Note that I am not asking for Linux "support" as that is much more expensive a proposition. Just a supported or acknowledged linux community...
As a side/similar question. Has Blizzard/Activision ever considered using their market dominance to influence the market for "the better"? IE. Every consider support Linux naively in an attempt to kick-start Linux as a desktop OS?
After all, if Blizzard games are Linux supported, gamers are like, half-way there. More people would be open to installing Ubuntu or the link on family PC's because the games they play the most are still playable without dual boot. Likewise, creating the "Leader of the Pack" situation where other major game studios start to support Linux because Blizzard supports Linux then "we should too", kind of thing.
You haven't played MMORPGs much have you? Would you like 2 hours to level from 51-52 or would you prefer 40 hours? Would you prefer being able to do that by completing a book full of quests or have to sit in the same forest, with 4 other plays, waiting for a snake to crawl by? Would you prefer to raid for 4 hours or for 12 hours? Would you like to die and just run back to your corpse invisable and instantly get all your stuff back or die, loose half your your level XP, loose a level if loosing enough XP, and on top of that, have to run back to your corpse, alive, with no weapons or armor, because they all stay on our corpse, which will disappear if left too long. Would you like to stand at the Zeppelin in Org. for 3 mins, or stand around a dock for 20 mins and then have to take a 10 min boat ride through an ocean, before arriving at the other city? Did I mention the boat could bug, dropping you in the middle of said ocean, with deadly sharks and small islands too far away to normally reach but typically covered with super-powered giants or sirens and dieing from exhaustion in the ocean meant your body sinking to the deepest depths, nearly unrecoverable. In a game were it was near impossible to solo a single monster of equal level.
Sure there's "grind" in WoW, but it doesn't mean what it use to mean back in my day! Now get off m'ah lawn! =D
Actually, Metaplace is already far ahead of Google on this one. Just running the system, though, makes Firefox use about as much memory usage as World of Warcraft.
However, the system is pretty cool. I've been beta testing for while now. But a flash based virtual world embedded in a browser simply cannot compare to a stand-alone app.
[Scene: A New York apartment. Someone knocks on the door.]
Woman: [not opening the door] Yes?
Voice: (mumbling) Mrs. Arlsburgerhhh?
Woman: What?
Voice: (mumbling) Mrs. Johannesburrrr?
Woman: Who is it?
Voice: [pause] Flowers.
Woman: Flowers for whom?
Voice: [long pause] Plumber, ma'am.
Woman: I don't need a plumber. You're that clever shark, aren't you?
Voice: [pause] Candygram.
Woman: Candygram, my foot. You get out of here before I call the police. You're the shark, and you know it.
Voice: Wait. I-I'm only a dolphin, ma'am.
Woman: A dolphin? Well...okay. [opens door]
[Huge latex and foam-rubber shark head lunges through open door, chomps down on woman's head, and drags her out of the apartment, all while the Jaws attack music is playing.]
Also, I think an "ugly mode" would actually serve to piss off the yammering fans rather than make them happy. I can really see it - the option would have the name "Ugly Mode" and the tooltip "How the game should have looked. Not WoW gay at all."
LOL, Me thinks there might be a new "cow" level Easter egg in D3.
Are the pigopolists looking for some kind of unilateral gag order?
"Mom, make him shut up, he's talking about us!"
RIAA legal team == tards of the worst order. When the revolution comes, they won't survive long enough to be stood up against the wall.
By locking him into a legal battle that could be about everything the RIAA does, that he won't be able to comment on, they might be able to do just that... regardless if they even go to court.
I'd have to say, don't bother. His show was based off his stand-up. Simply put, it's comedy by observation. He see's something odd and then mentions it. For example, He see's sky divers wearing helmets and asks: "What's the point? Is a helmet going to save your life when falling out of the sky? Really?" Then he turns that into an even funnier (by some people's tastes) simple comment. It's sort of a "funny because it's true" scenario.
