I think I'd rather someone pull a few movies out of the History of Middle-Earth. I'd love to see the story of, say, "The Flight of the Noldoli", or "The Tale of Tinúviel", or "The Tale of Eärendel" or "The Fall of Númenor", or 'The Fall of Gondolin'
Lots of content, and whats more, room for a great director or writer to be imaginative...
Ira
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
There's also another issue with server population. the "world" of WOW (or the world of world of warcraft) would be very crowded if there were ten or 20 times the people in it. Many more newbies attempting to get out of the beginning areas, and many many more farmers, making it even tougher to fight to get to attack things. Instances wouldn't be affected, but the rest of the world would get terribly crowede. Ironforge would be even worse to hang around in, and Ogrimmar, well... the less said, the better.
Ira
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
People who live on the edge of time zones have always had to live with those kinds of disparities. the key is that you get to chose which time zone the server you are playing on is in. If you are a Califonian displaced to the east coast, you might choose an east coast server so you can socialize with your friends from back home. Or vice versa. You might even chose a central time zone server and then have your west coast friends and east coast friends meet there.
The point is that WOW allows that kind of flexibility in social interaction They couldn't do that with only one server.
Ira
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
WOW does. people in WOW relate to it because its unlike most RPG's. Because the server clock has meaning. Because "day" is daytime and "night" is nighttime. Gamers might not care because concepts like night and day are pretty artificial to them. But non-gamers, which makes up much of the difference between the subscriber base of WOW and the subscriber base of other MMORPGs.
Ira.
Re:Sorry, but a lot of those "women" are men
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
Yes, some women are men. But many women are actually women. For those of us who have wives or girlfriends, if you let them try and play the game, they might actually enjoy it and keep playing. This was not generally true with previous games.
Ira
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
one of the problems with grouping people from different servers is actually time. as in time on the clock. The server I play on is actually in the mountain time zone, where I'm in the central time zone and sometimes that is an issue for me. Events happen at certain times of the day (for example, the sun sets around 6-7 o'clock server time and rises 12 hours later). If you were to group all servers together, then you'd have to deal with the, "its 2 am and the sun is shining." problem.
Also, there are different types of servers for slightly different types of games. PVE (player v. environment), PVP (player v player), RP (Role playing, where everyone talks like they lived 1000 years ago), and RP PVP. so that means 4 servers for each time zone in the US, so at least 12 servers in the US. In europe, you also have language problems, so 36 servers in europe (english, german, and french).
Once you have multiple servers all over the place, its just as cheap to add more as to make the existing ones better. Blizzard decided to do both things....
Ira
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
I think that you are right. but there's more to it than that.
Ask yourself. What percentage of Counterstrike players are female? 10%? 5? 1? WOW is successfull because women like to play it. its not so violent and bloodthirsty as to turn them off, and the social aspects of it (being able to chat with your friends for hours on end) is appealing.
And nothing pulls gamers to something like the hope that they might meet a real live actual (with tits and everything) woman.
See, that's the problem. No amount of money can "fix" poverty. No amount of spending can remove "prejudice, war, or pollution". The problem is that all four of these issues involve "fixing" people's attitudes.
"Fixing" poverty means making everyone above average. In any world where there are rich people, there will be poor people. The reality is that poor people in the US have more real property than average income people throughout the world. On the other side, "fixing" poverty throughout the world means making poor nations richer. 'Cept that doesn't work, because any country that really wants to be richer, as opposed to just having rich rulers, seems to get richer. Mostly, they (other countries) don't want the US meddling in them, and see that as more important than being rich.
"Fixing" prejudice obviously means changing attitudes. Its happening, though slowly. But will it happen faster if we throw money at it? I doubt it.
"Fixing" war? see poverty.
