most of the bad stuff you're saying about wow doesn't have to be true: Re setbacks: we got stuck on gruul (end game boss) for 2 weeks, i'd call that a setback.
Simply not moving forward is not a setBACK.
Plus its a Teir4 end-game boss... its not like there is THAT much room forward either.. Plus 2 weeks? Given you claim that you raid twice a week, means you were 'stuck' on him for all of 4 evenings. If anything that just reinforces my point about the game being on the easy side.
We have raid signups, i sign up for sundays and wednesdays and play from 8pm till 10:30pm, i'd hardly call that not having a life. Most guilds just want people who can turn up when they say they will, not spend every moment on there.
5 hours a week isn't bad at all. I'll grant you that.
I see what you're saying, but why couldn't this be any more true in D&D? The same mindless stuff could happen if you had a DM that granted it.
Sure it could happen. The difference is that in WoW, this playstyle is a norm. In D&D it would be a relatively isolated exception.
After all, it's not WoW's fault some level 70 powers a level 10 through a dungeon...
Isn't it? I call that poor game design that this is an 'effective way to play'.
There are all sorts of possible rational responses the game engine could take...
1) Why don't the lowbie gobbos flee (despawn) the moment a level 70 player descends upon them? (Why should they stick around for a slaughter?)
2) Why doesn't every lowbie gobbo in the entire dungeons dog pile the party the moment a level 70 player engages? Its the only chance they have of winning, after all, and they can at least wipe the lowbie players this way.
3) Why don't the level 10 gobbo's pray to their gods to send a squad of level 70+ defenders to protect them. If the players can bring high level protectors, why shouldn't the NPCs?
Or for more 'game' mechanics solutions.... 1) Why is the 70th level allowed in the dungeon with the lowbie group? 2) Why doesn't the game detect that the players are being assisted and reduce the reward to be commensurate with the risk they are taking? (e.g. 0 risk = 0 reward) 3) Some games allow high level and low level players to group by adjusting their effective level for the duration of the group. The idea is to allow friends to group regardless of level without making it a case of party members being 'dead weight' or a case blatant 'power levelling' the moment there is a few levels of spread.
anymore some God coming down to help a D&D party out in a dungeon is.
Even a half decent GM would let you die, or maybe escape with your lives and with a payment or debt to said deity.
Only a complete twit would be "Ok, so Jebus shows up, slays everything in the dungeon in the blink of an eye. You win. Here is your loots and bonus xp for doing it so efficiently. Want to play this dungeon again? Jebus says he a few more minutes before his raid!! Alright... Ok... so Jebus slays everything in the dungeon in the blink of an eye...you win... here's some more xp..."
Sure it could happen in D&D. Like I said: The difference is that in WoW, this playstyle is a norm. In D&D it would be a relatively isolated exception. And most self-respecting D&D players would choose a new GM if it became the norm.
Drop the snobbery. All that does is make you look bitter.
I think you have soft spot. It was mostly a joke.
Do you really think your D&D character who you've been playing off and on for 30 years since BECMI is so much more legitimate than someone's Tier 6-geared character with thousands of hours of play time? Hint: it's not.
Seriously though. The thing about WoW is that you can't lose. You really can't. You can't even really experience a setback. The worst that happens is that you don't move forward for a day, and even that only happens at endgame. You also don't need to even think about teamwork until endgame. This is a big part of what its appeal is to a lot of people, and why it sprung ahead of its predecessors like EQ.
This is why I think WoW is equivalent to MMO pablum. In order to advance all you have to do is show up; it doesn't exactly require tactics, strategy, problem solving, imagination, mathematics, or any other cranial exercise, and their is simply zero risk of ending the day behind where you started.
Disclaimer: I play WoW. I have 2 70s, neither of which are geared for raiding (yet...).
Oh, so you should know what I'm talking about then. Great.
I also run a weekly D&D game and I started a board game club at my college. So if you want to try and argue I'm not a gamer... Well, go right ahead. I don't need your validation.
Everyone likes to slum around from time to time. And besides, its not like you -can't- think in WoW, its just that you don't have to.
FWIW I played WoW for a while too, and a friend and I quite enjoyed doing instances as a duo while they still conned yellow using gear we quested or looted or crafted ourselves as we levelled up. It really was quite challenging, and fun. But most people we saw just had a much higher level friend come along, or brought a full group of twinks, or just ground xp solo and bought all their gear in the AH or got it from guildmates, etc.
And yeah, you do have to up your game as a raider, and as you approach the raid endgame, but to do that you also have to pretty much give up on having any life outside of WoW, which is pathetic. And even then the biggest requirements of the top tier guilds is being able to show up and follow instructions.
Oh, and my penis is HUGE (in Japan).
Um. Thanks. I'm flattered. But I'm just not interested.
What is the best way to turn down unsolicited gay advances as a happily married heterosexual male anyway? Be a good topic for 'ask slashdot'...after all who better than a bunch of socially inept guys to give advice for socially awkward situations?;)
An online hub for gamers to meet already exists. It's called "World of Warcraft."
If you are playing WoW and think you are a gamer with other gamers, by all means, PLEASE just keep on doing what you are doing. You are where you belong.
I quite like the fact that WoW acts like a honey pot, keeping you entertained, and away from the rest of us. Ooops... was that out loud?;)
What about after x hours it rotates and isnt being handed out by that npc or once its done its done for x hours.
That would be no fun. Your friend tells you about a cool quest with a cool story, so you go but its not available. And you go again, and its not available. And you go again, and its not available... and at some point you ask yourself why you are paying x$ per month to be arbitrarily blocked from doing something cool.
Worse, if was a specific rotation time, people would do the quest, and then tell their friends exactly when it would become available, and one guild would 'own' the quest for a couple weeks or more. This happened in Everquest and other games with mobs on long spawn times with good loot... guilds would kill it, and set their clocks to show up x hours later and kill it again the moment it respawned...
and you are asking me to pick up the short fall for something I do not want.
That's part of being part of a democratic society. We disagree, we take a vote, we act. Someone is always unhappy about something.
