Makoto_the_Phoenix

If they allowed full UTF characters, I would probably take the official symbol for "Makoto" (in my sig since I can't guarantee that the board will support it or you guys won't see a weird box). If not, I don't think I'd change it. "Makoto D" has a fair bit of history behind it, and I wouldn't want to nuke that.

I talked to you ingame about this, but I'll reiterate it here. You're probably best served taking this to a specialty shop, or if you don't want to, you could take Laura's advice and lure them out with ant poison. I believe that I mentioned something about canned air, and in hindsight that's probably not the best idea.

I think that people will finally switch to fully 64-bit operating systems by that time. As for the whole doomsday scenario, I don't buy into it. It's just another day...not to mention, the Mayans actually celebrated this kind of occurrence; dunno why we should fear it... :?

@Ouchy_S: Driving on the freeway is no different than driving on a main street with higher speed limits and no stop signs. You just have to have your wits about you while you do so; not everyone driving on the main street (or the highway) does. On topic: This didn't happen today, but I'm still kind of stunned from it 48 hours ago. I was in my Calc II class, as usual, trying to keep up with the professor. It's been two weeks since I started the class, and I could tell that the professor really wasn't teaching us jack about the more difficult aspects of Calculus (Trigonometric substitutions, partial fractions, and general review of complex limits). So everyone in the class is feeling dead and lifeless as he goes over yet another example without explaining how he got to where he was, and out of nowhere, a female student just gets up and storms out of the room. No big deal, really - students get frustrated with difficult courses all the time. I should know; I tutor one of the hardest subjects out there. About five seconds later, the entire class hears from the hallway a scream that would have made your blood freeze. The teacher was oblivious to the matter; didn't give a damn apparently, and continued right down his crappy path. At the break, more than half the students just left the class, and some told me they dropped. I stayed for the entire lecture (to show the professor some respect), but I wound up dropping the class and getting into another section. Honestly I thought the woman would go postal on him. I didn't know what to expect. She came back a bit calmer though to gather her belongings, and went to the Department Head to talk about a section change. What a wild day.

I'm almost certain you can find a torrent of the short-lived series "Cavemen" on the Internet, and I'm almost certain that no one in their right (or wrong) mind would have that series. It freaking sucked. People don't pirate because it's free. They pirate because they happen to like what they're downloading. Don't let the price tag fool you.

Can I siggy that? Go ahead. :P

I'm actually doing a degree in Computer Science, which covers not only programming and networking, but the theory and study of computation. Some things are fun; others very difficult. If you're interested in "computers", then you'd better narrow your focus in a heartbeat - do you want to program, network, or do sys-admin stuff? Congrats on the scholarship by the way, and good luck with whatever you decide to pursue.

No one's calling you out because you're a pirate; they're calling you out because you justify piracy in such a seedy way that it makes their stomachs turn. I said it earlier - I pirate what I can, when I can. But I sure as hell don't want to be a criminal. Either I have already paid for what I downloaded in some way (e.g. game BGM music or movies I own legit) or I don't plan on reselling them (e.g. Bleach/Naruto collection). But equating piracy to stealing is just a misunderstanding. Perhaps you should get that cleared up a bit.

I wholeheartedly concur. There's absolutely no sense in making the distro flashy or "RS themed" if it lags the game itself. You'd probably be best served using Fluxbox, Sun Java 6, and Prism for the RS Client. Provide some tools to aid the user in playing RS - since Prism can run the same plugins that Firefox can, that means you could give them the Tip.it plugin - but that's about all you need.

I've noticed major performance regressions with Ubuntu 9.04 as opposed to Ubuntu 8.10, but you should be alright. Just make sure that you have the proprietary drivers and Sun Java 6.

