Thursday, June 22, 2017
Diablo III Boredom and the Paragon System
Diablo III Boredom and the Paragon System
Ive never really understood the appeal of Diablos endless, repetitive style of play - insert World of Warcraft joke here. The whole gameplay system revolves around the acquisition of items. Said items make you a more effective killing machine, enabling you to acquire more items, and so on. In Diablo III, you literally experience every bit of content the game has to offer by level 30 (or sooner, depending on how quickly you progress through Normal difficulty). From there, you slog through the content another two times to hit 60, which opens up exactly nothing new except the Inferno difficulty. The only thing youre potentially gearing up for is the PvP system, which Blizzard has already stated will be a "for fun" addition and not a balanced potential eSport.
Bottom line, people are getting bored with the game; I took a monk into Act 4 Inferno, wondered why I was still playing, and stopped logging on about two months ago. Player numbers are steadily falling, with some estimates from July putting the number at about a 65% drop-off. Fewer players means fewer items are being picked up, which hits Blizzard where it hurts - the wallet. Blizzard takes a 15% cut of every item sold on the real-money auction house (RMAH), so their potential income stream dries up a little bit more every time someone steps away from the game.
Blizzard announced yesterday that patch 1.04 would introduce the "Paragon" system, a secondary set of levels available to level 60 characters. Theres no new content on the horizon, just another 100 levels that you can plow through by running the same content another 6000 times. Each level boosts your stats while also increasing your gold and magic find by 3%, meaning by Paragon level 100 youll be capped at a 300% bonus for each of those stats. Hope you didnt spend any money on some MF or GF gear on the RMAH.
It looks like they swung the nerf bat in a pretty wide arc as well. From the patch notes:
- Champion and Rare monsters will no longer enrage after prolonged combat, and they will no longer heal to full health after not being engaged
- Jailer can now no longer appear with Knockback, Nightmarish, or Vortex
- Invulnerable Minions has been removed as a possible affix
- Fire Chains damage has been reduced by 20%
- Shielding monsters will no longer shield if they are the last monster left in the area, and only one monster in a given pack can be shielded at a time
- The spawn points of Arcane Enchanted beams have been adjusted slightly to be more spread out, and their damage has been reduced by approximately 30%
To make things even more interesting, on Sunday IncGamers posted an interview with David Brevik, the guy who created the Diablo series. Hes no longer with Blizzard and talked about how D3 was "a very different game than [he] would have created." The current team at Blizzard caught wind of his comments and the following image popped up online:
Oops.
As someone who didnt play Diablo or Diablo II (sorry Internet), I approached D3 as a newcomer. For me, the game just doesnt stand up as a unique and interesting title in 2012. Blizzard seems to have sold 10+ million copies of a game on hype and nostalgia, because they certainly didnt do it based on innovative gameplay. The game is ultimately a clickfest where the player only has 6 possible inputs, two of which are located on the mouse buttons. The only real challenges you face are in building and gearing your character, as actual combat involves not standing in bad things while hitting the bad guys repeatedly - its more frustrating at times than difficult or exciting. It makes you wonder why multiple review sites gave the game a perfect score. The looting aspects of the game are mildly addictive, but after running the same content for a fourth or fifth time I was ready to gouge my eyes out with a spoon.
In the end, D3 isnt a terrible game, but its no perfect 10. Blizzard better have some tricks up their sleeve for future patches and expansions because theyll definitely be fighting an uphill battle. A ton of people are still playing D2 here in 2012; will anyone care about D3 in 2024?
Diablo 3 Season and Ladder System Confirmed
Diablo 3 Season and Ladder System Confirmed
Josh Mosqueira has announced that Season and a Ladder-Like-System will be arriving in the first Major Content patch during the Reaper of Souls Release Event. The devs are thinking about adding Seasons-only legendary items, and have hinted at "Tiered Rifts" where players can compete with each other in Adventure mode and fight to the top of leaderboards.
Below is the full information from Blizzard:
Posted by Blizzard:
Seasons And Ladder-Like System
One of the features you guys have asked about a lot, that we have done a lot of research for, is something called ladders. Im happy to say that as part of our first big content patch in a couple of months, we will be releasing Seasons, which will include a ladder-like aspect to them. Were still working on them, but the general gist is that youll level up a new character, well have specific ladders for Seasons, and also some goodies that will drop along the way. Theres more information of that to come, and were not making an announcement of when, but thats coming in the first major content patch - not the first patch, but the first major content patch.
Seasons-Exclusive Legendaries
There will be more legendary items in the future, both for rewards of Ladders, and also rewards from the Tiered Rifts. For the current ones, we probably are not going to revisit them. They all take time to do and Id rather we were adding new legendary items, and the time is better spent on new legendary items than going back to refit old ones.
Tiered Rifts And Leaderboards
There is another major feature in the patch 2.1, which is going to be what were internally calling tiered Rifts. The idea is a challenge scenario, where players do increasingly hard Rifts, to see who can get the farthest. You do your bounties, you do a Nephalem Rift. If you clear it, theres a chance to get a Greater Rift Token. If you successfully do that, youll get a Greater Rift Key (rank 2), then Rank 3, etc.. Much like seasons, were going to have a leaderboard as well, so you can see who got to the highest tier Rift, and what time were they able to obtain on that.
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Display amount of free and used memory in the system In Ubuntu
Display amount of free and used memory in the system In Ubuntu
By using free you can display amount of free and used memory in the system.
Free displays the total amount of free and used physical and swap memory in the system, as well as the buffers used by the kernel. The shared memory
column should be ignored; it is obsolete.
Example:
Will display something like this:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 244 240 3 0 15 82
-/+ buffers/cache: 143 101
Swap: 715 107 608
Usage:
Options:
The -b switch displays the amount of memory in bytes; the -k switch
(set by default)
displays it in kilobytes; the -m switch displays it in megabytes;
the -g switch displays it in gigabytes.
The -t switch displays a line containing the totals.
The -o switch disables the display of a "buffer adjusted" line. If the
-o option is not
specified, free subtracts buffer memory from the used memory and
adds it to the free memory reported.
The -s switch activates continuous polling delay seconds apart. You may
actually specify
any floating point number for delay, usleep(3) is used for
microsecond resolution delay times.
The -V displays version information.
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Disable System Beep Sound in Ubuntu
Disable System Beep Sound in Ubuntu
To temporarly disable system beep for current session use following command.
sudo rmmod pcspkr
To perminently disable system beep add following line to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file.
blacklist pcspkr
Monday, April 3, 2017
Digital system improves officer safety communication
Digital system improves officer safety communication
http://www.monett-times.com/story/1990182.html