending, and had the good guys kicking ass all over town. I'm not saying I LOVE Empire Strikes Back, but I have a lot more respect for it now than I did when I was a kid. I'd probably enjoy watching it more than ANH, in many ways, but that may be because I've seen them all so many times that it all runs together. ("Wait, they're on the Death Star already? Did I fall asleep or something?")
Or a more concrete example: ... but finding those gems is so much work that I tend to leave the volumes unmounted.
I have hard drives full of code, documents, and random crap from the past three computers laying about. Some of that is likely stuff I'd wish I had, if I knew about it
I think that is generally translateable as "I want to write back-end code that is awesome, and do not feel that writing a slick UI is a good use of my time". One involves lots of juicy problems to solve in creative ways, and the other is perceived by many as "Can we lay this info out differently?" or "Can we have a button that shows this table, and has automatic input-verification?". All is important, some are less fun for some people.
Many developers may feel that they're good at creating minimally-functionaly UIs, but are not confident (or knowledgeable) at creating really good user interfaces, and thus might not even be asking the users the right questions.
I suspect that it's also an issue of Google having a nigh-infinite number of servers and very good load-balancing. ;-)
To be fair, I didn't know what Plainsrunning was originally implemented as. That sounds kindof neat. I'd only ever heard it as "Taurens run instead of using a mount", and assumed it was otherwise identical to mount mechanics.
Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't add it as a non-combat upgrade to Travel form for druids.
Any game that has measurable performance will have SOME people who want to know how to Do it Better. Whether that's figuring out how to max their levels in a crafting skill, or do it for the least cost, or whether it's how to kill bad guys faster or heal people more efficiently or minimize the damage they take, someone will ALWAYS be making spreadsheets, simulations, or looking at (or making) logs of combat or experience gain.
On a side note, Recount has more utility than merely being an e-peen measuring tool. The "Deaths" page lets one see a timeline of all the damage (and healing) that someone took before dying. It's extremely helpful to identify whether someone failed to avoid something bad, or wasn't healed soon enough, or didn't get a bad guy taunted off of him quickly enough. It's one of the most informative screens. When looking at damage meters, it also lets you compare a rough breakdown of your skill use (by percent) with someone else's -- which lets me see that I'm doing things differently than the guy that did 20% more damage than me, even if I can't see exactly why that is. (e.g., is he prioritizing X skill over Y, or am I not capitalizing on Z procs?)
When leveling a new character, I was amazed at the disparity of performance between new people and veterans playing alts (alternate characters). People like me start a new character and already have Recount and threat meters running, and look carefully for optimal ways of doing things. New people don't even have a convenient way of knowing that they're performing poorly, because they don't even know that damage meters EXIST. All most people notice is the flashing numbers over the target's head, and more big numbers is better.
Damage meters let you, when grouped with someone of your class, see that "hey, he does 2x the damage I do", and then ask them how they do it. Sure, not everyone wants to do that, but it'd be nice if that capability were built in to the interface. Even more so if players got a tutorial blurb about "You can compare your performance to others by enabling the Damage Meter (Options->Interface->[x]Damage meter)" which showed when they entered a dungeon for the first time, or joined a group. That would at least enable motivated (but inexperienced) players to find out how well they were doing, without needing to start googling on the hunch that they could do better.
This only applies for completely new players to MMOs, or to people who have never played at "high levels". Non-veterans, as it were. When I played Aion (briefly), the first things I researched were how to optimally play my class (Templar), watched videos on weaving 2H strikes, and practiced it in game. A completely new player who picked it up at the store might never even THINK of doing that, unless they'd played an MMO before. The second thing I looked for was a damage meter, so that I could figure out whether I was doing it right. If I were to go play LOTR online, or the new Star Wars: The Old Republic game, I'd go looking for similar stuff too, and that already puts me ahead of a large portion of users.
You realize that World of Warcraft (an MMO, where by definition the servers need to be running the maps and encounter AI) is completely different from Starcraft II (both Blizzard products), right? There is no meaningful "LAN" play for WoW, whereas it might have been nice for SC2 and Diablo 3.
On the other hand, they've been mass-banning people for pointing out (or even asking nicely about) the extreme similarity between the Worgen (wolf people)'s "mount" (the wolf runs on all fours, sans-mount) and the Discarded and Never Implemented Tauren "Plainsrunning" (where the cow-people would do basically the same). If they're adding one, it can't be a tremendous amount of work to add it for the other -- and yet even mentioning it is enough to get a ban on their forums.
It's puzzling, but most players chalk it up as "Oh, Blizzard's so crazy, and no one reads the official forums anyway".
What's next, making HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent/the Internet illegal because it "encourages illegal file-sharing"?
If the RIAA/MPAA and their friends could figure out how to do it, they would. They've been trying for quite some time (witness, ACTA).
If a game is too easy, you need to play it on the harder settings. Unless you're Very Good at these games, the harder settings will likely be hard enough.
I also don't think that the games are substantially easier. Having played from Doom through COD4, all of the games have parts that are just trash-clearing, and other sequences that end up as tedious quick-load marathons for me. And yet, I'm a better player than I once was, because I have fifteenish years of FPS experiences. I no longer have to think about the process of the shooting or moving. (Now, if only I were more aware or had better reflexes or could aim better.)
In terms of multiplayer, I recall COD4 as a somewhat harsh experience as a newbie: most encounters, I'm on the floor, because hardcore means you die when you get shot. In balance, though, the games tend to be well-balanced (barring bugs and cheaters) and most guns are similarly effective. It's not like Quake where you were fodder if you didn't have a railgun or rockets, for example. In terms of single player, the AI still cheats, and there are still sections stacked against you.
I should revise what I said before. Games are easier now, in that NOW they usually have a difficulty modifier. Default difficulty seems similar, but often there's an easier option available than there used to be, because many players want to play for the maps and story, rather than for the challenge. In return, the hard modes can be VERY hard. (There's a noticeable difference between the hardest and next-hardest difficulty in many games, from DOOM's nightmare mode to AvP's hard modes to COD's harder modes.)
Shouldn't choosing things be when one lets GO of the finger, rather than presses it, since that will prevent this entire class of errors? I bet user testing made people say they didn't like that.
Somehow, I misread it at first as Sharon Apple. Whoops.
If there hasn't been a guilty verdict, then in the eyes of the law, one should be considered not guilty. No exceptions. I don't care if it's because the police fumbled their warrant, or the lawyer is just extra good, or if the person is innocent in truth. It's our duty, if we respect rule of law (and don't want to be hypocrites), to treat it this way.
The alternative is that we get witch-hunts, where people get punished for being accused or something.
You're also ineligible to moderate in any article that you've replied to (and replying will trash any mod points you'd already applied therein).
Distribution of knowledge!? What the hell is going on at these schools? Bunch of hoodlums ...