You missed one small but important point. Just because the game mechanics allows you to do it, doesn't mean it isn't exploiting. And exploiting has always been against the terms of use for World of Warcraft.
You might reread exactly what they did to powerlevel that person. It's pretty obvious that they were doing something not intended by the developers to get some sort of unintended advantage (exploiting).
For the last time, because I am tired of saying this: Athene ASKED PERMISSION. A GM OKAYED THIS.
There's some merit to the argument that a junior GM okayed this, when a senior decision might have been different. But GMs speak on behalf of Blizzard, and their word can be held in account.
The rules are not set by the popular vote, they are set by Blizzard. Their representatives - the GMs - speak directly on their behalf.
When a GM says X is not cheating, then x is not fucking cheating. Period.
Ignoring laws is fine as long as those laws ignore you. Unfortunately, the more people ignore the laws, the more they tend to be strengthened and enforced. The only solution to such stupidity is political.
When faced with such counter-intuitive, counter-productive abuses of the legal system, I feel like holding my hands up and crying 'fuck everything', but of course that won't work. But there is some method in my madness, when I suggest ignoring patents.
If your product is making enough waves that a patent infringement lawsuit is on the cards, move offshore and ship to the rest of the world. If a country files suit against you, pull out of that country, and don't pay. This is a self regulating system, and I don't think many people will end up against the wall for it... Patent infringement is not sufficient reason for extradition in many countries I can think of. Nobody should end up in jail, unless they're too stubborn to move country to keep in business. It's not the worst sacrifice anyone has had to make. You'd need to be very careful with your funds, because obviously various host countries would freeze your assests from time to time. But it's like this, ultimately: patent infringement is not illegal everywhere, and is not dealt with punitively everywhere. If your product can stay alive in one market, it can stay alive in another. And this stupidity will all resolve itself in time.
He went into instances with friends, left group, tagged all the mobs, then let them do all the damage. since those mobs were designed to be taken down by a group, they gave lots of experience.
And he got all of it.
Anyone who doesn't call it cheating has a pretty conservative definition of the term.
I know what he did, and what he did not do. He did not hack the game. He DID ask permission to play in that way, and was granted it.
That's why it's not cheating. Call it something else - gaming the system, powerlevelling, exploiting even. But since it's not against the rules of the game, as set out in software, and it's not against the rules of the game as set out by the GMs - remember, he asked! - it's frankly not cheating by any definition, other than possibly a stupid and jealous definition.
But not 13 consecutive hours, since Athene was banned at level 79 for - as far as I can tell - playing the game too well.
Getting your account suspended for doing something which does not involve hacking, require any 3rd party software, or cause grief for other players is frankly ridiculous.
It's even worse given that he'd been good enough to ask a GM for permission to play the game that way, and got an affirmitive.
I've never understood people who feel the need to rush to complete game content. After paying for a game, I like to take my time and enjoy it. I guess maybe people see it as another way of competing with each other? Or is it just obsession?
If you're this good at warcraft, lording your level above more casual plays is all you've got. You're going to want to reach the top fast!
In the long run games companies will only release new games on consoles, and consoles will be locked down as effectively as cell phones are so cracking them will be impossible. Sad really.
I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.
Remember that at the point at which your security measures make a piece of entertainment software into something that is hard work, rather than fun, then the battle is already lost. That's a language that EVERYONE understands.
Mobile software is only just getting to the point where it's worth using at all. For years it has been so weighed down and hampered by restrictions that it has been largely ignored. A lot of the games are PAY PER PLAY, for goodness sakes!
Accordingly, it has taken a long, long time for mobile software sales to take off at all, and they're still nothing to write home about. At least one carrier in the UK almost went out of business banking on online content sales, only to discover that hardly anyone gave a crap.
Yet more evidence to suggest that piracy is absolutely rife, but that DRM is not any kind of solution. Personally, I played someone elses copy of this game. I enjoyed it, but can't justify buying it for myself. I don't intend to REplay it. However, I've bought it for my dear sweet old mum, for Christmas. So... that's one pirated version and one sale, from a marketing perspective. Mind you, these days the corporate view of second hand goods is that they're evil, let alone borrowed ones!
On the subject of DRM:
Sales of Fallout 3, which does not have significant DRM, have been 3:1 in favour of the 360 over the PC.
Sales of Bioshock, which was the first of the new terrible fuckurom releases, were 10:1 in favour of the 360.
There are a lot of factors in play here, but I'd like to believe that we are seeing something like consumers voting with their wallets.