Most of the TV show was based off this premise then expanded by the writing crew. Perhaps something you might find more interesting is not Jerry Seinfeld's comedy but how incredibly tough the guy has it and how he's become the victim of his own success. There's a great documentary showing this called Comedian. You see Jerry get up on stage just after the end of his series and people laugh at every stupid thing he says (even when it's not a joke). Then you see him sweat bullets as he totally fails at remembering any of his jokes and the crowd just gets sort of shocked.
The documentary is a little dull (particularly considering when it's about comedians) but there are some pretty true parts in it.
Or visit Fuelly.com and just browse what some people are getting for fuel economy. There's a few people out there that apparently can't enter numbers properly, but it's a nice view of what people are getting in reality and not just "EPA Estimates".
In November, the city withdrew its demand that Reisinger not link to city government sites.
SO um, what's the issue?
Being from the area (born and raised in the county), this story is pretty old. It also had everything to do with the fact that the women in question was an out-spoken critic of the Sheboygan mayor, Perez. The whole thing is the fact that the mayor abusing his power to make a critics life difficult. Unfortunately for the major, and fortunately for the public, the mayor was pretty clueless about the ridiculous request he made (among many of his other ridiculous things he's done).
The whole thing hit local media pretty fast and the backlash was pretty big and the city withdrew it's request some time ago.
They need to clean up some talents/abilities, finish some content, but there really isn't a whole lot to finish. At this point it will be a lot of tweaking of all the changes they made.
Right, talents, spells, etc. are all things that are not actually part of the expansion, which consists of new content (new zones, factions, items, mobs, and a class). Everything else will be addressed via the Test Server and the patch that will precede the expansion, kind of like The Burning Crusade. Now that the new patch is on the test realm, I'm sure the talents and things will come along nicely.
Should the talent changes and things like "spellpower" have issues, they'll know and push back the release date until some point after the patch goes out. Speaking of which, we can probably expect the 3.0 patch to go live around the end of Oct. early Nov. all things being equal.
Either way, the only thing that will be on the CD's in the box will be the content files. The mechanics will all be mostly implemented through the patch. Pretty common practice now-a-days.
Some of us are willing to pay more than that to get old games like warcraft 2 working smoothly.
Hehe. Speaking of which, I played Warcraft II yesterday for a few hours on my Dell Inspiron 8100 that I bought in like 2001... for gaming.
It's suited my every gaming need since that time and I still play World of Warcraft on it. I couldn't play Doom 3 on it back then, but when I bought a gaming desktop a few years back, I just bought Doom 3 then.
It's a great machine for running my other older games I never got a chance to play, like Baulders Gate, Fallout 1 & 2, Warcraft 2, and Starcraft. And for playing casual Flash games.
I use to visit Newgrounds a lot several years ago. I was then introduced to Kongregate.com. They do something similar. Most of their flash games have some sort of achievement rewards which can award you with points and "cards". Said points then "level" your account.
It's an interesting system. And I enjoy their flash games. What I found, however, is that most of their flash games can equally be found on other sites, like Newgrounds. The more the merrier.
Re:Can you change the world in MMO's?
on
Quests
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· Score: 1
Actually, LotRO implemented a quest design that helped solve *some* of these issues. What they did is (for the major quests anyways) is instance the quest "room".
You see, Aragon or Gandolf or whoever are always sitting in a room that's instanced. So, to get the quest, you go into the instance room and only other people on that step of the quest are there.
Likewise, when doing the quest, you go into an instance. Before you do the quest, the cave might have baddies in it. After doing the quest (to clear out the baddies) it's empty or there's people moving it or what have you. (or maybe I'm mixing this part up, it's been so long I can't recall exactly)
Sure, it wasn't the end-all-be-all and the same problems existed, but it was one of the things I noticed that instead of always walking into the same room at the Bree Inn and seeing Aragon sitting there giving out quests to different people and saying the same thing, you can only "visit" him if you're on that step of the quest and enter his room.