I have a pretty firm stance on piracy - I'm for it. I do it on occasion, with justifications. But there are so many things wrong with the way the system is set up now that it's absolutely ludicrous. To begin with, piracy should not be seen as some sort of evil thing that is robbing artists blind. It's actually helping them. One of my favorite artists (Moby) released a song for free, and since he did that, I'm actually considering buying the album when I have both time and money. Not to mention there are other artists' songs that I've sampled in a similar manner, either free from last.fm or from friends, and they've all but won me over as a customer. You might be thinking, "Well you haven't bought any of their songs, so you *are* taking money from them", and you might have been justified in that statement if I wasn't ever going to buy that music. But that's not the issue at hand here. The issue is if I want to buy their music or not. There's no way in Hell that I am going to pay $0.99 for an artists' song that is absolute crap. I also hate making decisions on things that I haven't either heard reviews from or listened to myself. The way I see it, it's the equivalent of going to a college that you just heard about because you just heard about it, then realizing it was crap, and trying to get your tuition back. Do your research before you purchase. That's what the piracy model encourages, in my eyes. Next, we have the so-called "issue" of anime. I like anime a lot. Especially Bleach. The only problem is that it's not nearly as up to date as it is in Japan. Does this mean I'll never buy the box set? I will when it comes out complete, that's for sure. Not to mention, most anime licensees see this opportunity to sire interest in the series they're producing at hand, with the most prominent example of such being Naruto Shippuden being aired a week online after in Japan. Again, this comes back to the point, "the more people see it, the more likely they are to enjoy it". That's all it is. Of course, RIAA/MPAA can't see past their own wallets, so they don't normally accept the kind of publicity things like movies and songs get from these kinds of systems. Third, I pirate the BGM of games that I own. I absolutely hate considering that "piracy", as I actually own the game - I just want to listen to the BGM as well (and some BGM game CDs don't even retail in the United States). Hey - what the Hell is wrong with me listening to "Agnus Dei" from Ace Combat 04? I could accomplish the same thing if I put my legit bought AC04 disc in my PS2 and played the song there. I'm just doing it from a different device. No one's really bothered anyone about the BGM music thing; it's more of a niche market than anything. If they did bother me though, I'll be glad to dig out my old Game Gear cartridges when they question me about the Sonic music I'm listening to. Fourth, the reason that I embrace the sharing/piracy model is because of the system I choose to use. Did you know that it's illegal for me to watch legally purchased movies on my computer? That's [cabbage]. I'm not spending $35 so I could get slapped with a lawsuit behind the DMCA. It's not that I don't want to buy the movies, it's just that the way they're making us watch them and restricting how we may watch them which drives me to piracy. Although I will admit, it hasn't stopped me from buying movies that I really wanted. Finally, I think there's a handful of confusion (in Hollywood; what else is new?) about the real benefits of piracy. They have the perception that pirates will resell pirated songs or movies at a profit, which typically isn't the case - not to say that it doesn't still happen, but if a college student pirates 100 songs, it's probably because they want to try out those artists, not make a quick buck. Funny thing is that the colleagues I work with on campus feel the same way, and they hope that Hollywood wakes up to the issue before they either force P2P to innovate to be indiscernible from normal Internet traffic, or we resort back to the underground of Sneakernet. Oh, and on the 'legit' uses of torrenting clients - you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be Hell to pay if they force me to download a Linux ISO from an overworked main server. In that case, torrenting helps because not only are you getting the ISO, you're reducing the load to a particular server, so it doesn't go completely offline or becomes unbearably slow (imagine 256Kb/s downloads on a 40Mb line).

If we are not man enough to admit defeat, we are too proud of our own failure. At least, that's how I look at it. :P I've had the same thing happen to me in Chess (both in Funorb and on another site), but I always admit defeat when the guy really creams me. You did the best thing - just ignoring him and moving on. But hey - don't let it get you down. The world is full of people that will hurl insults at you because you play a better game than them. It sucks, but that's how it goes.

Yeah, it only mattered if you restored your approval rate on the day you withdrew, not any other time. You still made out like a bandit; 125K coal will take care of 99% of most skilling any day.

At the same time we got a new minigame, Jagex received a new piece of content to use in their future updates. I think that innovation as far as updates go is far more important than the update itself (case in point: Castle Wars, which can be seen as the granddaddy to safe PvP minigames, like Stealing Creation and Fist of Guthix). You honestly can't stop innovation, and Andrew even came out and admitted that the piece of content wouldn't be all that great. Also, writing new skills is about as complicated as writing brand new minigames, anyway - and I don't mean some old rehashed scenario - I mean something totally groundbreaking, a-la Construction or even Hunter. Yeah, because cutting off MechScape's only revenue stream is such a good idea. :roll: I'm also starting to tire of your pedantic (borderline childish) commenting of fixes; what you call "upgrayedd", they really are "fixes". They're working to fix issues that have plagued the game for long enough, while at the same time, trying to expand their game engine to work on multiple gaming platforms and improve legacy code. If you can't see it, perhaps your opinion of Jagex is a bit too jaded to appreciate the updates and fixes to the game as they come. Even though there's no justification for you to wait for a major upgrade this year, at least you're taking it with a grain of salt.

