Re:business and government are run by aliens?
on
GAO Report Slams FCC
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually corporations are interesting legal fictions that have some limited "personhood", except without the natural lifetime restrains of a human being.
Again, you have some idealistic ideas of how this whole thing works, but in actuality those spending the most amount of money on lobbying are not concerned citizens or corporations made of politically active workers, but rather very narrowly populated corporate leadership populations making a concerted effort to encourage legislation that furthers their interest, and hopefully to the detriment of their competitors' and/or opponents interests. This is, of course, done because it furthers the shareholders' interests, but nonetheless, the rosy picture you paint of corporate social structures is... shall we say... idealistic?
We worked fine without corporations for a long time between Neanderthals (which we likely never were, btw) and the modern day. Companies served that function just fine, though corporations do provide some useful legal shielding to their constituents/leadership.
Re:business and government are run by aliens?
on
GAO Report Slams FCC
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
unfortunately.. I believe your confusing the way lobbying SHOULD work, with the way it works in practice.
Correct. While the poster presents an excellent view of how lobbying would work in a perfect world, in reality lobbyists are quite often highly paid contractors that express the desires of a relatively small number of people who have large amount of resources directed towards legislative action that directly benefits themselves, not the population as a whole.
You fail to realize that satellite radio competes with terrestrial radio, Internet radio, portable music players (like the iPod).
I've routinely failed to be convinced by this argument. Basic/Standard cable may compete for viewers with broadcast TV, but it doesn't *really* compete with Video iPods, for example, because the viewership stats are so very different in number. Satellite radio really only competes with terrestrial radio, since it's the only one that has portable, streaming audio. When WiMax, et al. get popular, then perhaps you'll have a point, but until then, it's really just XM vs Sirius vs Clear Channel.
become a nerd who follows all news, and spends large portion of their time learning about new technologies, how they are integrated, what risks are there, etc.
I endorse this choice, as it would lead to more dates for moi.
One of the things WoW did well is it innovated a ton of things that hadn't really been done before, and forced every MMO after it to play catch-up to try and snag players away.
Uh, what? I'm having a hard time thinking of what WoW did that no MMORPG had done before. They streamlined and made it *better*, but WoW really just took a lot of things that were done before and put them in a better package.
Don't get me wrong, it's no small feat, but it's not amazingly original, either.
The major difference (I did the beta for a while) is that shooting and tactical skill is actually a factor. There's some "fudge" in the mechanics to account for lag, but there's no "start combat"/"end combat" keystroke that puts you on auto-fight.
Other useful benefits include the fact that the war is being fought primarily between NPCs, and the PCs are elite soldiers, making the "you are a hero" bit a little more immersive. The NPCs can capture and lose strategic strongholds, the battles for which a PC can participate in and effect the outcome thereof. The holding and losing of territory will likely effect gameplay in non-trivial ways (this was a DAoC thing and apparently will be a Warhammer thing, as well).
Either you didn;t play the game enough or didn't really understand what you were doing. It's not a totally original game, but neither is it exactly the same as WoW/Everquest/AO.
I feel like a broken record, but DAoC's endgame content was 80% "kill a lot of my PC enemies because it benefits my team", and 20% other stuff. Quite enjoyable.
Correct. The players that want to learn their characters will, but the PvE content previous to end-game raiding doesn't exactly concentrate on preparing people to do group work (not to mention some of the pet classes can do a *lot* of the group quests while solo).
I agree. Even by going all the given quests, getting to 10 is easy, and 20 is harder only if you get bored easily or have to pee. Nothing particularly interesting gameplay-wise happens between 20-60, sadly. Sure you "get stuff" and improve abilities, but most of the time it's quest-quest-grindgrind-run-from-bored-70's-that-need-to-get-their-stupid-asses-in-a-raiding-guild-instead-of-ganking-in-stv-quest-quest
There's some value to your ideas, but I think you're overlooking the fact that WoW has a huge allowance for the casual player. So making the system increasingly complex will hurt their revenue stream.
I'm not convinced that having more and more options is better, anyway. Inevitably the "choices" get narrowed down to a set of fairly-well-known templates that are optimal for a given task, and the other specs get left along the road.
Also, I don't really think that experience loss makes leveling more meaningful. It makes it more stressful and gives a penalty for death, but meaningful? I'm unconvinced. Exp would have to be much easier to amass for that not to be frustrating really fast (especially for a gimped class, for example).