"Fixing" pollution means not polluting. In one way, this could solve the whole "poverty" thing. If the US would stop driving their cars, and running their power plants, and their barbeque grills, and heating their homes, and using plastic, and refining chemicals, then that would solve pollution. It would also sort of solve "poverty" by making the US not so rich, thereby making all other nations less poor. Of course, that $450 billion to spend on "fixing" anything will disappear, since the US won't have it anymore. But, of course that won't stop other companies from polluting. Kyoto gives a free pass to any "developing" nation, like China. China is a developing nation? Since when do developing nations have 100 million men armies and nuclear weapons?
so, what are we left with? I personally hope that one day, we'll see poverty, prejudice, war, and pollution in space. Because that will mean that there will be people there. Real people, not just astronauts and heroes.
Though its been stated on slashdot in the past, there are a number of scams within the game of WOW being used to steal your gold. One involves the Auction house. For those of you who don't play WOW, the AH works like ebay, with a buyout feature. These scammers put a fairly low minimum bid price for items (like 2 gold), with a 99 gold buy out. People see the low minimum bid and attempt to buy the item out, not noticing that they've paid 99 gold for something not worth 5.
A second scam involves the mail system. They send unsolicited mail to people where they claim they are sending an epic, but its wrapped up in a box. They send this mail COD for 50 or 60 gold. If you are curious, and spend the money, what turns out to be in the wrapper is Coal or some trash green item worth very little.
1) Mosaic -> Netscape -> Mozilla Firefox
First browser, nuff said 2) IE
Made Internet security an important part of every day life 3) Napster (and bittorrent and limewire, etc)
Share (steal) things for free 4) AOL/MSN messenger/Yahoo/ICQ -> Trillian
Chat chat chat your life away 5) Outlook (though pine, et al was much earlier)
Would your business still work w/o email? 6) Skype
Free phone service w/o the phone. 7) Vonage
cheap phone service w/ the phone. 8) SETI@home
distributed computing for X-files fans everywhere. 9) ftp
That program you never knew you were using to download all that stuff you get. And the one you don't use to update the website you don't run. 10) weatherbug
Many of you don't know about it, but its simple, and it gives you a seamless way to know what the weather looks like when you have an office with no windows.
in fact there were so many different search engines that someone came up with a single program that would cruise all the existing search engines for results. It was (and still is) called Dogpile.com
"right-wing media"? that's like Military Intelligence, a contradiction in terms.
the story was reported by Newsday, which is as leftwing as any other news media. Its inaccuracy was widespread because Clinton's presidency was based on his personality and charisma which included his appearance. Using his power as president to get a famous Hollywood stylist to cut his hair on Air Force One is consistent with his personality, and wholly unlike any other president of the past 50 years except maybe Kennedy.
Brain age is pretty good. I really like the Sudoku on it. there are issues with writing and don't try and do the speaking portions in a car. but for an enjoyable time-waster which gives your brain some exercise its real cool.
As an American, and one who doesn't follow European news much, I might not have any call to speak, but I will anyway.
The United States is a nation only in the Political sense of the word. People call themselves "Americans" only when they are driving some Political Agenda. Otherwise they are "Texans", "Jews", "Irishmen", "Italians", "Africans", or whatever. sometimes they tack on "-American" to their designation. This would have you separate an "Italian-American" like Tony Soprano from an "Italian" like Mario Andretti.
In Europe, if you are English, you are English. You can be black, white, yellow, green or have the colors of Manchester United tattoed on your face. There's no difference. If you are French, you are French, Black, White, or whatever.
I'm not sure which approach is "right". The problem with Nationalism is that it harms relations with members of other countries (xenophobia) and causes problems with immigration. The problem with Racism (or Multiculturalism to use a less Hot-button word) is that it has a depleting sense of identity with the country you live in which can lead to things like depressed voter volume, crappy national teams (see the "World Baseball Classic") and even economic issues ("buy American, anyone?").
So many questions, so few answers. What do you think, Tony Sinclair? How do you Tanqueray?
seriously, I think that we should have an "on school grounds" clause which works the same way (and stacks with) the "hate" clause for crimes.
for example: I'm selling drugs, I get caught, I'm sentenced to 5 years. or I'm selling drugs ON SCHOOL GROUNDS, I get caught, I'm sentenced to 15 years.
also: I'm arrested for assault because me and some friends beat up a guy, I get 18 months. or I'm arrested for assault as a hate crime because me and some other white friends beat up a black guy and called him the n-word, I get 4.5 years. or I'm arrested for assault as a hate crime on school grounds because me and my white friends beat up a black kid as he was leaving class all the time calling him the n-word, I get 13.5 years.
