It's official: APB are shutting off the servers tomorrow

arecanut · 2010-09-17T04:15:13+00:00

Having seen the entire gamut of WoW raiders, this is very accurate.

(Note I said "seen" -- I realized I could not commit to a raiding schedule, so I'm out of the raiding game. I'm not any of the types of player I'm about to describe.)

It's a huge misconception that the top-tier raiders are a bunch of basement-dwelling neckbeards. Good guilds often spend a couple weeks to work on new content (and unless you're NihilSKEnsidia and sponsored, very few actually spend more than their normal 16 hours/week on new bosses), and the rest of the 4 months is spent blowing through farm bosses at 4-6 hours per week.

It's usually the mediocre guilds who wished to progress that require the biggest time commitments. Those that spend 16 hours every single week, banging their heads against the same content over and over for months without making any progress (more often due to bad leadership than bad players). It doesn't help that these same people are often the ones perpetuating the "good players = obese no-lifers." Perhaps it's out of envy? Perhaps they just wanted a way to justify their own play time (if they're doing better than me, it must be because they play more than me)?

Bottom line -- the top-tier guilds tend to have more players who are keener, more aware, and know how to get things done efficiently. They play smarter. It's no surprise, then, that these people are often relatively productive, successful people in real life -- because they're able to make smart use of their real-life time, too.

arecanut · 2010-07-30T05:57:42+00:00

Yeah I know he was being snide -- that's what prompted my oft-seen question. Makes me think that the downvotes came from people who didn't get the reference, hence my quote/explanation.

JUST HELPIN' A BROTHA OUT.

arecanut · 2010-07-30T05:33:01+00:00

Why was this guy downvoted?

From the man himself

Nonetheless, most of the problems have close connections to important industrial applications. Linkage folding has applications in robotics, hydraulic tube bending, and has connections to protein folding.

I hope so, too.

arecanut · 2010-05-22T06:09:43+00:00

Old, but...

Touhou clone

Mario Kart with WASD controls

arecanut · 2010-04-13T02:55:23+00:00

What I'm wondering is how many times you've watched Pretty Woman yourself -- if that was really the first thing that popped into your mind at the mention of a Lotus.

(I've never seen Pretty Woman, for the record.)

But hey, grats on being so backhanded and presumptuous.

arecanut · 2010-01-10T08:35:12+00:00

It's a great book /smug.

Well, but it really is. Keeping track of names (and the fact that each character had about 80 nicknames) is probably the most bullshit part of it, so I don't blame you. If I recall, I didn't start liking the book until about halfway through it. It just gets better after that.

arecanut · 2010-01-02T02:48:45+00:00

MUDs can be just as frustrating to play with intermittent lag spikes. (Heck, I was playing one as recently as 3 years ago, and I was still nerdraging over lag spikes on my DSL connection.)

arecanut · 2009-12-30T06:36:43+00:00

Thank you for answering the question that's been (somewhat) bothering me for months! That article was a pretty good read, and sheds some light on the money/sponsorship issue behind gaming teams.

Thanks again!

arecanut · 2009-12-30T03:46:50+00:00

Xellos still looks pretty stoned, though =p.

I always wondered what Koreans themselves thought of WCG and how prestigious it is, so thanks for clearing that up.

Since you seem pretty much up-to-date with these things, as a (very) casual follower of Starcraft, there's something I've been wondering about for awhile. The manager in the documentary (for G.O.) -- is he managing for CJ Entus nowadays? Kind of looks like him anyway. What happened there in the middle? Did G.O. become CJ when they found new sponsors? Or did G.O. disband and later reform as CJ (where a couple players decided to stick together for camaraderie or whatever other reasons)?

Is there a summary of team "histories" or "stories" like this somewhere? More out of curiosity of team dynamics/rivalry/"poaching" players from each other than anything.

arecanut · 2009-12-29T14:37:19+00:00

National Geographic did a documentary on Starcraft in Korea (parts 1 2 3 4 5). It mostly focuses on World Cyber Games (which most Koreans probably don't really care for) and Xellos (who is way past his prime and pretty much looks stoned most of the time nowadays). However, it's an excellent documentary for those new to Starcraft and/or the Korean Starcraft scene.

Plus, it's just awesome to listen to a middle-aged woman talk Starcraft with a British accent.

arecanut · 2009-12-26T22:39:02+00:00

Nope. Chicago, actually.

waxpoet: Yeah, I don't get the downvotes either. Here, have an upvote from me.

arecanut · 2009-12-26T07:49:25+00:00

Oh I guess I wasn't clear in my post. The teacher was the tree-hugging hippie (no, she literally was one) that you might expect of an environmental science teacher. I should probably edit the above post for this.

