Hurlshort

I got my wife hooked on WoW, but she can't run LotR Online on her laptop so I haven't even tried to get her to switch. She's been playing Spore and the Wiifit more recently though. Good times

Piracy has not been mentioned once in the thread. Therefore, for some reason that defies logical explination, I'm going to mention piracy in the hopes that piracy is not mentioned. That is because Gorth pruned out all the posts on piracy earlier. I'm not actually getting Fallout 3 until Christmas. I just have too many games coming out. But I'm excited to sit down and play it over the holiday break.

I wonder how they would handle Coruscant? It's a massive city, they really could have an entire game based on just part of that planet. I suppose they would have some sort of reasons to keep players out of certain areas. It will be interesting to see how they handle it, for sure.

I'm not sure how long the game has been in development, but I really hope they don't put a bunch of generic planets out in an attempt to make the world seem big. Turbine released LotR Online with very little of the map filled in, and at first I was upset areas like Gondor and Rohan weren't included, but they polished the released areas extremely well. Hopefully Bioware will release a just a few very well developed planets (maybe 5?). SWG planets were pretty generic.

This is equivalent to admitting that pr0 reviewers are essentially whores. Thus, their "ratings" are worthless. I've been arguing this for a long time, and it's good people are finally realizing it. Can you answer the first question I asked Mr. n00b? I don't remember anyone arguing for the idea that pro video game reviewers are upstanding journalists. These are trade magazines and websites, they rely on the companies they review to stay in business. But a negative person is going to look at that and say they all must be soulless shills for the man, and a positive person is simply going to read the review for the content and not worry too much about whether the game got a 92.75 percent out of 93.

this is a naive view, actually. you're basing your position on everything else being the same, i.e., the economic environment as it stands today, which is hardly appropriate for a situation in which all schools were private. apples and oranges. taks I'm confused (and I did skip a few pages of this thread, so maybe I missed something.) What are we doing to change the economic environment of the country? How is a place like downtown LA going to give educational opportunities on par with Beverly Hills (not that they are perfectly equal today, but at least the funding is similar and the teachers are supposed to have the same qualifications)?

Hear that? Yeah, that's what the point sounds like when going right over your head. It's true, I really have no clue what your point is. Do you want to explain it a bit more?

Do negative or pessemistic people know they are that way? Because there are quite a few negative folks on these forums, and I just assumed they knew that is their disposition. Most people who get a job writing game reviews are positive. That's how they continue to get work. There are only a few exceptions where a negative person manages to carve out a niche, like the zero punctuation guy. So figure out what your disposition is and stop being outraged every time someone with a different disposition posts a review.

Yes, Rotten Tomatoes is clearly the ultimate authority on how ratings work. I've seen the light!

Yeah, Warhammer had a great way of doing that.

That's not a bad idea at all. My wife and I are both teachers, and we basically work six days a week during most of the school year. In fact I just returned from a dance program that she was running. Moving most events to a Friday would definitely help that situation. But I think you'll see too much opposition to it. First, because parents want to attend those Friday events, and most businesses are still going to run on Friday regardless of what school districts choose to do. Secondly, many students need the summer months to finish summer school. In my community, most families are partially based here and partially in another country, and the 2 months in the summer give them a chance to go home. But summer is getting shorter every year, it seems like. We are down to about 8 weeks, whereas when I went to school it was about 11 weeks. Plus there are quite a few schools that run year round, we have one in our district, so the option is there.

7 as an average is a pretty well accepted idea. Honestly if I see a 5, I'm thinking this game is not worth playing and only for the most desperate or hardcore of fans. Maybe it would be better to stick with a strictly letter grade system. Ok, I give Fable 2 a B+. Education is trying to move towards a different scale in many areas, basically a 4-point or 6-point rubric, because of many of the reasons you folks are listing. I'm not arguing with your logic, I'm just stating the the accepted conventions don't line up with your reasoning. I'm not going to sit there and go "for the typical grading curve where 7 is average, I'd give Fable an 8.5, but for those who feel that a 5 is average, I give it a 7.8.

I'm on Windfola. It's a good server, pretty low in terms of population, but active enough and that keeps the lag from getting too bad in the main hubs. If you do make a character, add Taranto as a friend and give me a /tell sometime. I've also got a lot of alts in the teens so I can probably get some quests going sometime too. Hunters are great, I have one at level 12 and I need to try and play him again sometime.

What class are you playing? What server? I'm very excited about the expansion. I'm about 90k xp from 50, and I want to take it nice and slow so that I hit it right when the expansion comes out.