I think overall that we do in fact want, as a collective society, to set standards on food quality and to enforce accuracy in labeling so we are going to enact an agency of some sort to do that. Every country I'm familiar with has such rules and enforcers. So even if we had a perfect democracy and you could call a referendum tomorrow and have a well informed population vote on it, you'd probably find we'd end up choosing to have such an enforcement body.
Granted the actual democracy pretty much sucks, and I don't think ANYONE wants the FDA in its current form, but the solution isn't to abolish them. And even if we got rid of them, we'd likely just create another one shortly thereafter. Its what the majority wants.
However, their 'persecution' of you via 'income tax' collection is NOTHING compared to some people are treated by their "government".
Hell, if you'd claimed you were a gauntanamo bay prisoner seeking to get your assets from America to your family in Nigeria, I could even AGREE that America is, in that scenario, just as ass-backwards oppressive as Nigeria.
However, you didn't compare the 'hypothetical Nigerian Prince' to a 'Guantanamo prisoner', you compared him to -you-, and that's simply not remotely on the same level.
Short of doing the test yourself you have no assurance of anything.
I trust 'a government body doing testing' more than 'no one doing testing'.
The FDA is an unelected body and cannot be sued by the individual or corporation. It acts almost autonomously and always in it's own best interests not yours.
I've dealt with the FDA in the course of work, and while they make operate in their best interests, and they burden business with a shit-ton of make-work; but they don't seem particularly corrupt to me. Bureaucratic and arbitrary, but not corrupt.
If you wish to have people test restaurants in this manner then gather together with others and organize a body to do it.
I already did that, I formed a government, and then elected representatives to form bodies like the FDA for precisely this purpose.
You charge both your memebers and restaurants. You publish your methods and your results. Your members and restaurants would flock to you if this was seen as a good thing.
They do indeed see it as a good thing. If we deny them a license to sell goods or operate, they are finished. If we find they have violated the laws we have passed they are punished.
Think michellin guide but on a whole new level.
I'm already operating on a whole other level.
Of course you won't do the above, not because it's not a good idea but because you are too lazy/cheap and want other people to pick up the tab for what you deem a necessity.
I do pick up the tab. I pay a healthy dose in taxes to fund these government regulatory bodies.
And at the end of the day, I don't WANT a voluntary organization that restaurants sign up to. I don't want to to go into a market or restaurant and have to check the for logos and certifications just to be confident that when I order Alberta beef tenderloin that I'm not served mexican donkey.
I want standards to be mandatory and enforced nationwide.
It is illegal to mis-represent items for sale. You want more legislation than that?
How about enforcement? I'm not going to perform random DNA samples on my food. But I still expect to be sold what it says on the label/menu, so someone has to do that verification.
My government persecutes me too. I earn a certain amount each week and the Government takes a cut, will you help me evade this?
1) Certainly. Call a tax advisor. It is their job to find and advise you of any tax loopholes you can exploit to reduce the amount the government takes from you.
2) You cannot possibly equate north american income tax collection, with how military juntas act towards the officials they've just executed a bloody coup against.
Have a look at some typical letters at http://www.nigerianscambuster.com/letters.html . Of those, most are asking people to help divert funds that were found in a deceased person's estate or by other means.
Yes, to an extent they all present the scammer as needing to 'bypass' some legal obstacle. =However=, that doesn't mean that doing so is actually illegal.
For example, the one seeking to recover the deceased man's funds seems to require you to out-and-out lie, and claim you are next of kin; and its clearly immoral... and its surely illegal to claim the estate under false pretense.
But the first one reads like the 'Nigerian National Petroleum Company' has money that it can't move directly, but there is some LEGAL loophole whereby it can funnel them through you under certain circumstances. Of course on thoughtful analysis this is obviously absurd.
But these bizarre legal oddities DO exist, and its not categorically impossible that a company in Nigeria can't transfer the funds to a subsidiary operation in another country due to investment regulations, but for whatever reason they actually CAN subcontract and transfer funds to a foreign company. And of course, should you decide the best use of those funds is to subcontract back to a foreign subsidiary of the original company... who knows, it quite possibly could be legal. "Indeed it must be, the Nigerian CEO and his team of lawyers have obviously done their research! And even the Central Bank is assisting with the manuever.
So a victim might reasonably rationalize that it is in fact legal. And looking at how companies game the regulations everywhere, and get away with it, it might well be.
Take a look at the "Smith Maneuver" in Canada sometime for an example of an exploitable oddity in Canadian tax law, where by little more than shuffling some paper around you can convert a mortgage debt that is not tax deductable to a debt that is, and the banks will help you do it.
(It involves having an investment asset that you sell, then use the proceeds to pay off your mortage. Then you take out a line-of-credit against your now paid off home to buy back the investment assets. The original mortgage interest was not tax deductable... while the interest on the line-of-credit you used to buy back the investments is.)
Bottom line, when it comes to regulations, it often IS the case that you can't legally do X, but you can do Y+Z which equal X. Many successful businesses and people live off finding those Y+Z combos to give them an advantage. Few people think its even immoral in most cases.
Most are of the form "We found some person's money in a trust fund or something. Do you want to help shift it offshore and take a cut?". Taking something that is not yours is a crime. If you find a brown bag of cash on the side of the road, then keeping that is crime too.
Its usually more a case of 'someone is being persecuted, and they need to transfer their assets away from the government persectuing them, to retain them. The mark is being solicited to HELP the scammer to KEEP his own money, and in exchange the scammer is offering to give him a cut for helping him out.
Its often the equivalent of someone offering you a small sum of money to cash their paycheque for them after the bank is closed with some story about how they'll be evicted or something if they don't. Hell, the entire payday loans industry is based on this sort of transaction.
People scammed by these scams are attempting to be criminals, even if they are not succeeding.
Now, they are great for running legacy programs (such as payroll, etc)
Payroll is not a legacy application. You still get paid don't you?:) My point is, even if payroll were 'rewritten' it would still be a suitable mainframe application.
what advantage does a mainframe have compared to say, a server?
They are bigger.
A mainframe more comparable to a server cluster or server farm than a single server.
They feature processors dedicated to IO tasks. They are the kings of data throughput.
