>> ^Enzoblue:

Seems funny to me that no one mentions Everquest any more. Now it's like WoW is the only mmo that ever was. Everquest was the first online game to have an economy larger than some 3rd world nations. I played it for 3 yrs or so and I still miss it sometimes.


I'm right with you there! The economy was much more player driven in EQ, without limits/restrictions put in place such as Bind on Equip/Soulbound armor (the most epic of the epic stuff was indeed non-tradable). Once you were done with a piece of armor you could easily resell it to another player. It was really fun to haggle with people/search for deals and just upright barter.

The whole game in general was just more player driven, and less rigorously structured around soloing: especially the PvP servers, with the pro-PK vs the pacifistic non-PK guilds, waging war and providing either their protection to newbs from highway thieves or pillaging certain zones of all players and looting the spoils. Not to mention all the social intrigue of player alliances, betrayals, guild spies and secret plots to overthrow/assassinate and usurp leaders, bounty hunters, and tests of loyalty to your compatriots. Such a dynamic has never existed in any other MMO, to my knowledge. It was a hard, unforgiving place where loyalty was worth more than any piece of gear.

If you're interested in revisiting Classic EQ PVE progression for FREE (Kunark is being beta'd atm and then Velious) I'd check out Project 1999, the finest private server available for purely Classic EQ, no custom modifications just the real deal. I have a level 37 Darkelf necro and have been playing fairly regularly, the server population is pretty good and everyone is friendly, helpful towards newbs as well. You wouldn't believe how happy I was when I discovered P99 and ended up seeing a few people I remember from my dear old Quellious server. It really is everything one could ask for considering Live EQ1, at this state, is an abomination. Well, there it is. Try it out, I'll help you get started right! PM me if you decide to come back to Norrath, this also goes for anyone else on the Sift who would try it/return. It really surprised me how harsh they start you out in that game after years of WoW, one needs all the help they can get.

Great WoW trailer as well, and I love Blizzard, but I just can't get back into the game despite my attempts to literally will myself into playing. I really feel as if I'm just being touted around, top-down style, by Blizzard to do this dungeon or that. My choices feel like they have no real impact on the game world, my actions rarely end up having actual consequences, besides maybe a momentary invconvenience. It's just too damned safe to be exciting! Raids are easy mode, though from all the impressions of Cataclysm is seems like they're trying to return to form of having the content be much more stimulating, brain intensive. If raiding becomes more like pre-BC/BC then I will return. I will most definitely at the very least try Cataclysm and see what happens.

Ebert's current assertion is that games cannot be considered an artform in the foreseeable future due to their interactive nature. This is good, because he used to say up until a couple of months ago that "games could never be considered art". Supposedly he's since tried his hand at Metroid Prime, and some other classics, but IIRC he even wrote himself that he felt his newbness limited his potential enjoyment of said games considerably. Regarding this though, I'm not sure if he would appreciate this game or the trailer as an exhibit for the "games as art" debate more than, say, the noire of Max Payne (first part - the second sucked much balls).

Having said that, this does look really good to me apart from character detail (obnoxious cleavage and anime-eyes on Elizabeth, anyone?), lack of much-needed tesselation and vertex shading and lack of RPG elements that I wished were implemented to a wider extent in Bioshock 1. Other than that, wreaking havoc upon the tea-partiers' paradise ought to be a lot of fun. >> ^Xax:

Perhaps the most impressive trailer I've ever seen for a game, even if it is just a render.
And who cares if Ebert refuses to acknowledge that games are art? That's his error.

Abusing? Humiliating? Distress?! Pff!!

I can empathise just fine thanks :] - if I had succumbed to such a jape and watched the replay, I think I would have done something similar to the following.

'Motherfucker....' followed by a small chuckle.

It's all fun and games.

>> ^Stormsinger:

Spoken like a true sociopath.
It's amazing (or not) how the estimated number of griefers seems to correlate so closely to the estimated number of sociopaths in the general population. Both ride right around the 1-2% mark.
Coincidence? I think not. It takes a virtually complete lack of empathy to view other people's distress as a form of amusement...and one valuable enough to put out significant effort to attain, at that.
>> ^Tymbrwulf:
>> ^Stormsinger:
Playing with newbs, of course...abusing and humiliating them, no. This guy is nothing more than a jackass. I wouldn't shed a tear if he was banned from battlenet. Not that they're likely to get that strict, more's the pity.
Your reactions are what make cheating/griefing fun

Spoken like a true sociopath.

It's amazing (or not) how the estimated number of griefers seems to correlate so closely to the estimated number of sociopaths in the general population. Both ride right around the 1-2% mark.

