Rhomal

You open source fanboys have thin skin.. really. And how you totally dismiss hard facts is amazing. That wasn't a random unknown search engine that was a reputable security site that compiles and reports daily security issues and exploits for all public s/w packages. Fact is DNN is historically MORE secure then the major PHP CMS's PERIOD. Sadly you can't wrap your little mind around that. Living in a state of denial must be fun. Whatever, you are hell bent on being 'right' and I have no interest in debating with a ignorant zealot as its pointless. Moving on.

My bad, I am at work and skimmed over your points to hurl in my hurry. Fair enough. As for my AoC comments I was not posting that towards you I was just tossing that out there about folks I met on AoC. As they really seem opposed to any kind of serious challenge, and the point I was making was it seems thats a trend. Did not mean to imply you were in that boat. Finally it's not I -need- or require looting, I just don't see the big deal about as I was taken aback by you compairing it to players exploiting or going out of their way to harrass others, real griefing. XP loss, money loss.. really is item loss that worse? *shrugs* I know many folks who would gladly loose their weapon (as they had a backup or two in the bank) rather then skill or xp points which took twice as long to regain. I played and even ran a UO server and item loss wasn't a make it or break it situation as you seem to me making it out to be. Setback sure, but certainly not a game ending event.

The fictional character in the bible version or the real historical version? Mel Gibson version. huh... that may be a potential hit... perhaps toss in a little passion of the christ action too...

In your opinion.. I'd point you to a typical dictonary to rebutt your stance, but thats not here nor there. And yes it does, call it a pet peeve of mine. And you like to play candyland games where death means little apparently, fair enough. As you said to each their own. Personally if theres little chance of me having any significant loss for my actions ever then whats the point? But again, thats just me. I have noticed playing AoC some folks WANT that kind of game, where the rewards are high and the risks low. As lossing anything 'isn't fun' is the defense I hear time and time again. *shrugs* Why not just start your PC at max level with the highest gear? Save you the trouble if thats the case...

On a side note I want to say the looting of dead bodies was not as bad as it may sound. If you were grouping with a party your friends would guard your body if no one could rez you. Also on RP player run shards most players would give the peep 5 or 10 mins to return if they came across a body before looting it. (unless said player was playing a rogue or similar type PC). So it really wasn't if you die you are going to loose all your items and gold no matter what. Generally speaking you prob got looted ~10 to 15% of the time from my expereinces. Unless you solo'ed a lot then yes.. you prob going to get looted more. Also to add tot hat there was a decay rate of about 20mins. So not only did you have to run back to your body if no one was guarding it but if you got there too late you lost your items anyways! lol Generally speaking again if you with friends they would loot your body for you to save your items. But it did add another level of urgency! lol As for the permadeath topic.. not a huge fan of it but I can see the attraction for some players, however heavy death penalities should be enforced IMO. Such as loosing 5% xp, or 10% of your money.. or both.

Again you are misusing the term. Just becasue YOU do not like a aspect does not equate to being griefed by the accepted defination. Once again being griefed means when player A goes out of his or her way to harrass player B usually not within the accpected conduct or gameplay of the world. Looting is a default mechanic of UO and certain player run servers like nwn1/2. Thus thats the same as complaining about someone building a house next to your lot in secondlife spoiling you view. er... its their lot now and if you wanted to keep the view you should have bought it yourself, so tough. Same difference here you choose to play in a game where it within the scope of the game to loot dead bodies. Its not griefing by defination as it is a. not out of the scope of the game rules or b. not a 'undocumented feature'. When you play on a such a server you know that is a possibility. Now if you want to make up your own meaning to the word all the power to you, I am simply saying by in large you are misusing the accepted meaning of the term. I'll leave it at that.

*ppssstt* They did that with FO3... in case you didn't hear.. just saying.

simply swap out party members when you need to

Correction; thats not 'griefing'. Looting a corpse is part of the gameplay. While the lootie may not like the fact someone came upon their corpse and took their gold or sword of ruin thats not going out of their way to spoil your experience, which is the correct defination of being a griefer (such as rez killing or ganking newbies).

The fictional character in the bible version or the real historical version?

UO is hard core on that level and thats why I liked it. None of this candy coated, hold you by the hand death means little MMO's today. In UO (and EQ if I recall correctly) death could have serious repercussions, as it should.