While I'd love that ability in WoW, the argument is "then people won't know how to play their new characters effectively, and raiding / instances will suck".
I say, what does it matter, when people buy characters or buy leveling services, have a high-level alt, and STILL don't know how to play. Not only that, but if they don't know how to play their new characters effectively, then I guess they'll just have to learn, won't they? I don't really see the problem with that.
What qualifies as "prolonged periods of very high inflation"? Post the 1970's stagflation, I don't believe I can recall "prolonged periods of very high inflation", unless you can inflation being between 4-5% as "very high".
No, it's actually more likely that the general tenor of the console market is being accurately reflected by the comments in this thread. The PS3's market share is hurtin' for a variety of reasons, and it doesn't help that the "positive" comments you're speaking of are often trivial or, worse, contrived.
DAoC, in its later revisions, introduced the ability for people who had max-level characters to start another character at an advanced level, in order to avoid the low-mid-level grinding (which was pretty bad in that game at times). This was done partially for the reason you mention, and partially to increase the diversity of character types for PvP (which was much better in DAoC than WoW, if you ask me). Since some character classes are also, obviously, harder/more tedious to level, and since DAoC has something on the order of 40 character classes, this seemed to work out fairly well and make a good measure of sense.
Was just talking about this with someone else. The original WoW noob zones could really use some fine tuning, as there's some situations where you run out of quests for your level and have to old-fashioned grind to get back up to speed. Plus the chaining of quests isn't all that well developed.
The Blood Elf and Draenei 1-20 quest chains, though, are extremely well developed not only with regards to keeping you stocked with appropriately leveled quests (and making those quests seem interesting and immersive), but also with regards to adequate equipment as quest rewards, to alleviate the need to buy equipment from vendors or make it yourself.
They definitely learned how to optimize the whole beginning-of-game experience between the initial release and TBC.
I do similar, except I read the story bits. The WoW content people write pretty good quest stories, so I like to read them and get an impression of what's going on in-character.
I know this is the current trendy speculation, but there's a lot of reasons that the Saudis agreed to use the USD as the effective petrodollar, only one of which was the nature of the USD in relation to other currencies.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually corporations are interesting legal fictions that have some limited "personhood", except without the natural lifetime restrains of a human being.
Again, you have some idealistic ideas of how this whole thing works, but in actuality those spending the most amount of money on lobbying are not concerned citizens or corporations made of politically active workers, but rather very narrowly populated corporate leadership populations making a concerted effort to encourage legislation that furthers their interest, and hopefully to the detriment of their competitors' and/or opponents interests. This is, of course, done because it furthers the shareholders' interests, but nonetheless, the rosy picture you paint of corporate social structures is... shall we say... idealistic?
We worked fine without corporations for a long time between Neanderthals (which we likely never were, btw) and the modern day. Companies served that function just fine, though corporations do provide some useful legal shielding to their constituents/leadership.
Correct. While the poster presents an excellent view of how lobbying would work in a perfect world, in reality lobbyists are quite often highly paid contractors that express the desires of a relatively small number of people who have large amount of resources directed towards legislative action that directly benefits themselves, not the population as a whole.
I've routinely failed to be convinced by this argument. Basic/Standard cable may compete for viewers with broadcast TV, but it doesn't *really* compete with Video iPods, for example, because the viewership stats are so very different in number. Satellite radio really only competes with terrestrial radio, since it's the only one that has portable, streaming audio. When WiMax, et al. get popular, then perhaps you'll have a point, but until then, it's really just XM vs Sirius vs Clear Channel.
I endorse this choice, as it would lead to more dates for moi.
Uh, what? I'm having a hard time thinking of what WoW did that no MMORPG had done before. They streamlined and made it *better*, but WoW really just took a lot of things that were done before and put them in a better package.
Don't get me wrong, it's no small feat, but it's not amazingly original, either.
The major difference (I did the beta for a while) is that shooting and tactical skill is actually a factor. There's some "fudge" in the mechanics to account for lag, but there's no "start combat"/"end combat" keystroke that puts you on auto-fight.