They are also big on reliability. Everything is hot-swappable. Everything is redundant. Failover is automatic and processes are rarely even aware its even happened. They have stuff like io multipathing (multiple redundant buses, controllers, etc) and execution integrity -- multiple processors do the same work, the results are compared, and only if they all agree is the computation accepted, errors are thus averted and defective processors and memory can be detected (and hot-swapped), transparent to the running programs and users.
Because they are basically an entire 'server farm' in a dedicated optimized box they also can require less space and power than a server farm of equivalent capability, which is one of their selling points.
I doubt there are any features of a mainframe that can't be obtained by building a suitable server farm, but at some point in some cases the mainframe is markedly more cost effective.
I don't understand how Monsters vs. Aliens is the first 3D, CG animated film. Hasn't every CG animated film for the last decade been 3D?
The latest trend is for films to make use of those circular polarized imax glasses, to give you a true 3D stereo optical experience. I presume this will be this companies first such film.
You know what'd be fun is if the owner of ebay put ebay on ebay to finally cash out on their business and retire or whatever but that might tear a hole in the universe.
Never happen. The fees are too high and the last second sniping will keep it from reaching its true market value. Plus being forced to use paypal makes payment awkward.
In this case, though, it isn't the system persecuting you.
A case I explicitly addressed.
There may be officials who are in the system doing it, but they aren't representative of the system as a whole, they're acting individually.
Precisely.
I think the GP is right in saying that a completely free system doesn't require anonymity... but that said, the need for anonymity may still be present, the impulse just comes from outside the system.
No. Because the only way to ensure that 'a completely free system' STAYS free is if people can anonymously report it the moment it starts to get off track.
Furthermore there will never be a "completely free system", because it will ALWAYS be run by individuals some of whom will be trying to subvert it for their own reasons. Anonymity is a check or balance against them to ensure that the system remains as free as possible, to enable them to be unmasked as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Certainly worth modding up IMHO. She won despite her age, not because she took drugs or anything. I think she deserves her medal. The only scandal here are the documents, not her competing.
In gymnastics being 14 is an advantage. You are NATURALLY lighter, shorter, and more flexible. She didn't win 'despite' being 14, she won in part due to the advantages being 14 conferred upon her.
This is more on par with wrestling where its divided into weight classes, and someone lied about their weight to compete in a different class, where they would have an advantage due to their weight. The only real difference is that checking someones weight is relatively easy so detecting an attempt to cheat like this would not be especially hard.
Perhaps gymnastics should be divided up into age groups. After all most gymnasts aren't competitive past their twenties, but why shouldn't we recognize the most able gymnast in the world who is 11-15, 16-20, and 21+
What % of people who fly on planes intent on hijacking them to fly them into buildings? Can't be that high, but airports/etc still try stopping would be hijackers from being able to board planes tho.
More because many many more people are reactionary idiots than critical thinkers.
If something's not essential, even if the chances are low of things going wrong, the risk (potential mass loss of life) usually dictates that the chance is just not worth taking.
People are essentially irrational. They fear unlikely deaths disproportionately more than likely ones. You are far more likely to die in a car accident than from a terrorist attack. Yet, we fear terrorists FAR more than motorists. Fear of terrorism at its current levels is stupid.
More lives would be saved if we put the money and effort towards driver education and vehicle maintenance.
Or to put thing another way, if you can think of a system where there is legitimate need for anonymity, then that system isn't totally free.
Suppose I want to report that so-and-so murdered his wife and where the body was buried, but wish to do it anonymously because I fear that if so-and-so knew I'd reported it, he'd have me and/or family members killed as retaliation.
How is the system 'not free' simply because I feel I have a legitimate need for anonymity?
Or will you argue that my need for anonymity doesn't count because I only want anonymity from so-and-so not and don't need anonymity from 'the state'? And if so, that falls apart trivially because so-and-so might have adequate connections within 'the state' to unmask me, or perhaps so-and-so is even the Senator in charge of monitoring communication and recording who said what. Perhaps so-and-so didn't murder his wife, but instead is murdering the people who are critical of his policy.
In other words, even a completely free system requires anonymity, as a check against abuse or corruption of the free system by corrupt or criminal people.
There hasn't been a decent MMO since that didn't make you buy the game to get into beta (or at least have a decent shot). I think most of these developers realize their game has no chance so they try to grab as much money as they can before the playerbase realizes what a pile of shit it actually is (Age of Conan/Hellgate London/Tabula Rasa).
Bottom line: The demand for those beta slots is significant enough that they can 'restrict supply' to the level needed for a full on stress test, set the price of entry at 'full retail', and still have enough people signed up.
There is no reason whatsoever for the game publisher not to capitalize on this situation.
I don't blame you for not wanting to participate in these idiotic frenzies, but your contempt is misplaced, it belongs squarely on your 'fellow gamers'. They are the ones falling for this nonsense in droves.
That said, 'open beta' has multiple purposes: 1) Its good advertising, part of the hype 2) Once the game is 'done' it gives you some final stress testing before launch. 3) Because these games can't really have 'demos' the 'beta' is the best chance of getting a preview.*
* Its not usually until well after launch that you can create 7 or 14 day trial accounts. And this is for a few reasons, the biggest one is straight up pragmatic capacity. They want to provide a playable game for the paying customers, and having everyone dogpile on with a free trial account will overload their capacity, without providing any revenue to increase capacity. During the beta, its ok for the servers to be down, for logins attempts to be rejected because its 'full', etc, but you can't do that to paying customers.
As applied to Warhammer Online --given that we already know the content has been stripped down for launch, the short open beta window and pre-order arrangement to get in suggests the following to me:
1) They are running behind and over budget, and can't afford to delay launch. Meanwhile just getting the what they are still committed to getting done for launch is still squeezing them for time, and the open beta window is as long as they can make it. This does singal trouble, but isn't necessarily a disaster. That explains the short window, but not the cost of getting in...so
2) The hype machine has done its job well, and the number of people lined up for open beta and anticipated at launch already exceeds their launch capacity, so they don't really need or want to offer any 'freebies' to grab more people. It doesn't say anything about the quality of the game, but from the business side of things, it means the game is going to sell well.