Make schools safer by making it worth criminals while to do their crimes elsewhere, just like you make speeding in school zones cost more.
I disagree with your statement about illiteracy. The US educational system is not underfunded. Schools are. Too much money is spent on administration of schools. Too much money is spent on administration of school systems. Too much money is spent writing and re-writing school books in a vain attempt to make one set of school books applicable to diverse school systems. Too much money is spent on inner city school security. And way too little money is spent on inner city school security. (Schools should be safe, but schools should not need to be fortresses to be safe.)
Illiteracy is not a failure of throwing money at our educational system. Illiteracy is a social failure. It's a failure of our entertainment industry. We see charitable organizations attacking illiteracy, and public service ads attacking illiteracy. What we don't see is people reading. What we don't see is video games which REQUIRE you to read and spell to solve the puzzles involved.
But that's changing. (note, the previous sentence was actually a sentence fragment and bad English, sue me). Most computer games require you to read. Most video games require at least basic literary skills. Everything else with a computer requires reading and typing. We may all lose the ability to use pens, soon, but at least we can still recognize typed characters.
in many ways this is an instance that should give terrorists reason for hope. the terrorism perpetrated by the palestinians raised the stakes so high that Israel was forced to do something just to make the constant fear of sidewalk cafes blowing up go away.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I'd rather someone pull a few movies out of the History of Middle-Earth. I'd love to see the story of, say, "The Flight of the Noldoli", or "The Tale of Tinúviel", or "The Tale of Eärendel" or "The Fall of Númenor", or 'The Fall of Gondolin'
Lots of content, and whats more, room for a great director or writer to be imaginative...
Ira
There's also another issue with server population. the "world" of WOW (or the world of world of warcraft) would be very crowded if there were ten or 20 times the people in it. Many more newbies attempting to get out of the beginning areas, and many many more farmers, making it even tougher to fight to get to attack things. Instances wouldn't be affected, but the rest of the world would get terribly crowede. Ironforge would be even worse to hang around in, and Ogrimmar, well... the less said, the better.
Ira
People who live on the edge of time zones have always had to live with those kinds of disparities. the key is that you get to chose which time zone the server you are playing on is in. If you are a Califonian displaced to the east coast, you might choose an east coast server so you can socialize with your friends from back home. Or vice versa. You might even chose a central time zone server and then have your west coast friends and east coast friends meet there.
The point is that WOW allows that kind of flexibility in social interaction They couldn't do that with only one server.
Ira
WOW does. people in WOW relate to it because its unlike most RPG's. Because the server clock has meaning. Because "day" is daytime and "night" is nighttime. Gamers might not care because concepts like night and day are pretty artificial to them. But non-gamers, which makes up much of the difference between the subscriber base of WOW and the subscriber base of other MMORPGs.
Ira.
Yes, some women are men. But many women are actually women. For those of us who have wives or girlfriends, if you let them try and play the game, they might actually enjoy it and keep playing. This was not generally true with previous games.
Ira
one of the problems with grouping people from different servers is actually time. as in time on the clock. The server I play on is actually in the mountain time zone, where I'm in the central time zone and sometimes that is an issue for me.
Events happen at certain times of the day (for example, the sun sets around 6-7 o'clock server time and rises 12 hours later). If you were to group all servers together, then you'd have to deal with the, "its 2 am and the sun is shining." problem.
Also, there are different types of servers for slightly different types of games. PVE (player v. environment), PVP (player v player), RP (Role playing, where everyone talks like they lived 1000 years ago), and RP PVP. so that means 4 servers for each time zone in the US, so at least 12 servers in the US. In europe, you also have language problems, so 36 servers in europe (english, german, and french).
