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f13.net General Forums => World of Warcraft => Topic started by: Signe on July 17, 2004, 05:18:09 PM



Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Signe on July 17, 2004, 05:18:09 PM
They should charge a fee for this sort of action!

Live Minicam (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?sw=1280&sh=1024&loadnews=1964)


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: HRose on July 17, 2004, 06:26:58 PM
It seems I need cookies...


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: schild on July 17, 2004, 06:34:32 PM
Quote from: HRose
It seems I need cookies...


Quote from: MMORPG.com
YOU HAVE COOKIES DISABLED

MMORPG.COM requires the use of browser "cookies" to allow our site to function properly.


I could go for a handful of these mystical browser "cookies" right now.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Krakrok on July 17, 2004, 08:23:03 PM
This is the second site I ran into today that claims I don't have cookies when I do (the other was Best Buy).


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: NiX on July 17, 2004, 08:29:35 PM
The stupid cookies message has to do with the link Signe provided. Click the link at the bottom to go back to the frontpage and click on the WoW cam news link. It'll work then.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Alkiera on July 18, 2004, 12:29:40 AM
Actually, it's probably due to this...
Quote from: site
You are required to be a MMORPG.com member to view the cam.


I don't need to see some guy playing WoW that bad, really.

--
Alkiera


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Signe on July 18, 2004, 06:08:29 AM
Oops.  Sorry about that.  Cookies are such spiteful little things.  Anyway, I've never seen the 'minicam' do anything at all but tell me: "Player is currently offline".  Riveting excitement, I tell you.  Well worth the cookie inconvenience.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Liquidator on July 18, 2004, 01:00:29 PM
It said that the player was currently offline, but it looked to be one of those pages where the image only refreshes every 30 seconds.  There is a guy who  plays an awful lot of WoW and he streams it out live via Winamp Shoutcast Internet TV.  He even has an IRC channel setup so you can ask him questions live.... not that I've ever done that, mind you.

Click here (http://www.everygamesucks.com/)

-Liquidator


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: stray on July 18, 2004, 05:55:07 PM
Quote from: Liquidator
There is a guy who  plays an awful lot of WoW and he streams it out live via Winamp Shoutcast Internet TV.  He even has an IRC channel setup so you can ask him questions live.... not that I've ever done that, mind you.

Click here (http://www.everygamesucks.com/)


Jesus, I think even SWG didn't have this much hype (I may be wrong about that).


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: boley on July 18, 2004, 08:31:06 PM
Quote


CHANNEL RULES
- Do not abbreviate the words 'you', 'your', 'you're', 'are', 'for', or any other three to four letter words into a one character replacement. DO NOT USE 'U' INSTEAD OF 'YOU'.

- Do not send any unsolicited private messages to any channel operators.

- Do not complain about what I'm doing in game.

- Do not complain about me not playing the game.

- Do not ask if/when I'm going to play.

- Do not ask if/when I'm going to show movies.

- Do not ask me to show porn.

- Do not complain about games that cost money to play.

- Do not talk about leaked beta torrents and emulated/hacked WoW servers.

- Do not be a typical battle.net moron.

- Do not beg for other people's accounts and make an ass of yourself to hundreds of people.


The above are the rules for joining the web cam guy's IRC channel.  These rules pretty well sum up why I am not excited about WoW (bold emphasis mine).


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Signe on July 19, 2004, 07:00:02 AM
It's true.  When I think about WoW, I get that same sort of nervous trepidation that I enjoyed when starting my first MMOGs.  I like the feeling of never knowing what's around the corner.  Unfortunately, it's not the game that's making me anxious, it's the community.  It's probably a mistake, but I'll give the open beta a go.  I'll need something to do when the cold weather sets in.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Riley on July 20, 2004, 07:38:22 PM
Quote from: Alkiera
Actually, it's probably due to this...
Quote from: site
You are required to be a MMORPG.com member to view the cam.


I don't need to see some guy playing WoW that bad, really.