Your alternate explanation, that they are desperate for cash, and the game is shit, so they are making getting into the beta a pre-order situation to extract some cash before the world catches on to the fail is needlessly complicated. All that is required for this to happen is for their to be massive enough demand. The game can be simply 'ok' or even 'good' and the massive demand to be in the beta would enable them to link it to pre-ordering and capitalize on the hype.
Soney did this first with Everquest2, as I recall. They had a variety of contests and whatnot to get into the eq2 beta, but the one sure-fire method, was to buy a copy of "Heroes of Norrath" or whatever their idiotic EQ related RTS [real-time-strategy game] was called, which came with a 'beta slot' for EQ2. Personally, I think more people bought the RTS for the EQ2 beta slot than for the actual game.
And EQ2, while it wasn't "awesome", it wasn't "epic fail" either. And the selling of beta slots via their RTS wasn't indicitive of them trying to cash in on EQ2 before people caught on that it was shit, but rather it was simply because there was enough demand for the beta, that, in their case, by bundling beta slots to a game that nobody really wanted, they were able to sell a LOT more copies of that game, and capitalize on the demand. They phrased it as a bonus for buying the RTS, because like you a lot of p
It was pretty hard to "pull" some of the early dungeons at the intended level with the available gear. And by hard I mean, a net loss to xp and gear for all but the elite.
Pushing it right to the edge, and taking those deaths was how you learned the game, was how you got GOOD at it. How you became 'elite'.
It was always best to hit the dungeons well above the intended level, with a full group.
Best for rolling though it without any risk, without finesse, and above all, without learning anything. Few people who played like that ever got to be good players. Sure, they got higher level, and better gear. But as players, they sucked.
Everywhere I went I was surrounded by players who sucked. If they'd bloody well actually played the game instead of power-levelling in fast, safe XP camps... with maybe an odd foray into a dungeon in a full group that was 'well above the intended level', they'd maybe have become decent players.
In my low 50s I took on high end Luclin zones like The Deep, The Grey, Akheva Ruins, Acrylia Caverns, etc. Myself and 2 other mid 50s characters together had aquired all 10 pieces for our Vex Thal keys except the Ssra Temple Raid piece as a 3 man, mid fifties group. Places my 'fellow' guildmates wouldn't venture without a full group or two, preferably with 60+ level characters.
And we developed a lot of skill learning how to push it right to the edge. We did things in our mid-50s as a 3-man team that some of the guilds we were in wiped on, even when they brought multiple groups of higher level players. It was almost comical to see a full group and a half of 60+ characters wipe on stuff we'd done with 3 people 10 levels lower.
We knew how to pull. We knew pathing. We knew when they would run and where. We knew where to put them to ensure they ran where we already cleared. We knew what to clear to give particularly nasty runners (fast/snare resistant/etc) a bit of a runway. We knew respawn rates. We knew which mobs were most dangerous, what their special abilities were, what their aggro range was, what their level ranges were, etc, etc.
The group and a half of 60s didn't know, (and didn't care). Everything they'd fight was 'blue or green' and they could out-DPS and defeat anything but a massive overpull.. so they didn't care about runners, they didn't care about pathing, they didn't prioritize targets, and they'd do fine until something got away and pulled half the dungeon on them.
As a 3-man team, every single mob was a potential wipe, every single add was a genuine threat, so we were careful, and observant, and we learned from our successes, and doubly from our mistakes.
So yeah, I became relatively 'elite' and maybe I am being 'elitist' but seriously, I don't think we were THAT special. We were good sure, but what really set people like me and my group mates apart was that we weren't in a rush to level, and we weren't afraid of dying, and because of that we knew the game, the zones, and the mobs MUCH more intimately than most.
That's how the camping started - preparations for hitting a dungeon.
Camping started when people started watching and caring about their XP bar advancement more than anything else. I actually started collecting 'alternate advancement' XP in my 50s. By the time I reached 55th I had probably 50AA points. This was massively inefficient -- everyone "knows" that you 'Powerlevel to 70' and then turn AA on, maybe stopping for a couple key AA points along the way depending on class, because at 70 you can get a couple AA per hour, while at 55th, getting an AA in a day was a 'good day'. So yeah, I was levelling deliberately slow, because there was tons of content I wanted to see and beat *BEFORE* I levelled past it.
So I was practically NEVER in an XP camp. I was almost never in a big-overpowered group rolling through a lower level dungeon. I did a lot of stuff that most people had never done and I did it while it was still, according to some 'impossibly hard at that level'. I also had a lot
Part of the problem with EQ was that, if you played the game 'as intended' the XP bar moved sooo slooooowly. And the XP penalty was extremely harsh. In short, the only effective way to play was as efficently as possible.
Why would it matter how fast the XP bar moved? If you hadn't seen everything in the world that was appropriate for your level, what would the rush be to be higher level. Its not like the higher level parts of the game weren't going to be there when you got there.
In short, the only effective way to play was as efficently as possible.
Effective at what? All you did was spend your time bored in safe XP camps. What did that effectively get you: you could be higher level to go be bored in safe XP camps somewhere else. Seriously how was that 'effective'?
It's a mmog where you sit in groups of 6 for roughly 1 year (real life time) killing things, over and over, and over again. Then, upon attaining max level, you join groups of 30-70 people to kill really big things. Over and over again.
You can play any game like that. Its up to the player to choose not to. Everquest was designed before it had really been fully established that people were more interested in watching their xp bar than seeing the world, and doing interesting things.
I don't think anyone really expected the 'lets form a group and sit at the dungeon entrance for 8 hours because actually exploring the dungeon is hard' mentality. Or the, "lets go camp on that ramp, I did that for 8 hours yesterday and it worked well. No I don't want to go to that dungeon, I've never been their, and besides I heard this ramp is the best xp/hr at this level.
Granted the game shouldn't have rewarded players xp for simply killing things... but really, nobody actually thought you would have to prod characters around with a sharp stick to get them to move around.
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most of the bad stuff you're saying about wow doesn't have to be true: Re setbacks: we got stuck on gruul (end game boss) for 2 weeks, i'd call that a setback.
