Posts by Taylor

Definitely NWS, those 2 are probably his cleanest and even those cause me to blush diagonal lines and get a severe nose bleed if I don't prepare myself mentally before hitting Show Desktop. He never goes all the way but he does apply suspicious patches of moisture. Awesome artist though.

[Blocked Image: http://alexandertaylor.net/stuff/desktop_t.jpg]

X2 3800+

2GB RAM

7900 GS

Other stuff.

Yeah I agree, I said kind of hitman.

E: It's a genre with a few games though so you need to stretch it a little.

Splinter Cell was a good game but behind Thief, MGS and kind of Hitman for the whole infiltration sneak ‘em up genre. It was extremely over-hyped because it was beneficial to the xbox at the time and the sequels have been small and fast enough to feel like expensive expansions. I can’t say I’m wet for this, but I’d play it if I got hold of it.

Suprised they went with the cartoony look already associated with Warcraft but I imagine they're not going to make another RTS one of those anyway. Which is kind of a shame for people like me that find the RTS genre rather boring but enjoyed Warcraft because of all the non-RTS bits.

I'm going to have to check this out when it hits though.

I think if you tried WoW’s raid content with a capable group you’d be pleasantly surprised. The fights are scripted and genuinely enjoyable. It’s not some scaled up mob with more health you beat like a loot piñata for 3 hours with a battalion of people like in EQ1 and FFXI.

Though that said it's impossible to simply dive into that content now, so it's moot.

Quote from Zyndrome

With the introduction of Arenas in WoW, the gap between casual (like someone who doesn't raid and do battlegrounds) and competetive players grew to the size of Grand Canyon. If you don't have Arena-gear and engage in PvP-combat while, say.. questing, and your opponent is fully geared up in Arena-armor and weapons (with stamina-enchants on every peice), your odds to win is much much lower, since they add Resilliance which reduces damage taken and chance to get critically hit.But later people found that you can get amazing gear in Arena by just teaming up with a few friends and don't put any effort into it, since you'll get a bunch of points anyways, however it takes much longer than winning matches but it works.

Battleground gear from honour rewards is only slightly behind arena gear, except the epic items which are on par and actually complementary, and I would call it casual. Craftable items are above the first few tiers of raid content, especially for casters, and reputation awards are at least comparable.

Casual content isn't bad because they slack behind in terms of gear; this was the problem in legacy but not in the expansion. The problem is "casual content" is a slew of reputation grinds and when Blizzard wants to add more casual content they just throw a few new bars into your reputation panel. You still geared up faster than the average raider doing this, but it was tedium and largely the fault of their poor raid design.

Quote from Sentura

that aside, i never actually imagined that people enjoyed raiding. having played mmos for as long as i have (some 4 years total), i long for something more sophisticated than just an endless grind of items/experience/whatever else. i just fail to see this as 'fun'. sorry. i see that people's opinion differ, so on top of my previous question, let me ask: what are you going to do when you've gotten all the items you initially started raiding for?

I could see how that would apply to Everquest but the bosses in WoW are actually quite involving and fun to kill. I fell asleep routinely on the trash mobs leading to them, though. Ragnaros rising out the lava, one-shotting a previous boss and unleashing the fury is probably one of the better ‘game experiences’ out there.

It’s true most people went into raiding because it was the easiest way to gear up. In the current expansion they made it so PvP and reputation grinds (casual content!) is also viable. So for some reason decided to make raid content the slowest and most drama-heavy way to gear up, and make raid content initially so hard it was impossible for a new group to get started. Each patch added a new raid instance literally 3-4 guilds in the world could enter, all other players got reputation bars and items added too vendors.

To hammer home the err in raid design: It took us three weeks back in the day to learn Lucifron, back when Molten Core was hard and was missing two bosses. The fight was like this:

You pull Lucifron by having hunters (rangers) direct him and his two additional guards to three separate warriors (tanks). You kill each guard in turn then focus Lucifron. We didn’t have a mod for dispelling back then so people were assigned groups to dispel – Lucifron randomly put damage and mana cost debuffs on people and his additionals could Mind Control making the pull the most important part.