Okay. I'll bite. First and foremost, they're not just updating the code, they're refactoring the entire engine [source]. It's been rehashed a lot this past week and a half that refactoring is one of the most complicated things any programmer or team of programmers has to do, and for RuneScape, has become absolutely necessary. Refactoring also means that they're adding support for new stuff, so things like randomly-generated scenarios for groups or multidimensional combat may become possible. With that out of the way, and even without ever seeing a single line of their in-house code, I would imagine that the creation of new areas, such as Morytania, Priffnidas, and so forth requires less new code than most; chances are they have a way to generate cities and landscapes without much work on the developers' part. New updates or things that they want to do differently than the norm (example: Temple of Light/Construction) require new code, and in many cases, it's these projects that not only take a lot of time, but are susceptible to break a lot more quickly. [Case in point: Construction. Not only did the game engine get updated twice to support it, it still had a lot of gaping errors. Not that I'm pointing my finger at them for that, though. Just saying.] That being said, in 2004, the biggest minigame we had was probably Castle Wars. This was a new piece of code since nothing had existed that allowed multiple players to play "capture the flag", and it needed plenty of tweaks throughout the years to fix gaping holes. So I'll wrap up here. It's probably not that difficult to get new updates out of the door, but you sure don't want to be thinking about extending on to your 1896 Victorian house without making sure that the wiring and pipes are all up to date. Also, if you haven't really noticed, the new graphics don't take much time. They're prepped images of each type of surface, and simply called on by the client at a later date when required. At least, that's my working theory.

RE: Wake Up! Personally I think that the author had too high of an expectation for this year. When I read "upgrade year", I kind of figured that there'd be no ultra-super-cool new content that was just waiting in the pipeline. I suppose that it's just the nature of most RS players; when we're given a glimpse of the future, we let our own imaginations dictate what will come to pass. I don't know why anyone, let alone the author, got their hopes up for something super cool and exciting anyway; it's almost as bad as the BTS hype (when players would buy X item in anticipation of an update, but get their hopes dashed). It should also be noted that the game engine is under an extensive refactoring project. For those that don't know what it is, it basically means that legacy, stable code is being replaced with new, unstable code, and as such, it can cause things to break. The reason that anyone would want to re-factor an engine would be to support new updates, make it easier to update, isolate parts of the game further, or allow the game engine to extend well into the future (think 64-bit platforms). I'll wrap up here - the author got their hopes up for something big that was never promised; they feel let down by an artificial promise, now they want this year of upgrades to end for no conceivable reason other than to get that "big update" that's in the pipeline. Take it with a grain of salt; no major updates were promised to us, and I still don't see why anyone got their hopes up this year. RE: My Observations: WoW for a Month At the very least, even if it undermines the whole point of the article, the last statement the author made was right on the money. You just can't compare WoW to RuneScape, no matter how hard you try, since it will always be about personal preference. Overall, both articles were good reads. When I finish with my Calc homework, I'll give the Fictional series an earnest look.

I think that being a DIYer fails the 'feasibility test'. An ideal has to be both possible and practical for it to be feasible. Let's cut to the chase and say that yes, it's perfectly possible to do it all yourself. But it isn't by any means practical. I debated doing most things myself (did probably 90% of my 92 Smithing on my own, with smelting ores), but in retrospect, if I could have afforded it, I would have bought the entire thing and been just as satisfied, not to mention it wouldn't have taken seven months to do it. The thing about not relying on the community for things (raws, goods, or bringing your goods to market) only makes it harder for you to enjoy the game. I'd imagine that, while being a DIYer might be one hell of an accomplishment, you're not having nearly as much fun as you would claim to be. To give you a hint as to how hard I think it would be, just take a look at how many iron bars is required to get 99 Smithing from 15. Any player that did that themselves would probably rethink the reason that they're playing in the first place.

Oh c'mon now, there's no shame in asking for clay at the onset of the game to get tools. It's a team effort; helping the team > helping yourself.

