i'm sorry but i prefer high fantasy, and I like the screenshots from this game better. But as my previous reaction post suggests, looks aren't everything.
I think it's a big mistake centering their game on pvp like this.
they can call it "pvpve" all they want, but the entire game depends on pvp to control the resources necessary for gear, and with it, raid progression.
Additionally, everyone I met who likes their fantasy games "ornate" tends to avoid pvp like the plague.
I personally cannot stand it in WoW, and i'm looking at pretty much the same class system from wow transplanted into this game.
The screenshots are very encouraging. Listening to the description of the gameplay and progression reminds me of those horrible days trying out a pvp server and leveling in STV on WoW.
Ganked by skull? No thanks, you can keep that. MMO's to me are supposed to be about style and substance, not "headshot" and rankings.
To reiterate: I want to live in a society that supports those who take basic care of themselves but are unlucky. Choose not to live reasonably healthily and you should not expect society to pay for your poor choice.
unfortunately, as with all solutions of this nature, there is the potential for false positive/negative.
Personally, i'd err toward caution on the humanitarian rather than the financial side of this debate.
"better 1,000 welfare queens suck cash than 1 legitimate sufferer go untreated."
According to obama's page, he still thinks the information age will be about "selling bits" as if theyre property.
So now you have a real gamble..
elect someone who is incompetent with tech and hope he either ignores it or utterly fails in the mass initiative against freedom of the internet and consumer rights.
-OR-
elect someone who has shown remarkable savvy and grasp of technology, and has sold out to the DMCA.
Protect American Intellectual Property Abroad: The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that in 2005, more than nine of every 10 DVDs sold in China were illegal copies. The U.S. Trade Representative said 80 percent of all counterfeit products seized at U.S. borders still come from China. Barack Obama will work to ensure intellectual property is protected in foreign markets, and promote greater cooperation on international standards [HELLO ACTA] that allow our technologies to compete everywhere. Protect Intellectual Property at Home: Intellectual property is to the digital age what physical goods were to the industrial age. [No DMCA reform in our time! hello new "drug war"]Barack Obama believes we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.
A family friend of mine is part of an ohio voter watchdog mailing list.
The MSM has at best mentioned it in passing, but senior diebold officials with heavy connections to the republican party were left alone to perform "patches" on the voting machines which, aside from eye witnesses at the time, went entirely unlogged, and which were entirely unsupervised.
Shortly after, the 2004 presidential elections took place.
Characterize it how you like, but in "entertaining" this outlook you are assisting a misanthropic FUD campaign which mischaracterizes anyone with chronic health concerns as "welfare queens" leeching off others.
Of course, they don't talk about how there's a growing sect of people, including medical professionals, who believe the FDA's lax stance on food additives cause chronic diseases like the one I have. (the number of chemical additive and Rx recalls in the past decade for "unforeseen side effects" is staggering, for instance)
In which case, that is actually repayment of a toll they took from me and people like me in quality of life.
If this was not your intent, then you did an awful job framing it in terms of hypothetical or third person perspective.
Enable stock holders to share data about corporate executives, their health records, their private lives, credit scores of their companies, etc. Build a website that allows people to post photos of wandering executives, health histories so that shareholders can then approach the board to remove a CEO. Do it especially on a large corporate scale. Incorporate a company to do this, and operate under the corporate shell. If they sue you, they need to sue your corporate and not bankrupt you. Make the records public, for sale, and provide detailed analysis of banks, especially based on credit ratings, customer satisfaction, etc.
This is the perfect analogy to what these scumbags are doing to us. May as well just slap the barcodes on us so we can be "scanned" for interviews.
There are several neutral, non-profit organizations which provide social services to america at large.
They were founded by the government, but are otherwise independent, and appointed directors either keep them solvent or they die.
This works for numerous organizations, and it could work for a federal, TRULY equal opportunity, insurance company. Of course, a very powerful middle-man who has been gouging us for several centuries will be cut out: the other insurance companies, who will either go kaput or be forced to reap "not-obscene" amounts of profit.
What you are spouting is their propaganda, no less so than the way the MAFIAA spews fud about the internet, p2p, the DMCA, fair use rights, and competition.
To play devil's advocate, why should those of us with good health have to pay extra for your problems?
Because on a long enough timeline, the chance that you won't get sick approaches 0.