Other useful benefits include the fact that the war is being fought primarily between NPCs, and the PCs are elite soldiers, making the "you are a hero" bit a little more immersive. The NPCs can capture and lose strategic strongholds, the battles for which a PC can participate in and effect the outcome thereof. The holding and losing of territory will likely effect gameplay in non-trivial ways (this was a DAoC thing and apparently will be a Warhammer thing, as well).
Either you didn;t play the game enough or didn't really understand what you were doing. It's not a totally original game, but neither is it exactly the same as WoW/Everquest/AO.
Mod post up, people. It's actually informative.
I feel like a broken record, but DAoC's endgame content was 80% "kill a lot of my PC enemies because it benefits my team", and 20% other stuff. Quite enjoyable.
If only I hadn't waited until thumbnail vision was enabled before registering on slashdot!
Really? I can't say that's the case for me at all.
Correct. The players that want to learn their characters will, but the PvE content previous to end-game raiding doesn't exactly concentrate on preparing people to do group work (not to mention some of the pet classes can do a *lot* of the group quests while solo).
I agree. Even by going all the given quests, getting to 10 is easy, and 20 is harder only if you get bored easily or have to pee. Nothing particularly interesting gameplay-wise happens between 20-60, sadly. Sure you "get stuff" and improve abilities, but most of the time it's quest-quest-grindgrind-run-from-bored-70's-that-need-to-get-their-stupid-asses-in-a-raiding-guild-instead-of-ganking-in-stv-quest-quest
There's some value to your ideas, but I think you're overlooking the fact that WoW has a huge allowance for the casual player. So making the system increasingly complex will hurt their revenue stream.
I'm not convinced that having more and more options is better, anyway. Inevitably the "choices" get narrowed down to a set of fairly-well-known templates that are optimal for a given task, and the other specs get left along the road.
Also, I don't really think that experience loss makes leveling more meaningful. It makes it more stressful and gives a penalty for death, but meaningful? I'm unconvinced. Exp would have to be much easier to amass for that not to be frustrating really fast (especially for a gimped class, for example).
I say, what does it matter, when people buy characters or buy leveling services, have a high-level alt, and STILL don't know how to play. Not only that, but if they don't know how to play their new characters effectively, then I guess they'll just have to learn, won't they? I don't really see the problem with that.
What qualifies as "prolonged periods of very high inflation"? Post the 1970's stagflation, I don't believe I can recall "prolonged periods of very high inflation", unless you can inflation being between 4-5% as "very high".
No, it's actually more likely that the general tenor of the console market is being accurately reflected by the comments in this thread. The PS3's market share is hurtin' for a variety of reasons, and it doesn't help that the "positive" comments you're speaking of are often trivial or, worse, contrived.
DAoC, in its later revisions, introduced the ability for people who had max-level characters to start another character at an advanced level, in order to avoid the low-mid-level grinding (which was pretty bad in that game at times). This was done partially for the reason you mention, and partially to increase the diversity of character types for PvP (which was much better in DAoC than WoW, if you ask me). Since some character classes are also, obviously, harder/more tedious to level, and since DAoC has something on the order of 40 character classes, this seemed to work out fairly well and make a good measure of sense.
Was just talking about this with someone else. The original WoW noob zones could really use some fine tuning, as there's some situations where you run out of quests for your level and have to old-fashioned grind to get back up to speed. Plus the chaining of quests isn't all that well developed.
The Blood Elf and Draenei 1-20 quest chains, though, are extremely well developed not only with regards to keeping you stocked with appropriately leveled quests (and making those quests seem interesting and immersive), but also with regards to adequate equipment as quest rewards, to alleviate the need to buy equipment from vendors or make it yourself.
They definitely learned how to optimize the whole beginning-of-game experience between the initial release and TBC.
What would you consider an addition that would make it more meaningful?
Not that I'm disagreeing with you (I might be, dunno), but I'm curious as to what would make 20-60 meaningful in your eyes.
I do similar, except I read the story bits. The WoW content people write pretty good quest stories, so I like to read them and get an impression of what's going on in-character.
My main is smack in the middle, so I'm a happy Drae for that.
I do believe that at least the Cosmos addon will mark quests with a "g" as known group quests.
So essentially, they're making changes so that the "middle" level grind is shorter.
Meh!
I know this is the current trendy speculation, but there's a lot of reasons that the Saudis agreed to use the USD as the effective petrodollar, only one of which was the nature of the USD in relation to other currencies.