--
Alkiera


I'd say hop on over to www.bugmenot.com, but it looks like all their mmorpg.com accounts have been canned and I'm far too lazy to submit a new one.  Damned nice site in general though, works for the majority of the register-for-content sites out there.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Velorath on July 20, 2004, 11:22:49 PM
Quote from: stray
Quote from: Liquidator
There is a guy who  plays an awful lot of WoW and he streams it out live via Winamp Shoutcast Internet TV.  He even has an IRC channel setup so you can ask him questions live.... not that I've ever done that, mind you.

Click here (http://www.everygamesucks.com/)


Jesus, I think even SWG didn't have this much hype (I may be wrong about that).


FFXI though on the other hand had their live cam up during the Japanese beta and regularly had events where devs would explain aspects of the game.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: NiX on July 21, 2004, 12:51:26 AM
As a side note: This joshie guy also plays movies on his shoutcast. Tonight I got to see "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (I think.) Very weird movie. Was really good though. After that they showed Bourne Identity.

Apparently he does this often and they also show TV shows. Sometimes it's nice to have someone else do all the grunt work. Isn't bad quality and the sound is good enough that you won't miss a word. Joshie makes it fullscreen and barely interrupts the movie (only once because he had to switch his laundry. Opportunity for a piss break and all of that.) Worth the look see.

Also, still haven't seen him play WoW.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Signe on July 22, 2004, 07:39:37 AM
Didn't feel like starting a new topic... I think I start too many, sometimes.  I snuck over to corpnews and nicked this off their site.  I don't post there anymore as they don't seem to much like me.  :(  Well, at least I assume that since I am banned and all.  Anyway... I LOVE this movie.  If I had known I could dance, I'd have made more of an effort to get in this beta.  I bet Boog will be spending a bit of time in the bathroom after viewing some of the more... umm.... sensual dances.  :)

http://freecache.org/http://www.taiphun.com/eq/dwarves.wmv


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Nyght on July 22, 2004, 08:08:36 AM
Fun movie. Like so many before it.

I'd like to like WoW, but I just can't get past the high fantasy art. I mean I like big T&A on human models as much as the next guy but even the humans are over the top.

I have come to believe that I would rather have more poorly rendered but more realistic (perhaps conventional is a better word) art then things that do really really look like saturday morning cartoons. YMMV.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: NiX on July 22, 2004, 08:36:00 AM
I find it ironic that the only dance emote that made it look like they couldn't dance, was the humans. Stereotyping is fun :P


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Alluvian on July 26, 2004, 11:41:42 AM
That dancing movie was embarassing to watch.  I personally thought every single dance was horrible.  Much the same as I think every single CoH dance is horrible.  My wife's comment after watching that movie: "Why are all the women fat and blobby?".

This said she is also none too thrilled with the EQ2 models.  Fake and cartoony in a different way.  The character generation CD that is out now for EQ2 shows that MOST races have decent looking options, but the sliders are just redundant.  For most races there are only 1 or 2 faces you can make that don't look hideous.  And to get there the game has to store a ton of unimportant information on sliders that don't really change much of anything.  More data transmission for every character you meet.  Trolls, ogres, halflings, female dwarves (with their lee press on beards, a proper female dwarf needs a well trimmed beard), and male gnomes(with their tiny piglike eyes and not a single decent hair option) are all hideous.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Signe on July 26, 2004, 01:22:21 PM
Hey!  Your wife is right... I looked back and the women ARE sort of pudgy, especially the human.  What's up with that?  I still enjoyed the movie, however, though I didn't think it a reflection of the what the game will be like.  I simply looked at it as a somewhat fun endeavor.

I don't know what I'm looking for in my next MMOG, to tell you the truth.  I find myself rather more concerned with how it looks than I used to be.  It doesn't have to be stunning, but I'd like it to be, at the least, pleasant  to look at.  I don't find WoW ugly... though it is a little cartoony.  Right now, I'm not minding that so much.  Morphiend or someone, I forget who, said that it doesn't offer anything really new or unusual, just better quality and more technically stable.  Right now that sounds new and unusual to me.  There are some other games in the mix that interest me more, though.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Alkiera on July 26, 2004, 09:09:49 PM
Quote from: Alluvian
That dancing movie was embarassing to watch. I personally thought every single dance was horrible. Much the same as I think every single CoH dance is horrible. My wife's comment after watching that movie: "Why are all the women fat and blobby?".