The equivalent boss in the expansion is either Maulgar or Hydross, try putting these into a paragraph. There's goddamn diagrams.

http://www.bosskillers.com/cgi-bin/bbgu ... H85v3Fu9qF

http://www.bosskillers.com/cgi-bin/bbgu ... H85v3Fu9qF

Eventually we conquered 11 bosses in Naxx (for non-geeks this is impressive) but we initially had trouble with an encounter that is simply: tank, spank and dispel. How in the living hell is a new guild going to start off on either of those two? Well as evidenced, they don't. But was blatantly obvious before implementation

To be quite honest my fondest memories playing this game were definitely back at the initial release, with one and a half raid instances nobody entered, supposedly amazing blue sets and PvP having no reward whatsoever except the satisfaction of killing someone. You just filled your time with fun stuff like arena tournaments and Hillsbrad fights. This stuff doesn’t happen anymore, because people feel compelled to grind things to get shiny items. People only do PvP because killing someone is part of a treadmill and they do it in battlegrounds because it has the most turnover. It’s soulless. When I made my Warrior I got some arena gear and full PvP while interacting with 2 other people and never leaving Stormwind’s War Room (no fighting in, etc). Then I quit.

I'm not a fan of massive raids either, but they are a fundamental part of the game. The number of raid guilds post-expansion was depressingly low. Why was there no Molten Core 2?

They seemed more focused on showing people how they can make 25-man content hard for all the naysayers.

Plus getting geared up as a 'casual' is easy. Instead of relying on weekly random drops you grind reputation for raid compareable content, do PvP for raid compareable content or take up professions for raid-superior content. No self-proclaimed casual can complain about gear gaps anymore.

Every patch hurt the game a little, and the current expansion killed the game. My activity went to a complete lull; I cancelled my account 5 weeks ago, and haven't thought once about going back. And I was unhealthily hardcore before. Three (count ‘em) max level warlocks, two max level warriors, a max level priest and more alts you can shake a stick with “sad-bastard” engraved on it at.

I was so sourly disappointed about the first expansion. If you want my breakdown on why it completely failed, and even if you don’t, here’s the list.

• 
  [*:34tgy34b]Complete progress wipe, I'm all for phasing out gear but I was replacing Nemesis with crafted greens the moment I hit Hellfires Inn and the only reason I didn’t take Plagueheart off before heaving the marsh was sheer stubbornness.
  [*:34tgy34b]Warlock used to be a hard class to play. Tell people that now and they start explaining how they don’t believe you but mid-sentence their speech goes into a mumble and comes out as a hate filled rant as the other half of the brain says “wait, did he say Warlock?”
  [*:34tgy34b]I literally got by in the expansion 99% of my fights with my “9,000” and “MOAR DOTS” Warlock macros. I’m sure you can guess what they do.
  

  [*:34tgy34b]New raid sizes destroyed guilds. Yeah, turns out they weren’t such a good idea after all as they killed all existing teams. No matter though, because you made raid content more accessible right?
  [*:34tgy34b]Inaccessible raid content, spend the best part of a couple of months trying to get enough people to jump through all the hoops to actually get inside. But once they’re in?
  [*:34tgy34b]No difficulty curve, the first proper raid zone in the game was on equal difficulty of the final zone in legacy. How are new guilds going to get off the ground if they have to tackle that level of content at the start? They don’t.
  [*:34tgy34b]No tuning of content, the content was left utterly broken for months after release unless it was proving to be too easy, they seemed more interested in getting out content one guild on a soap-box would see than their actual playerbase. We killed Ragnaros 30-somethingth in the world. Yay for us. The world didn't weep for us having no new boss to focus on.
  [*:34tgy34b]Heroics, I'm not even going to comment on the reputation grind. Why do the bosses get a tiny nudge in difficulty but the hoards of trash before them is now capable of killing your entire group 5 times before your trigger happy mage manages to type out “oops”?

  [*:34tgy34b]But hey you don't need to do PvE anymore, right? We have PvP gear in battlegrounds to idle for and competitive PvP in arenas! Shame we upset all game balance even more than a Might of Menethil Arms Warrior could hope to. Did you believe us when we said we designed it for groups? Buffed Warriors, Shadow damage synergy? When are we going to fix this? Never.

  [*:34tgy34b]Casual content. Casual apparently means reputation grind.

