fud
Latest
Ready Check: The morning after a bad raid
Ready Check helps you prepare yourself and your raid for the bosses that simply require killing. Check back with Ready Check each week for the latest pointers on killing adds, not standing in fire, and hoping for loot that won't drop. It happens. Your raids are doing well, you're making good use of your time, and progression is happening. Then, all at once, you have a bad night. The exact reasons you have a bad night are wide and varied. Your tank might be having trouble picking up adds, your healers might be out of synch, or maybe your DPS isn't pulling the numbers needed for the boss fights. Raiding is complex enough that there are plenty of moving parts to go radically, radically wrong. A bad night isn't much of a challenge, in and of itself. The lost time isn't the end of the world, and you can always pick it up another night. Sure, if you're racing for a realm first or something, you could lose ground. But for most raids, that kind of competition isn't really an issue. The real danger that stems from a bad night is its harm to morale. Especially if you have raid members who take each raid night very seriously, then the mistakes and painful moments get overanalyzed and picked apart. Analysis is good, but dwelling on a fluke failings can wreck a good environment. So when you have a bad raid, the morning after becomes incredibly important.
Head of Roman Catholic Church in England warns against the dangers of SMS, email, and social networking
In case you haven't been apprised of the situation, your addiction to texting and email is ruining your relationship... with god. According to Vincent Nichols, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, modern friendships built around (or involving) heavy SMS volley, electronic mail correspondences, and social networking sites create "transient relationships" which put users at the risk of suicide. Yes, suicide. According to the British man of the cloth, using electronic communication to build friendships is causing humanity to lose "the ability to build interpersonal communication that's necessary for living together." Sure, it may sound like heavy FUD talk, but there is sense in some of his points. For instance, the Archbishop of Westminster believes that social networking sites encourage people to concentrate on their number of friends rather than build actual relationships, and they tend to view that number as a commodity. Anyone who's seen the growth of Facebook and MySpace shouldn't have trouble making that connection, but when it comes to SMS and email, your friendship has likely moved on, and lumping that kind of one-to-one communication in with the broad relationships of social networking sites seems like an unfair characterization. We put the question to our typically calm and even-keeled commenter community -- are we doomed, or what?
Dr. Phil confronts WoW players
Yes, Oprah's psychologist (actually, I heard just the other day on Wait Wait that Dr. Phil was originally hired as a jury consultant on Oprah's beef slander case) has turned his mustachioed and Texas-accented attention to MMO gamers, and it's the usual rundown: someone's been playing the game way too much, and it's time for Dr. Phil to draw out the stereotype to anyone who finds a little fun in the online world of Azeroth.To be fair, I haven't seen the show itself, so maybe Phil does admit that millions of people around the world play these games in their free time, and that the vast majority of them have paying jobs, lead healthy lives and have happy relationships. But he doesn't feature any of those on his website -- instead, he's got the story of lives ruined over and over again because folks without self control took their game too far. And all the usual TV culprits are there -- flash cuts of chaotic keyboard and controller pressing, blurred video, and pictures of pasty gamers playing late into the night while the rest of their lives go ignored. Worried that you might be addicted? Dr. Phil's also got a "gaming behavior audit" that will let you know, in just ten questions, whether you're an addict or not. Here's a helpful question: do you feel you play online games to deal with anxiety or depression in your life? If so, you may have anxiety or depression in your life! Thanks, Dr. Phil!In all seriousness, sure, it's possible to play these games too much, and if you're playing the game even after you've lost a job or sacrificed a relationship, it's time to get help (or even better, just unplug the computer). But it would be nice to see a healthy gamer on these shows once in a while -- there's definitely plenty of them around, too.[via BlizzPlanet]
Atari founder cries wolf about piracy-ending chip
So news is making its way around the internets that at the Wedbush Morgan Securities Management Access Conference, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell proclaimed the end of PC gaming piracy as we know it, thanks to a "stealth encryption chip." The magic chip he's referring to that "will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay"? The TPM chip -- what's been on motherboards for years, that apparently Bushnell just found out about. While the tinfoil hats in the house will likely attribute TPM (Trusted Platform Module) and other onboard crypto-chips to the eventual downfall of privacy and personal computing, to date we've yet to see piracy stunted or civil liberties breached because of the little bugger. FUD you later, Nolan.[Thanks, Carl]
NPR on Mac hacking-- a little FUD, a little fact
NPR hits up the issue of Mac hacking (the bad malware kind, not the good kind), and suggests that Macs are supposedly becoming a bigger target for exploitative folk.While this is a topic that could easily (and does often) degenerate into complete misinformation and FUD, NPR basically acknowledges that Macs are showing up in more and more places (and that includes the iPhone, where even Apple is concerned about security), and that means that they're becoming a juicier target for malware developers. Fortunately, however, a familiar voice shows up later in the report (dig those dulcet tones!) to remind everyone that throughout five iterations of OS X, the malware problems have been hard to find. Malware developers may be trying, but it ain't working.Of course, we can't let this go without noting that this story was inspired in the first place by a PR report released by... you guessed it: an antivirus company. The people who profit off of programs that supposedly prevent malware are claiming that malware is a bigger threat than ever before? Go figure.
PS3's Europe launch all FUD up
GamesIndustry.biz has a thought-provoking editorial up looking at the PS3's European launch through the tech industry marketing concept of FUD -- the creation of fear, uncertainty and doubt around a competitor's product. While Microsoft has done its fair share of FUDing up the air around the PS3, Sony has been contributing to the FUD with questionable executive comments and unclear communication about the system's European pricing and release date. Questions about the fate of Blu-ray and images of PS3's stacked up in North American stores aren't helping Sony's image either. While all this FUD might not matter once big franchises like Final Fantasy and Gran Turismo finally hit stores, it doesn't change the fact that, currently, "there's a cloud over PS3 whose presence has nothing to do with the system's rivals," as the editorial puts it. In other words, consumers can barely see the PS3 through the Sony-created fog of FUD.
Sony clears up some PS3 confusion
Sony has officially commented on earlier rumors (that we did our best to debunk earlier) regarding the lack of upgradability in the "core" $500 version of the system. The rumor stated that the lower model would be unable to use wireless controllers (suggesting the console would ship with wired controllers) and that the 20GB hard drive would be unable to be upgraded. A Sony spokesperson told GamesIndustry.biz, "Both configurations will support Bluetooth PS3 controllers." As for the second rumor, Phil Harrison told GI.biz earlier, "You can put in any drive that you like - it is a computer, after all."What about the other disparities between the two systems? Sony says both a Wi-Fi adapter and a card reader will be available for the system leaving HDMI output as the "only non-upgradeable feature of the 20GB configuration."[Via Engadget]
