Actually an officemate was just telling me that Microsoft, in their rush to get Xbox2 kiosks out to, e.g., Best Buy, forgot to encrypt their demo CDs and that people are pulling boot loader code off of it and dissassembling it. No source to cite (and I didn't bother to search) but it is probably out there if true.
That didn't even require a hardware or software oops. Just some dumb human, and we have those in spades!
Besides, you're still assuming there are no bugs in the entire TC chain, down to hardware up from software. Do you really expect the people who gave us the Pentium fdiv bug and Windows version (pick your poison) to ship a totally bug free platform? Sure they will and I might quantum teleport into the sun and die tomorrow. Given the probability of that occuring, I don't think I'll be sleepless in dread.
It is also only a matter of time till some company who has a driver-signing key gets 0wned and that key is public on the net. Sure, Microsoft will have ways to revoke keys, but the damage of one being out is probably sufficient to let a chain of exploits based on it continue long past the key itself being useless.
And there won't be a damn thing you can do about it until someone finds the first security exploit in the OS!
So we should have to wait all of what, negative five minutes?
Seriously. This just copy protection at the OS level. People break game copy protection all the time. People will find a security hole in Vista and use it to do the exact same thing (where's the statement that tests the signed condition... yes some nops there would do nicely) and it'll be wide open again. In the worst case there is always the ability of something like a mod chip to alter signals on the fly. I'd have faith if the hardware gurus can do it to a Xbox they can do it to a PC.
It is as bad as MMO makers claiming they're going to detect and ban bots. If my bot is a linux router with a usb hookup and a "keyboard" program running to feed "user interaction" to the game-running windows machine, they can't detect it. To them nothing is out of the ordinary. Sure, you have to decode the packet stream but that isn't/that/ hard. The information MMOs send isn't that different from what MUDs send, and people have been scripting those for years. The best the MMO maker can do is use hieuristics to watch for "bot-like" behavior but even that is questionable at best. (I'm sure I look like a bot by about 2 am if I'm up playing that late)
Big media wants people to watch more TV. Or read newspapers. Or magazines. Not play games on the computer with friends who's jobs have taken them thousands of miles away across the country (or world).
Why report stories about TV addiction or other such things? Why not report it instead about games. If they're lucky and get a few to quit, that's probably more TV addicts in a few years for them anyway.
1. This is a problem, but are you willing to pay more to get lower ratios? That's the rub, take it or leave it. Personally I found classes targetted enough below me I usually didn't need to see a TA. If I did have questions, they were usually better answered over newsgroups. ("Question 2b contains the following unclear english, please clarify...")
2. Most classes at my particular large university (UIUC, big enough?) are lectured by profs and have smaller sections taught by TAs. There are problems still however; one semester I got assigned to teach a course I was signed up for. Gee ya think I may not have mastery of the material yet? Actually I was assigned to teach TWO courses, over 110 students (average per TA being more in the 60-80 range) and one of them I'd never had before. I asked the dept. to change it since I was signed up for that course as part of my program and got told "too bad drop the course and add a different one."
Luckily my professors (an associate prof and an ABD PhD canidate really) were fairly understanding of the matter.
3. Don't get me started. UIUC CS had a policy where graduate students who couldn't pass the SPEAK test required to actually interact with students were assigned as "no-contact" TAs. In theory they helped us write and grade assignments/exams and update the web site.
In practice, all of those things still require communication with students, just mediated through the written (and then corrected by everyone else) word. Further, when a TA can't correctly solve a simple undergraduate cache-load problem, having them write solutions/grade doesn't so much help.
4. Rote assignments are indeed sucky. I always worked to make any programming project I put out interesting, as well as test questions. I also had a reputation for writing impossible questions. Here's a hint: a lot of the students can only handle dull, route assignments. A cache size problem (x-way associativity, y size-words, z bytes large) where I played around with which of the peice of the equation they were missing got me berated for writing questions that were "too hard."
5. True students seeking more elegant/better/high-graded solutions. This is why you talk to your friends in class about the assignment. Not "can I copy yours?" but "I used a X method to solve problem Y, but it's kludgy. Did you find a better way?"
The other problem here can be unreasonable deadlines. "Implement a filesystem in nachos in 1 week." Good frikkin luck, you (would) have spent half your time looking up what was being passed in to the funciton you were writing. (Good old C/C++ nachos 'void *' hell. None of this newfangled java nachos crap that probably has all the parameters typed.)