Isn't this sort of like crying about getting PK'ed and someone looting your body before you got back to it in UO? Or a better example are the player run 'banks' in secondlife that disappeared overnight along with the virtual money. Technicalities are different but the principal is the same. If the server was hacked or used a exploit then that's one thing. But just like no one held a gun to a player in secondlife head to deposit their lindens with this 'bank', nor is their any guarantee your corpse will still have all your phat l00t in UO, same here. They gambled in game and lost. Suck it up and stop crying.

Clearly you are in one of your moods and out for blood no matter what so I'll let you get the final word and 'win' as that's what matters to you. Enjoy it. For the record the 'patting on the head' I was visulizing patting a little kid on the head to calm his tantrum. If you wish however to view it otherwise theres probably some Freudian symbology to that but thats not here nor there.

> Says the guy who thinks SOZ is a great game, and a gift to old schook rpgs. LMAO I think SoZ is good for what it tries to do with the limited budget they had. It is the best of its type? No, I'd day IWD series takes that title. But since we have had nothing close to that since I give them A for effort, C+ on execution. Its good and IMO captures the feel of those high adventure modules I posted about earlier. You clearly feel otherwise. Agree to disagree and lets move on as we are debating opinions at this point which inherently have no 'truth'. Public opinion will in the end validate one of us. Of course you side stepped the who nwn1 OC fisaco but I'll let that slade as you wisely chose not to fight that battle which is lost (to all but you apparently) > Of course, as usual, you ignore everything that disproves what you calimed before. Not surprising. Just like you conviently ignore the fact you believe that NWN2 would completely wipe out NWN1's player base. LMAO And what am I 'ignoring' exactly? Again you have a opinion, as I do about this game. There are no 'facts' to debate here for the most part. And arguing opinion is pointless, however you make a career out of it. heh. You are jumping all over the place... but if you want to change subjects... looking at the activity of nwvault I certainly blew that call to a degree, can't win them all. Is this what the discussion has broken down to now? Should I go dig up some old posts of yours where your predictions were in error? I really don't see a logical connection. *snip the rest of the flamebait* *pats v on the head* good boy...

You give the NWN1 OC a 7.5 and you call ME the fanboy?! *blinks* Then again if your idea of good writing is 2 giant fed-ex quests duck taped together then sure it was a 'good' story.

I am not sure what that validates? Open source is over rated more times then not. Good job showing your ignorance sunshine. But anyway, Diamond's link is poignant because the programming trends of the FOSS community are very similar to general trends. Although I do now expect you try to prove that VB is the most used programming language because it has the highest number of search results on some obscure search engine. Ignorant? While that may be true for other topics I keep pretty well informed on technology since, you know, people pay me loads of money to work in said field and it helps me if I keep up to date. It's these jobs that kept nwn2news and currently wodonlinenews ad, spam free for the record. Second, I never said 'all' open source was over rated. If you would have asked me what I meant by that rather then, like your normal self, jump the gun and have a knee jerk reaction to something you disagree with I would have been more then happy to explain what I was referring to. When I said 'open source' I had the non-commercial groups on mind. I was not pointing fingers at the red hats or the googles of the world. That have paid employees and setup little different then a MS or McAfee. AS they have the money, mgt and resources to manage and organize the project, unlike many other open source groups. What I find, generally, with open source groups that work on PHP packages or the like is the total lack of standards, direction or timely updates. The problem with open source and when theres little to no compensation for your work theres little drive to finish or maintain your project as time goes on. Look how many unfinished projects are on sourceforge for example to prove my point, in fact from looking over them not long ago I'd say at least 50% are unfinished and have not been touched for 6+ months (at least the topics I was looking at). I was pointing fingers at groups like the PHP package xoops (which I have first hand knowledge) whos direction seems to change with the wind (and why I ended up dumping it to go with DNN which I'll address later). The open source folk bemoan and whine about commercial software, but at least you know when you go with a MS, IBM, McAfee or the like you know they will be around tomm, able to get real support and if they do make some major changes it won't be out of the blue and give some warning ahead of time. While I am not saying commercial s/w makers are perfect, far from it, however I rather deal with the devil I know then some outfit run by a group of kids on dads PC. As for DNN, if you'd not be ignorant about it you would know while yes the core s/w is open source, however the group is a spin off of a MS project by some MS employees and indirectly gets MS support. Now since they are organized quite well and the updates come out on a reasonable basis I have no issue with it. Keep in mind while there are free open source modules (news, forums, gallery, RSS feed etc) for DNN they are maintained by volunteers and this gets me back to my main issue. They are infrequently updated and most pale in comparison to their commercial counterparts. Hence why at least 75% of the modules I use I paid for. So while yes the core of my site is opens source the content modules are not. I got burned with xoops on that level, not again. My DNN site was FAR from free cost wise. Open source <> always mean free. With these commercial modules I get support and updates and there are folks accountable to my satisfaction. With the open source projects you get either 'it'll be done when its done' or 'you should worship the ground we walk on for us doing this for you.' That's pretty much the only 2 replies you get from open source folks when you are critical or give criticism, at least in my experiences. In either case I can't run a public site with s/w developed by such kids. I personally couldn't care less if s/w is open source of commercial as long as it WORKS and gets the job done I need. It is just from what I have encountered certain open source lags badly behind their commercial counterparts on several key levels. As for VB I never said or even implied it was the best lang, it simple is something I want to pursue.. *shrugs* I simply made the case PHP is far from more secure as a CMS then VB/DNN ever has been. If that is a tough pill to swallow that's your problem, not mine. Sorry of those little things called 'facts' get in your way.