Bioshock was really the first time I started to see major mainstream lashbacks against DRM, and represents the beginning of consumer awareness. So I guess we have something to thank them for after all, just not a game that we can easily play.
NB. Both Fallout 3 and Bioshock used 'securom' but there is a world of difference in the implementation. In the case of Bioshock the executable code of the game isn't actually even on the disc! You download the EXE as part of the install routine from an activation server!
The best way to fight a derogatory term is to take it back. A group trying to run away from a word with negative connotations is simply running on a treadmill, each new euphemism becoming an insult in a few years. (e.g. Retarded -> Mentally Disabled -> Differently Abled etc.)
My brother is severely physically disabled (oh no! that's the not the politcally correct way of saying it any more!) and playing online video games has given him a freedom and confidence I've never seen in him. When he gets on teamspeak, he's just one more of the guys. He's not the greatest gameplayer in the world, but he doesn't let the side down in a five man instance, for example.
He doesn't play on Xbox Live! though. In his words 'Those guys are retards'.
Amen. And think about it... Micro-soft itself is a pretty ho-hum name, in fact it's downright lame. Today, if the company name would be still available, no one in their right mind would give their software firm a name like that, even freelancing consultants wouldn't be so silly as to pick that as their firm's name. But they rose to greatness (in influence and dollars if not reputation for quality), and thus the name lost its lameness and became associated with an extremely succesful tech company.
Perfecty expressed. And the best example of this ever?
Drum roll.... (pun intended)
The Beatles.
Awful name. And now forever the name of greatness.
When did this event occur? Last I tested Vista performance on this machine was with Crysis. That would be close to a year after Vista release. I got half the FPS compared to in XP. Half.
Apart from DX10 there is nothing in Vista that interests me that can't already be gotten for XP via third party applications.
This is not a well informed viewpoint.
1) DirectX 10 is not interesting, has not been used interestingly. Like many other ill informed PC gamers you are still sitting around waiting for improvements to come from that well, but trust me, that well is dry - partly technologically, and partly circumstantially, but DX10 is nobody's answer to anything.
2) Vista performance HAS been significantly improved, and simply pretending it hasn't does not make Vista a worse operating system.
I don't know what the constant need to hate Vista is, or where it comes from, but it is irrational. It was bad, it is now better, most people have little reason to move from XP. That's the entire situation in a sentence. A constant outpouring of hatred changes nothing.
The best way around that crap is to stick the disc in your computer, and use various software to rip out the garbage. Optionally, use Handbrake, encode to h.264, and stream it to a set-top-box/game console instead.
Yeah, that takes less than four minutes. Thanks, champ.
I think that it's important to remember that costs do need to be justified. IT is often underappreciated, but it's also a special kind of arrogance to assume that yours is the one indispensible role in the company.
It's perfectly fair to justify your costs. People seem to think that this means they are being automatically undervalued, or that they shouldn't need to perform such an exercise. Well, I've got news for you. If you're in management then, yes, you do.
Just because your role is necessary does not mean that it could not be fulfilled by someone else, for less.
All well functioning companies are like bowls of water. They may be less full when you take out key staff, but there isn't a hole left behind.
And even if your job could not be done as well for less, it is perfectly justifiable to ask: 'Should we do it less well, for less?'.
And we can all hope that the answer to that question is 'no'. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be asked.
The NHS is underfunded, but it's not inefficient, by far. Compared to the US system, it's awesome,... in that respect.
Of course I'm implying that you mean inefficient when you write inefficient. In physics, it's defined as
efficiency = useful_output / input
I'm not sure whether you should be modded interesting or informative, but one of them certainly.
The NHS is bloated, failing, inefficient. I am also more cynical than I should be.
Because the NHS is also one of the best healthcare systems in the world. There are maybe five countries in the world that can boast better healthcare, across the board. A lot of places do things better, but not many do so as consistently.
The US is most decidedly not one of the top five. I can't think of ANYTHING it does better than the UK.
Sure, you can see the top specialist in a given field within days in the US. But you can do that in the UK, as well. There's no bar to private service in the UK. In fact, the fact that the vast majority of people still rely on the NHS lightens the load for the private doctors. If you want to pay for health insurance, you can. If you want to ignore health insurance, and directly pay the doctor on the day, you can. And it will be cheaper than in the US to do so, even in this most extreme of cases.