The problem is the conversion of real world gold to virtual gold.
Actually, that's not even the problem.
The real problem is that games are designed so that there is a grind; there is something to get for a lot of virtual gold. And worse, there's an infinite amount of virtual gold.
Trust me, MUD/MOO/MUSHes/etc don't have "gold farmers" selling the gold on ebay. (well, back in the day I worked on them they didn't) They still had inflation problems. It is a problem with the way the system is designed. Every starting character gets 100 gold. 90% quit. Do the math: For every starting character who stays, you've added an extra 900 gold to the system. Plus of course mobs dropping things, respawning and dropping more.
I've heard academics talk and claim that this problem can be solved, but I have yet to be convinced (without killing trade) that it can.
While you are on one hand correct, equipment and levels make the character, you are also wrong to assume that there is no skill component to it.
In warcraft, if your and your enemies skills are close, equipment will decide who wins. On the other hand, the best equipment in the world won't save an idiot from losing. I've seen toons that have >500 gold spent on them die to a level-2, standard leveling gear equipped reroll of mine because they have the gear but not the skill.
I've also slugged it out with people who have an equal level of skill and it all comes down to equipment.
And of course there's coordination and tactics. Three friends and I on a teamspeak server who have played together, learned each other's playstyles, developed (at least an informal) kill-priority order do much better with a given set of characters/equipment than we should. Duh! We practice together (informally, playing the game; not drill-like at 7pm or anything).
So I think in summary, Learn2Play.
Or in really bad pseudocode: Skill > equipment unless (level difference >= 5 | (player1.haspurples && player2.hasgreens))
Because the last game with a 100% player crafted/run economy worked so well! (Well, okay the game itself had cash but there were no vendors -- it's about as close as I've seen a game come.)
It is interesting to hear other users of Xserve RAID/Xserves comment on things like this. Within a year we had our (2) Xserve raids throw 2 disks and 1 controller (!).
And don't even get me started on the repair parts for the cluster of Xserves themselves -- though if you have only 20 you're probably doing light-duty use with them, not heavy memory-hogging, CPU-killing number crunching on them. Nothing seems to find CPU/memory related errors like linpack...
There are only two MOOs. The third, commonly referred to "MOO" is really MOTRAIG: Master of The Retarded AI Planetary Govenor.
There was a MOM2 in the works but I think it has slipped release dates by years and been passed hot-potato style amoung developers. I wouldn't count on it anytime soon.
Isn't from US companies. Or if it is, the companies that spam in game are TRYING to look Chinese(/asian) by having Chinese(/asian) looking names. 'chengchang', 'llw', 'lz', etc. (the latter two may not look asian, but I have local users at my university with logins like those and very asian names) And then they're spamming me with broken English: "Fast come,fast serve!" amoung others (I'm sure players on my server recognise that).
What really irritates me is that despite Blizzard claiming to ban farming/spamming accounts, I get the same "Fast come,fast serve!" spam literally character for character over and over and over again across weeks of time. I'd think with enough account bans, it wouldn't be profitable anymore. It isn't like the boxed game is super cheap, and if they'd ban an account for spamming like they claim to, they'd need easily 3.5 boxes a week (trial account + real account in each box). I'd think baning c-card numbers would be even better, but unfortunatly I think they support time-cards now, so even that wouldn't work so well.
And the driving force isn't American companies, it's Americans who will spend $$$ on in-game gold. Much like spam, all we'd need to do to end it (spam or gold farming or the RIAA) would be to have everyone quit buying from them.
And we know that, if nothing else, Americans excel at that. [/sarcasm]
Complex strategies in FPSes? Sometimes, but certainly not in a FFA deathmatch. Nothing more complex than path planning in pacman. And you could certainly teach a 7 year old the strats even if they wouldn't come up with them on their own.
Besides if it makes any of the teenaged "god's gift to " n00bs go cry over a nice game of The Sims it has made a better place. (insert your favorite with player vs player combat)
Because giving it away for free hasn't worked for operating systems either. And there aren't artists (indies, of course) who sign up for places like magnatune(.com) where you can download the music and play it for free (mp3), and pay for full cd-quality wav (and case art).
Obviously the RIAA & co's campaign has worked on you. Don't believe all the junk they say. Look for youself and you'll see it isn't all true.
Turning something that's defective with the game (too many traps; no way to deal with them except using a rogue) into a "feature" with spin. That's about what I'd expect from them really.