Going into his room before/after the quest and he might not be there because in the "story arc" he's supposedly traveling to Moria or whatever. Anyway, it was an interesting little change. In general, I would really like to see more dynamic worlds, but that is pretty difficult and costly to manage. Even then, it would still get old pretty fast. I'd just settle for more GM events in game. There never much of that anymore. I'm pretty sure Blizzard can afford to hire a few people to play some unique characters on all their servers and just run around doing something unique.
I'm ashamed that show is one of out exports. It should never have been seen outside (or even inside) of the UK.
Really? I thought it was uniquely funny, albeit a little boring. Far funnier than the UK version of the Office. But that could just be cultural differences.
Indeed. I think the Wii in our apt has been turned on once since the summer started, but I've played through at least 5-6 360 games in that time (if you count things like the PA game from Live Arcade as a full game then its 1 more).
Myself, I've not turned on my Wii in several months. No games that really interest me. However, that will soon change when Batman Lego is released. Then shortly following that the Tales of Symphonia sequel (an excellent single player RPG that was on the GameCube).
Though, other than that, there's not much in general I enjoy playing on consoles. I'm still glad I have a Wii and wouldn't trade it. Actually, now that I think about it. I did use my Wii a lot this summer for Wii Fit. I just don't really consider it "gaming".
All my other time was spent playing WoW mostly. Though, I've decided to go back and start playing Oblivion again, since I bought it but never played it more than a couple of hours.
I'll be waiting for Starcraft 2 and the WoW expansion. Though, I might go back and try playing LotRO again. That was a decent game. Of course, I've also been spending a lot of time on Kongregate.com. There's tons of fun flash games (with achievements) to play for a quick 10-30mins.
I guess my point is that I have a ton games to play and no time to play them. That doesn't even include the fact that I bought the Fallout 1, 2, Tactics package to play, but haven't touched yet. There's so much hype about Fallout 3 I thought I should go back and finally play that game. Which also reminds me that I need to play Warcraft 2 sometime. Yet another game I've never played but own. I need a long vacation. =P
Well, I guess I should follow up to myself. The Games Wherehouse Australia is listing it as $89.99 and $139.99. Which is, indeed, a lot more at an American $ exchange rate being ~$76.36 and $118.80
I'm going to have to speculate and ask, does Australia have a VAT tax? Are they adding on some 50% "games tax" or something but since it's VAT the consumers don't actually see this tax?
How long is it now before we have WoWA (World of Warcraft Anonymous)?
"Support Groups" for MMO's have been around for a long time. Probably since MUDs but at the earliest I know of is "EQ Widows", a support group for spouses who's significant other is "addicted" to EQ (the popular MMO at the time). To the point that it destroyed their marriage. A not to uncommon of an occurrence.
I guess you could call that one of the first "addiction" support groups as that's basically what it was. Particularly popular were spouses looking for advice to "break the addition". Something I always wanted to do a research paper on, but I was too busy playing EQ to bother. =P Though, honestly, EQ was my first MMO and by far destroyed my summer as I fell hopelessly addicted to it that I couldn't pull myself away despite feeling the need too. It took an equally measurable event, a "crash" for me to shock myself out of it.
Seriously though. The thing about WoW is that you can't lose. You really can't.
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. Picking on a game because of how people choose to play it is kind of silly. After all, it's not WoW's fault some level 70 powers a level 10 through a dungeon anymore some God coming down to help a D&D party out in a dungeon is.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that I am not asking for Linux "support" as that is much more expensive a proposition. Just a supported or acknowledged linux community...
As a side/similar question. Has Blizzard/Activision ever considered using their market dominance to influence the market for "the better"? IE. Every consider support Linux naively in an attempt to kick-start Linux as a desktop OS?
After all, if Blizzard games are Linux supported, gamers are like, half-way there. More people would be open to installing Ubuntu or the link on family PC's because the games they play the most are still playable without dual boot. Likewise, creating the "Leader of the Pack" situation where other major game studios start to support Linux because Blizzard supports Linux then "we should too", kind of thing.