Quote from: Signe
Hey!  Your wife is right... I looked back and the women ARE sort of pudgy, especially the human.  What's up with that?  I still enjoyed the movie, however, though I didn't think it a reflection of the what the game will be like.  I simply looked at it as a somewhat fun endeavor.


*boggle*  I'm baffled.  Assuming we watched the same movie, (the 'Dwarves Can't Dance' one, music was "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC), the female characters weren't pudgy at all.  Maybe the male gnome was, and the dwarf wasn't skinny...  but none of the characters were the least bit fat.

Perhaps you are big fans of the 'skeleton+epidermis' look that seems popular in the modeling industry...  frankly, I find it ridiculous.  Women are supposed to be rounded, not flat and angular.

--
Alkiera


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: geldonyetich on July 26, 2004, 09:52:47 PM
<fanboi>Star Wars Galaxies has a whole dancing profession with motion captured moves for each of several styles.</fanboi>


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Soukyan on July 27, 2004, 04:45:12 AM
Quote from: geldonyetich
<fanboi>Star Wars Galaxies has a whole dancing profession with motion captured moves for each of several styles.</fanboi>


Yes, but the Night Elf women do the "Alizee butt waggle". That trumps anything SWG could show me. ;)


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Signe on July 27, 2004, 06:18:44 AM
Dancing in SWG was odd.  After mastering it, for a laugh, I was angry because I would still fall down so much.  Master musicians didn't miss notes or go flat, after all.  Strangely, if you hold something in your hand while dancing, you'll never fall down again.  I didn't know this until, recently, when I returned to SWG.  That's why you see most dancers gyrating away holding a gun or sword.  Weird.

The view I had during the WoW movie of the human woman, she appeared chubby (maybe a better word than pudgy?) and way too short waisted.  She had almost no waist at all, in fact.  Looking at it again, it might have been the angle.  The females also seemed to be having much less fun than the males.  Hopefully, the devs will get a clue.  Us girls like to grab our happy bits and play air guitar too, dammit, not just sway and move our arms about like Skunk Aniseseed, or whoever that strange singer is.  I also found most of the female outfits to be a bit twee.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: schild on July 27, 2004, 06:21:20 AM
Quote from: Signe
That's why you see most dancers gyrating away holding a gun or sword.  Weird.


Guns and tits are sexy, am i rite?

Someone paying me to play SWG still won't get me to login until I don't see the mind bar on the gui.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Alluvian on July 27, 2004, 07:08:48 AM
Quote
*boggle* I'm baffled. Assuming we watched the same movie, (the 'Dwarves Can't Dance' one, music was "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC), the female characters weren't pudgy at all. Maybe the male gnome was, and the dwarf wasn't skinny... but none of the characters were the least bit fat.

Perhaps you are big fans of the 'skeleton+epidermis' look that seems popular in the modeling industry... frankly, I find it ridiculous. Women are supposed to be rounded, not flat and angular.


Heh, oooookay.  Yeah, my wife is really into skeleton and epidermis.  Whatever.  It is in how the characters are 'drawn'.  Thin joints and overly fleshy bits between the joints.  Night elf forearms in the males is an exaggerated example of this.  I call it 'the popeye look'.  They carry a lot of weight in places women don't really carry much weight unless they are overweight.  My wife is more in tune with this, as an expert in human and animal anatomy from her artwork, and has an excellent eye for this.  But it comes down to how they are 'drawn'.   A lot of this 'critical thinking for the eye' (as I like to call it) has rubbed off on me since we have been married.  So it just looks very weird.

After seeing the EQ2 character generation in motion and can only imagine they were also not even trying for photorealistic.  There are just too many stylistic additions (like very large female eyes and small male eyes on many races) and mistakes (arm length to body ratio is messed up, etc).  Just to understand I am not bashing WoW or anything in favor of any other upcoming game.  (I do like the cloth system in EQ2)

Probably the best character models so far IMO is SWG for realism and CoH for stylized.  Too bad I can't stand that HAM system, and too bad the facial expressions make the best face look hideous.  At least I can still enjoy CoH.