Oh, and expect all the sociopathic assholes (and griefers) to play rogues. Then they can inflict maximum pain on everyone else but know they'll always get party invites (since you have to have a party) because every party MUST have a rogue.
Seriously. A game where I don't have to group up with the tools spamming "ur gay" in the barrens is a game I can appreciate. Warcraft is the first game since AC that really had any strength at soloing. CoH had a little of it, but it was only a little and has since been nerfed into the ground. (though in a way that made the solo game stronger as the high-end there degenerated into herding madness which usually means a lot of players to get the instance to spawn that many mobs)
There are group quests from NPCs. They're called instances. Go try one solo, you'll be back looking for a group nice and quick.
Or go try PvP. If you don't work with your group (pickup or not) prepare to be owned by the other side. There was a match I was in last night with a group of 10 horde. 7 were a lowbie (20-29) PvP guild and the last three were a couple friends and myself (all on TeamSpeak).
To say we owned hardcore would be an understatment. At one point I lead the charge into the alliance coming down midfield. I had support behind me but I figured I'd die for it as I had all the alliance (7-9, hard to get an exact count with pets) on me and would be solo for at least 3-4 seconds. Somehow, through well timed heals arrived when I was around 10% health (from I think the druid on our team) and I lived through it. I had absolutly no right to, not even geared out as insane as I am. (why yes those are level 38 leather legs I'm wearing at 29 thanks for asking! Yes that is 2k health I'm sporting no it's not a typo.)
You know, back when I used to hack out system code for a star wars MUSH (SW2: A New Threat -- if you're curious) there was another coder on the MUSH who I had disagreements with about user-interface style (and practically everything else).
Anyway, his idea of a good text-only UI to an in-game cash machine was: look at it to see the screen. Then use +input to fill in the form it is displaying. Then use +input ok to use the continue/enter button on the screen. Then look at it again to see the next screeen it has up.
So to type in your username and password to withdraw money you'd do:
l atm +input username +input ok l atm +input password +input ok l atm +input withdrawl +input ok l atm +input 530 credits +input ok l atm +input logout +input ok l atm +input yes (yes really log off the atm) +input ok l atm (whew finally done)
As opposed to what any sane coder would do:
+atm/withdraw 530 credits
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is your description of the combat system just SMELLS like this guy's idea about how user interfaces should be designed. I have no clue who he is in real life of course, I only know the screen name he used. But I have to wonder if he got hired by Sony to do SWG...
Actually any large installation of the same brand/type of drive can tell you a lot about the drive's reliability. Yes it varies from batch to batch like all other physical things, but reliability defects due to 1) bad design 2) cheap components or 3) poor QA aren't likely to change across batches of disks.
Find someone who's running a few hundred of the same companies disks and you've found someone who can answer reliability questions pretty well. 5 disks is far too small a sample to mean crap. 500 on the other hand, especially over a few years is a pretty good sample. Trusting a user's machine to keep the drive operating within spec is also a dumb idea. Users have fans die and don't replace them (or don't notice) and do other similarly dumb things.
If I wasn't working from home, I could look through my RMA shipping log and tell you exactly how many drive failures we've had in our 640, 80-gig hitachi (I think) disks in the cluster I run over 10-11 months now. It is fairly low; on the order of 5-10 drives. Ask me in a year or two and I'm sure that rate will have gone up, but you can probably use the rates I'm getting to calculate a real MTBF for the disks in a proper server-room type enviroment. (temp 68 deg F, proper cooling & ventilation in the machine, checked regularly for errors and running 24/7)
So you grind and grind and grind in galaxies but can't stand the warcraft grind. Sounds to me like you can't stand PvP and were trying to run on a PvP server in warcraft. There's pleny of skill required there.
The missions are a lot more varied than you imply. Sure there's kill X. There is also recover item X (clickable on landscape), recover items X (dropped from mobs), recover items X (crafted), escort NPC quests, explore quests, use item on other item (kinda like clickable on landscape quest), courier quests, and all the instance quests (like the above but in a private setting for you and friends, or you and a PUG if you lack friends. Hint: have friends.)
There's class specific quests at (most of) your landmark levels which are usually different and unique, as well as in-theme for the class in question.
Something less recyclable than paper to package all our crap with. That's flashy and annoying. And uses (and landfills) batteries.