If you happen to be the greedy psychopathic type that drives our economy.. if qualified or potentially qualified people who could or may already work for you are incapacitated because they were denied treatment, you lose productivity, ergo money
So the more information your insurer has about you, the more each person is bearing his own risk, and the less he is bearing the risks of those around him. Literally, society is bearing less of the cost of individuals who behave dangerously.
Republicans love that kind of thing. They like the idea of personal responsibility
One month back in 1999, my stomach hurt like someone was running it through the "puree" setting on your average blender for that entire month. (it continues on and off to this day, and severely affects my nutrition uptake)
I went in, was put through testing, and diagnosed by one of the regions most eminent experts in the field with Crohns disease.
In addition, I was born with a chemical imbalance called bipolar disorder.
Neither of these was my choice. I didn't "live dangerously". In fact, i've been one of the straightest shooters out there.
Now i'm being penalized. I "can't get arrested" in my quest to get insured, so i can get treatment, so i can get this kind of thing under enough control to pursue a stable career.
Believe me, when you suffer from chronic pain and nutrition issues of this nature AND have bipolar, you don't get a much more perfect storm than that.
Insurance companies are supposed to be about SPREADING risk, not about discriminating against people, and yes, when they demand anything more than your name, phone number, and social security number to make their decision, it is discrimination.
the only progress i've seen on marijuana is states lying to their citizens and getting them tossed into prison under federal charges.
every single election they say what you said about how social security is 'bound to be looked at', and the only "looking" i've seen is hungry republican eyes looking to give the scraps to corporations.
Are you saying the mid 70's never happened with oil? it's been a major issue for 4 decades and running... theyre burying their heads in the sand and selling my generation and yours down the river.
Nafta not seen as a big issue? it's been a drain on the middle class for over a decade, and what have they done? they've expanded the program with cafta, ausfta, etc.
DMCA.. there's a difference between "fighting" it with hackers and actually making progress in the legislatures. Not only are public interest groups shuffled into the broom closet, but with initiatives like acta theyre taking them out of that closet and moving them to the outhouse down the street.. the really smelly one the maintenance workers are afraid to go near.
Pretty much all the game has turned into 'things to do at the level cap'. And there is a lot of stuff to do.
A new player joining a server is going to be pretty much ignored until they reach 70, no one does the old content anymore. And there's no harm in giving an old player a speed-leveling alt.
This is the typical "arse-backwards" solution blizzard further breaks their game with every patch, forcing them to backpedal even harder the patch after.
For example: In early bc, people were still using thunderfury because it was better for tanking than what bc had to offer. Instead of fixing the BC tanking weapons, they nerfed thunderfury. Half a year later, they buff prot warrior base threat because of that lacking gear.
In this case, rather than offer properly balanced loot tables and tweak instances to allow continuous runs and compelling upgrades for every class at every level from 20 to 70 to actually make alts interesting to "play" rather than "power level", theyre introducing this limited band-aid.
This will not solve the greater problem of spending 2 days looking for a group for a pre-70 instance, and being lucky if you meet one person who knows how to play in a group every two weeks. The only way to do that is to make level 1 to 70 as equally compelling as the endgame raiding.
I've been everywhere, from deadmines to hyjal, and what i really miss, is mara.
My guild goes with the flow. There's no DKP or "special" loot system, just/rolls.
At one point they were 2 into hyjal and bt, we lost a few members over the summer, and have rebuilt and are very quickly moving back to that point.
There was no drama through any of this though. We go for the experience and socialization first, loot second. I have yet to see any "moping", and "guild politics" is a foreign concept.
He's made it clear that Google, the company, is not directly involved with the closing of his blog. I've read and respect Patry enough to believe that if something along those cynical lines was the case, he'd pretty much say so.
just like, when the police ask, that escaped prisoner in the basement with a gun to your child's head was never there.
I don't think you're getting it. They're charging people for INCOMING text.
I don't use text, and believe in the kiss principle (thus my brick mobile which is as close to "just a phone" as you can buy), but I still receive text spam. More text spam in fact than email spam!
They're charging you for having text spam forced down your gullet by unsolicited third parties (which could include your carrier as well)
I can understand how this might be a breach of contract issue for customers with binding contracts, and I would certainly expect many customers, even without binding contracts, to cancel their service over this. However, I really can't see how a customer can consider themselves justified in arbitrarily billing a company for their time just because the company makes changes that they dislike, no matter how horrible those changes may be.
explain to me how it's not justified? they're billing people for spam they RECEIVE, using the assanine american "per-message" system.