You don't play wow much do you?
You haven't played MMORPGs much have you? Would you like 2 hours to level from 51-52 or would you prefer 40 hours? Would you prefer being able to do that by completing a book full of quests or have to sit in the same forest, with 4 other plays, waiting for a snake to crawl by? Would you prefer to raid for 4 hours or for 12 hours? Would you like to die and just run back to your corpse invisable and instantly get all your stuff back or die, loose half your your level XP, loose a level if loosing enough XP, and on top of that, have to run back to your corpse, alive, with no weapons or armor, because they all stay on our corpse, which will disappear if left too long. Would you like to stand at the Zeppelin in Org. for 3 mins, or stand around a dock for 20 mins and then have to take a 10 min boat ride through an ocean, before arriving at the other city? Did I mention the boat could bug, dropping you in the middle of said ocean, with deadly sharks and small islands too far away to normally reach but typically covered with super-powered giants or sirens and dieing from exhaustion in the ocean meant your body sinking to the deepest depths, nearly unrecoverable. In a game were it was near impossible to solo a single monster of equal level.
Sure there's "grind" in WoW, but it doesn't mean what it use to mean back in my day! Now get off m'ah lawn! =D
Actually, Metaplace is already far ahead of Google on this one. Just running the system, though, makes Firefox use about as much memory usage as World of Warcraft.
However, the system is pretty cool. I've been beta testing for while now. But a flash based virtual world embedded in a browser simply cannot compare to a stand-alone app.
[Scene: A New York apartment. Someone knocks on the door.]
Woman: [not opening the door] Yes?
Voice: (mumbling) Mrs. Arlsburgerhhh?
Woman: What?
Voice: (mumbling) Mrs. Johannesburrrr?
Woman: Who is it?
Voice: [pause] Flowers.
Woman: Flowers for whom?
Voice: [long pause] Plumber, ma'am.
Woman: I don't need a plumber. You're that clever shark, aren't you?
Voice: [pause] Candygram.
Woman: Candygram, my foot. You get out of here before I call the police. You're the shark, and you know it.
Voice: Wait. I-I'm only a dolphin, ma'am.
Woman: A dolphin? Well...okay. [opens door]
[Huge latex and foam-rubber shark head lunges through open door, chomps down on woman's head, and drags her out of the apartment, all while the Jaws attack music is playing.]
Now with more formatting.
Also, I think an "ugly mode" would actually serve to piss off the yammering fans rather than make them happy. I can really see it - the option would have the name "Ugly Mode" and the tooltip "How the game should have looked. Not WoW gay at all."
LOL, Me thinks there might be a new "cow" level Easter egg in D3.
Are the pigopolists looking for some kind of unilateral gag order?
"Mom, make him shut up, he's talking about us!"
RIAA legal team == tards of the worst order. When the revolution comes, they won't survive long enough to be stood up against the wall.
By locking him into a legal battle that could be about everything the RIAA does, that he won't be able to comment on, they might be able to do just that... regardless if they even go to court.
I've never got the Seinfeld thing. [...]
I'd have to say, don't bother. His show was based off his stand-up. Simply put, it's comedy by observation. He see's something odd and then mentions it. For example, He see's sky divers wearing helmets and asks: "What's the point? Is a helmet going to save your life when falling out of the sky? Really?" Then he turns that into an even funnier (by some people's tastes) simple comment. It's sort of a "funny because it's true" scenario.
Most of the TV show was based off this premise then expanded by the writing crew. Perhaps something you might find more interesting is not Jerry Seinfeld's comedy but how incredibly tough the guy has it and how he's become the victim of his own success. There's a great documentary showing this called Comedian. You see Jerry get up on stage just after the end of his series and people laugh at every stupid thing he says (even when it's not a joke). Then you see him sweat bullets as he totally fails at remembering any of his jokes and the crowd just gets sort of shocked.
The documentary is a little dull (particularly considering when it's about comedians) but there are some pretty true parts in it.
