i agree that taunt should go and is the one thing enforcing the trinity, but scrappers really aren't the first alternative here. there are essentially two types of scrappers, one on one and ae dps, ae dps is squishy and draws alot of aggro because of dmg while one on one typically is tougher but with less aggro, neither of those give you much of any control over enemies. if you want to control enemies with scrappers you have two possibilites: gather a lot of scrappers so that there aren't many weak points in your group and everyone takes a part of the damage or use a scrapper with taunt aura and a tough skin (like kat/wp). the first is non functional in most groups, the second is again the tank concept.

the classes enabling different approaches are mostly controllers and defenders with cc, buffing and debuffing, which allows for very mixed groups that can survive on pure dps (with buffs/debuffs) or enemy control (with cc/debuffs) without having a central figure with ultimate control (aka tank)

the original eq trinity was warrior, cleric, enchanter, dps was just added fancy. sadly most games after eq felt like removing the finesse of crowd control that actually matters, which left us with todays tanks, healer, dps trinity. as far as i can tell it won't change anytime soon, since people love it, even though they always complain, especially mmorpg veterans, people always lean towards the very traditional mmorpgs.

well yes, the interesting part of PD is if it's not a one-shot game, and as you pointed out in reality you will hardly ever face a one-shot. but there is no actual dilemma in a one-shot PD if you only care about yourself (which is what i was answering to), however there is still a dilemma present if you consider empathy and the hope that everyone can work together and be happy (in a real life experiment you will see that in a one-shot PD many people will not choose the dominant strategy even though they're aware of there only being one iteration).

no, the whole point of it is that every player has one dominating strategy, meaning no matter what the opponent does, this one strategy is always the best. what your opponent does changes your actual win, but in a one-shot PD it never influences your choice.

that is not because the daily show broadcasts better/more news, it's because you will only watch and understand the daily show if you have a clue of what is going on in the world and follow the news through reading the paper, online articles and interesting pieces on tv. you can't take someone whose watching fox and sit him in front of tds, hoping that he will now be better informed, because he will not. (he will actually get aggressive, throw something at the tv or at least turn it off)

so what exactly made you say that i think the daily show is crap? the fact that i said "i like it" or that i said "i watch it 4 days a week"? seriously...

i am not attacking the daily show, you can't reply to me by defending what they do and tell me they are the only ones pointing out what ridiculous stunts the news networks pull, i know that, i watch and like the show, remember? what you guys here are saying is that the daily show covers as much news as other media, they don't, they take the most ridiculous pieces out of other news coverage, reports about hilarious events, odd trends and a guest and make 20 minutes out of it.

i do not care if you think tv is not made for news, it doesn't help your case either way, since both the news networks and tds are on tv, so what tv allows for and what not, does not matter in the discussion around tds.

and you are not using my samples for anything, in fact you are straight out ignoring them. show me how the last three tds contain the news of the last six days, because that is what you are defending here, the position of tds as a news broadcast.

lastly i would like to point out that the american news networks are an abomination created by american television, it's not what news is like in general. check a short news section of 20-30 minutes on normal tv (i am not american, i have no clue how your normal channels handle news, just talking from what we have here) and you will see a dense block of news without idiotic comments and unimportant stuff. tds does not want to and never will have that much information in a segment, simply because they_are_not_a_news_brodcast.

that rating is based on the the 2004 dem and rep conventions and one debate, where the daily show didn't report much of anything else than that, so yes i see how you might feel like the daily show isn't too bad for news. but let me just list here what the daily show reported on this week, which should, if it compares to actual news, cover the news from last friday till this wednesday:

• the house passing the health care bill
• shortage of flu vaccine and who got it first
• interview with kit bond
• satire about the medias coverage of the 20th anniversary of their coverage of the fall of the berlin wall
• report about the use of old footage by fox in a wrong context
• interview with serena williams
• grateful death archivist
• discussing 'blackfacing'
• report on the car shortage for demolishen derby
• interview with clarence clemons

first of all we can delete all interviews, they are not news, and were hardly interesting at all. then we can remove the coverage of the berlin wall reporting, which was satire of news coverage without any content. blackfacing had nothing to do with news, it's just a social commentary, also the piece about a grateful death archivist can be removed. let's be nice and tag everything else at news, we're left with about 20 minutes of coverage (or 4 reports) for 6 days.