People being held liable for unsollicited traffic they cannot control is criminally absurd, and if their regulatory bodies refuse to crush it in the womb, then I say billing phone companies for their time is an excellent proactive demonstration of, and against, that absurdity.
An entire complete operating system including thousands of programs that can be freely shared far and wide at no cost by everyone, suitable for use in the tiniest embedded processors all the way to the top ranked supercomputers on Earth..and now beyond into space?
I think this guy hit the nail on the head, and to GP:
i'm glad those people are a minority, unfortunately for every one of those there are many who simply walk away silently. Personally, I think that's tragic, and I think the parent post outlines a proper compromise in regard to that kind of conflict.
The situation is compounded if it becomes easier to write one's own X than to modify an X already available - you end up with lots and lots of Xs that are finished only to a point where their development teams find them sufficient.
all too often this is the case.
projects should always take care to extensively document their code to prevent this kind of thing.
"-are all options of the application available in the GUI"
almost all OSS software I know fails in this check.
not that that's necessarily a drawback.
The application could be incredibly powerful, far more-so than it's non-oss competitors, and still offer the same more more options configurable from the UI plus additional options.
I suppose the GP poster simply didn't feel like spelling out such nuances, but it's rather important.
The presence of a gui does not preclude the presence of a CLI option.
If it does, the program lacks proper delineation between the front and back ends.
I have both versions of mplayer on my mac. The "click and drool" version allows me to trivally playlist things for that "noisy wallpaper" that is piping vids to my tv. The CLI version has more current code, better efficiency, and lighter weight for when i'm actually focusing my full attention on the app.
I agree that some users are at a level of naivety where it really is their fault (my mother, for instance - BUT because her needs are far less stringent than mine, she's able to use ubuntu on an everyday basis). Yet, i'm not a naive user and I have a lot of trouble with a great many OSS guis.
I had to train myself on VLC for instance, and I still don't understand it all because their prefpanes are (apparently) based on the structure of the underlying code rather than logical categories. This doesn't mean features or configurability need to be stripped to "streamline" it. Personally, I'd suggest taking each configurable setting they have right now and placing it in a "naive user defined" basket.
Slashdot Mirror
i'm sorry but i prefer high fantasy, and I like the screenshots from this game better. But as my previous reaction post suggests, looks aren't everything.
I think it's a big mistake centering their game on pvp like this.
they can call it "pvpve" all they want, but the entire game depends on pvp to control the resources necessary for gear, and with it, raid progression.
Additionally, everyone I met who likes their fantasy games "ornate" tends to avoid pvp like the plague.
I personally cannot stand it in WoW, and i'm looking at pretty much the same class system from wow transplanted into this game.
The screenshots are very encouraging. Listening to the description of the gameplay and progression reminds me of those horrible days trying out a pvp server and leveling in STV on WoW.
Ganked by skull? No thanks, you can keep that. MMO's to me are supposed to be about style and substance, not "headshot" and rankings.
To reiterate: I want to live in a society that supports those who take basic care of themselves but are unlucky. Choose not to live reasonably healthily and you should not expect society to pay for your poor choice.
unfortunately, as with all solutions of this nature, there is the potential for false positive/negative.
Personally, i'd err toward caution on the humanitarian rather than the financial side of this debate.
"better 1,000 welfare queens suck cash than 1 legitimate sufferer go untreated."
McCain and Obama on geek issues. This also covers candidates who have been eliminated from the race.
Isn't this kind of ignoring the Elephant in the room?
According to obama's page, he still thinks the information age will be about "selling bits" as if theyre property.
So now you have a real gamble..
elect someone who is incompetent with tech and hope he either ignores it or utterly fails in the mass initiative against freedom of the internet and consumer rights.
-OR-
elect someone who has shown remarkable savvy and grasp of technology, and has sold out to the DMCA.
A family friend of mine is part of an ohio voter watchdog mailing list.
The MSM has at best mentioned it in passing, but senior diebold officials with heavy connections to the republican party were left alone to perform "patches" on the voting machines which, aside from eye witnesses at the time, went entirely unlogged, and which were entirely unsupervised.
Shortly after, the 2004 presidential elections took place.
Characterize it how you like, but in "entertaining" this outlook you are assisting a misanthropic FUD campaign which mischaracterizes anyone with chronic health concerns as "welfare queens" leeching off others.
Of course, they don't talk about how there's a growing sect of people, including medical professionals, who believe the FDA's lax stance on food additives cause chronic diseases like the one I have. (the number of chemical additive and Rx recalls in the past decade for "unforeseen side effects" is staggering, for instance)
In which case, that is actually repayment of a toll they took from me and people like me in quality of life.