On the bright side you'll always know if the product is fresh or not. Not fresh: no display. Of course then you won't know till you open it if you have Cheerios or Chex Mix.
is the set you're looking for. Red plastic tub full of a bunch of bricks plus cardboard box full of more bricks on top of it plastic-shipping-corded on top. No directions on it, but if you just want lots of random brickage, it's great.
$19.99 at T-r-U, 2k bricks in it. You even get some fun colors. (in my world, lego bricks come in black, grey, white, blue, red, and yellow. Plus some transparent parts in other colors (green, notibly). Base plates come in grey, green, or black.)
There was the great herding nerf about three to six months back. The great hearding nerf slowed down leveling speed (particularly in the post-30 world) dramatically. I've been playing WoW for four months now, and haven't hit 60 quite yet. In CoH, I'd hit 50 in about 3 months.
Where no matter what you wear, you look normal/professional compared to the students.
It works for me!
More seriously: I work in a server room, often on the floor every day. I wear jeans, and I've just trashed one pair up there and am doing a good number on two others. Dress pants would have turned into scrap long ago.
The quality of non-lego blocks is seriously sub-par compared to the lego company's brick quality.
They feel cheap, they don't hook together and stay hooked, and they use way way way more custom peices than lego (and these days, that's saying something!).
I mean, I'm all for competition, but I can't say that I think the price legos deliver at, around 1c US per brick in the generic bins of bricks is, you know, out of line.
It isn't like this same problem comes up and keeps coming up in other games. Warcraft has the same problem in the battlegrounds. Some people are tools and just want to frag the enemy "to gain rank." (which is minor compared to the gain for winning the match but hey what do I know? I'm only rank 3 at level 29.)
Thankfully those idiots apparently have moved out of the 20-29 bracket on my server, because there's now competition to run the flag. So now I and my friends (coordinated on teamspeak as well) sit midfiled and deny the alliance access to anything but their base. Meanwhile our flag runner has a field day as the alliance flail against the offensive defense that is us four.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually an officemate was just telling me that Microsoft, in their rush to get Xbox2 kiosks out to, e.g., Best Buy, forgot to encrypt their demo CDs and that people are pulling boot loader code off of it and dissassembling it. No source to cite (and I didn't bother to search) but it is probably out there if true.
That didn't even require a hardware or software oops. Just some dumb human, and we have those in spades!
Besides, you're still assuming there are no bugs in the entire TC chain, down to hardware up from software. Do you really expect the people who gave us the Pentium fdiv bug and Windows version (pick your poison) to ship a totally bug free platform? Sure they will and I might quantum teleport into the sun and die tomorrow. Given the probability of that occuring, I don't think I'll be sleepless in dread.
It is also only a matter of time till some company who has a driver-signing key gets 0wned and that key is public on the net. Sure, Microsoft will have ways to revoke keys, but the damage of one being out is probably sufficient to let a chain of exploits based on it continue long past the key itself being useless.
And there won't be a damn thing you can do about it until someone finds the first security exploit in the OS!
/that/ hard. The information MMOs send isn't that different from what MUDs send, and people have been scripting those for years. The best the MMO maker can do is use hieuristics to watch for "bot-like" behavior but even that is questionable at best. (I'm sure I look like a bot by about 2 am if I'm up playing that late)
So we should have to wait all of what, negative five minutes?
Seriously. This just copy protection at the OS level. People break game copy protection all the time. People will find a security hole in Vista and use it to do the exact same thing (where's the statement that tests the signed condition... yes some nops there would do nicely) and it'll be wide open again. In the worst case there is always the ability of something like a mod chip to alter signals on the fly. I'd have faith if the hardware gurus can do it to a Xbox they can do it to a PC.
It is as bad as MMO makers claiming they're going to detect and ban bots. If my bot is a linux router with a usb hookup and a "keyboard" program running to feed "user interaction" to the game-running windows machine, they can't detect it. To them nothing is out of the ordinary. Sure, you have to decode the packet stream but that isn't
Big media wants people to watch more TV. Or read newspapers. Or magazines. Not play games on the computer with friends who's jobs have taken them thousands of miles away across the country (or world).
Why report stories about TV addiction or other such things? Why not report it instead about games. If they're lucky and get a few to quit, that's probably more TV addicts in a few years for them anyway.
Speaking as a former student & TA...
1. This is a problem, but are you willing to pay more to get lower ratios? That's the rub, take it or leave it. Personally I found classes targetted enough below me I usually didn't need to see a TA. If I did have questions, they were usually better answered over newsgroups. ("Question 2b contains the following unclear english, please clarify...")