I can't imagine this expansion doing anything but continuing the trend, except with the possible advantage you invested less time in your character before it got wiped this time around. The only thing in that article that will be relevant 2 months after you have the expansion is the new battleground and Death Knight – which sounds to me like “DPS Warrior” leaving them with room to fix the current one, which is still in a mess after the initial design of “best at everything but healing.”

For me to go back that speech needed to include two things:

The mention of two opening PvE instances, both with no attunement and requiring the same level of gear to enter; The first being tank and spank with bells on and the second being the “look what we can do” encounters.

And then something about their late realisation PvP is still about the Warrior class and how buffed and geared he is. And hints they might actually do something about PvP teams that completely circumvent the PvP mitigation stat making up most of your item budget.

If they're going to continue running it into the ground. I'll continue being disinterested.

There are other genres out there than D&D RPG, RTS and FPS. Get a console already.

To be fair "do you ever plan on making a film that doesn’t suck" is hardly constructive criticism. The initial beatdown was good, but it was tedium after that.

Lots of people have disliked the trailer from the very offset, and have managed it without creating a ruckus. Insulting something when you disagree just provokes people who like it, and is trolling. Though it was hardly off the chart, you’d expect people to be a bit more thick-skinned. I personally love a well placed swear word.

However, the fagging up of the SC2 thread was people disagreeing? That was a complete train wreck from page 9 starting with the amazing ‘disagreement’ by Leileilol that everyone who likes the look of SC2 is a blind consumer whore and is running the games industry into the ground. I could see how someone could be rubbed up the wrong way by that.

Teeth, ears, tail and demeanour!

Until Warby gives it a human nose it's furry

They're almost as important as the Rohypnol.

I think that’s the worst AI I’ve ever seen.

Well Guild Wars isn’t really a MMORPG, but I agree it's probably the better option. Especially if you’re finding WoW’s levelling boring because it is definitely the most lenient one out there, and it’s not until max level does the treadmill go really boring.

I quit WoW a few weeks ago and looking back it was a pretty appalling game towards the end, every patch and the expansion has completely pulled it away from what it was initially and all progress gets flushed away every expansion (yearly).

Most of the time I pissed away, which was an awful lot, was prancing around in a circle on Orgrimmar bank watching other people inspect me and talking complete balls in whisper and guild chat. I’ve since realised I can talk complete bollocks to people without paying monthly fees.

The implication was people dislike it purely because lots of people do like it, just to go against the grain, and if it was more cult they'd be more open to it.

Quote from buddy the designer

Amount of LOST chapters/series is fixed and everyone knows how much episodes will it have. R_Yell and FrieChamp are about the right.

Err no, originally it was going to be one series of six. And if it was fixed it wouldn't be a revelation when the actors signed contracts to do more.

But hey, it’s all subjective isn’t it? Nobody likes the same things, I know half the stuff I like would be shunted. So if you enjoy people sitting on a beach, around a hatch or next to a computer for hours on end being melodramatic with hints that something might actually happen only to be disappointed, all the more power to you.

Quote from R_Yell

Do you prefer more action and more answers? Then I guess you won't have problems finding them.

No, I prefer some action and some answers. Not some muppet on a raft for several episodes shouting Walt. Or watching people stand around a hatch for an entire series and then when they open it (next series) they find nothing interesting inside except a computer to stand around in much the same manner.

Here's a polar bear that was in Walts comic somehow, and Locke can walk, and a monster made of smoke, and a hatch, and a computer, and a number sequence and The Others! Get to it Internet Forums, make some theories because we sure as hell don't know what's going on. Oooh, who will Kate pick!? Tune in next week and next week and next week and next week for a hint of finding out! Just kidding!

Edit: Ranting aside I can pinpoint the exact reason I don’t like it. I watch a lot of obscure slow moving crap, I mean I liked Lain and Pi, but it’s different because you know the people who made it actually have a clue where’s all going and it all fits together. Lost, however is going to be strung-out until it is no longer profitable with writers working on it constantly to patchwork it together and it inherently doesn’t want to give up or reveal anything, instead hooks his audience with constant cheap anti-climaxes. And after realising that and being a sucker for 3 series, I stopped watching and vowed to rant bitterly when anyone spoke its name.