quitthegame

Actually, those are both grammatically sound, which likely explains your earlier question as well :) (i.e., words with multiple meanings develop restrictions on how each meaning can be used syntactically to increase clarity) (open and close both have multiple meanings, but close has more, and more pronounciations, and more syntactic restriction) (actually open has more meanings 88 to 75 in the dictionary I checked, but not in reference to stores, and in many cases open is opposed to closed, like in math you refer to open and closed sets, which distorts the comparison.)

I'm not intending to take you out of context--but I'm not sure who you were accusing of censorship if not Jagex. Did you mean some other word, because it's hard to think of another word that would typo to 'censorship'? Cover-up maybe? Your explanation above is all well and good, but you did actually use the word censorship and your explanation above has nothing to do with it, which seems odd. About taking you in context--I was going to reply to something else, from your last paragraph about whether Jagex would succeed against bots longterm or not, which came from whether Jmods are downplaying, which came from Jiblix...you guys are jumping around topics very quickly. Part of the responsibility for being taken in context is with the author staying in the original context, and also using words precisely. I decided the only way I could stay in context was to not reply at all to that paragraph. I end up agreeing with most of your paragraphs, but sometimes it seems like they don't get along with each other, which does indeed come back to context. Like if I take your last paragraph literally, where you say Jagex maybe can't deal with the bots, it kinda destroys all your previous arguments about how they should fully disclose :shock: If they can't succeed long term, they should hide that and keep stalling, tbh. But if you don't like a line by line analysis then I"ll leave it general like that for you.

Why are you using Islam and religion interchangeably? Islam is one religion, not equal to religion in general. On the James quote: 1. He makes a false dilemma between materialism and theism. 2. He quotes the theory of his time on how the universe would end according to cosmographers. Now there are many theories as to what might happen, rendering his interpretation outdated. 3. His assumption that man's need for eternal moral order, while clearly stated as an assumption by the compositor of the quotes, is not only not an assumption that I share, but it doesn't even seem that tenable. 4. Interestingly, the belief in a recurring physical universe, such as one with enough matter to contract into a big crunch leading into another big bang, does seem to result in an "eternal moral order" without requiring theism.

You want honesty? There, they're being honest that they censor their forums. Really, I have no idea why you bring up honesty and censorship. They mention that they censor the forums like 500 times, the list of rules is longer than this thread. I wasn't supposed to post in this thread again :shame: But accusing Jagex of censorship just is so funny :oops:

Happy solstice day :lol: Also it makes for a funny convo if your employed. Me - Merry Christmas Customer - Oh im not christian Me - Well neither am I, trollface.png lol I like that. What about: Me- Merry Christmas Customer - Oh, I'm not Christian. Me- Oh, me neither, -beat-, but you believe in Santa right? *Angrily stare at heathen customer*

I think it actually is sufficient for you, in the sense that it covers your first example. "But it doesn't really matter to me, I simply believe it and I'm happy how it shapes my life" when it comes to your second example: "But there are people claiming their own religion to be true, not only for themselves, but for other people too, and they try to argue from a rational point of view, and that's something I'm not able to understand." Someone arguing from a rational point of view, for the positive proof of something for which they don't have evidence--they're wrong. So, that covers your second example. That covers both examples, right? If you're asking why someone would do the second example, they're either deluded or trying to deceive you, and if you're asking why that is, I'd refer you to the classic Propaganda, 1928 by Edward Bernays, and if you want to know why that book is true I'd refer you to Daniel Dennett's later work, etc. How far up the chain do you want to go? :P There's a bit of an implied false dilemma of omission in your post, as you don't mention people trying to convert other people to their religion using irrational means. Are you against that, and why?