No one, which is why Jagex should have issued out a return of assets lost, especially if they can determine the players who were targeted by the anomaly. As one of the Jagex Moderators said, "I know more about your account than you do." It's a shame they, or at least he, refuted the player's claim with such a belligerent attitude. You have a decent point. Responding to critical, game-breaking bugs hasn't been really pleasant, but what does that really mean? How many ultra-super-major bugs have been confirmed besides the one we're discussing, anyway? Admittedly they should implement a system that *does* give items back in the event of a glitch, but I wouldn't really count on it. I don't think that a system effective enough could be implemented, and not have an impact on either production time or customer support turnaround, since it would almost always have to be a human doing the checking, anyway. [i wonder how long this guy is going to be made a marty- no, he's not a martyr - he's a freakin' poster child now...wonder how long it has to last before people just move on...] So? My characters and account are owned by Blizzard and, if I were to lose items or money due to a software glitch, they'll, cheerfully, fix the problem for me. Furthermore, the bugs are generally there in testing but, if they're not, then the conditions used FOR testing need to be changed. And content acting weirdly is not the problem. The problem is that players lose bundles of cash, whatever is in their inventory, or items that have taken a long time to acquire and Jagex replying to their complaints with a cheerful "Bugger off." Or, on the opposite of the spectrum, we have people receiving free items or items at greatly reduced cost and Jagex not doing a thing about them. Though they may have whipped out the banhammer for free planking. Seriously, the bugs, inconsequential updates, and Jagex's policy towards customers have caused me to cancel my membership. So, yeah, you could say that this sort of thing DOES have repercussions. Man...where to begin... First. Do us all a favor and stop comparing Jagex's item return policy to Blizzard's. Their staff is significantly larger than Jagex (think 2,000 to about 500), so they have the time to sift through all of those reports and actually return items. It can't be done by a program, no matter what you think - you not only have to verify the bug (software can't tell you if it's glitched), but you also have to verify that the player in question was affected adversely by it. Next, the environment for testing is probably alright, it's just that testing things with 50 people is probably nothing compared to letting every active player "test" it. Third, there was only ONE bug in which ONE player lost a bundle of cash. The only other instance like that which springs to mind would be the Durial incident, but no one could've seen that coming. Fourth, bans are handed down in situations in which a player gains an obscene advantage, and they often tell their players NOT to go around and do stuff like that. Besides, it was patched within the day, and those that deserved punishment, I'm sure, were punished. Why in Gods' name are you making this recent string of bugs out like they not only took your cookies, but drank your milk? Not being able to go to your POH or test the new update is like...what, 3 hours worth of content compared to the rest of the game? Maybe some time away from RS would do you good; I've seen you do nothing but complain for the last six months. They do have the right to complain. There's a massive difference in complaining and whinging, of which the average scaper tends to lean on the latter. Again thats wrong. People complain because they do not feel satisfied by jagex service. Whinging on the otherhand is exactly what your doing. There is no call whinging at players who have a complaint about the service of a company. Unless ofcourse your a jagex big boss who doesnt wish to thoroughly have the programming checked before risking it on their players. (Again thats not directed at the programmers or testers) The difference between a complaint and whining: "I don't feel that the QA team has done a quality job as of the last few updates. It seems that more things keep breaking. I want Jagex to resolve to be more diligent in their bug checks in the future." "I don't feel that QA even exists. I mean, c'mon - look at all the freaking bugs! It's like the guys there are drunk or half asleep! It's like they just don't care about the players, or the quality of their own game. What's up with that?" I shouldn't have to tell you which is which, and I most certainly shouldn't have to tell you which has shown up on forums (here and RSOF) the most. What's the difference between a few hundred players and a few hundred QA people? From a testing standpoint, nothing. You would still have the same amount of testing time as if it were done by the QA staff. Besides, there are always going to be those unscrupulous few that want to ruin a surprise for someone, or blurt out confidential stuff. Sure, it'll get removed as soon as someone catches wind of it, and someone will land in jail - but the knowledge would have been out there long enough for someone to get a hold of it, anyway. Long story short, I personally don't like the idea of beta servers. It might mean that the code gets more exposure, but still - what's a hundred people compared to a hundred thousand?

With the amount theese people seem to lose with some bugs, why even take that ANYWHERE?! Bringing 300m+ to new mini/anywhere is not very smart >.< Holy [bleep]! a paying customer expects the game they pay for to work? [cabbage] THAT'S SOME CRAZY STUFF! With the reduced amount of good updates, and the crazy amount of bugs, it's no wonder why people complain. Good grief... It's fine to complain, but the fact of the matter is that bugs happen. Testing every feasible permutation of how every object will interact with each other would take more time than any QA would ever be allotted. Yelling at those guys to get stuff fixed or calling them "incompetent" or what have you is not going to make bugs disappear. It's going to make the QA feel unappreciated, since they do a lot of hard work. It's like I said in another [ironically related] thread here: You don't expect software to be bug-free. You expect it to be bug-free to a reasonable degree. Demanding that a piece of software as complicated as RuneScape be bug-free every time something is changed is just plain foolish. Now I'm not saying that bugs are okay, I'm saying they're inevitable - just don't bite QA's heads off every time something breaks in an obscure manner. [Honestly. Who would have thought that someone would be logged out or log out during a MA tutorial, losing everything?]