Once you have multiple servers all over the place, its just as cheap to add more as to make the existing ones better. Blizzard decided to do both things....
Ira
I think that you are right. but there's more to it than that.
Ask yourself. What percentage of Counterstrike players are female? 10%? 5? 1? WOW is successfull because women like to play it. its not so violent and bloodthirsty as to turn them off, and the social aspects of it (being able to chat with your friends for hours on end) is appealing.
And nothing pulls gamers to something like the hope that they might meet a real live actual (with tits and everything) woman.
Ira
Favorite kitchen appliance ever!
See, that's the problem. No amount of money can "fix" poverty. No amount of spending can remove "prejudice, war, or pollution". The problem is that all four of these issues involve "fixing" people's attitudes.
"Fixing" poverty means making everyone above average. In any world where there are rich people, there will be poor people. The reality is that poor people in the US have more real property than average income people throughout the world. On the other side, "fixing" poverty throughout the world means making poor nations richer. 'Cept that doesn't work, because any country that really wants to be richer, as opposed to just having rich rulers, seems to get richer. Mostly, they (other countries) don't want the US meddling in them, and see that as more important than being rich.
"Fixing" prejudice obviously means changing attitudes. Its happening, though slowly. But will it happen faster if we throw money at it? I doubt it.
"Fixing" war? see poverty.
"Fixing" pollution means not polluting. In one way, this could solve the whole "poverty" thing. If the US would stop driving their cars, and running their power plants, and their barbeque grills, and heating their homes, and using plastic, and refining chemicals, then that would solve pollution. It would also sort of solve "poverty" by making the US not so rich, thereby making all other nations less poor. Of course, that $450 billion to spend on "fixing" anything will disappear, since the US won't have it anymore. But, of course that won't stop other companies from polluting. Kyoto gives a free pass to any "developing" nation, like China. China is a developing nation? Since when do developing nations have 100 million men armies and nuclear weapons?
so, what are we left with? I personally hope that one day, we'll see poverty, prejudice, war, and pollution in space. Because that will mean that there will be people there. Real people, not just astronauts and heroes.
Ira
Though its been stated on slashdot in the past, there are a number of scams within the game of WOW being used to steal your gold. One involves the Auction house. For those of you who don't play WOW, the AH works like ebay, with a buyout feature. These scammers put a fairly low minimum bid price for items (like 2 gold), with a 99 gold buy out. People see the low minimum bid and attempt to buy the item out, not noticing that they've paid 99 gold for something not worth 5.
A second scam involves the mail system. They send unsolicited mail to people where they claim they are sending an epic, but its wrapped up in a box. They send this mail COD for 50 or 60 gold. If you are curious, and spend the money, what turns out to be in the wrapper is Coal or some trash green item worth very little.
1) Mosaic -> Netscape -> Mozilla Firefox
First browser, nuff said
2) IE
Made Internet security an important part of every day life
3) Napster (and bittorrent and limewire, etc)
Share (steal) things for free
4) AOL/MSN messenger/Yahoo/ICQ -> Trillian
Chat chat chat your life away
5) Outlook (though pine, et al was much earlier)
Would your business still work w/o email?
6) Skype
Free phone service w/o the phone.
7) Vonage
cheap phone service w/ the phone.
8) SETI@home
distributed computing for X-files fans everywhere.
9) ftp
That program you never knew you were using to download all that stuff you get. And the one you don't use to update the website you don't run.
10) weatherbug
Many of you don't know about it, but its simple, and it gives you a seamless way to know what the weather looks like when you have an office with no windows.
Ira
in fact there were so many different search engines that someone came up with a single program that would cruise all the existing search engines for results. It was (and still is) called Dogpile.com
Ira
I agree. From a sheer popularity of content, there's two types of websites that needed to be included in their list that werent.
1) Sports (as represented by ESPN.com, etc.
2) PORN
Ira
"right-wing media"? that's like Military Intelligence, a contradiction in terms.
the story was reported by Newsday, which is as leftwing as any other news media.