Coincidence? I think not. It takes a virtually complete lack of empathy to view other people's distress as a form of amusement...and one valuable enough to put out significant effort to attain, at that.
>> ^Tymbrwulf:

>> ^Stormsinger:
Playing with newbs, of course...abusing and humiliating them, no. This guy is nothing more than a jackass. I wouldn't shed a tear if he was banned from battlenet. Not that they're likely to get that strict, more's the pity.
Your reactions are what make cheating/griefing fun

From the description, I thought this was going to about about how the MMM ball (Marauders/Marines/Medivacs) > everything, with way less micro(Attack Move basically) and resources required than the other race's counters.

Roche is quite gullible and a bad SC player at that. The reason Roche didn't check for the Command Center before plopping down the Gateway was because he was attempting a common Starcraft/Warcraft "all-in" cheese tactic, akin to tower rushes. These types of tactics are one-trick ponies and only work against unassuming newbs who don't properly scout.

He basically just got outclassed in the cheese department, in part due to his own stupidity.

>> ^Stormsinger:

Playing with newbs, of course...abusing and humiliating them, no. This guy is nothing more than a jackass. I wouldn't shed a tear if he was banned from battlenet. Not that they're likely to get that strict, more's the pity.

Your reactions are what make cheating/griefing fun

Playing with newbs, of course...abusing and humiliating them, no. This guy is nothing more than a jackass. I wouldn't shed a tear if he was banned from battlenet. Not that they're likely to get that strict, more's the pity.

And don't call me Shirley.
>> ^Seric:

All games are a little about playing with the nubs, surely?
Press F10 for Rocket Launcher
Alt+F4 for more resources
Press the windows key to win
Press the windows key and L to win more.
That kinda stuff.
It's all in good fun.
<div><div style="margin: 10px; overflow: auto; width: 80%; float: left; position: relative;" class="convoPiece"> Xax said:<img style="margin: 4px 10px 10px; float: left; width: 40px;" src="http://static1.videosift.com/avatars/x/Xax-s.jpg" onerror="ph(this)"><div style="position: absolute; margin-left: 52px; padding-top: 1px; font-size: 10px;" class="commentarrow">◄</div><div style="padding: 8px; margin-left: 60px; margin-top: 2px; min-height: 30px;" class="nestedComment box">Er, so the strategy is to trick the other person into quitting the game? Fail.
</div></div></div>

Never heard of the illuminati card game. What is it? This guy totally lost me in trying to think of what he's trying to say is rational. Then again I haven't seen the cards.>> ^GuyFawkes:

Im a newb dude, dont have the patience to load his other stuff. Pretty scary days we are living in folks!
Anybody know about the Illuminati card game? Check it out for yourself

Im a newb dude, dont have the patience to load his other stuff. Pretty scary days we are living in folks!
Anybody know about the Illuminati card game? Check it out for yourself

>> ^VoodooV:

I'm a football newb. What's with the constant droning horns in the background. At first I thought it was a psychological thing to use against the opposing team but it is non-stop.


Drove me up a freaking wall. Apparently, they're vuvuzelas which are big horns that South Africans blow at matches. I imagine all the World Cup visitors wanted them too.

I'm a football newb. What's with the constant droning horns in the background. At first I thought it was a psychological thing to use against the opposing team but it is non-stop.

They should reconfigure that server to auto-balance team matches. newbs.

That's nothing, I once five starred this song on Rock Band.
This guys a newb.

>> ^blankfist:

As much as I can appreciate everyone's point of view, I think this is one of those times where people are being a tad too critical over a channel assignment. If you don't like it, don't invoke it.
If you dislike the number of channels we have or the way they're organized, then that's another thing entirely.


Good points, BF. I can see too where folks are coming from on this. From an end-user standpoint * wilhelm seems incredibly narrow in scope compared to other channels and my first reaction was that the channel choice could have been much better (considering long-requested channels such as 90s are nowhere to be found). Then again, YDJ is a classy sifter and has been for a long time, and he proves that yet again by taking the community's lumps over this topic. Why shouldn't he get to pick what he wants? If we can revise the way the channels are presented when picking a video, not only would that make things more newb-friendly when sifting but folks could also pick whatever they'd like (within reason or dag-wood-test).

Full-screen. It was a fucking nightmare. I had one of those newb moments where I thought I'd been hacked.

In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
Haha, you get rickrolled if you're banned? I didn't know that! Awesome.

In reply to this comment by Deano:
IP banned.

I was emailing a video and wiped out the video url in error and clicked send. If you do that, they consider it spammy behaviour and that's yer lot.

As I'm not a spammer they kindly readmitted me back into the fold. Watching that Ricky Astley video over and over wasn't fun.

In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
You were banned? On Videosift?