Simply not moving forward is not a setBACK.
Plus its a Teir4 end-game boss... its not like there is THAT much room forward either.. Plus 2 weeks? Given you claim that you raid twice a week, means you were 'stuck' on him for all of 4 evenings. If anything that just reinforces my point about the game being on the easy side.
We have raid signups, i sign up for sundays and wednesdays and play from 8pm till 10:30pm, i'd hardly call that not having a life. Most guilds just want people who can turn up when they say they will, not spend every moment on there.
5 hours a week isn't bad at all. I'll grant you that.
I see what you're saying, but why couldn't this be any more true in D&D? The same mindless stuff could happen if you had a DM that granted it.
Sure it could happen. The difference is that in WoW, this playstyle is a norm. In D&D it would be a relatively isolated exception.
After all, it's not WoW's fault some level 70 powers a level 10 through a dungeon...
Isn't it? I call that poor game design that this is an 'effective way to play'.
There are all sorts of possible rational responses the game engine could take...
1) Why don't the lowbie gobbos flee (despawn) the moment a level 70 player descends upon them? (Why should they stick around for a slaughter?)
2) Why doesn't every lowbie gobbo in the entire dungeons dog pile the party the moment a level 70 player engages? Its the only chance they have of winning, after all, and they can at least wipe the lowbie players this way.
3) Why don't the level 10 gobbo's pray to their gods to send a squad of level 70+ defenders to protect them. If the players can bring high level protectors, why shouldn't the NPCs?
Or for more 'game' mechanics solutions....
1) Why is the 70th level allowed in the dungeon with the lowbie group?
2) Why doesn't the game detect that the players are being assisted and reduce the reward to be commensurate with the risk they are taking? (e.g. 0 risk = 0 reward)
3) Some games allow high level and low level players to group by adjusting their effective level for the duration of the group. The idea is to allow friends to group regardless of level without making it a case of party members being 'dead weight' or a case blatant 'power levelling' the moment there is a few levels of spread.
anymore some God coming down to help a D&D party out in a dungeon is.
Even a half decent GM would let you die, or maybe escape with your lives and with a payment or debt to said deity.
Only a complete twit would be "Ok, so Jebus shows up, slays everything in the dungeon in the blink of an eye. You win. Here is your loots and bonus xp for doing it so efficiently. Want to play this dungeon again? Jebus says he a few more minutes before his raid!! Alright... Ok... so Jebus slays everything in the dungeon in the blink of an eye...you win... here's some more xp..."
Sure it could happen in D&D. Like I said: The difference is that in WoW, this playstyle is a norm. In D&D it would be a relatively isolated exception. And most self-respecting D&D players would choose a new GM if it became the norm.
Drop the snobbery. All that does is make you look bitter.
I think you have soft spot. It was mostly a joke.
Do you really think your D&D character who you've been playing off and on for 30 years since BECMI is so much more legitimate than someone's Tier 6-geared character with thousands of hours of play time? Hint: it's not.
Seriously though. The thing about WoW is that you can't lose. You really can't. You can't even really experience a setback. The worst that happens is that you don't move forward for a day, and even that only happens at endgame. You also don't need to even think about teamwork until endgame. This is a big part of what its appeal is to a lot of people, and why it sprung ahead of its predecessors like EQ.
This is why I think WoW is equivalent to MMO pablum. In order to advance all you have to do is show up; it doesn't exactly require tactics, strategy, problem solving, imagination, mathematics, or any other cranial exercise, and their is simply zero risk of ending the day behind where you started.
Disclaimer: I play WoW. I have 2 70s, neither of which are geared for raiding (yet...).
Oh, so you should know what I'm talking about then. Great.
I also run a weekly D&D game and I started a board game club at my college. So if you want to try and argue I'm not a gamer... Well, go right ahead. I don't need your validation.
Everyone likes to slum around from time to time. And besides, its not like you -can't- think in WoW, its just that you don't have to.
FWIW I played WoW for a while too, and a friend and I quite enjoyed doing instances as a duo while they still conned yellow using gear we quested or looted or crafted ourselves as we levelled up. It really was quite challenging, and fun. But most people we saw just had a much higher level friend come along, or brought a full group of twinks, or just ground xp solo and bought all their gear in the AH or got it from guildmates, etc.
And yeah, you do have to up your game as a raider, and as you approach the raid endgame, but to do that you also have to pretty much give up on having any life outside of WoW, which is pathetic. And even then the biggest requirements of the top tier guilds is being able to show up and follow instructions.
Oh, and my penis is HUGE (in Japan).
Um. Thanks. I'm flattered. But I'm just not interested.
What is the best way to turn down unsolicited gay advances as a happily married heterosexual male anyway? Be a good topic for 'ask slashdot'...after all who better than a bunch of socially inept guys to give advice for socially awkward situations? ;)
An online hub for gamers to meet already exists. It's called "World of Warcraft."
If you are playing WoW and think you are a gamer with other gamers, by all means, PLEASE just keep on doing what you are doing. You are where you belong.
I quite like the fact that WoW acts like a honey pot, keeping you entertained, and away from the rest of us. Ooops... was that out loud? ;)
Under what circumstances can ID be refuted?
Easy. God shows up and tells us he didn't do it.
What about after x hours it rotates and isnt being handed out by that npc or once its done its done for x hours.
That would be no fun. Your friend tells you about a cool quest with a cool story, so you go but its not available. And you go again, and its not available. And you go again, and its not available... and at some point you ask yourself why you are paying x$ per month to be arbitrarily blocked from doing something cool.
Worse, if was a specific rotation time, people would do the quest, and then tell their friends exactly when it would become available, and one guild would 'own' the quest for a couple weeks or more. This happened in Everquest and other games with mobs on long spawn times with good loot... guilds would kill it, and set their clocks to show up x hours later and kill it again the moment it respawned...
and you are asking me to pick up the short fall for something I do not want.
That's part of being part of a democratic society. We disagree, we take a vote, we act. Someone is always unhappy about something.