Or visit Fuelly.com and just browse what some people are getting for fuel economy. There's a few people out there that apparently can't enter numbers properly, but it's a nice view of what people are getting in reality and not just "EPA Estimates".
Yes, my cars are on there too.
Even on consoles, it's rough to convince people to play games with something other than the standard controller.
Like Guitar Hero/Rock Band/Singstar? Or Buzz? Or Wii Fit?
Or the Wii remote even.
.
In November, the city withdrew its demand that Reisinger not link to city government sites.
SO um, what's the issue?
Being from the area (born and raised in the county), this story is pretty old. It also had everything to do with the fact that the women in question was an out-spoken critic of the Sheboygan mayor, Perez. The whole thing is the fact that the mayor abusing his power to make a critics life difficult. Unfortunately for the major, and fortunately for the public, the mayor was pretty clueless about the ridiculous request he made (among many of his other ridiculous things he's done).
The whole thing hit local media pretty fast and the backlash was pretty big and the city withdrew it's request some time ago.
Well, at least you'll have a lot of other DK to level up with. =P Now if only you could find a healer for your group... hehe
They need to clean up some talents/abilities, finish some content, but there really isn't a whole lot to finish. At this point it will be a lot of tweaking of all the changes they made.
Right, talents, spells, etc. are all things that are not actually part of the expansion, which consists of new content (new zones, factions, items, mobs, and a class). Everything else will be addressed via the Test Server and the patch that will precede the expansion, kind of like The Burning Crusade. Now that the new patch is on the test realm, I'm sure the talents and things will come along nicely.
Should the talent changes and things like "spellpower" have issues, they'll know and push back the release date until some point after the patch goes out. Speaking of which, we can probably expect the 3.0 patch to go live around the end of Oct. early Nov. all things being equal.
Either way, the only thing that will be on the CD's in the box will be the content files. The mechanics will all be mostly implemented through the patch. Pretty common practice now-a-days.
Some of us are willing to pay more than that to get old games like warcraft 2 working smoothly.
Hehe. Speaking of which, I played Warcraft II yesterday for a few hours on my Dell Inspiron 8100 that I bought in like 2001... for gaming.
It's suited my every gaming need since that time and I still play World of Warcraft on it. I couldn't play Doom 3 on it back then, but when I bought a gaming desktop a few years back, I just bought Doom 3 then.
It's a great machine for running my other older games I never got a chance to play, like Baulders Gate, Fallout 1 & 2, Warcraft 2, and Starcraft. And for playing casual Flash games.
I use to visit Newgrounds a lot several years ago. I was then introduced to Kongregate.com. They do something similar. Most of their flash games have some sort of achievement rewards which can award you with points and "cards". Said points then "level" your account.
It's an interesting system. And I enjoy their flash games. What I found, however, is that most of their flash games can equally be found on other sites, like Newgrounds. The more the merrier.
Actually, LotRO implemented a quest design that helped solve *some* of these issues. What they did is (for the major quests anyways) is instance the quest "room".
You see, Aragon or Gandolf or whoever are always sitting in a room that's instanced. So, to get the quest, you go into the instance room and only other people on that step of the quest are there.
Likewise, when doing the quest, you go into an instance. Before you do the quest, the cave might have baddies in it. After doing the quest (to clear out the baddies) it's empty or there's people moving it or what have you. (or maybe I'm mixing this part up, it's been so long I can't recall exactly)
Sure, it wasn't the end-all-be-all and the same problems existed, but it was one of the things I noticed that instead of always walking into the same room at the Bree Inn and seeing Aragon sitting there giving out quests to different people and saying the same thing, you can only "visit" him if you're on that step of the quest and enter his room.
Going into his room before/after the quest and he might not be there because in the "story arc" he's supposedly traveling to Moria or whatever. Anyway, it was an interesting little change. In general, I would really like to see more dynamic worlds, but that is pretty difficult and costly to manage. Even then, it would still get old pretty fast. I'd just settle for more GM events in game. There never much of that anymore. I'm pretty sure Blizzard can afford to hire a few people to play some unique characters on all their servers and just run around doing something unique.
