Still, from what I've heard (mostly from biased people, I freely admit) WoW is more polished than EQ2 anyway.
I've been playing WoW beta for about five months now. It's a great game, lots of fun; my favorite way of describing it is, "WoW is like EQ with all the stupid shit taken out." (And lots of cool stuff added.) EQ2, though, I knew nothing about until last weekend, when I was over at a friend's house. He showed me EQ2 and let me play around with it a little bit.
Before I describe what it was like, let me say that the single thing that will most keep me from playing EQ2 is that I played EQ for three years and SWG for six months (after beta testing it for 9 months), and I'm intimately familiar with SOE's significant tendency toward cluelessness. There was a lot good about EQ (and some, though less, about SWG), but there were so many times when they just screwed the pooch one way or another, that I'm not willing to trust that they're going to run EQ2 right.
That said, the actual play experience with EQ2 was a bit underwhelming. The graphics are fantastic -- I love how you can actually see terrain reflected in water, a feature I wish they'd add to WoW. But graphics aren't enough, and a few specific things turned me off. One, EQ2 still seems to feature lengthy loading screens when you go between zones, or even when you transit between parts of the same city. I'd have hoped this would be a thing of the past; I'm so used to the lack of loading screens in WoW that it was jarring the first time it happened.
(To be fair, WoW does have loading screens for when you enter an instanced dungeon, and when you switch between the two continents, but in either case the loading screens take no longer than 10-20 seconds, and that's on my 2-year-old, not-all-that-fast machine. When I was playing EQ2 on my friend's machine, which is a top-of-the-line Alienware gaming box, it still took a good 30 seconds to go from one part of Qeynos to another. I can't imagine how long it would take on my machine.)
The voice acting was, well, goofy; I wasn't especially impressed. Some of the NPCs sounded okay, but others just sounded annoying. They should use Blizzard's casting director when hiring voices. The interface didn't seem nearly as polished as WoW's, either. Granted, I only played for about ten minutes, so I'm sure a longer experience would really be necessary to make a fair judgment.
I'm sure I'd have fun playing EQ2, but I'm virtually certain I'll have more fun playing WoW, and I don't have time for more than one MMOG right now. Odds are I'll be sticking with WoW when it goes live.
Yes in the case of the Doom 3 vs Half-Life 2 argument. Doom 3 lacked polish when it went beyond single-player which hurt it badly (deathmatch only? fun, but lacks variety). But in anyway you look at it, Doom 3 put a dent in Half-Life 2's fanfare.
This is somewhat tangential, but don't make the mistake of assuming that Doom 3 was "hurt" at all by lacking polish beyond single player. id Software isn't in the business of selling games: they're in the business of selling game engines. They make far more money doing that than they do from selling copies of a game like Doom 3. Don't get me wrong, game sales are a nice side benefit, but essentially Doom 3 (and every id game since Quake) has been released in order to demonstrate the new engine they've created. id then licenses the engine to numerous developers, who wrap their own content around it.
Don't laugh. Rumor has it that the Mac responsible for doing the "Greedo shoots first" changes later became clinically depressed, turned to pills and booze, and finally committed suicide.
Lucas, you maniac! When will this abuse of innocent computers end?!
Your DB truncating numbers, giving invalid results and allowing invalid data is not an issue for you? I dunno but that is not something I will tolerate from my DB. I expect its output to make sense and I expect it not to take artistic license with what I give to it.
Even if MySQL does a few things counterintuitively, it does them deterministically. We've learned those problems and moved on. "Artistic license"? Please.
I don't trust my data to a desktop GUI environment. I trust my data to the underlying filesystem and the DBs running on top of that filesystem.
Yes, and I'm sure your favorite underlying filesystem and the DBs you run never have any quirks or bugs.
I would not accept such quirks from the filesystem or any kind of data archival/backup solution, either, but it seems that you would. You're a more tolerant person than I.
Well, one man's quirk is another man's expected behavior. We're all familiar with MySQL and its quirks, which means we don't have to worry about them causing problems, because we've already accounted for them.
I'm calling your bluff. What hardware is this running on?