Imagine one morning you wake up, and you "just know" that the Qu'ran is correct and not the Bible, or anything else but the Qu'ran. That really is the answer to "how do you know", you just wake up one morning and you do. Or you have a similar experience at some non-morning time. :P The "what empowers one religion over the others" is a powerful logical argument. But, since the above paragraph is not really logical, it doesn't necessarily apply. It is "pre-logical", in a sense which I will develop now. If you have 20 eyewitnesses to a crime, there's a good chance they'll all give slightly different accounts. But that doesn't mean that one of them can't have the facts perfectly correct, or at least most correct. To this argument, the "which eyewitness do you believe" is a powerful logical argument that you can't trust eyewitnesses accounts. But if you're one of the eyewitnesses, and you're sure you're that one of the 20 who really saw what happened, aren't you going to believe it, despite that argument? It's difficult for logic to overpower our sense of "really seeing what I saw". Which came first--your sense of logic, or your perceptions of the universe? Were you born with a logical intuition, or did you develop a logical sense from watching the world around you behave according to physical laws which are describable with a logical system of postulates? I would argue that it is the latter. Thus, we see that perception is "pre-logical". More precisely, learning to perceive is identical with formulating a logical system for extracting narrative sequences from the configuration space also extracted from the various sensory apparatuses, but that would take too long to put into normal english. Realizing that human perception is imperfect and therefore logic should be used to recursively limit prelogic perception seems inductively true to me, but not deductively true. The fact that sensory perception and processing can be improved through systematic training has been experimentally verified, albeit more in a task-area based way than in general way. If you haven't ever had the experience of "just knowing that this religion is true, and not all the others" then it's much easier to apply the powerful logical argument "what privileges one religion to be true over all the others" to dismiss them all, in the same way in which it is easier to doubt eyewitness accounts than it is to doubt one's own sensory inputs. Investigation of the various sensory illusions is useful in the latter area, there are various lines of inquiry performing a similar function for the former.

It wasn't going on, you necro'd it.

It has a spammy effect, as 80% of the people who don't read the thread post the same thing. Whatever floats your long-haired boat.

pointing out tldr'ing happens all the time. Why point it out? :-o

the thing is ring_world, if you posted that only pretending you'd tldr'd the entire thread as a troll, it'd be even funnier than if unintentionally. How rare is that?

I said I was done with this thread, because at this point the central disagreement is out there, and it's better to agree to disagree. But, there's no way I can let a statement that bots are rationally good for RuneScape go unchallenged. RuneScape is a bit of grindy game, I think we can all agree on that. Whether one personally agrees or disagrees that this style suits their gameplay, I think we can all agree that this makes using bots more advantageous than it would in a less grindy game. In this short run, this leads to more profits for Jagex, but in the medium and long run my rational forecast is that nonbotters would stop playing in large numbers because of the unfairness, and that this would remove the market for RWT bots, and remove the incentive to play for those whose only reason for playing was to be better than those who played legitimately. All you'd have left would be those pkers and bossers who would use bots to get their stats up high enough to pk/boss, obviously they would stop botting once they had enough gp/skills to do that. In a rational and detached manner, I doubt that this would be a profitable situation for Jagex, although the possibility is out there that perhaps it might be. The possibility is slim, because even if that situation were theoretically profitable, there's a strong possibility that it would just lead to the stolen credit card problem again, where the credit card carriers would threaten to disallow CC payments to Jagex again, or whatever happened before that led to free trade removal. (a lot of botters paid for their memberships by rwt gold for cash. If all the legit players quit RS, then there's no market for rwt. Then the botters use stolen CC's to play. The questions of what % of legit players you need to make the system work is a complicated one, but I assume Jagex knows.) Seriously though guys, think about agreeing to disagree at this point. When it comes to forums, if you're not going forwards, then you're going backwards.