If this was not your intent, then you did an awful job framing it in terms of hypothetical or third person perspective.
exactly! I wish I had known this little factoid before making a reply above.
Enable stock holders to share data about corporate executives, their health records, their private lives, credit scores of their companies, etc.
Build a website that allows people to post photos of wandering executives, health histories so that shareholders can then approach the board to remove a CEO.
Do it especially on a large corporate scale. Incorporate a company to do this, and operate under the corporate shell. If they sue you, they need to sue your corporate and not bankrupt you.
Make the records public, for sale, and provide detailed analysis of banks, especially based on credit ratings, customer satisfaction, etc.
This is the perfect analogy to what these scumbags are doing to us. May as well just slap the barcodes on us so we can be "scanned" for interviews.
There are several neutral, non-profit organizations which provide social services to america at large.
They were founded by the government, but are otherwise independent, and appointed directors either keep them solvent or they die.
This works for numerous organizations, and it could work for a federal, TRULY equal opportunity, insurance company. Of course, a very powerful middle-man who has been gouging us for several centuries will be cut out: the other insurance companies, who will either go kaput or be forced to reap "not-obscene" amounts of profit.
What you are spouting is their propaganda, no less so than the way the MAFIAA spews fud about the internet, p2p, the DMCA, fair use rights, and competition.
pass "medical insurance neutrality" laws.
"all medical insurance companies are hereby compelled to provide insurance at a flat rate across the board to anyone who seeks coverage"
They will optimize for profits, but without gouging and/or denying coverage to select groups.
To play devil's advocate, why should those of us with good health have to pay extra for your problems?
Because on a long enough timeline, the chance that you won't get sick approaches 0.
If you happen to be the greedy psychopathic type that drives our economy.. if qualified or potentially qualified people who could or may already work for you are incapacitated because they were denied treatment, you lose productivity, ergo money
a healthy workforce is a productive workforce.
Much sickness is due to lifestyle.
bullshit.
Most of it is due to hereditary factors. Generally we call denying people services or charging more based on hereditary factors "discrimination".
So the more information your insurer has about you, the more each person is bearing his own risk, and the less he is bearing the risks of those around him. Literally, society is bearing less of the cost of individuals who behave dangerously.
Republicans love that kind of thing. They like the idea of personal responsibility
One month back in 1999, my stomach hurt like someone was running it through the "puree" setting on your average blender for that entire month. (it continues on and off to this day, and severely affects my nutrition uptake)
I went in, was put through testing, and diagnosed by one of the regions most eminent experts in the field with Crohns disease.
In addition, I was born with a chemical imbalance called bipolar disorder.
Neither of these was my choice. I didn't "live dangerously". In fact, i've been one of the straightest shooters out there.
Now i'm being penalized. I "can't get arrested" in my quest to get insured, so i can get treatment, so i can get this kind of thing under enough control to pursue a stable career.
Believe me, when you suffer from chronic pain and nutrition issues of this nature AND have bipolar, you don't get a much more perfect storm than that.
Insurance companies are supposed to be about SPREADING risk, not about discriminating against people, and yes, when they demand anything more than your name, phone number, and social security number to make their decision, it is discrimination.
how much time?
and all i see in this post is lip service.
the only progress i've seen on marijuana is states lying to their citizens and getting them tossed into prison under federal charges.
every single election they say what you said about how social security is 'bound to be looked at', and the only "looking" i've seen is hungry republican eyes looking to give the scraps to corporations.
Are you saying the mid 70's never happened with oil? it's been a major issue for 4 decades and running... theyre burying their heads in the sand and selling my generation and yours down the river.
Nafta not seen as a big issue? it's been a drain on the middle class for over a decade, and what have they done? they've expanded the program with cafta, ausfta, etc.
DMCA.. there's a difference between "fighting" it with hackers and actually making progress in the legislatures. Not only are public interest groups shuffled into the broom closet, but with initiatives like acta theyre taking them out of that closet and moving them to the outhouse down the street.. the really smelly one the maintenance workers are afraid to go near.
Pretty much all the game has turned into 'things to do at the level cap'. And there is a lot of stuff to do.
A new player joining a server is going to be pretty much ignored until they reach 70, no one does the old content anymore. And there's no harm in giving an old player a speed-leveling alt.
This is the typical "arse-backwards" solution blizzard further breaks their game with every patch, forcing them to backpedal even harder the patch after.