EQ2 wins I think for the most hideous looking natural creatures.  The pictures of the wolf I have seen have TOTALLY botched the front legs, putting the ankle joint even higher than in the rear legs so the legs appear to bend backwards.  There is a cow in one of the movies showing off talking that moves in such a way that it would have to be seriously disjointed to do.  Pisses me off.  I would think when making a model and animating it these morons would at least look at a picture of the skeletal structure or watch a video of the thing moving.  It only takes a few seconds to google up "cow skeleton" to figure out how the joints work.  AAAAArrrrgh.  Useless crappy modelers and animators.  Then they have the 'deer'.  They look hideous as deer.  Way out of proportion, but they are nearly perfect for dikdik (sp?).  Why don't they just call them what they actually look like?  Right now everyone will just think "look at the crappy deer", instead of "what is a dikdik?".


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: HaemishM on July 27, 2004, 08:25:16 AM
I saw the movie, and chuckled. I still think most of the dances are completely anachronistic, totally out of place with the world, but that's just me. I mean, cabbage patching? Air guitar? They would fit in CoH, but not much else.

The women aren't pudgy, they are zoftig (I think that's how it's spelled). I like women with some meat on their bones, as opposed to the ones who look like a snake that swallowed a rat when they eat a ham sammich.


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Alkiera on July 27, 2004, 09:24:18 AM
Quote from: Alluvian
It is in how the characters are 'drawn'. Thin joints and overly fleshy bits between the joints. Night elf forearms in the males is an exaggerated example of this. I call it 'the popeye look'.


While I agree this makes them look a little odd, I wouldn't have called it pudgy, just odd.  I agree that the elbows and forearms look kinda weird, especially on the night elves, tho the other elves and the human have it to a lesser extent, and the dwarf has no discernable elbows whatsoever... his arms just bend in the middle.

The style of the characters didn't disturb me too much, tho the models are a bit low-poly compared to other stuff out already...  they could really use some TRUFORM, or just higher poly counts.  They looks like original-EQ level models.... especially the arms.  Perhaps the person who did the video uses a low-detail setting?  Other than that, it's mostly the architecture that bothers me, too many insanely off-square buildings, among the humans.

--
Alkiera


Title: WoW meets Big Brother...
Post by: Soukyan on July 27, 2004, 12:33:47 PM
Quote from: Alkiera
Quote from: Alluvian
It is in how the characters are 'drawn'. Thin joints and overly fleshy bits between the joints. Night elf forearms in the males is an exaggerated example of this. I call it 'the popeye look'.


While I agree this makes them look a little odd, I wouldn't have called it pudgy, just odd.  I agree that the elbows and forearms look kinda weird, especially on the night elves, tho the other elves and the human have it to a lesser extent, and the dwarf has no discernable elbows whatsoever... his arms just bend in the middle.

The style of the characters didn't disturb me too much, tho the models are a bit low-poly compared to other stuff out already...  they could really use some TRUFORM, or just higher poly counts.  They looks like original-EQ level models.... especially the arms.  Perhaps the person who did the video uses a low-detail setting?  Other than that, it's mostly the architecture that bothers me, too many insanely off-square buildings, among the humans.

--
Alkiera


The models are indeed low poly count, it's not the users video settings. I believe part of the reason the poly count was kept low was for performance reasons. Unless they changed it recently (I haven't checked the FAQ for months), they were shooting for running on minimum specs of 800 MHz processor with GeForce 2 cards and 256 MB of RAM or something rather low like that. As to the "off-square" architecture, they were sticking to the style precedent that they set with Warcraft 3. I'm guessing some people won't like it. The world is pretty damn immersive though. Little things like ambient sounds, footprints left in the snow, seeing your breath when its cold outside, birds and other small game frollicking in the woods, etc. All these little things give the world a very "Real" feeling. They breath life into this cartoon-bright, polygonal world.