I think overall that we do in fact want, as a collective society, to set standards on food quality and to enforce accuracy in labeling so we are going to enact an agency of some sort to do that. Every country I'm familiar with has such rules and enforcers. So even if we had a perfect democracy and you could call a referendum tomorrow and have a well informed population vote on it, you'd probably find we'd end up choosing to have such an enforcement body.
Granted the actual democracy pretty much sucks, and I don't think ANYONE wants the FDA in its current form, but the solution isn't to abolish them. And even if we got rid of them, we'd likely just create another one shortly thereafter. Its what the majority wants.
Sorry I forgot, America is always right.
No. America is not always right.
However, their 'persecution' of you via 'income tax' collection is NOTHING compared to some people are treated by their "government".
Hell, if you'd claimed you were a gauntanamo bay prisoner seeking to get your assets from America to your family in Nigeria, I could even AGREE that America is, in that scenario, just as ass-backwards oppressive as Nigeria.
However, you didn't compare the 'hypothetical Nigerian Prince' to a 'Guantanamo prisoner', you compared him to -you-, and that's simply not remotely on the same level.
Short of doing the test yourself you have no assurance of anything.
I trust 'a government body doing testing' more than 'no one doing testing'.
The FDA is an unelected body and cannot be sued by the individual or corporation. It acts almost autonomously and always in it's own best interests not yours.
I've dealt with the FDA in the course of work, and while they make operate in their best interests, and they burden business with a shit-ton of make-work; but they don't seem particularly corrupt to me. Bureaucratic and arbitrary, but not corrupt.
If you wish to have people test restaurants in this manner then gather together with others and organize a body to do it.
I already did that, I formed a government, and then elected representatives to form bodies like the FDA for precisely this purpose.
You charge both your memebers and restaurants. You publish your methods and your results. Your members and restaurants would flock to you if this was seen as a good thing.
They do indeed see it as a good thing. If we deny them a license to sell goods or operate, they are finished. If we find they have violated the laws we have passed they are punished.
Think michellin guide but on a whole new level.
I'm already operating on a whole other level.
Of course you won't do the above, not because it's not a good idea but because you are too lazy/cheap and want other people to pick up the tab for what you deem a necessity.
I do pick up the tab. I pay a healthy dose in taxes to fund these government regulatory bodies.
And at the end of the day, I don't WANT a voluntary organization that restaurants sign up to. I don't want to to go into a market or restaurant and have to check the for logos and certifications just to be confident that when I order Alberta beef tenderloin that I'm not served mexican donkey.
I want standards to be mandatory and enforced nationwide.
It is illegal to mis-represent items for sale. You want more legislation than that?
How about enforcement? I'm not going to perform random DNA samples on my food. But I still expect to be sold what it says on the label/menu, so someone has to do that verification.
My government persecutes me too.
I earn a certain amount each week and the Government takes a cut, will you help me evade this?
1) Certainly. Call a tax advisor. It is their job to find and advise you of any tax loopholes you can exploit to reduce the amount the government takes from you.
2) You cannot possibly equate north american income tax collection, with how military juntas act towards the officials they've just executed a bloody coup against.
Have a look at some typical letters at http://www.nigerianscambuster.com/letters.html . Of those, most are asking people to help divert funds that were found in a deceased person's estate or by other means.
Yes, to an extent they all present the scammer as needing to 'bypass' some legal obstacle. =However=, that doesn't mean that doing so is actually illegal.
For example, the one seeking to recover the deceased man's funds seems to require you to out-and-out lie, and claim you are next of kin; and its clearly immoral... and its surely illegal to claim the estate under false pretense.
But the first one reads like the 'Nigerian National Petroleum Company' has money that it can't move directly, but there is some LEGAL loophole whereby it can funnel them through you under certain circumstances. Of course on thoughtful analysis this is obviously absurd.
But these bizarre legal oddities DO exist, and its not categorically impossible that a company in Nigeria can't transfer the funds to a subsidiary operation in another country due to investment regulations, but for whatever reason they actually CAN subcontract and transfer funds to a foreign company. And of course, should you decide the best use of those funds is to subcontract back to a foreign subsidiary of the original company... who knows, it quite possibly could be legal. "Indeed it must be, the Nigerian CEO and his team of lawyers have obviously done their research! And even the Central Bank is assisting with the manuever.
So a victim might reasonably rationalize that it is in fact legal. And looking at how companies game the regulations everywhere, and get away with it, it might well be.
Take a look at the "Smith Maneuver" in Canada sometime for an example of an exploitable oddity in Canadian tax law, where by little more than shuffling some paper around you can convert a mortgage debt that is not tax deductable to a debt that is, and the banks will help you do it.
(It involves having an investment asset that you sell, then use the proceeds to pay off your mortage. Then you take out a line-of-credit against your now paid off home to buy back the investment assets. The original mortgage interest was not tax deductable ... while the interest on the line-of-credit you used to buy back the investments is.)
Bottom line, when it comes to regulations, it often IS the case that you can't legally do X, but you can do Y+Z which equal X. Many successful businesses and people live off finding those Y+Z combos to give them an advantage. Few people think its even immoral in most cases.
Most are of the form "We found some person's money in a trust fund or something. Do you want to help shift it offshore and take a cut?". Taking something that is not yours is a crime. If you find a brown bag of cash on the side of the road, then keeping that is crime too.
Its usually more a case of 'someone is being persecuted, and they need to transfer their assets away from the government persectuing them, to retain them. The mark is being solicited to HELP the scammer to KEEP his own money, and in exchange the scammer is offering to give him a cut for helping him out.
Its often the equivalent of someone offering you a small sum of money to cash their paycheque for them after the bank is closed with some story about how they'll be evicted or something if they don't. Hell, the entire payday loans industry is based on this sort of transaction.
People scammed by these scams are attempting to be criminals, even if they are not succeeding.
No. Not necessarily.
Now, they are great for running legacy programs (such as payroll, etc)
Payroll is not a legacy application. You still get paid don't you? :)
My point is, even if payroll were 'rewritten' it would still be a suitable mainframe application.
what advantage does a mainframe have compared to say, a server?
They are bigger.
A mainframe more comparable to a server cluster or server farm than a single server.
They feature processors dedicated to IO tasks. They are the kings of data throughput.