But whatever you decide to do, a pretty large chunk of your salary will go to pay for the NHS. If you object to that, on the basis that you might not use it, or that you don't want to pay to help other people, that's your own bag. But I believe that making sure every single person in the country can be healthy (and yourself as well if you choose) is no sacrifice at all for a less than 10% stake in my pre-tax salary.
Forget about it. If there's money to be made, someone's got a sniff of it and they're already lobbying harder than you ever could. (For 'harder' see 'with more assets'.)
And even if it stands that the space will not be licensed for some other commercial use, the existing bandwidth owners will lobby against it ever being given back to the public, because there is money to be made fencing people in to their existing ownership of the spectrum.
The very idea that the electromagnetic spectrum can be fenced off strikes me as ridiculous. Don't get me wrong - I'm aware of why it needs to be done. But it seems like such a short jump from there to Coca Cola declaring all rights over 'red'.
enormous number of Joe Six-Packs who perceive it as their god-given right to committ theft via Lime Wire
It's not theft. Period. End of argument, by the way. If you want to call it theft, you are wrong, and the discussions needs to halt right there until you can start using words correctly. And no, that doesn't mean I approve. And no, that doesn't mean it's not wrong. But it's not theft, and we can't have a cogent argument when we're using false, and incidentally biased, terms.
Are they the companies that voluntarily provide products and services that you can choose to purchase or not
You need to check in on your definition of voluntary.
I mean, lots of jobs have some amount of down-time, and lots of times there are other productive things that people can be doing during those times, but sometimes not. Sometimes there are genuinely jobs that, when there's nothing to do, there's nothing to do.
If you have nothing to do at work, then you probably have very little responsibility at your company. If you have very little responsibility at your company then it is probably because you are new, awful, or not trusted with responsibility. None of those reasons earn you an Xbox.
With the passage of time, a lot of people seem to have forgotten that these services are, for most users, free services.
When hotmail was new, before Microsoft owned it, there was genuine discussion over how appropriate it would be to trust a service that you don't pay for.
Seems like for the last ten years or so, that's not even been on the table. It's just one more service that people expect, and expect to run with utter reliability
I know these companies make a buck from advertising revenue, or whatever. But YOU don't pay them a penny, unless you want to. Most people don't want to.
If you're complaining because the least part of a large service that you have been using for free, perhaps since the dawn of the commerical internet, has made an unexpected change... well, really, you need to have a long think about whether or not that makes you an ass.
Even if it doesn't, relying on a free service to keep ANY of your data probably makes you one.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed one small but important point. Just because the game mechanics allows you to do it, doesn't mean it isn't exploiting. And exploiting has always been against the terms of use for World of Warcraft. You might reread exactly what they did to powerlevel that person. It's pretty obvious that they were doing something not intended by the developers to get some sort of unintended advantage (exploiting).
For the last time, because I am tired of saying this: Athene ASKED PERMISSION. A GM OKAYED THIS.
There's some merit to the argument that a junior GM okayed this, when a senior decision might have been different. But GMs speak on behalf of Blizzard, and their word can be held in account.
The rules are not set by the popular vote, they are set by Blizzard. Their representatives - the GMs - speak directly on their behalf.
When a GM says X is not cheating, then x is not fucking cheating. Period.
Ignoring laws is fine as long as those laws ignore you. Unfortunately, the more people ignore the laws, the more they tend to be strengthened and enforced. The only solution to such stupidity is political.
When faced with such counter-intuitive, counter-productive abuses of the legal system, I feel like holding my hands up and crying 'fuck everything', but of course that won't work. But there is some method in my madness, when I suggest ignoring patents.
If your product is making enough waves that a patent infringement lawsuit is on the cards, move offshore and ship to the rest of the world. If a country files suit against you, pull out of that country, and don't pay. This is a self regulating system, and I don't think many people will end up against the wall for it... Patent infringement is not sufficient reason for extradition in many countries I can think of. Nobody should end up in jail, unless they're too stubborn to move country to keep in business. It's not the worst sacrifice anyone has had to make. You'd need to be very careful with your funds, because obviously various host countries would freeze your assests from time to time. But it's like this, ultimately: patent infringement is not illegal everywhere, and is not dealt with punitively everywhere. If your product can stay alive in one market, it can stay alive in another. And this stupidity will all resolve itself in time.
With laws as outrageously stupid as some of the current patent laws, it's frankly time to start ignoring them.
He went into instances with friends, left group, tagged all the mobs, then let them do all the damage. since those mobs were designed to be taken down by a group, they gave lots of experience. And he got all of it. Anyone who doesn't call it cheating has a pretty conservative definition of the term.