Not exactly...you can prove sometimes prove causation even with a correlation below one. The problem is that correlation is not always causation in the desired direction, or even either direction, even if the correlation is 1 to 1. I.e., long greasy hair on a man, society's dislike of men with long hair, which is the chicken and which is the egg? The rest of your post is basically working out that the causation goes both ways, which points us in the direction of thinking that perhaps we're looking at a proximate cause here, and looking for a deeper cause that explains the two-way causation. Correlation/causation: Every person taking anti-baldness medication is bald. Therefore, taking anti-baldness medication causes baldness. -- example of correlation of 1, but causation goes one way only. The first ship headed to a particular island sinks, the only ship that sinks in the world that day. Being on a ship headed to Island A, and being on a ship that sunk on Date B, have a correlation of 1. Yet, causation doesn't go either way. It's just a coincidence, despite being perfectly correlated. Men are generally taller than women. This is a correlation much less than 1, and yet being a man rather than a woman does have some causative factor on your height. Again, the point is that the argument above is not strictly false, just that it doesn't capture the whole picture.

Like I said, I was unsure what you meant, and gave one scenario and asked you if it was correctly describing what you meant. It seems like it wasn't precisely. This is really the only thing we disagree on. I think the RSOF gives a completely insane projection of what people in general are feeling, and I think there are multiple other things that could be done. 1. Not base your article on people's general opinion, because it's difficult to obtain a representative sample. 2. Take surveys ingame, even though this is difficult to do. 3. Not write an article, and go fishing instead. 4. Worst option of all, base an article on RSOF. If you choose to believe that RSOF is a reasonable source for anything, we should just agree to disagree on that then. (TIF is a much more idealistic crowd than the average player, with many retired posters, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but means it's not perfectly representative--whereas RSOF is a cesspool.) I enjoyed the parts of your article that were your own opinion. p.s. quote from a developer of Asheron's Call 2, from his article on eldergame.com "Taming the forum tiger": :P

It seems like you're proposing that there's a group of highly idealistic and emotionally volatile players who dominate the forums, and which most of your friends belong to, and then the vast majority of nonidealistic players who you think aren't representative of anything because they're not highly idealistic and volatile. The fact is, those players are representative of themselves, the majority of the players of RS. They may not matter to you, but I guarantee you that they matter to Jagex. If that's not what you're proposing, and you think that the highly opinionated forum group is the majority, then I'll look for some 3rd-party surveys on that issue, see what I can find. I definitely recall seeing some surveys for WoW about how only 1% used the official forums there, not sure if I ever saw any for RS. Blizzard has definitely made some statements in their o-forums about how they know how few people use the forums, and that they value the forum input but also take it in perspective. They actually moved their main developer-to-player statements out of the forum and onto a link on the game launcher, because they felt it was nonproductive on the forums. Pretty sure there was a reference by a J-mod to the "echo chamber" effect on the forums, I'll see if I can hunt that down. --nope, didn't see it. apparently can only search by words in title, which was unhelpful.

It's a "big problem" with just about every other company involved with video games, then. Jagex are hardly alone in being guilty of turning a blind eye to rampant cheating. Clearly, the whole industry has this "big problem". Can you really be that harsh to someone when they're only failing something that's been failed by everyone else who's tried before? At least Jagex have had some success; other companies have had none with their efforts. It's always easier to criticise than praise though, I guess. That's a bit of an overstatement, other games do variously well against bots; in addition, any comprehensive look at the problem should also look at other ways RWT can be funded. (Dicing, staking, etc). Having people hiring gold farmers to manually play one account could be looked at as the ultimate success of anti-bot and anti-RWT measures, sadly. That said, people keep quoting "There's so much rage in the community", or there was earlier, w/e. None of my ingame friends cared about any of that stuff. Going by the 1% that post in the RSOF is an incredibly biased sample. As kimberly pointed out, the average player doesn't care. (Remember, there's no point asking me or kimberly to back up our claim. That's the fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam Until someone provides evidence one way or the other, the question is where it always was-- in the default state of undecided. The onus would be on us to provide the initial evidence if one of us wrote an article making some claims based on the fact that the majority opinion was not rage. ) Any survey done on people's emotional state 6 months ago would be a bit dicey of course, but better than relying on anything so nonrepresentative as the forums. Honestly though, of all the possible things to write about, none of my ideas require that as a prerequisite, so I think I'm safe from having to do that survey :P Plus, any random poster on TIF who did do a survey in a more representative way would face critics that he made it up, perhaps. That's perhaps why I stick to lines of argument that do not depend on the "general opinion". Additionally, if you wanted to include the ppl who quit in the last 6 months over the recent updates, how do you reach them in a representatively accurate fashion? Not an enjoyable task, for me anyway. That's why more commonly you see people go to sub numbers, instead of surveys, to gauge reactions of the players of various MMOs (many other MMOs have historically released more sub number information than Jagex does, although the highscores may now provide such information about RuneScape). Obviously this has confounds also, but often it still seems superior. In this case, the botsplosion and botnuke are such huge confounds, that this option seems fairly hopeless here.