2. Most classes at my particular large university (UIUC, big enough?) are lectured by profs and have smaller sections taught by TAs. There are problems still however; one semester I got assigned to teach a course I was signed up for. Gee ya think I may not have mastery of the material yet? Actually I was assigned to teach TWO courses, over 110 students (average per TA being more in the 60-80 range) and one of them I'd never had before. I asked the dept. to change it since I was signed up for that course as part of my program and got told "too bad drop the course and add a different one."
Luckily my professors (an associate prof and an ABD PhD canidate really) were fairly understanding of the matter.
3. Don't get me started. UIUC CS had a policy where graduate students who couldn't pass the SPEAK test required to actually interact with students were assigned as "no-contact" TAs. In theory they helped us write and grade assignments/exams and update the web site.
In practice, all of those things still require communication with students, just mediated through the written (and then corrected by everyone else) word. Further, when a TA can't correctly solve a simple undergraduate cache-load problem, having them write solutions/grade doesn't so much help.
4. Rote assignments are indeed sucky. I always worked to make any programming project I put out interesting, as well as test questions. I also had a reputation for writing impossible questions. Here's a hint: a lot of the students can only handle dull, route assignments. A cache size problem (x-way associativity, y size-words, z bytes large) where I played around with which of the peice of the equation they were missing got me berated for writing questions that were "too hard."
5. True students seeking more elegant/better/high-graded solutions. This is why you talk to your friends in class about the assignment. Not "can I copy yours?" but "I used a X method to solve problem Y, but it's kludgy. Did you find a better way?"
The other problem here can be unreasonable deadlines. "Implement a filesystem in nachos in 1 week." Good frikkin luck, you (would) have spent half your time looking up what was being passed in to the funciton you were writing. (Good old C/C++ nachos 'void *' hell. None of this newfangled java nachos crap that probably has all the parameters typed.)
The problem is the conversion of real world gold to virtual gold.
Actually, that's not even the problem.
The real problem is that games are designed so that there is a grind; there is something to get for a lot of virtual gold. And worse, there's an infinite amount of virtual gold.
Trust me, MUD/MOO/MUSHes/etc don't have "gold farmers" selling the gold on ebay. (well, back in the day I worked on them they didn't) They still had inflation problems. It is a problem with the way the system is designed. Every starting character gets 100 gold. 90% quit. Do the math: For every starting character who stays, you've added an extra 900 gold to the system. Plus of course mobs dropping things, respawning and dropping more.
I've heard academics talk and claim that this problem can be solved, but I have yet to be convinced (without killing trade) that it can.
While you are on one hand correct, equipment and levels make the character, you are also wrong to assume that there is no skill component to it.
In warcraft, if your and your enemies skills are close, equipment will decide who wins. On the other hand, the best equipment in the world won't save an idiot from losing. I've seen toons that have >500 gold spent on them die to a level-2, standard leveling gear equipped reroll of mine because they have the gear but not the skill.
I've also slugged it out with people who have an equal level of skill and it all comes down to equipment.
And of course there's coordination and tactics. Three friends and I on a teamspeak server who have played together, learned each other's playstyles, developed (at least an informal) kill-priority order do much better with a given set of characters/equipment than we should. Duh! We practice together (informally, playing the game; not drill-like at 7pm or anything).
So I think in summary, Learn2Play.
Or in really bad pseudocode: Skill > equipment unless (level difference >= 5 | (player1.haspurples && player2.hasgreens))
Because the last game with a 100% player crafted/run economy worked so well! (Well, okay the game itself had cash but there were no vendors -- it's about as close as I've seen a game come.)
.2 llaC s'norehsA
Hint: it closed just a couple weeks ago.
Solution:
It is interesting to hear other users of Xserve RAID/Xserves comment on things like this. Within a year we had our (2) Xserve raids throw 2 disks and 1 controller (!).
And don't even get me started on the repair parts for the cluster of Xserves themselves -- though if you have only 20 you're probably doing light-duty use with them, not heavy memory-hogging, CPU-killing number crunching on them. Nothing seems to find CPU/memory related errors like linpack...
There are only two MOOs. The third, commonly referred to "MOO" is really MOTRAIG: Master of The Retarded AI Planetary Govenor.