I know what he did, and what he did not do. He did not hack the game. He DID ask permission to play in that way, and was granted it.
That's why it's not cheating. Call it something else - gaming the system, powerlevelling, exploiting even. But since it's not against the rules of the game, as set out in software, and it's not against the rules of the game as set out by the GMs - remember, he asked! - it's frankly not cheating by any definition, other than possibly a stupid and jealous definition.
Athene got to 80 in 13 hours..
But not 13 consecutive hours, since Athene was banned at level 79 for - as far as I can tell - playing the game too well.
Getting your account suspended for doing something which does not involve hacking, require any 3rd party software, or cause grief for other players is frankly ridiculous.
It's even worse given that he'd been good enough to ask a GM for permission to play the game that way, and got an affirmitive.
I've never understood people who feel the need to rush to complete game content. After paying for a game, I like to take my time and enjoy it. I guess maybe people see it as another way of competing with each other? Or is it just obsession?
If you're this good at warcraft, lording your level above more casual plays is all you've got. You're going to want to reach the top fast!
So what part of that is he claiming is illegal?
The defamation he's about to recieve on his wikipedia page.
In the long run games companies will only release new games on consoles, and consoles will be locked down as effectively as cell phones are so cracking them will be impossible. Sad really.
I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.
Remember that at the point at which your security measures make a piece of entertainment software into something that is hard work, rather than fun, then the battle is already lost. That's a language that EVERYONE understands.
Mobile software is only just getting to the point where it's worth using at all. For years it has been so weighed down and hampered by restrictions that it has been largely ignored. A lot of the games are PAY PER PLAY, for goodness sakes!
Accordingly, it has taken a long, long time for mobile software sales to take off at all, and they're still nothing to write home about. At least one carrier in the UK almost went out of business banking on online content sales, only to discover that hardly anyone gave a crap.
On the subject of DRM:
Sales of Fallout 3, which does not have significant DRM, have been 3:1 in favour of the 360 over the PC.
Sales of Bioshock, which was the first of the new terrible fuckurom releases, were 10:1 in favour of the 360.
There are a lot of factors in play here, but I'd like to believe that we are seeing something like consumers voting with their wallets.
Bioshock was really the first time I started to see major mainstream lashbacks against DRM, and represents the beginning of consumer awareness. So I guess we have something to thank them for after all, just not a game that we can easily play. NB. Both Fallout 3 and Bioshock used 'securom' but there is a world of difference in the implementation. In the case of Bioshock the executable code of the game isn't actually even on the disc! You download the EXE as part of the install routine from an activation server!
Developers.
Developers, developers, developers...
http://astalavista.box.sk/
Yeah, that used to list the bad places. Now it mostly lists the awful ones.
There, fixed that for you.
The best way to fight a derogatory term is to take it back. A group trying to run away from a word with negative connotations is simply running on a treadmill, each new euphemism becoming an insult in a few years. (e.g. Retarded -> Mentally Disabled -> Differently Abled etc.)
My brother is severely physically disabled (oh no! that's the not the politcally correct way of saying it any more!) and playing online video games has given him a freedom and confidence I've never seen in him. When he gets on teamspeak, he's just one more of the guys. He's not the greatest gameplayer in the world, but he doesn't let the side down in a five man instance, for example.
He doesn't play on Xbox Live! though. In his words 'Those guys are retards'.
Amen. And think about it... Micro-soft itself is a pretty ho-hum name, in fact it's downright lame. Today, if the company name would be still available, no one in their right mind would give their software firm a name like that, even freelancing consultants wouldn't be so silly as to pick that as their firm's name. But they rose to greatness (in influence and dollars if not reputation for quality), and thus the name lost its lameness and became associated with an extremely succesful tech company.
Perfecty expressed. And the best example of this ever?
Drum roll.... (pun intended)
The Beatles.
Awful name. And now forever the name of greatness.
When did this event occur? Last I tested Vista performance on this machine was with Crysis. That would be close to a year after Vista release. I got half the FPS compared to in XP. Half. Apart from DX10 there is nothing in Vista that interests me that can't already be gotten for XP via third party applications.
This is not a well informed viewpoint.
1) DirectX 10 is not interesting, has not been used interestingly. Like many other ill informed PC gamers you are still sitting around waiting for improvements to come from that well, but trust me, that well is dry - partly technologically, and partly circumstantially, but DX10 is nobody's answer to anything.
