You could try recommending Pidgin with the Off The Record plugin. I can't say I've personally gone through the code and verified all of its claims, but the plugin looks promising, and it's easy to install.
My family had an issue with fraud using Sprint cell phones - we had a $20 / month cell phone plan, maximum of 30 minutes a month, for emergency uses only. We had our plan for 2 years until someone got a social security number and opened a series of phones attached to the plan. With the new phone fees and the insane amount of overage charges, our monthly bill went from $20 to $1500, three months in a row.
When we called Sprint's customer service department, they couldn't cancel the charges because nobody in the company was allowed to talk to the fraud investigation department. Nine months of complaints, refusals to pay, and BBB calls later, we finally got all the charges dropped, but I'll never work with Sprint again.
I've installed the game on both my computers and pulled the patches from one of the various patch mirror sites around the internet. I've never had to activate.
Admittedly, I don't play online matches, just skirmishes and LAN/Hamachi games against my friends, but I've never had to deal with any of that registration stuff.
I'd like to see you copy the game to another PC and run it without having to phone home or patch it to fix all the bugs that version 1.0 has without Impulse.
Done. The patch files are.exe installers and they're available all over the internet. I bought the game, installed on both my computers and I've never used Impulse.
Better yet, let's teach people how to think for themselves, particularly how to fact-check sources, thus reducing the number of people who believe the first website they see off of Google.
It doesn't matter if the WoW PvP system is broken or not. Most casual players don't want to PvP.
That's where you're wrong. It does matter if WoW's PvP system is broken, because that's exactly why casual players dislike PvP.
Casual players want to log on, make some kind of progress towards a defined goal (usually quests), and log off, without spending their entire evening to do so.
You say that players prefer PvE versus PvP because there are more players on PvE servers. There's a correlation there, but I think the cause lies completely in World of Warcraft's world PvP system. How many times have casual players logged into Stranglethorn Vale to finish a quest or two, only to get killed and corpse-camped for 2 hours by a character who's 30 levels higher than they are? Without high-level friends, they have no chance to make progress that evening. Even if high-level friends arrive, the enemy's high-level friends arrive, and very little changes. Casual players prefer PvE servers because they don't get ganked, and therefore can still make progress with small amounts of gametime.
WAR will try to solve this in two ways. One, all RvR is going to be within a certain level range. If you enter a noob zone with a high-level character, you get turned into a chicken. This keeps extreme ganking to a minimum. Second, the main focus will always be PvP. Sure, PvE exists, but most of the time, players will be forced into an arena-like mindset of "I need to kill other players before they kill me". Since you can level and get loot from PvP, it almost turns PvP into a PvE experience... it moves from a quest to kill 80 murlocs into a quest to kill 80 player-controlled drow, which isn't a whole lot different.
I'm expecting that WAR will attract casual players back to PvP, simply by fixing what's wrong with WoW's PvP model. I'll be looking at over-gearing and overpowered classes, but I'm still optimistic about its success. I think that all casual players need to enjoy PvP again is a system that rewards them no matter how many hours they have to play.
The PvP system in World of Warcraft is fundamentally broken. It favors people who play for hours at a time over casual players. The people with the uber PvP gear completely wipe the floor with the casual players, and it ruins the casual player's day.
Guild Wars had a better system, at least. Give everyone access to max-level PvP right away, and give them unfettered access to almost top-of-the-line gear. This, along with the smaller 8-skill skillset, focused the PvP around individual and team strategy, not wtfpwning the other side because you've grinded for months to get your purples.
I'm looking forward to trying WAR, and hopefully the RvR will be just as easy to win for casual players as the hardcore players. I'm hoping the whole "armies versus armies" mindset balances out battles so that they doesn't end up being lopsided against the non-geared. We'll have to wait and see. For the meantime, I'm cautiously optimistic.
The huge markup is because they have to pay crazy tariffs and transport costs to get all those bits over the border. It's cheaper now that they're using a series of tubes instead of a bunch of trucks, but it still costs a lot.
I am sure most browsers will come up with a message allowing you to bypass any pre-rendering checks... "The page you requested contains code which, when loaded, may prove to bring your Vista operating system to it's knees. Do you wish to continue?"
And that will be extremely effective, right up until Joe Sixpack says, "Well if I say no, I can't get my porn." and clicks Yes.
Late adopters don't usually care if the lore of the universe is expanded or if they won a battle because they outfitted their skins with shields and placed them in swamp, they just want the game to be easy and fun. When the developers start pandering to them instead of focusing on the early-adopting trendsetters, then we'll see plenty of "This isn't news for nerds!" posts.
On a related side note, I liked reading Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point, which did an excellent job of explaining trends.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are the lines so long?
When you're only expecting 50 percent of the population to turn out, you only hire enough poll workers to handle 50 percent of the population.
You could try recommending Pidgin with the Off The Record plugin. I can't say I've personally gone through the code and verified all of its claims, but the plugin looks promising, and it's easy to install.
Personally, I'm waiting for the cypher built on Onefish, Twofish, Redfish, and Bluefish.