Its inaccuracy was widespread because Clinton's presidency was based on his personality and charisma
which included his appearance. Using his power as president to get a famous Hollywood stylist to
cut his hair on Air Force One is consistent with his personality, and wholly unlike any other president
of the past 50 years except maybe Kennedy.
Ira
Brain age is pretty good. I really like the Sudoku on it. there are issues with writing and don't try and do the speaking portions in a car. but for an enjoyable time-waster which gives your brain some exercise its real cool.
Ira
or, if you're french, all you need to do is convince a ref you got fouled in the box. Once.
Ira
but what if no one showed up? Can you still have a war if everyone decided to take a pass on it?
Ira
You're from New Jersey? What exit?
As an American, and one who doesn't follow European news much, I might not have any call to speak, but I will anyway.
The United States is a nation only in the Political sense of the word. People call themselves "Americans" only when they are driving some Political Agenda. Otherwise they are "Texans", "Jews", "Irishmen", "Italians", "Africans", or whatever. sometimes they tack on "-American" to their designation. This would have you separate an "Italian-American" like Tony Soprano from an "Italian" like Mario Andretti.
In Europe, if you are English, you are English. You can be black, white, yellow, green or have the colors of Manchester United tattoed on your face. There's no difference. If you are French, you are French, Black, White, or whatever.
I'm not sure which approach is "right". The problem with Nationalism is that it harms relations with members of other countries (xenophobia) and causes problems with immigration. The problem with Racism (or Multiculturalism to use a less Hot-button word) is that it has a depleting sense of identity with the country you live in which can lead to things like depressed voter volume, crappy national teams (see the "World Baseball Classic") and even economic issues ("buy American, anyone?").
So many questions, so few answers. What do you think, Tony Sinclair? How do you Tanqueray?
Ira
Right.
seriously, I think that we should have an "on school grounds" clause which works the same way (and stacks with) the "hate" clause for crimes.
for example:
I'm selling drugs, I get caught, I'm sentenced to 5 years.
or
I'm selling drugs ON SCHOOL GROUNDS, I get caught, I'm sentenced to 15 years.
also:
I'm arrested for assault because me and some friends beat up a guy, I get 18 months.
or
I'm arrested for assault as a hate crime because me and some other white friends beat up a black guy and called him the n-word, I get 4.5 years.
or
I'm arrested for assault as a hate crime on school grounds because me and my white friends beat up a black kid as he was leaving class all the time calling him the n-word, I get 13.5 years.
Make schools safer by making it worth criminals while to do their crimes elsewhere, just like you make speeding in school zones cost more.
Ira
I disagree with your statement about illiteracy. The US educational system is not underfunded. Schools are. Too much money is spent on administration of schools. Too much money is spent on administration of school systems. Too much money is spent writing and re-writing school books in a vain attempt to make one set of school books applicable to diverse school systems. Too much money is spent on inner city school security. And way too little money is spent on inner city school security. (Schools should be safe, but schools should not need to be fortresses to be safe.)
Illiteracy is not a failure of throwing money at our educational system. Illiteracy is a social failure. It's a failure of our entertainment industry. We see charitable organizations attacking illiteracy, and public service ads attacking illiteracy. What we don't see is people reading. What we don't see is video games which REQUIRE you to read and spell to solve the puzzles involved.
But that's changing. (note, the previous sentence was actually a sentence fragment and bad English, sue me). Most computer games require you to read. Most video games require at least basic literary skills. Everything else with a computer requires reading and typing. We may all lose the ability to use pens, soon, but at least we can still recognize typed characters.
Ira
sorry, you are fired from the spelling police. football soccer.
football == football
futbol == soccer.
Ira
so, since I have a PhD and I work as a programmer, I can be a Doctor Engineer......
imagine if I actually had a PhD in "Computer Science", instead of this useless Physics degree.
Ira
Are you sure you were'nt on an EU server?
Ira
in many ways this is an instance that should give terrorists reason for hope. the terrorism perpetrated by the palestinians raised the stakes so high that Israel was forced to do something just to make the constant fear of sidewalk cafes blowing up go away.
Ira