2) Vista performance HAS been significantly improved, and simply pretending it hasn't does not make Vista a worse operating system.
I don't know what the constant need to hate Vista is, or where it comes from, but it is irrational. It was bad, it is now better, most people have little reason to move from XP. That's the entire situation in a sentence. A constant outpouring of hatred changes nothing.
The best way around that crap is to stick the disc in your computer, and use various software to rip out the garbage. Optionally, use Handbrake, encode to h.264, and stream it to a set-top-box/game console instead.
Yeah, that takes less than four minutes. Thanks, champ.
I have and carry both a Blackberry for work, and an iPhone because I wanted something that wasn't under the control of IT overlords.
Better luck next time, I guess.
It's perfectly fair to justify your costs. People seem to think that this means they are being automatically undervalued, or that they shouldn't need to perform such an exercise. Well, I've got news for you. If you're in management then, yes, you do.
Just because your role is necessary does not mean that it could not be fulfilled by someone else, for less.
All well functioning companies are like bowls of water. They may be less full when you take out key staff, but there isn't a hole left behind.
And even if your job could not be done as well for less, it is perfectly justifiable to ask: 'Should we do it less well, for less?'.
And we can all hope that the answer to that question is 'no'. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be asked.
2. ??????WTF?????
3. Look like an idiot.
The NHS is underfunded, but it's not inefficient, by far. Compared to the US system, it's awesome, ... in that respect.
Of course I'm implying that you mean inefficient when you write inefficient. In physics, it's defined as
efficiency = useful_output / input
I'm not sure whether you should be modded interesting or informative, but one of them certainly.
Because the NHS is also one of the best healthcare systems in the world. There are maybe five countries in the world that can boast better healthcare, across the board. A lot of places do things better, but not many do so as consistently.
The US is most decidedly not one of the top five. I can't think of ANYTHING it does better than the UK.
Sure, you can see the top specialist in a given field within days in the US. But you can do that in the UK, as well. There's no bar to private service in the UK. In fact, the fact that the vast majority of people still rely on the NHS lightens the load for the private doctors. If you want to pay for health insurance, you can. If you want to ignore health insurance, and directly pay the doctor on the day, you can. And it will be cheaper than in the US to do so, even in this most extreme of cases.
But whatever you decide to do, a pretty large chunk of your salary will go to pay for the NHS. If you object to that, on the basis that you might not use it, or that you don't want to pay to help other people, that's your own bag. But I believe that making sure every single person in the country can be healthy (and yourself as well if you choose) is no sacrifice at all for a less than 10% stake in my pre-tax salary.
And even if it stands that the space will not be licensed for some other commercial use, the existing bandwidth owners will lobby against it ever being given back to the public, because there is money to be made fencing people in to their existing ownership of the spectrum.
The very idea that the electromagnetic spectrum can be fenced off strikes me as ridiculous. Don't get me wrong - I'm aware of why it needs to be done. But it seems like such a short jump from there to Coca Cola declaring all rights over 'red'.
enormous number of Joe Six-Packs who perceive it as their god-given right to committ theft via Lime Wire
It's not theft. Period. End of argument, by the way. If you want to call it theft, you are wrong, and the discussions needs to halt right there until you can start using words correctly. And no, that doesn't mean I approve. And no, that doesn't mean it's not wrong. But it's not theft, and we can't have a cogent argument when we're using false, and incidentally biased, terms.
Are they the companies that voluntarily provide products and services that you can choose to purchase or not
You need to check in on your definition of voluntary.
I mean, lots of jobs have some amount of down-time, and lots of times there are other productive things that people can be doing during those times, but sometimes not. Sometimes there are genuinely jobs that, when there's nothing to do, there's nothing to do.
If you have nothing to do at work, then you probably have very little responsibility at your company. If you have very little responsibility at your company then it is probably because you are new, awful, or not trusted with responsibility. None of those reasons earn you an Xbox.
When hotmail was new, before Microsoft owned it, there was genuine discussion over how appropriate it would be to trust a service that you don't pay for.
Seems like for the last ten years or so, that's not even been on the table. It's just one more service that people expect, and expect to run with utter reliability
I know these companies make a buck from advertising revenue, or whatever. But YOU don't pay them a penny, unless you want to. Most people don't want to.
If you're complaining because the least part of a large service that you have been using for free, perhaps since the dawn of the commerical internet, has made an unexpected change... well, really, you need to have a long think about whether or not that makes you an ass.
Even if it doesn't, relying on a free service to keep ANY of your data probably makes you one.