I'll reply to more quotes later; going to catch the train home after this class. I view that as rather hypocritical, to be honest - if you disagree with what Jagex is doing, or the direction that Jagex is going in, then you don't give them any money. They still get money from the ads that you're blocking viewing, so I usually do view it as silly to support some alleged evil corporation by hiding out in the 'free' variant of the game. Not to mention, I don't know if half a million people would just stop paying overnight, not unless they did something to seriously piss the community off...

Probably the statement that wraps up my point. When an OS is buggy or is not to one's favor, it is quickly dumped for a different OS. Whether or not you agree with the Vista fiasco or not, the media portrayed it as a buggy and frustrating operating system. Because of this, many people switched their OS or reverted to one they were more comfortable with. Should the bugs ever outweigh the intended updates, people will being to quit. If you understand why the bugs are there, that's fine. As for myself, I can understand and I still don't care. They have plenty of options to choose from, and while I have not quit, I do look down on it heavily. I'll agree that if an OS is too buggy, people will run away from it, but that's not what I perceived your statement to be. You said that you paid for updates and/or software to be bug-free; that's a fallacy at best. Software will always have bugs in it, but you're most likely paying for it to be bug-free to a certain extent. Not even jumping ship will accomplish bug-free software.

Finally, someone else that gets it. I'm an undergraduate CS major right now, and I do a lot of programming in a lot of languages (Java, Python, small bits of C, C++, and some ARM assembly), and I'll just say that I agree with this entire OP. Let's begin debunking myths, then. The reason that I think things aren't going quite as planned is that Jagex has begun or is continuing a major refactoring project on their engine. The bigger a piece of code becomes, the harder it becomes to maintain - and with an ever changing language like Java, things may become deprecated in the future that were perfectly acceptable two months ago. The "fun" part then becomes to make certain that all of the existing code works well with the new, refactored engine, and sometimes, things just don't go as you would expect them. It's for the simple reason that if you change one piece of code, or one seemingly obscure function around, the possibility exists that something else will break in a major way. I don't get your contradictory statement. You said you are fully aware of what programmers have to deal with, but you thought that Construction would be released with zero bugs? First, Construction was something that they had to update their game engine to support - twice. Second, the bugs that came with Construction were most likely because they tried something new with their engine - and regardless of how much testing one could have did, I don't think that the case could have been that > 1,500 players would be ejected from a POH at the same time and allow a handful of players to continue attacking others, as if they were in a POH, would have been caught anyway. I'll also tell you - the update wasn't badly programmed or tested, honestly - the testing environment is a much more sane environment than a live environment is, and while things should always be the same, they don't always react the same as if they would publicly (case in point: the alleged new server connections that didn't work as planned due to kernel memory not being large enough). Lastly, there's a radical difference between "appalling" programming and a few oops glitches here and there; one of them means that players lose plenty of money, items or skills; the other means that it was some only quick annoyance. "Invalid teleport" sounds more like an annoyance to me. I'm going to have to jump on the bandwagon here as well and say that the choice is very, very clear. The only way you can vote is with your feet; if you don't want to pay for seemingly bad upgrades, or you disagree with the quality of updates that they're doing, then all you can do is quit. What commercial programmer likes working for free? We expect our operating systems' code to be bug free as well, but we all know how that goes, right? [Hint] Fact of the matter is, the bigger the project, the more bugs become present, full stop. You can't just blindly give someone $100 and expect their code to be bug free, but you can expect that it will be bug free to a certain degree, and it if isn't, you can hope/expect/demand/tantrum/whatever that the bug gets fixed within a certain amount of time (hopefully less than 24 hours), if it's critical. This bug with the update wasn't all that critical. It stopped a few players from experimenting with the new POH room, big deal. It isn't like you guys lost your entire bank account, now is it? :? It was still a bug, and it should be fixed by now, but please, don't act like the world ended behind this one little thing. Now that I look back on it...the only serious bugs were the one instance of someone losing their entire bank worth during a MA cutscene, and NPCs not being able to attack for an hour or less, but that was about it, really...

Pulled it from the C++ Builder 6 Quick Start guide on this page: http://docs.embarcadero.com/products/rad_studio/ Just for the record, it compiles and runs without errors on g++. Good luck with C++ man. :P

The only way that raw materials can actually dive is if people started harvesting them en masse. It's unlikely that we'll see hundreds of thousands of people at Aviansies or cutting Yews for quite some time, so I don't think that there will be a crash of raws anytime soon.