They are also big on reliability. Everything is hot-swappable. Everything is redundant. Failover is automatic and processes are rarely even aware its even happened. They have stuff like io multipathing (multiple redundant buses, controllers, etc) and execution integrity -- multiple processors do the same work, the results are compared, and only if they all agree is the computation accepted, errors are thus averted and defective processors and memory can be detected (and hot-swapped), transparent to the running programs and users.
Because they are basically an entire 'server farm' in a dedicated optimized box they also can require less space and power than a server farm of equivalent capability, which is one of their selling points.
I doubt there are any features of a mainframe that can't be obtained by building a suitable server farm, but at some point in some cases the mainframe is markedly more cost effective.
I don't understand how Monsters vs. Aliens is the first 3D, CG animated film. Hasn't every CG animated film for the last decade been 3D?
The latest trend is for films to make use of those circular polarized imax glasses, to give you a true 3D stereo optical experience. I presume this will be this companies first such film.
You know what'd be fun is if the owner of ebay put ebay on ebay to finally cash out on their business and retire or whatever but that might tear a hole in the universe.
Never happen. The fees are too high and the last second sniping will keep it from reaching its true market value. Plus being forced to use paypal makes payment awkward.
In this case, though, it isn't the system persecuting you.
A case I explicitly addressed.
There may be officials who are in the system doing it, but they aren't representative of the system as a whole, they're acting individually.
Precisely.
I think the GP is right in saying that a completely free system doesn't require anonymity... but that said, the need for anonymity may still be present, the impulse just comes from outside the system.
No. Because the only way to ensure that 'a completely free system' STAYS free is if people can anonymously report it the moment it starts to get off track.
Furthermore there will never be a "completely free system", because it will ALWAYS be run by individuals some of whom will be trying to subvert it for their own reasons. Anonymity is a check or balance against them to ensure that the system remains as free as possible, to enable them to be unmasked as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Now, if I could pay just $5 dollars and get MP3s to play on my ipod...
????????
MP3s play on ipods for free.
Certainly worth modding up IMHO. She won despite her age, not because she took drugs or anything. I think she deserves her medal. The only scandal here are the documents, not her competing.
In gymnastics being 14 is an advantage. You are NATURALLY lighter, shorter, and more flexible.
She didn't win 'despite' being 14, she won in part due to the advantages being 14 conferred upon her.
This is more on par with wrestling where its divided into weight classes, and someone lied about their weight to compete in a different class, where they would have an advantage due to their weight. The only real difference is that checking someones weight is relatively easy so detecting an attempt to cheat like this would not be especially hard.
Perhaps gymnastics should be divided up into age groups. After all most gymnasts aren't competitive past their twenties, but why shouldn't we recognize the most able gymnast in the world who is 11-15, 16-20, and 21+
What % of people who fly on planes intent on hijacking them to fly them into buildings? Can't be that high, but airports/etc still try stopping would be hijackers from being able to board planes tho.
More because many many more people are reactionary idiots than critical thinkers.
If something's not essential, even if the chances are low of things going wrong, the risk (potential mass loss of life) usually dictates that the chance is just not worth taking.
People are essentially irrational. They fear unlikely deaths disproportionately more than likely ones. You are far more likely to die in a car accident than from a terrorist attack. Yet, we fear terrorists FAR more than motorists. Fear of terrorism at its current levels is stupid.
More lives would be saved if we put the money and effort towards driver education and vehicle maintenance.
Or to put thing another way, if you can think of a system where there is legitimate need for anonymity, then that system isn't totally free.
Suppose I want to report that so-and-so murdered his wife and where the body was buried, but wish to do it anonymously because I fear that if so-and-so knew I'd reported it, he'd have me and/or family members killed as retaliation.
How is the system 'not free' simply because I feel I have a legitimate need for anonymity?
Or will you argue that my need for anonymity doesn't count because I only want anonymity from so-and-so not and don't need anonymity from 'the state'? And if so, that falls apart trivially because so-and-so might have adequate connections within 'the state' to unmask me, or perhaps so-and-so is even the Senator in charge of monitoring communication and recording who said what. Perhaps so-and-so didn't murder his wife, but instead is murdering the people who are critical of his policy.
In other words, even a completely free system requires anonymity, as a check against abuse or corruption of the free system by corrupt or criminal people.
There hasn't been a decent MMO since that didn't make you buy the game to get into beta (or at least have a decent shot). I think most of these developers realize their game has no chance so they try to grab as much money as they can before the playerbase realizes what a pile of shit it actually is (Age of Conan/Hellgate London/Tabula Rasa).
Bottom line: The demand for those beta slots is significant enough that they can 'restrict supply' to the level needed for a full on stress test, set the price of entry at 'full retail', and still have enough people signed up.
There is no reason whatsoever for the game publisher not to capitalize on this situation.
I don't blame you for not wanting to participate in these idiotic frenzies, but your contempt is misplaced, it belongs squarely on your 'fellow gamers'. They are the ones falling for this nonsense in droves.
That said, 'open beta' has multiple purposes:
1) Its good advertising, part of the hype
2) Once the game is 'done' it gives you some final stress testing before launch.
3) Because these games can't really have 'demos' the 'beta' is the best chance of getting a preview.*
* Its not usually until well after launch that you can create 7 or 14 day trial accounts. And this is for a few reasons, the biggest one is straight up pragmatic capacity. They want to provide a playable game for the paying customers, and having everyone dogpile on with a free trial account will overload their capacity, without providing any revenue to increase capacity. During the beta, its ok for the servers to be down, for logins attempts to be rejected because its 'full', etc, but you can't do that to paying customers.
As applied to Warhammer Online --given that we already know the content has been stripped down for launch, the short open beta window and pre-order arrangement to get in suggests the following to me:
1) They are running behind and over budget, and can't afford to delay launch. Meanwhile just getting the what they are still committed to getting done for launch is still squeezing them for time, and the open beta window is as long as they can make it. This does singal trouble, but isn't necessarily a disaster. That explains the short window, but not the cost of getting in...so
2) The hype machine has done its job well, and the number of people lined up for open beta and anticipated at launch already exceeds their launch capacity, so they don't really need or want to offer any 'freebies' to grab more people. It doesn't say anything about the quality of the game, but from the business side of things, it means the game is going to sell well.