There was a MOM2 in the works but I think it has slipped release dates by years and been passed hot-potato style amoung developers. I wouldn't count on it anytime soon.
Isn't from US companies. Or if it is, the companies that spam in game are TRYING to look Chinese(/asian) by having Chinese(/asian) looking names. 'chengchang', 'llw', 'lz', etc. (the latter two may not look asian, but I have local users at my university with logins like those and very asian names) And then they're spamming me with broken English: "Fast come,fast serve!" amoung others (I'm sure players on my server recognise that).
What really irritates me is that despite Blizzard claiming to ban farming/spamming accounts, I get the same "Fast come,fast serve!" spam literally character for character over and over and over again across weeks of time. I'd think with enough account bans, it wouldn't be profitable anymore. It isn't like the boxed game is super cheap, and if they'd ban an account for spamming like they claim to, they'd need easily 3.5 boxes a week (trial account + real account in each box). I'd think baning c-card numbers would be even better, but unfortunatly I think they support time-cards now, so even that wouldn't work so well.
And the driving force isn't American companies, it's Americans who will spend $$$ on in-game gold. Much like spam, all we'd need to do to end it (spam or gold farming or the RIAA) would be to have everyone quit buying from them.
And we know that, if nothing else, Americans excel at that. [/sarcasm]
His or yours? Stastically, it'd be his.
Complex strategies in FPSes? Sometimes, but certainly not in a FFA deathmatch. Nothing more complex than path planning in pacman. And you could certainly teach a 7 year old the strats even if they wouldn't come up with them on their own.
Besides if it makes any of the teenaged "god's gift to " n00bs go cry over a nice game of The Sims it has made a better place. (insert your favorite with player vs player combat)
Because giving it away for free hasn't worked for operating systems either. And there aren't artists (indies, of course) who sign up for places like magnatune(.com) where you can download the music and play it for free (mp3), and pay for full cd-quality wav (and case art).
Obviously the RIAA & co's campaign has worked on you. Don't believe all the junk they say. Look for youself and you'll see it isn't all true.
Turning something that's defective with the game (too many traps; no way to deal with them except using a rogue) into a "feature" with spin. That's about what I'd expect from them really.
Oh, and expect all the sociopathic assholes (and griefers) to play rogues. Then they can inflict maximum pain on everyone else but know they'll always get party invites (since you have to have a party) because every party MUST have a rogue.
Go play everquest.
Or EQ2. Or DDO.
Seriously. A game where I don't have to group up with the tools spamming "ur gay" in the barrens is a game I can appreciate. Warcraft is the first game since AC that really had any strength at soloing. CoH had a little of it, but it was only a little and has since been nerfed into the ground. (though in a way that made the solo game stronger as the high-end there degenerated into herding madness which usually means a lot of players to get the instance to spawn that many mobs)
There are group quests from NPCs. They're called instances. Go try one solo, you'll be back looking for a group nice and quick.
Or go try PvP. If you don't work with your group (pickup or not) prepare to be owned by the other side. There was a match I was in last night with a group of 10 horde. 7 were a lowbie (20-29) PvP guild and the last three were a couple friends and myself (all on TeamSpeak).
To say we owned hardcore would be an understatment. At one point I lead the charge into the alliance coming down midfield. I had support behind me but I figured I'd die for it as I had all the alliance (7-9, hard to get an exact count with pets) on me and would be solo for at least 3-4 seconds. Somehow, through well timed heals arrived when I was around 10% health (from I think the druid on our team) and I lived through it. I had absolutly no right to, not even geared out as insane as I am. (why yes those are level 38 leather legs I'm wearing at 29 thanks for asking! Yes that is 2k health I'm sporting no it's not a typo.)
You know, back when I used to hack out system code for a star wars MUSH (SW2: A New Threat -- if you're curious) there was another coder on the MUSH who I had disagreements with about user-interface style (and practically everything else).
Anyway, his idea of a good text-only UI to an in-game cash machine was: look at it to see the screen. Then use +input to fill in the form it is displaying. Then use +input ok to use the continue/enter button on the screen. Then look at it again to see the next screeen it has up.
So to type in your username and password to withdraw money you'd do:
l atm
+input username
+input ok
l atm
+input password
+input ok
l atm
+input withdrawl
+input ok
l atm
+input 530 credits
+input ok
l atm
+input logout
+input ok
l atm
+input yes (yes really log off the atm)
+input ok
l atm (whew finally done)
As opposed to what any sane coder would do:
+atm/withdraw 530 credits
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is your description of the combat system just SMELLS like this guy's idea about how user interfaces should be designed. I have no clue who he is in real life of course, I only know the screen name he used. But I have to wonder if he got hired by Sony to do SWG...