You don't see any practical use for misinformation? I guess you're right...I'm just glad you don't know where I live, in case you find out why you didn't get that last job...and why that tall handsome dude Delapaz got the job instead. I've said too much

Didn't I answer that question from you 2 weeks ago? If one believes in evolution, then gossip was a very effective and advantageous mode of communication for millions of years. In the past few hundred years, its usefulness is debatable. Gossip is like your verbal small toe. Just got to wait a million years and it'll be gone. Unless it's still useful, which it probably is. Then it's more like vomiting. (not a pun) If you don't believe in evolution, then your hatred of gossip is probably sinful? Shame on you. :shame: Unless it's not, in which case good job. :thumbup:

The reductio ad absurdum was amusing. The fact that his argument in that post about why guys with long hair look bad never even mentioned guys was sufficient to prove him wrong :P But yes, reductio ad absurdum is useful here mainly because it illustrates with an entire sheaf of examples why the argument is flawed, to show that the logical structure is underdetermined. Yes, he said the same thing as well. This argument suffers from several defects. First, it doesn't explain why at some historical times, long hair on men was ok. Second, it is a proximate cause, that argues from statistical evidence based on what people have observed in men and women. This carries both the risk of confusing correlation with causation, and the risk that the ultimate cause is more explanatory and general. In this case, the ultimate cause would probably give the benefit of answering the historical question, as well as negate the correlation/causation uncertainty. Also, we have the questions left, even assuming that your statistics are 100% true, "why do guys with long hair not take care of it?", and "why do men and women take different care of their hair?" I'm not really able to explain perfectly how to distinguish at what level of precision a question should be answered with any generality, English isn't that precise of a language, but I can offer an example. If I asked you "why is the sky blue", and you answered "the human eye perceives light waves between the wavelengths of x and y as blue, and that's what the sky is usually dominated by," I've answered your question with a reasonable of accuracy and precision, (not being very precise on how mixed spectra are perceived by the nervous system) but if my question had been "why is our sky blue except at sunset and sunrise", then the above answer is still accurate but no longer precise, as you've omitted some of the causative factors. The answer you guys are giving to this question is more analogous to a situation where I'm asking "why is the sky blue", and you're answering "because it's 2 pm, and not cloudy". No [kale], Sherlock. As we can see, truth and direct responsiveness is not enough to make an answer a quality one. The answer must also operate at the proper level of abstraction.