Your alternate explanation, that they are desperate for cash, and the game is shit, so they are making getting into the beta a pre-order situation to extract some cash before the world catches on to the fail is needlessly complicated. All that is required for this to happen is for their to be massive enough demand. The game can be simply 'ok' or even 'good' and the massive demand to be in the beta would enable them to link it to pre-ordering and capitalize on the hype.
Soney did this first with Everquest2, as I recall. They had a variety of contests and whatnot to get into the eq2 beta, but the one sure-fire method, was to buy a copy of "Heroes of Norrath" or whatever their idiotic EQ related RTS [real-time-strategy game] was called, which came with a 'beta slot' for EQ2. Personally, I think more people bought the RTS for the EQ2 beta slot than for the actual game.
And EQ2, while it wasn't "awesome", it wasn't "epic fail" either. And the selling of beta slots via their RTS wasn't indicitive of them trying to cash in on EQ2 before people caught on that it was shit, but rather it was simply because there was enough demand for the beta, that, in their case, by bundling beta slots to a game that nobody really wanted, they were able to sell a LOT more copies of that game, and capitalize on the demand. They phrased it as a bonus for buying the RTS, because like you a lot of p
It was pretty hard to "pull" some of the early dungeons at the intended level with the available gear. And by hard I mean, a net loss to xp and gear for all but the elite.
Pushing it right to the edge, and taking those deaths was how you learned the game, was how you got GOOD at it. How you became 'elite'.
It was always best to hit the dungeons well above the intended level, with a full group.
Best for rolling though it without any risk, without finesse, and above all, without learning anything. Few people who played like that ever got to be good players. Sure, they got higher level, and better gear. But as players, they sucked.
Everywhere I went I was surrounded by players who sucked. If they'd bloody well actually played the game instead of power-levelling in fast, safe XP camps... with maybe an odd foray into a dungeon in a full group that was 'well above the intended level', they'd maybe have become decent players.
In my low 50s I took on high end Luclin zones like The Deep, The Grey, Akheva Ruins, Acrylia Caverns, etc. Myself and 2 other mid 50s characters together had aquired all 10 pieces for our Vex Thal keys except the Ssra Temple Raid piece as a 3 man, mid fifties group. Places my 'fellow' guildmates wouldn't venture without a full group or two, preferably with 60+ level characters.
And we developed a lot of skill learning how to push it right to the edge. We did things in our mid-50s as a 3-man team that some of the guilds we were in wiped on, even when they brought multiple groups of higher level players. It was almost comical to see a full group and a half of 60+ characters wipe on stuff we'd done with 3 people 10 levels lower.
We knew how to pull. We knew pathing. We knew when they would run and where. We knew where to put them to ensure they ran where we already cleared. We knew what to clear to give particularly nasty runners (fast/snare resistant/etc) a bit of a runway. We knew respawn rates. We knew which mobs were most dangerous, what their special abilities were, what their aggro range was, what their level ranges were, etc, etc.
The group and a half of 60s didn't know, (and didn't care). Everything they'd fight was 'blue or green' and they could out-DPS and defeat anything but a massive overpull.. so they didn't care about runners, they didn't care about pathing, they didn't prioritize targets, and they'd do fine until something got away and pulled half the dungeon on them.
As a 3-man team, every single mob was a potential wipe, every single add was a genuine threat, so we were careful, and observant, and we learned from our successes, and doubly from our mistakes.
So yeah, I became relatively 'elite' and maybe I am being 'elitist' but seriously, I don't think we were THAT special. We were good sure, but what really set people like me and my group mates apart was that we weren't in a rush to level, and we weren't afraid of dying, and because of that we knew the game, the zones, and the mobs MUCH more intimately than most.
That's how the camping started - preparations for hitting a dungeon.
Camping started when people started watching and caring about their XP bar advancement more than anything else. I actually started collecting 'alternate advancement' XP in my 50s. By the time I reached 55th I had probably 50AA points. This was massively inefficient -- everyone "knows" that you 'Powerlevel to 70' and then turn AA on, maybe stopping for a couple key AA points along the way depending on class, because at 70 you can get a couple AA per hour, while at 55th, getting an AA in a day was a 'good day'. So yeah, I was levelling deliberately slow, because there was tons of content I wanted to see and beat *BEFORE* I levelled past it.
So I was practically NEVER in an XP camp. I was almost never in a big-overpowered group rolling through a lower level dungeon. I did a lot of stuff that most people had never done and I did it while it was still, according to some 'impossibly hard at that level'. I also had a lot
Part of the problem with EQ was that, if you played the game 'as intended' the XP bar moved sooo slooooowly. And the XP penalty was extremely harsh. In short, the only effective way to play was as efficently as possible.
Why would it matter how fast the XP bar moved? If you hadn't seen everything in the world that was appropriate for your level, what would the rush be to be higher level. Its not like the higher level parts of the game weren't going to be there when you got there.
In short, the only effective way to play was as efficently as possible.
Effective at what? All you did was spend your time bored in safe XP camps. What did that effectively get you: you could be higher level to go be bored in safe XP camps somewhere else. Seriously how was that 'effective'?
It's a mmog where you sit in groups of 6 for roughly 1 year (real life time) killing things, over and over, and over again. Then, upon attaining max level, you join groups of 30-70 people to kill really big things. Over and over again.
You can play any game like that. Its up to the player to choose not to. Everquest was designed before it had really been fully established that people were more interested in watching their xp bar than seeing the world, and doing interesting things.
I don't think anyone really expected the 'lets form a group and sit at the dungeon entrance for 8 hours because actually exploring the dungeon is hard' mentality. Or the, "lets go camp on that ramp, I did that for 8 hours yesterday and it worked well. No I don't want to go to that dungeon, I've never been their, and besides I heard this ramp is the best xp/hr at this level.
Granted the game shouldn't have rewarded players xp for simply killing things... but really, nobody actually thought you would have to prod characters around with a sharp stick to get them to move around.