I'm ashamed that show is one of out exports. It should never have been seen outside (or even inside) of the UK.
Really? I thought it was uniquely funny, albeit a little boring. Far funnier than the UK version of the Office. But that could just be cultural differences.
Canadian DMCA Proposal Needs Food Badly... (which is when the stupid wizard shoots the f*ing food)
Indeed. I think the Wii in our apt has been turned on once since the summer started, but I've played through at least 5-6 360 games in that time (if you count things like the PA game from Live Arcade as a full game then its 1 more).
Myself, I've not turned on my Wii in several months. No games that really interest me. However, that will soon change when Batman Lego is released. Then shortly following that the Tales of Symphonia sequel (an excellent single player RPG that was on the GameCube).
Though, other than that, there's not much in general I enjoy playing on consoles. I'm still glad I have a Wii and wouldn't trade it. Actually, now that I think about it. I did use my Wii a lot this summer for Wii Fit. I just don't really consider it "gaming".
All my other time was spent playing WoW mostly. Though, I've decided to go back and start playing Oblivion again, since I bought it but never played it more than a couple of hours.
I'll be waiting for Starcraft 2 and the WoW expansion. Though, I might go back and try playing LotRO again. That was a decent game. Of course, I've also been spending a lot of time on Kongregate.com. There's tons of fun flash games (with achievements) to play for a quick 10-30mins.
I guess my point is that I have a ton games to play and no time to play them. That doesn't even include the fact that I bought the Fallout 1, 2, Tactics package to play, but haven't touched yet. There's so much hype about Fallout 3 I thought I should go back and finally play that game. Which also reminds me that I need to play Warcraft 2 sometime. Yet another game I've never played but own. I need a long vacation. =P
http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php
That guy was using his last name as well. Didn't go so well for him.
Not sure why it's linking to Digest.com, other than trying to drive traffic to one's site, but here's the actual link
Well, I guess I should follow up to myself. The Games Wherehouse Australia is listing it as $89.99 and $139.99. Which is, indeed, a lot more at an American $ exchange rate being ~$76.36 and $118.80
I'm going to have to speculate and ask, does Australia have a VAT tax? Are they adding on some 50% "games tax" or something but since it's VAT the consumers don't actually see this tax?
Notably, the price is in Australian dollars. In American its 81.36$. Still a huge markup for apparently no reason.
Er... to confirm the game prices... $49.99 and $79.99 for the regular or "collectors" edition, respectively.
It would be helpful to identify which version people are talking about. Because that $81.36 would be on par with the "collectors" edition version.
Blame Google.
hehe, I thought you where going to say "blame Google" because they're releasing their Beta "Chrome" browser today (Sept. 2nd) (in beta, of course).
How long is it now before we have WoWA (World of Warcraft Anonymous)?
"Support Groups" for MMO's have been around for a long time. Probably since MUDs but at the earliest I know of is "EQ Widows", a support group for spouses who's significant other is "addicted" to EQ (the popular MMO at the time). To the point that it destroyed their marriage. A not to uncommon of an occurrence.
I guess you could call that one of the first "addiction" support groups as that's basically what it was. Particularly popular were spouses looking for advice to "break the addition". Something I always wanted to do a research paper on, but I was too busy playing EQ to bother. =P Though, honestly, EQ was my first MMO and by far destroyed my summer as I fell hopelessly addicted to it that I couldn't pull myself away despite feeling the need too. It took an equally measurable event, a "crash" for me to shock myself out of it.
This would make it all the same thing then wouldn't it?
Same? No. Similar or related? Yes.
Seriously though. The thing about WoW is that you can't lose. You really can't.
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. Picking on a game because of how people choose to play it is kind of silly. After all, it's not WoW's fault some level 70 powers a level 10 through a dungeon anymore some God coming down to help a D&D party out in a dungeon is.