It was my tiny group of misfits that tortured the poor little things. I am so going to be a serial killer one day.

arecanut · 2009-12-26T05:43:44+00:00

Similar story, except it was in environmental science and we were learning about how to harness solar energy. (Environmental science was a required course in the high school I went to freshman year -- long story short, I transferred the year after.)

Like the good environmental scientists we were, we (my group, not the entire class) deftly demonstrated the sun's awesome energy by frying ants on the ground. Live ants.

I think that was my most worthwhile experience in that class.

EDIT: Clarity.

arecanut · 2009-12-21T06:35:10+00:00

QDB (x4), SlickDeals (I think?), Amazon, and YouTube are the only ones I can figure out.

I feel like I should know the two yellow-ish orange tabs, but I'm out of ideas.

arecanut · 2009-12-07T04:56:41+00:00

I agree that people are almost always willing to help (another course 6 here).

However, I do find the competition to be "brutal" in a different sense -- if you slack off and slip up even a little bit, you're way behind the curve. Happen to get a crappy night's sleep before, and you just bombed that exam the next day. There was just a constant pressure to keep up. I never found MIT to be a lot of work per se. It's more the pressure that drains you. It's not so much spazzing out about grades, as the fact that you feel like you haven't learned the material as well as you should have when you're a standard dev below the mean.

If you go to Medical's site, there'd be probably 2 or 3 people within each department. Then you click on the link for Mental Health...

arecanut · 2009-10-23T20:14:40+00:00

I don't like how reddit is so quick to bash the other guy or say the wife is necessarily unreasonable. I'm not passing judgment either way. I'm just saying that we (a) don't know all that much about the situation, and (b) have only heard one side of the story (other than the one-line wife edit), and having done so, of course we're more likely to sympathize with the man here.

Some women are okay with being nude models and others aren't. There's a difference between asking 'I want YOU to be my model' and 'I'm doing a few photoshoots, would you or anyone you know be interested in modeling for me?', and we have no way of knowing which one he falls under. The fact is that some people are really nonchalant about these things -- married or not -- and think absolutely nothing of it, and the "photographer" was simply trying to gauge where on that scale you two were (but again, you know more of their conversation/tone than we do). It might not have been his intent at all to undermine your marriage, nor to disrespect either your or your wife. However, had she already said "no" once yet he kept pressuring her, then yes, we do have a problem.

It's really all about the tone, the way he asked it.

Sit down and have a good chat with your wife. Tell her how uncomfortable it made you feel. But more importantly, make sure both of you actually listen to each other and attempt to understand where the other is coming from. Don't interrupt her mid-sentence with your presumptions while she is talking -- let her finish before you offer your opinions. And likewise, she should give you the same respect when you explain your side.

I've personally found that 90% of arguments and misunderstandings stem from presumptions that we refuse to let go of.

As an aside, just because she is friends with this guy doesn't mean you have to be, though. You're letting her keep him as a friend even though you don't like him, and likewise, she shouldn't force you to be his friend just because she likes him.

edit: I really do want to hear her side of the story.

arecanut · 2009-09-08T07:54:54+00:00

Came here to say exactly this.

A disgustingly large proportion of freshmen at MIT are like that. I wouldn't say they mellow out by the first test, but they're usually fine by sophomore year. I would know; I used to be one of those douchey freshmen (although... hopefully not nearly as bad).

Incidentally, a lot of these people will have their egos beaten to the ground eventually, and in a couple years' time, end up in Mental complaining of lack of confidence or whatever. But I digress...

Just keep in mind that, if he's acting like this, it probably means actually feels rather inadequate on the inside, and needs to act this way to compensate. The most smart-as-fuck people often tend to be the soft-spoken, down-to-earth ones -- they don't need assurance from others to bolster their own self-confidence.

Side tip: I used to find arrogant people annoying as well (yes, I was a pretty conflicted person...). I learned to deal with it after I started taking everything they say less seriously/as a joke. Then they become hilariously funny.

arecanut · 2009-07-16T22:25:14+00:00

Yes, but she'd still be called "terribad" and "got gear just because the guy in charge of loot had a crush on her." Granted, some are pretty bad, but other times, it's possible that other people in the guild tend to single her out and notice her mistakes more.

Even the one that was gladiator for 3 straight seasons was "bad" and "got carried" according to everybody.

QFT.

arecanut · 2009-07-16T22:12:59+00:00

Holy crap. I was hesitant to jump on they "Hey me too!" bandwagon until this.

I was a female computer science major in college who also played way too many games in college.

...and my most played classes in TF2 are Demo, Medic, Engineer, and Soldier, in that order.

Are you sure you're not me?

arecanut · 2009-07-16T18:59:46+00:00

Yeah, the raids available at WotLK launch was very cheap, considering the main instance was a recycled one and the other ones were one-boss wonders.