300 web servers (Mandrake 9.2) (we were overloaded with 100 servers, then we brought up a shitload more to reduce per-server load and give us room to grow), twenty MySQL servers in paired clusters that each hold distinct tables (one of them, used for holding gobs of language translation data, is quad-replicated).
You do no query caching
We probably do, but most of our tables are getting updated at least ten percent as often as they're getting selected from.
or static pageviews?
Essentially zero static pages. Every single page has PHP code in it, and all but a tiny handful of pages have queries.
Every single one of those 250 million pages is dynamically served?
Yep (although some of the flat content, like the Neopian Times (weekly newspaper) are served from static include files, but PHP still comes into play for things like picking random news articles to display in the sidebar). Go play with our site (neopets.com) a bit.
Not even the mighty Slashdot does that.
I'm not familiar with Slashdot's numbers, but I'm reasonably certain we do quite a lot more pages (and bandwidth) than Slashdot. I think, during peak times, we have an outgoing steady bandwidth of 1.5 gigabits/sec. Two colo facilities, one in Los Angeles and one in San Jose.
You have a table with a hundred million rows in it that's actively manipulated in read and write capacity and it has acceptable performance?
We have several of them, actually. Ten big ones with 100mrows or more. Plus a few hundred other, smaller tables ("smaller" meaning "between one and 30-odd million rows").
How many queries/sec on that one and what kind of queries?
Our biggest table is, naturally, the account data table, which gets selected on every page and updated pretty frequently (probably about 5% of page loads per user, and we usually have a couple hundred thousand users playing at peak).
I suppose you think it's acceptable to remove reverse from your transmission since some people accidentally slip into reverse on the way to park?
You know the old saying: Never let a pig drive a tractor full of fish. That saying makes about as much sense as your transmission analogy, which is to say: What the hell are you talking about?
you're saying that you prefer to try and keep all of these in mind when you write apps that use MySQL,
It probably says more about you than about me that you think that that list of "gotchas" (many of which are no longer valid, or are otherwise insignificant) is somehow difficult to keep in mind. None of the professional programmers I work with have any difficulty dealing with the quirks of the MySQL database environment, especially considering that that list of gotchas is tiny compared to the list of design quirks our site code has built up over the years. Hell, it's tiny compared to the quirks in any desktop GUI environment.
What company do you own, again?
I work at Neopets.com. 250 million pages a day, mean of 9 queries per page, which averages out to about 26,000 queries per second. And we're having many fewer DB integrity problems since we started switching back to MySQL from Oracle. What problems we do have arise when people do things like enable code that lets users do fulltext field searches 20 times a second on tables that have 200,000 rows. Our biggest tables have over 100 million rows.
My company uses MySQL for most of its databases (we're still in the lengthy process of converting everything over from Oracle, but, ah, we have a handful of critical tables with over 100 million rows each). We do several thousand queries per second, non-stop, and have minimal problems with MySQL. (We have fewer problems with MySQL than we did with Oracle!)
I'm sure Postgre is great and all, but the evidence does seem to indicate that MySQL is suited for at least some intense applications.
Maybe this is just nitpicking, but the word "custom" usually means "built to custom specifications for a particular customer." Customer. This is really just a special promotional edition iPod that is being mass-produced. Kind of misleading to call it "custom."
The point of the Second Amendment was not to guarantee people the right to arm themselves against criminals and bandits (although that is a side benefit). The point of the Second Amendment was so that the people can take up arms against the government if it became corrupt and oppressive.
Whether it's a good amendment, or still makes any sense in modern times, is a different kettle of fish entirely.
Are you implying that because we haven't directed billions of dollars' worth of movies, we don't have a right to criticize the AFI's choice? Or Lucas's actions or motivations?
Makes one wonder why they don't just still call them Wizards.
Probably because one of the player classes in EQ is Wizard.:) And though I understand your point in general, I think the proper solution is to have better customer service, not by merely labelling the GMs with a word synonymous for "powerful, capricious bastards."
I'm sure that having celebrity voices will make up for Sony's historical lack of responsiveness to its players, tendency toward leaving significant bugs extant for months at a time, incredible ability to back and fill when their community representatives contradict themselves, and so on.