I remember when CGW did away with review scores altogether. That was great, but I guess the community complained a lot and they went back to the old system pretty quickly. I also think it's ridiculous to argue with a score someone assigns to a game. Sure, disagreeing is great. Having discussions about why you rate something can be really helpful for folks looking to pick it up, but it's an opinion. Their opinion isn't wrong, it's just not your opinion. When you go into a thread and try to belittle someone over their opinion, you've got serious issues.

VOUCHER SCHOOLS? That is still government paying with public funds to education. Also, don't you think that a group of professionals coming together through a joint interest has the right to seek what is the best for themselves? Without unions the little guy worker has no voice and can get screwed over on a regular basis. As a teacher and a member of a teacher's union, I gotta agree with Killian on a few points. Private schools would fail to service a huge part of the population. What kind of private school are the kids of downtown Compton going to get? They rely heavily on government funding. They also can't get vouchers passed. The community doesn't have the money to create a school that can compete with affluent areas. Charter schools are also a very complex situation. They work well right now because they work as an extension to the public school model. If every school was a charter school, the system probably wouldn't work. They serve special populations and they tend to rely on small classes. If you have 30 schools, and one decides to go Charter, then the other schools can support the fact that the one school is servicing less students. My district averages about 600 students in their elementary schools. Charter schools aim for about 250. Meeting performance standards is much easier with a small group. Sure, my job would be much easier if I had 20 students in each class, but there already aren't enough teachers available to support those class sizes in every grade level. I can really go on and on about this stuff. It's just a complicated situation, and there is no easy fix, and the system really isn't as broken as folks like to make it. There are success stories all over the place.

so a 'fun adventure game' these days rates 8.5 or 9 on a 10 point scale? some day you kids are gonna grow up and finish high school and realise that the average of a bell curve distribution on a 10 point scale isn't 7 or 8. i realise you're all on ritalin and everything but this kind of grade inflation is truly puerile. Go go condescending posts! Your way must clearly be the right way. That must be why so many educational institutions classify 7-8 as average, 8-9 as above average, and 9-10 as excellent. When I get out of High School, I hope I learn to capitalize words at the beginning of a sentence.

I think quite a few fliks on here have stated that they enjoyed Fable 1. I think you need to take that into account. So far, Fable 2 is a notch above the original for me, but it's definitely a similar game. I'd put it in the 8-9 range, but I need to finish it first. The original I'd give an 8.5, mostly because I felt the ending was way too quick. Otherwise I'd rate it a solid 9. But hey, this is like a fun adventure game. That's not everyone's cup o' tea.

That isn't surprising. In 3-4 years, WoW will likely be in decline (probably dropping from 15 million to under 10 million, maybe closer to 3 or 4 million.) Eventually someone has to take their place at the top. I don't see WoW2 on the horizon, so SWKOR looks like it has a decent shot. Who the heck came up with SWKOR?

SWG was a setting that, according to cannon, had very few Jedi. Heck, Darth Vader was still alive during that game, so technically the only Jedi should have been in hiding. KotOR is a setting that plays into the idea that there are many Jedi, so it works better for an MMO in that regard. Also, aren't you born with your powers? So I think it makes perfect sense to start at level 1 as a Jedi, or padawan, and slowly train your way up to a full scale badass.

Is this game mod-able? I really like the setting, but if you've got respawns happening the way it sounds, I'm not going to be happy. I'd love for them to just completely turn off respawning, so it actually matters when you clean a guard post out.

KotOR at least has set the stage for different classes of Jedi. That will play into an MMO better than SWG, which made it very difficult to become a Jedi.

That is a spectacular failure. A single player game might be judged on how many units are sold, but a MMORPG is about retaining and gaining customers over time. I don't think I worded that right. I was more trying to point out that SWG didn't fail because of the setting. The setting helped it sell well at release. Like others have stated, it was badly designed and that killed it.

I'm not quite sure where everyone is getting this data that SWG was a spectacular failure. I think I remember when it was released that it sold fairly well. The failure was in its inability to maintain those subscriptions. WoW also didn't sell 15 million copies overnight. It took a few months for it to fully blossom, and the real amazing part is how much of a subscriber base it has managed to retain. Word of mouth and good advertising made it into a phenomenon. The MMO market has grown a lot since WoW was released, so I think it's reasonable to guess that eventually another MMO will take over their incredible numbers. Heck, Age of Conan sold over a million copies in the first month. But they weren't able to hang onto those numbers and now it's floundering. I think it's very likely a SW MMO will sell in large numbers, but it will only beat WoW numbers by growing after release and maintain its subscription base. It's also good to remember that there are plenty of profitable MMO's working in the shadow of WoW and having no problems. I'm not sure what the business plan will be for Bio/EA/LA here, but I doubt they need to get anywhere near WoW numbers to turn a profit.

Doesn't GOG mean Good Old Games? How did Lionheart get on that list?