Actually any large installation of the same brand/type of drive can tell you a lot about the drive's reliability. Yes it varies from batch to batch like all other physical things, but reliability defects due to 1) bad design 2) cheap components or 3) poor QA aren't likely to change across batches of disks.
Find someone who's running a few hundred of the same companies disks and you've found someone who can answer reliability questions pretty well. 5 disks is far too small a sample to mean crap. 500 on the other hand, especially over a few years is a pretty good sample. Trusting a user's machine to keep the drive operating within spec is also a dumb idea. Users have fans die and don't replace them (or don't notice) and do other similarly dumb things.
If I wasn't working from home, I could look through my RMA shipping log and tell you exactly how many drive failures we've had in our 640, 80-gig hitachi (I think) disks in the cluster I run over 10-11 months now. It is fairly low; on the order of 5-10 drives. Ask me in a year or two and I'm sure that rate will have gone up, but you can probably use the rates I'm getting to calculate a real MTBF for the disks in a proper server-room type enviroment. (temp 68 deg F, proper cooling & ventilation in the machine, checked regularly for errors and running 24/7)
So you grind and grind and grind in galaxies but can't stand the warcraft grind. Sounds to me like you can't stand PvP and were trying to run on a PvP server in warcraft. There's pleny of skill required there.
The missions are a lot more varied than you imply. Sure there's kill X. There is also recover item X (clickable on landscape), recover items X (dropped from mobs), recover items X (crafted), escort NPC quests, explore quests, use item on other item (kinda like clickable on landscape quest), courier quests, and all the instance quests (like the above but in a private setting for you and friends, or you and a PUG if you lack friends. Hint: have friends.)
There's class specific quests at (most of) your landmark levels which are usually different and unique, as well as in-theme for the class in question.
Something less recyclable than paper to package all our crap with. That's flashy and annoying. And uses (and landfills) batteries.
On the bright side you'll always know if the product is fresh or not. Not fresh: no display. Of course then you won't know till you open it if you have Cheerios or Chex Mix.
is the set you're looking for. Red plastic tub full of a bunch of bricks plus cardboard box full of more bricks on top of it plastic-shipping-corded on top. No directions on it, but if you just want lots of random brickage, it's great.
$19.99 at T-r-U, 2k bricks in it. You even get some fun colors. (in my world, lego bricks come in black, grey, white, blue, red, and yellow. Plus some transparent parts in other colors (green, notibly). Base plates come in grey, green, or black.)
Only played CoH recently eh?
There was the great herding nerf about three to six months back. The great hearding nerf slowed down leveling speed (particularly in the post-30 world) dramatically. I've been playing WoW for four months now, and haven't hit 60 quite yet. In CoH, I'd hit 50 in about 3 months.
Ah, parsing English.
..."
..."
"Records of (the (Lego collector's Web site), Bricklink.Com)
not
"Records of ((the Lego collector's) Web site, Bricklink.Com)
Thunder Bluff.
Seriously. Falling there hurts. Bring a [Parachute Cloak].
Where no matter what you wear, you look normal/professional compared to the students.
It works for me!
More seriously: I work in a server room, often on the floor every day. I wear jeans, and I've just trashed one pair up there and am doing a good number on two others. Dress pants would have turned into scrap long ago.
The quality of non-lego blocks is seriously sub-par compared to the lego company's brick quality.
They feel cheap, they don't hook together and stay hooked, and they use way way way more custom peices than lego (and these days, that's saying something!).
I mean, I'm all for competition, but I can't say that I think the price legos deliver at, around 1c US per brick in the generic bins of bricks is, you know, out of line.
It isn't like this same problem comes up and keeps coming up in other games. Warcraft has the same problem in the battlegrounds. Some people are tools and just want to frag the enemy "to gain rank." (which is minor compared to the gain for winning the match but hey what do I know? I'm only rank 3 at level 29.)
Thankfully those idiots apparently have moved out of the 20-29 bracket on my server, because there's now competition to run the flag. So now I and my friends (coordinated on teamspeak as well) sit midfiled and deny the alliance access to anything but their base. Meanwhile our flag runner has a field day as the alliance flail against the offensive defense that is us four.