Well if you'd like me to rephrase it then the answer is association. The majority of people don't have long hair --> some of those who do "look bad" from an objective standpoint (greasy, unkempt, whatever) --> by association, long hair "looks bad" Works for other things too - The majority of people don't wear this shirt --> famous person wearing the shirt "looks good" objectively --> by association, it is a good shirt / looks good Most people just skip the association and go right to the conclusion, however. Some people who have long hair look bad --> long hair looks bad, or in other words long hair looks bad "because it does". There are other reasons such as looking feminine in a masculine culture, etc. but those don't matter nearly as much as what has become the universal western perception of long hair i.e. that it looks bad. "Well if you'd like me to rephrase it then the answer is association. The majority of people don't have long hair --> some of those who do "look bad" from an objective standpoint (greasy, unkempt, whatever) --> by association, long hair "looks bad"" That doesn't make sense. If we accept that chain of logic, then we can identically argue: "Some people with short hair look bad for the reason of (funny ears, dry, oddly shaped skull, whatever) --> by association, short hair 'looks bad' " Unless you think that every single person on this earth with short hair looks great, you're going to need a more refined argument. Or actually, your argument against long hair works equally well for women and men, as stated, so unless you mean to argue that women and men should all get buzzcuts, you're going to need to refine your argument in that respect as well. Really, if you're arguing that women should go Mr. Clean totally baldy look, then you aren't answering the question, but taking issue with the asker's assumptions, anyway. Also, that argument doesn't address the fact that at times in the past, long hair has been accepted as "looking good" for men, but at other times it doesn't.', which again should be answered or your disagreement with that assumption stated. Fundamentally, your argument is logically circular. Your concept of "association" and shortcuts doesn't erase the circularity. It is true that sometimes a positive feedback cycle occurs between a feature and the opinion of the feature over time, in fact it is almost certain that it occurred in this exact subject; but as we saw in your examples above, merely claiming "association" amounts to little more than handwaving. It is necessary to distinguish the operation of the feedback cycle, to render the results distinguishable between populations and times, thereby to provide any explanatory power in regards to causation. If you examine my post I made above beginning with "a lot of answers..." , you'll notice that my basic point was pretty much "association", except I was careful to distinguish why it affected men but not women, and in the past century and not before. When you skip crucial steps like that, then your shortcut is a foolish one. I'm going to copy your logical structure again in an exaggerated fashion, to poke a little fun :P *shows you a picture, with the ugliest person in the world, wearing a shirt* One person wearing a shirt instead of being fully nude is the ugliest person in the world --> Wearing a shirt instead of being fully nude makes you the ugliest person in the world , or in other words because it does. Does that argument persuade you to go to work or school wearing no clothes, like the emperor from the fable? Let me know if it does, I'm staying home that day. p.s.--personally I had long hair for a few years in high school as part of a "rebellious" period, and have had extremely short hair ever since. So we clearly share the same social conditioning, and we both acknowledge that we do, but your explication of how that social conditioning came about has some logical flaws, as above.

Just because your long hair looked bad doesn't mean every other man with long hair looks bad. :wink: True, not every, but from my (obviously limited) experience in knowing men who have long hair, I would say that it looks bad on the vast majority (and the exceptions tend to be people who would look just as good with short hair anyway). You keep saying that. Are you arguing that: 1. The fundamental laws of the universe cause men to look bad with long hair? or 2. God makes men look bad with long hair? or 3. You were socially conditioned to think men look bad with long hair, and are now circularly using the results of your social conditioning to explain the cause of your social conditioning? Surely you understand that the question "why does society dislike men having long hair" is fundamentally inclusive of the question "why does any individual person think men look bad with small hair?", as society is nothing more than the aggregate of human learned behaviors, being a shorthand for describing the emergent properties of such? Obviously then, whether or not you find is unattractive doesn't answer the question, only you analyzing why that is so would be helpful. Currently, your answer to the original question equates to "because it does." That is not responsive.

It's a year in review article, meant to go over the biggest updates/additions of the year and people's reactions to them, not editorialize on what should have been done instead. We have plenty of those every week. :wink: I can't reply to your post without violating " 3. Off topic posts that do not discuss the content of that week's articles will be removed. This is not the place to discuss the direction of the times, how much you love or hate the times, etc. Off topic posts will be removed." So I'll have to PM you to reply.