Yes V we should all just uninstall nwn2 and go back to nwn1 because it was so much 'better'. Next.

I am not sure what that validates? Open source is over rated more times then not. That aside, thanks to all those folks above for the links, quite helpful!

*chants* PODCAST, PODCAST, PODCAST!!!

Clearly you never played old school PnP D&D or you'd realize they captured the feel of such fun, high adventure modules like war rafts of kron or quest for the heart stone to the T! If thats not your cup of tea or before your time then I can see where one simply does not 'get it' with this XP. Even if it's not your thing the additions to the game engine are going to open a new era for community mods I think. Looking forward to see what folks like Adam Miller do with it.

WoW is, IMO, the poster child with what is wrong with MMO's today. It dumbs itself down to the lowest common demoninator. Its like the difference between colbert and larry the cable guy when it comes to comedy. You need to be aleast aware of current events and history to 'get it' with the report where as larry the cable guy you could live under a rock and he plays down to such red neck stupidity takes 0 brain power to 'get'. Call me elitist if you wish but thats how I see WoW vs. other MMORPGs that at least try to be more then a kiddyfied simplistic game.

Matthew already addressed where lucas is deeply involved with his studios. As for what I quoted, you clearly skipped over the part where I said it isn't the making money I have a issue with its the quality vs quantity aspect of his offerings for the past 10 yrs. And if you tell me the last 3 live action films were high quality (story, writing, directing & acting wise) then we'll agree to disagree. Please go back and re-read what I posted as apparently you chose not to read it in full (or have selective memory).

I just picked up SoZ yesterday myself.. did not get far myself just a few quests into the story. My party: human ranger/barb moon elf warlock dwarf druid human rogue (going for assassin) Will post more once I can talk about the game in detail, however first impression, whoever the sound eng was for the voice acting needs to be fired. Not only do the ambient sounds/music wash out 1/2 the voice acting so you can hardly hear it but some of the actors seemed to speak with their mouths right on the mic and you hear the reverberation of speaking P's for example. So far interesting story, love the party aspect, good AI when I let the other 3 party members fend for themselves, and the overland map is nicely executed. Just the poor voice acting quality is huring my expereince thus far..

A public CCP doc was stumbled upon, dated last summer and they specificly talk about the MMO and their target release date is 2010... http://www.wodonlinenews.net/Home/tabid/36...ne-details.aspx

I have actually a few distros. And between dependency issues and plain install issues it took x5 times longer to get anything done then on windows. Windows is a simple click setup.exe and in a few moments you are off and running. With linux its a pain in the arse from start to finish. Granted its been about 2 yrs since I tried linux but I follow the saying fool me once shame on you, fool my twice shame on me. I gave linux 3 tries and each time it was nothing but a head ache and limited apps. And that was true for the mac TEN years ago. Now the PC has certainly caught up to it media editing wise. Or are all those studios using win servers or all the media editing apps just a illusion? Not the mention last I saw the PC outperforms the mac in media work.