I played EQ for 2 years and while I did have a lot of fun, I was never especially happy with how they handled customer interaction. It didn't help that every single expansion they released had numerous, major bugs, and unfinished content that would get implemented months after launch, and then immediately get broken by players doing things the developers never thought of. Then they'd rebalance that content, and it would still be broken, merely in a new and interesting way.
Then there was the incredibly variable customer service. GMs were given an extremely wide latitude about how they could do things, which led to a lot of situations where someone did X, and was told it was okay, and someone else later also did exactly X, and was warned/suspended/banned for it. I was a Guide for six months on Brell Serilis (Tovarax Two Tone, troll bard), and we had a cool GM (Hi Oribi!) but a lot of other servers weren't so lucky. Even some of our guides were anal-retentive assholes, while others were easygoing. This kind of thing led directly to the impression that EQ customer service was capricious and cruel. It didn't help that there was no guarantee that a CS person would be online at any given time, so you might have an issue and have no chance of it being resolved before you had to log off.
Don't even get me started about the disaster that is Star Wars Galaxies. (It's not a game, it's an economy simulator with a Star Wars-themed front end.) Unless you saw it, you can't imagine the pandemonium on the beta boards when they announced that the game was launching in 9 days. Everyone thought SOE was nuts. The game was released less than half-finished, and over a year later it's still got huge problems.
I'm sure EQ2 will be pretty and flashy and have lots of cool stuff. But I have severe doubts -- well-grounded in history -- about SOE's ability to keep things good in the long run. Certainly wouldn't mind them proving me wrong.
Meanwhile, World of Warcraft in beta is already a better game than EQ was three years after it launched:)
Beating people up--and that includes snide, offhand, inaccurate and ad-hominem remarks--is wrong.
(Emphasis mine.) Then:
I don't know how you got modded +2 Insightful. I really don't. I'd like to think that all of us here have at least the basic moral development of a kindergartener.
I've got this pot and this kettle here next to me -- perhaps you could tell me what color they are.
not one of the sickening fascist authoritarian new Republicans
Random FYI: you're referring to "neocons" (neo-conservatives), who no longer believe in small government, but rather in fascist, centralized power held by the rich.:)
We should use the yardstick of reason - what actually works, and what do the majority of the people find acceptable?
This only works with a properly informed populace. When powerful forces do their best to prevent people from having accurate information about (for example) the effects and dangers of drug use, and the mechanisms for appropriately dealing with drug abuse, just looking at "what works" and what people find acceptible is, to be bluntly scientific, suboptimal. When most people believe (due to inaccurate information) that anyone who ever uses drugs should be put in jail for years, is that really the best thing for society?
It's like denying kids information about reproductive biology and sex education, and then wondering why teenagers get each other pregnant.
it is much like dreaming about a world without crimes.
It is our responsiblity to shield ourselves from the shit.
Yeah, but we have professional crimefighting forces (police) so that every random Joe doesn't have to investigate crimes himself. The GP is saying that we should have the same for spam.
Slashdot Mirror
Before I describe what it was like, let me say that the single thing that will most keep me from playing EQ2 is that I played EQ for three years and SWG for six months (after beta testing it for 9 months), and I'm intimately familiar with SOE's significant tendency toward cluelessness. There was a lot good about EQ (and some, though less, about SWG), but there were so many times when they just screwed the pooch one way or another, that I'm not willing to trust that they're going to run EQ2 right.
That said, the actual play experience with EQ2 was a bit underwhelming. The graphics are fantastic -- I love how you can actually see terrain reflected in water, a feature I wish they'd add to WoW. But graphics aren't enough, and a few specific things turned me off. One, EQ2 still seems to feature lengthy loading screens when you go between zones, or even when you transit between parts of the same city. I'd have hoped this would be a thing of the past; I'm so used to the lack of loading screens in WoW that it was jarring the first time it happened.
(To be fair, WoW does have loading screens for when you enter an instanced dungeon, and when you switch between the two continents, but in either case the loading screens take no longer than 10-20 seconds, and that's on my 2-year-old, not-all-that-fast machine. When I was playing EQ2 on my friend's machine, which is a top-of-the-line Alienware gaming box, it still took a good 30 seconds to go from one part of Qeynos to another. I can't imagine how long it would take on my machine.)