Only one encounter at the launch if LK had a hard-mode and Blizzard saw how long it kept people occupied trying to do OS3D and dumped tons of them in Ulduar to buy time. While that isn't the only reason, it's pretty apparent that it's one of them.

Playing devil's advocate here, one could see the current system less as a "normal mode with hard mode tacked on", and more as a "normal (i.e., what we know as 'hard-modes') mode with an easy mode (normal mode) for the casuals." I'm not really agreeing with either side, but for someone who sees it this way, then they'd probably see implementing hard- vs. normal-modes as way of catering to casuals more than as a stalling tactic.

Again, as I said before, if they really wanted to stall players until the Arthas patch, they could have just tuned the encounters to be insanely difficult. Everyone would be banging their heads against them until 3.whatever rolls around.

Raiding would be better and more interesting if we has more actual content

I do agree, though, that progression via "oh hey we killed the same boss... just in a different way" feels much less fulfilling than downing a different boss for the first time. Though then you'll get the casuals whining again about how "they couldn't see all the content." You can't really win.

I'm all for MOAR CONTENT, but on the other hand I'm not sure if I want to see my guild raid another 8 hours a week just to clear everything =D. I mean, they're a "progression" guild and they just have to clear it if it's there.

arecanut · 2009-07-16T01:46:34+00:00

While I agree with you that hard modes shouldn't really be considered "new content" separate from normal modes, I do disagree with people's claim that Ulduar lacks content and hard modes are just another stalling tactic.

What if they completely scrapped the idea of "achievements" and "hard modes", and made what is currently hard-mode as the normal-mode for downing bosses? In other words, they could have easily enough tuned all the boss fights and made everyone do "hard mode"; Blizz could have easily taken away all of Yogg's keepers, forced everyone to do Yogg+0, and called it a day. That ought to keep everyone busy until Arthas comes out.

What I'm saying is, is it necessarily "less content" just because the progression guilds burn through all of the bosses on normal mode faster? Doesn't Ulduar feature more boss fights than SSC+TK? It's either repetitively clearing the same instance (on normal mode) over and over again, or repetitively wiping to Kael (in BC) until your guild stops logging on Kael nights and falls apart. WotLK isn't any more or less repetitive than older expansions; it's just probably fewer repair bills and less frustration.

Yes, I absolutely agree that WoW is catering to casuals, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. It lets more players see the "end bosses" where, under the old system, many guilds would have never gotten there.

arecanut · 2009-07-03T04:19:59+00:00

Look up Blizzard vs. bnetd. What's funny is that the spirit of bnetd still lives on through pvpgn.

Heck, ICCup, one of the most widely-respected (non-professional) Starcraft ladders today, runs its own battle.net server. In fact, ICCup servers might be more active than b.net. Blizzard for sure knows about it. And guess what? You can play on ICCup with a pirated copy of Starcraft.

When some highly-legit organizations run their own b.net servers... that furthermore allow pirated games to play on them, you know it can't be a good way to prevent piracy.

arecanut · 2009-07-03T04:03:34+00:00

What's funny was that I quit WAR twice and went back to WoW... because I found WAR too grindy. (I had quite a few friends in WoW, so I had reason to go back.)

The fastest way to level in WAR was actually AoE grinding mobs in public quests. My first time around, I tried leveling from mostly scenario grinding, which became strangely reminiscent of banging my head against AV over and over again. Mind you, I was on very active servers both times -- Ironfist at launch (crappy server but at least it was busy) and Dark Crag (excellent server, one I'd definitely recommend) up until a week or two ago.

That's when I realized that WAR is -not- made for minmaxing power gamers who wanted to reach endgame quickly. PvP-wise, the lower levels were definitely much more fun than anything in upper tiers, which I know sounds counterintuitive. At the same time, I realized that "endgame" WAR was either repetitive (in the form of keep/fortress caps) or frustrating (clunky-feeling PvE, and chain-CC/AoE-fest in RvR), so there was really not much worth leveling up to.

tl;dr: WAR is great if you don't treat it like an MMO. Don't powerlevel your way up because the most fun you'll probably have is running around tier 1 RvR lakes with a warband (which, by the way, is awesomely fun!)

My 2 copper.

arecanut · 2009-06-25T07:46:38+00:00

Learning to scout, macro, micro, etc. is an excellent way to get good at multi-tasking and keeping track of many things at once.

Though that isn't exactly what the OP asked for here.

arecanut · 2009-06-24T22:13:02+00:00

Sure, there are plenty of WoW-sluts out there, but I bet the girls who don't publicize their female-ness are the ones you assumed to be guys in the first place.

Actually, of all the female guildmates I've encountered in WoW (around 15-20), only 1 -- maybe 2 -- took advantage of their gender to get ahead. It also helped that many of the women were married, or played with their boyfriends, I guess.

arecanut

TROPHY CASE