For example: In early bc, people were still using thunderfury because it was better for tanking than what bc had to offer. Instead of fixing the BC tanking weapons, they nerfed thunderfury. Half a year later, they buff prot warrior base threat because of that lacking gear.
In this case, rather than offer properly balanced loot tables and tweak instances to allow continuous runs and compelling upgrades for every class at every level from 20 to 70 to actually make alts interesting to "play" rather than "power level", theyre introducing this limited band-aid.
This will not solve the greater problem of spending 2 days looking for a group for a pre-70 instance, and being lucky if you meet one person who knows how to play in a group every two weeks. The only way to do that is to make level 1 to 70 as equally compelling as the endgame raiding.
I've been everywhere, from deadmines to hyjal, and what i really miss, is mara.
I enjoyed experiencing Stranglethorn Vale
I know you were'nt on a pvp realm! : ) (neither was i)
I got lucky.
My guild goes with the flow. There's no DKP or "special" loot system, just /rolls.
At one point they were 2 into hyjal and bt, we lost a few members over the summer, and have rebuilt and are very quickly moving back to that point.
There was no drama through any of this though. We go for the experience and socialization first, loot second. I have yet to see any "moping", and "guild politics" is a foreign concept.
He's made it clear that Google, the company, is not directly involved with the closing of his blog. I've read and respect Patry enough to believe that if something along those cynical lines was the case, he'd pretty much say so.
just like, when the police ask, that escaped prisoner in the basement with a gun to your child's head was never there.
I believe it like i believe the world is flat.
I don't think you're getting it. They're charging people for INCOMING text.
I don't use text, and believe in the kiss principle (thus my brick mobile which is as close to "just a phone" as you can buy), but I still receive text spam. More text spam in fact than email spam!
They're charging you for having text spam forced down your gullet by unsolicited third parties (which could include your carrier as well)
I can understand how this might be a breach of contract issue for customers with binding contracts, and I would certainly expect many customers, even without binding contracts, to cancel their service over this. However, I really can't see how a customer can consider themselves justified in arbitrarily billing a company for their time just because the company makes changes that they dislike, no matter how horrible those changes may be.
explain to me how it's not justified? they're billing people for spam they RECEIVE, using the assanine american "per-message" system.
People being held liable for unsollicited traffic they cannot control is criminally absurd, and if their regulatory bodies refuse to crush it in the womb, then I say billing phone companies for their time is an excellent proactive demonstration of, and against, that absurdity.
An entire complete operating system including thousands of programs that can be freely shared far and wide at no cost by everyone, suitable for use in the tiniest embedded processors all the way to the top ranked supercomputers on Earth..and now beyond into space?
Outside of that, nothing I guess.
yes, but does it run linux?
I think this guy hit the nail on the head, and to GP:
i'm glad those people are a minority, unfortunately for every one of those there are many who simply walk away silently. Personally, I think that's tragic, and I think the parent post outlines a proper compromise in regard to that kind of conflict.
The situation is compounded if it becomes easier to write one's own X than to modify an X already available - you end up with lots and lots of Xs that are finished only to a point where their development teams find them sufficient.
all too often this is the case.
projects should always take care to extensively document their code to prevent this kind of thing.
"-are all options of the application available in the GUI"
almost all OSS software I know fails in this check.
not that that's necessarily a drawback.
The application could be incredibly powerful, far more-so than it's non-oss competitors, and still offer the same more more options configurable from the UI plus additional options.
I suppose the GP poster simply didn't feel like spelling out such nuances, but it's rather important.
The presence of a gui does not preclude the presence of a CLI option.
If it does, the program lacks proper delineation between the front and back ends.
I have both versions of mplayer on my mac. The "click and drool" version allows me to trivally playlist things for that "noisy wallpaper" that is piping vids to my tv. The CLI version has more current code, better efficiency, and lighter weight for when i'm actually focusing my full attention on the app.
I agree that some users are at a level of naivety where it really is their fault (my mother, for instance - BUT because her needs are far less stringent than mine, she's able to use ubuntu on an everyday basis). Yet, i'm not a naive user and I have a lot of trouble with a great many OSS guis.
I had to train myself on VLC for instance, and I still don't understand it all because their prefpanes are (apparently) based on the structure of the underlying code rather than logical categories. This doesn't mean features or configurability need to be stripped to "streamline" it. Personally, I'd suggest taking each configurable setting they have right now and placing it in a "naive user defined" basket.