even jon stewart laughs at people who say that the daily show is a replacement for actual news (go search for the quote), i like the show, i like the colbert report, watch them 4 days a week, but they are not news, they do not replace news in any way, they are not meant to and they never will.

it has to be pointed out that the independent review they talk about in the article seems to only look at the link between seasonal flu shots and severe cases of swine flu, while the original study looks to be about the link between seasonal flu shots and swine flu, which is obviously not at all the same thing. obviously there are still a lot of questions around selection bias etc, but there is nothing in the article that would be any indication of it being debunked.

from the article:

...there's still no worldwide standard for electrical sockets, makes it easier to justify the missing standards in the it-world.

there is no point, opening it would not tell you whether there was a basilisk in it when you were initially asking the question.

we actually know nothing at all other than that we somehow exist (we don't know if the existance is corporeal), descartes' demon sends greetings. nothing you see has to be true, when you talk to someone, there is no way of knowing that you are actually talking to the person you think you're talking to. still no one goes around and says that he doesn't believe in anything there is because there is no way of actually telling it is true. agnostics should go and check out what an agnostic atheist is and i am sure most of them would see that they aren't really agnostic. if you're agnostic you can't not believe in god, you have to stand absolutely neutral. there are lots of people here posting about them being agnostic but feeling that there is no god. that doesn't work, either you withhold judgment and call yourself an agnostic or you have to pick a side.

you're obviously just reading whatever you want, i told you over and over again that people aren't sitting around in pvp zones, they are in fact pvping. people who want to team up with others of the opposite faction have zones for that and they use them. there is no farming whatsoever going on in open zones of any kind in cox, all farming is taking place in instances, no one is ever farming in a pvp zone. you haven't played cox, yet you somehow feel like you have a clue how it's gameplay looks like because of reading one ridiculous article, are you kidding me?

twixt was porting people into npcs without much of any chance of him being hurt at all, it's like fansy training npcs, letting them kill everyone with the occasional train that killed him as well. both have not gained anything from the whole thing, other than annoy people and they are both very hard to keep from it since they are either close to npcs that insta-kill or lvl 5 and non-pvpable (only chance then is to train against him). yes they are actually rather similar.

there is a lot of stuff going on in that direction. tabula rasa was the first mmorpg to not have auto targeting, many mmorpgs already have cc like stun etc which you optionally use to interrupt your enemy, in the near future champion releases which does have a block ability and then also mortal online which has no targeting and blocking etc, all in first person. the problem imho though is mostly that many people actually do not want this, the fun in mmorpgs is for most players that it's not an fps like combat, where you have to aim and evade all the time, so most of the mmorpgs going in that direction will either fail (like tr) or simply get a niche.

and no, i don't think darkfall was worth mentioning here.

yes 12 million can be wrong, in fact several billions can be wrong. that said, mmorpgs have been stagnating after wow released and most developers are simply trying to get something very similar to wow, in the hope that people will get tired of the wow world and then hop onto another mmorpg that is essentially the same in a different wrap. the few games that have really deviated from wow were all failures (tabula rasa, darkfall). that said, wow wasn't much different from the first generation mmorpgs and simply picked the best elements of each of them and mixed it up, they didn't reinvent the wheel, but arguable made the last "big" successfull step. the actual reason why wow is as popular as it is, has mostly to do with blizzards name in the gaming industry, the popularity of previous warcraft titles and the suction generated by many people playing, sucking in more etc.

also: there are f2p mmorpgs with far higher populations than wow (as far as those are correct) like maplestory and stuff like that, they still suck though.

fuck it, i have to post again, your post is just ridiculous.

first off, a griever is someone who causes grieve by interrupting gameplay in an unintended way, griever != whiner, please at least get your mmorpg slang right.

i have played eq, and cross teaming has absolutely nothing to do with this, you're not able to team up with anyone of the opposite faction in cox (only in cooperation zones, but we're talking pvp areas here), you can't heal them etc. i am repeating myself, people in those zones are playing as intended, they are pvping, they are fighting each other with some ooc text in between. twixt is essentially doing what fansy did in eq1, are you getting it now?