My family had an issue with fraud using Sprint cell phones - we had a $20 / month cell phone plan, maximum of 30 minutes a month, for emergency uses only. We had our plan for 2 years until someone got a social security number and opened a series of phones attached to the plan. With the new phone fees and the insane amount of overage charges, our monthly bill went from $20 to $1500, three months in a row.
When we called Sprint's customer service department, they couldn't cancel the charges because nobody in the company was allowed to talk to the fraud investigation department. Nine months of complaints, refusals to pay, and BBB calls later, we finally got all the charges dropped, but I'll never work with Sprint again.
I believe you need to be introduced to Rule 34. Your childhood lost its virginity a long, long time ago.
WNMHGB
Gesundheit.
The Nintendo Wang also has an optional "Power Glove" addon.
Eh, it was worth a shot. Apparently it doesn't work on all systems.
I have that problem with my laptop. It was fixed by adding "irqpoll" to the Linux kernel's boot options.
Reinstalled your XP anytime recently? There's a basic version installed with the OS, assuming you didn't customize it with nLite.
I've installed the game on both my computers and pulled the patches from one of the various patch mirror sites around the internet. I've never had to activate. Admittedly, I don't play online matches, just skirmishes and LAN/Hamachi games against my friends, but I've never had to deal with any of that registration stuff.
I'd like to see you copy the game to another PC and run it without having to phone home or patch it to fix all the bugs that version 1.0 has without Impulse.
Done. The patch files are .exe installers and they're available all over the internet. I bought the game, installed on both my computers and I've never used Impulse.
Better yet, let's teach people how to think for themselves, particularly how to fact-check sources, thus reducing the number of people who believe the first website they see off of Google.
That's where you're wrong. It does matter if WoW's PvP system is broken, because that's exactly why casual players dislike PvP.
Casual players want to log on, make some kind of progress towards a defined goal (usually quests), and log off, without spending their entire evening to do so.
You say that players prefer PvE versus PvP because there are more players on PvE servers. There's a correlation there, but I think the cause lies completely in World of Warcraft's world PvP system. How many times have casual players logged into Stranglethorn Vale to finish a quest or two, only to get killed and corpse-camped for 2 hours by a character who's 30 levels higher than they are? Without high-level friends, they have no chance to make progress that evening. Even if high-level friends arrive, the enemy's high-level friends arrive, and very little changes. Casual players prefer PvE servers because they don't get ganked, and therefore can still make progress with small amounts of gametime.
WAR will try to solve this in two ways. One, all RvR is going to be within a certain level range. If you enter a noob zone with a high-level character, you get turned into a chicken. This keeps extreme ganking to a minimum. Second, the main focus will always be PvP. Sure, PvE exists, but most of the time, players will be forced into an arena-like mindset of "I need to kill other players before they kill me". Since you can level and get loot from PvP, it almost turns PvP into a PvE experience... it moves from a quest to kill 80 murlocs into a quest to kill 80 player-controlled drow, which isn't a whole lot different.
I'm expecting that WAR will attract casual players back to PvP, simply by fixing what's wrong with WoW's PvP model. I'll be looking at over-gearing and overpowered classes, but I'm still optimistic about its success. I think that all casual players need to enjoy PvP again is a system that rewards them no matter how many hours they have to play.
The PvP system in World of Warcraft is fundamentally broken. It favors people who play for hours at a time over casual players. The people with the uber PvP gear completely wipe the floor with the casual players, and it ruins the casual player's day.
Guild Wars had a better system, at least. Give everyone access to max-level PvP right away, and give them unfettered access to almost top-of-the-line gear. This, along with the smaller 8-skill skillset, focused the PvP around individual and team strategy, not wtfpwning the other side because you've grinded for months to get your purples.
I'm looking forward to trying WAR, and hopefully the RvR will be just as easy to win for casual players as the hardcore players. I'm hoping the whole "armies versus armies" mindset balances out battles so that they doesn't end up being lopsided against the non-geared. We'll have to wait and see. For the meantime, I'm cautiously optimistic.
See also: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
Because, shockingly enough, most users care more about usability and functionality than performance.
The huge markup is because they have to pay crazy tariffs and transport costs to get all those bits over the border. It's cheaper now that they're using a series of tubes instead of a bunch of trucks, but it still costs a lot.
Yeah, I end up finding most of my disc covers in non-obvious places.
Irony!
Yay, Linux will have 78% of the market!
Please stay away from my computers. Thanks.
Sure, but do you have one?
And that will be extremely effective, right up until Joe Sixpack says, "Well if I say no, I can't get my porn." and clicks Yes.
Late adopters don't usually care if the lore of the universe is expanded or if they won a battle because they outfitted their skins with shields and placed them in swamp, they just want the game to be easy and fun. When the developers start pandering to them instead of focusing on the early-adopting trendsetters, then we'll see plenty of "This isn't news for nerds!" posts.
On a related side note, I liked reading Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point, which did an excellent job of explaining trends.