The voice acting was, well, goofy; I wasn't especially impressed. Some of the NPCs sounded okay, but others just sounded annoying. They should use Blizzard's casting director when hiring voices. The interface didn't seem nearly as polished as WoW's, either. Granted, I only played for about ten minutes, so I'm sure a longer experience would really be necessary to make a fair judgment.
I'm sure I'd have fun playing EQ2, but I'm virtually certain I'll have more fun playing WoW, and I don't have time for more than one MMOG right now. Odds are I'll be sticking with WoW when it goes live.
Lucas, you maniac! When will this abuse of innocent computers end?!
What company do you own?
My company uses MySQL for most of its databases (we're still in the lengthy process of converting everything over from Oracle, but, ah, we have a handful of critical tables with over 100 million rows each). We do several thousand queries per second, non-stop, and have minimal problems with MySQL. (We have fewer problems with MySQL than we did with Oracle!)
I'm sure Postgre is great and all, but the evidence does seem to indicate that MySQL is suited for at least some intense applications.
Maybe this is just nitpicking, but the word "custom" usually means "built to custom specifications for a particular customer." Customer. This is really just a special promotional edition iPod that is being mass-produced. Kind of misleading to call it "custom."
The point of the Second Amendment was not to guarantee people the right to arm themselves against criminals and bandits (although that is a side benefit). The point of the Second Amendment was so that the people can take up arms against the government if it became corrupt and oppressive.
Whether it's a good amendment, or still makes any sense in modern times, is a different kettle of fish entirely.
Are you implying that because we haven't directed billions of dollars' worth of movies, we don't have a right to criticize the AFI's choice? Or Lucas's actions or motivations?
In the new version, Alderaan shoots first.
According to the article, in Soviet Russia, Mars missions mock you.
Alternatively, in Capitalist America, uh... Mars missions are real? No, that can't be right...
Should we be worried that Linus is apparently capable of defecating C code?
Huh? Oh.
I'll valiantly sacrifice myself at the feet of Godwin's Law:
Darl McBride is comparable to Hitler.
There, it had to be said. I know I lose the debate, but it was worth it.
I'm sure that having celebrity voices will make up for Sony's historical lack of responsiveness to its players, tendency toward leaving significant bugs extant for months at a time, incredible ability to back and fill when their community representatives contradict themselves, and so on.
:)
I played EQ for 2 years and while I did have a lot of fun, I was never especially happy with how they handled customer interaction. It didn't help that every single expansion they released had numerous, major bugs, and unfinished content that would get implemented months after launch, and then immediately get broken by players doing things the developers never thought of. Then they'd rebalance that content, and it would still be broken, merely in a new and interesting way.
Then there was the incredibly variable customer service. GMs were given an extremely wide latitude about how they could do things, which led to a lot of situations where someone did X, and was told it was okay, and someone else later also did exactly X, and was warned/suspended/banned for it. I was a Guide for six months on Brell Serilis (Tovarax Two Tone, troll bard), and we had a cool GM (Hi Oribi!) but a lot of other servers weren't so lucky. Even some of our guides were anal-retentive assholes, while others were easygoing. This kind of thing led directly to the impression that EQ customer service was capricious and cruel. It didn't help that there was no guarantee that a CS person would be online at any given time, so you might have an issue and have no chance of it being resolved before you had to log off.
Don't even get me started about the disaster that is Star Wars Galaxies. (It's not a game, it's an economy simulator with a Star Wars-themed front end.) Unless you saw it, you can't imagine the pandemonium on the beta boards when they announced that the game was launching in 9 days. Everyone thought SOE was nuts. The game was released less than half-finished, and over a year later it's still got huge problems.
I'm sure EQ2 will be pretty and flashy and have lots of cool stuff. But I have severe doubts -- well-grounded in history -- about SOE's ability to keep things good in the long run. Certainly wouldn't mind them proving me wrong.
Meanwhile, World of Warcraft in beta is already a better game than EQ was three years after it launched
It's like denying kids information about reproductive biology and sex education, and then wondering why teenagers get each other pregnant.
...because as history has shown us, the best way to keep people from doing the things they want has been to make those things illegal.
This'll work out great in the long run, I'm sure.