Zaph

@Matt said:

@Seppli: I'm curious. When you say

SW:TOR seemed several steps behind WoW's design templates. Blizzard's questdesign is way past what I've seen in my brief stint with the SW:TOR beta weekend. I'd hardly call that iterative on WoW

what quests exactly are you referring to?

He's probably referring to any quest from the last two expansion packs.

If you take away the voice acting from SWTOR, the quests themselves (even 'Story' ones) are very simple and static. While WoW has many issues, it's still the gold standard when it comes to quest design. Their use of scripting, phasing and 'one-off' mechanics allow their quests to 'flow' unlike any other MMO.

Inevitably, all MMO's are a 'grind' (hell, you could even extend that to most RPG's too) and it's up to the developers to hide as much of that as possible using smoke and mirrors. Blizzard are the masters of smoke and mirrors.

Not to say that I won't be playing SWTOR (virtually all my old Uni friends have bought it so I'm jumping back on the MMO bandwagon) but they're relying heavily on voicing acting and cosmetic decision making to make up for shortfalls in their quest design and flow.

I think the actual reason so many people are upset about the new Endurance Run is due to the waiting.

There are roughly 14-18 months between starting ER's, which means the next one (if there is a next one), probably won't start until 2013 at the earliest.

So for those who feel this isn't a 'real' ER (or the ER they wanted it to be - maybe because of the choice of game or the people playing it) that's a whole 3 years to wait between the last one finishing and the next one starting.

Looking at it like that, I can understand why some people are disappointed - but I just wish they'd express that disappointment in a more respectful manner, especially considering how hard the small GB crew work to pump out all the content.

https://dh3vbjnk0bnfa.cloudfront.net/media/centralauth/audio/gobble.ogg

Also, play Saints Row.

(BTW it's from here- $35 memberships)

Is anyone here savvy to the standard Youtube Partners agreement?

The reason I ask is, I've noticed a lot of long form videos on Youtube (1hr+) are 360p only. Now, this could just be down to users compressing videos so that they upload faster, but I have a feeling it might be a restriction enforced by Youtube themselves.

@taemun: Also, do you mind bringing your Sherlock skills over to this thread? Something is causing HD videos to clash with Hardware Accelerated playback - which is especially annoying when trying to watch videos off-line on my Macbook using Quicktime. Oddly, the corruption alternates on and off every 18m15s.

@taemun: Holy shit, you're like the Columbo of H264 compression issues. But seriously, I highly doubt either of the guys have seen your PM. Any time you see the GB homepage in a site video, the staff seem to have thousand of unread PM's (probably due to people @-replying them in the forum).

Try emailing the video guys. It's not really cool to post their email addresses on public forums, but you can easily guess them, they're pretty obvious.

Yeah, I have the exact same problem but it seems to only happen on the very long videos. Try loading up a shorter HD video (like a video review) and see if it plays immediately. I'm guessing it's something to do with the way Firefox buffers/cache's progressive video (maybe the amount buffered is proportional to total length?). I've found if you leave the video for a long time, it usually starts playing.

My only advice is to use Chrome for long HD videos. They start straight away for me.

@Spellbot5000 said:

Has Whiskey even commented on this issue? This isn't the first thread about this issue, and I don't recall seeing anyone from Whiskey mentioning that they were looking into ask. This is clearly something happening on Whiskey's end, as this is the only site on the net I've seen this sort of thing with HD vids. C'mon Whiskey, at least let us know you're aware of the issue and are trying to do something about it.

No. While WM is usually really good (the best?) when it comes to addressing the community, video issues seem to be the exception. Even the hardware acceleration corruption thing still hasn't been fixed. To hazard a guess, I'd say either the problems are bugs they're not able to track down or an issue with their production pipeline that can't be easily remedied.

Someone asked Jeff about it on Formspring, but he said he hasn't heard any specifics.

Just throwing in my $0.02c to mention that I've also had this problem recently. At first I thought Adobe had screwed Flash up again, so I turned Hardware Acc. on/off, updated my player etc etc. None of that helped. Since downloaded the Tricaster Part 2 video, and the problem appears in every media player I try - on both my PC and Macbook.

If it was just intentional heavy compression due to the length of the video, that would be fine - but the video itself is over 3.5GB, so there really shouldn't be anything this noticeable. Also, the flickering genuinely makes videos hard to watch.

I've always felt WM only launches new sites when there's a 'perfect storm'. By that I mean an idea, the technology and, most importantly, the staff/editorial department all being right. There's no point investing in a new brand to only go about it half-arsed.

If you watch the Ramblin' Rorie video over on Screened, Matt talks about how difficult it is finding a replacement for Alex. They can easily find people who love movies, or write great editorials, or are good podcasters, or are comfortable on-camera, or 'fit in' at WM. But finding a suitable combination of all five? Not so easy.

I'd guess that WM has a few different sites in the works at any given time, and depending on how circumstances play out, they then go forward with whichever site has all the right pieces fall into place.