The articles this week lacked perspective, in that they only discussed one side of each issue. Crocefisso's article discussed how the Clan features were shallow and lacked content--which is already common knowledge. Instead of merely pointing out that which we already knew, why did he not give us his opinion of what changes should be made to fix citadels? Similarly, for the 'marketing' features, again he merely discusses some players' emotional reaction to the updates, without providing any information on what alternative fund-raising efforts were available to Jagex, or any financial data showing whether or not additional fund-raising was reasonable or necessary. Perhaps he could have just titled the article "players' reaction to the updates of 2011, a year in review". edit: "As I have said time and time again, however, is that the best way to sell an MMO is to make an update that is substantial, that will keep people playing and paying without the need for such gimmicks." So actually this does address some of the points I was complaining about before...I just don't agree with your assertion. In my experience, most of the most profitable MMOs are currently rife with such gimmicks. If I can find a reputable source for a top ten profitable MMO, then I'll post that back here with an analysis of which of them forgo such gimmicks. Here's a quote describing how company-conducted RWT is better for the bottom line than merely focusing on subscription numbers: "Starting with the bad -- everyone asks to start with the bad news, don't they? -- World of Warcraft's subscriber numbers are much lower than they were this past May. The company reports that subscriptions have dropped from 11.4 million in May to 11.1 million in June to 10.3 million, representing a loss of 10% of the playerbase. These numbers represent the total worldwide, and Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said that most of the losses were suffered in the eastern market. No matter where the losses come from, this continues the downward trend of the title during the past year. Blizzard declined to provide a subscriber forecast for the next quarter. The good news is that the company has whooped expectations by nearly tripling its profit for the quarter over this time last year. During this past quarter, Activision Blizzard raked in $627 million worth of sales, of which $148 million is pure profit. A majority of the revenue -- 62% -- comes from its digital sales." digital sales = people buying the game online, plus people buying mounts and pets for 10-25$ each, or paying 30$ for a server transfer, etc. Do you really think Jagex is going to look at numbers from the industry leader showing that kind of distribution, and not try to copy it, like every other MMO company out there? I did find another site which listed total revenue worldwide for all MMOs as coming in at about 35% legit RWT, in 2010. Since companies all over are moving away from subscriptions and towards RWT, I would be surprised if that total did not go over 50% very soon, if not already. This smaller playerbase resulting in a larger profit--kinda reminds me of the F2P hiscore removal. At least you can't accuse Jagex of being inconsistent. Master_Smither's article I found hard to follow. I couldn't tell exactly what he was saying, if he is accusing Jagex of lying in saying that the bot nuke was very difficult to implement and took up a large portion of development time for 2011, or if he believes them but thinks that the choice to botnuke over doing another 5 quests proves that they are disrespectful to the game in preference for money. I can't respect either of those viewpoints, as he provides no evidence for the first and the second is illogical, considering how the botnuke seems to have cost them money overall. Personally the botnuke is infinitely preferable to me over another 5 quests, and I wouldn't shed a tear if every single player that was against it quit today.

Desperate anger is funny. Early comedies mined that humor ceaselessly, Abbot and Costello especially, 3 Stooges and Marx Brothers to a lesser extent. It's somewhat demasculinizing, so you tend to see it in modern comic movies and TV shows only in specific though common cases, like the aging father figure alternating between befuddlement and hapless rage. Often that character is portrayed as having been, and still perceiving himself as extremely masculine, but now his wife, aging more gracefully, is portrayed as taking control generating conflict and humor. Comic opposition almost demands that there be a bunch of teenage girl characters in movies and shows who generate humor through ineffectual rage, but I"m not really familiar with that genre.

My family history is weak arms, so I took your advice and omitted arms from my workout program. Yesterday I tried to move my refrigerator, and my powerful legs and core were fine, but my left arm literally ripped off. I have no arm, now. Thanks. Someone told me that a true workout program should carefully bring weak areas up to par, not ignore them--but I just can't risk my one remaining arm. I hope nothing happens to it. People who say they have a high metabolism usually are actually telling you that they don't eat very much. People who say they have a low metabolism are generally telling you they sometimes eat 2-3 cartons of ice cream when they're sad. (No offense intended, but calories aren't magic numbers, and the truth is out there if you look.) People who compare people's metabolisms to Veyrons are telling you they don't know much about Veyrons, or metabolisms. While advising a beginning lifter to take creatine would be unusual, advising people to stay away from energy sources that bloat you by diliuting your muscles with water is also unusual. Carbs do exactly that, too, are you advising a zero-carb diet for a beginning weightlifter trying to put on 20 lbs? No? Then what's 'nasty' about creatine's moderate water-retentive properties? Water absorption tendencies of carbohydrates are extremely well known.