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Quote from "s0ur" »

Agreed 100% Varth, you know what, in my life lately I've been noticing that many people bend conversation topics to fit their arguments. I find this annoying and I keep away from such people. (sometimes it's just a misunderstanding though, but you can't always tell)

PS: Tom's is falling apart lately, it's getting more and more biased towards nVidia, I don't like it. They didn't even use the 4870x2 beta drivers in their review, rather some older drivers(vast performance boost, the older ones don't support 4870x2 properly). Oh, and with reviews, I'm sure he didn't mean just 3DMark. There are games optimized towards nV(unreal tournament, company of heroes), there are games optimized towards ATi(half life 2), and all game benches favor the 4870x2 when forcing 16x AA at 1920x1200 :D. It always depends on the games they choose to benchmark and the CPU.

Review sites are sometimes favoring one vendor, and most times are ignorant enough to do so unwillingly. I checked at least 15 review sites before making my choice. Can you believe that no sites except this one http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/video/sapphire/hd4870x2_2GB/page1.asp do heavy AA checks, on at least 1 title? Hell, most don't even push very high on Crysis.
What do they think? That people buying these cards, won't consider cranking up AA? /shrug

I know what you mean. I try not to take it personally when people misquote me or argue over something I said.

And ya, I've noticed too that Tom's hardware is losing its credibility which sucks. It makes it hard to find unbiased reviews now. I tend to go to Maximum PC to find good reviews. They are completely unbiased but of course, being primarily a magazine, they don't have as many reviews as Tom's. For what I can't find on there, I tend to just google it and fish through the BS till I get some good info. lol and if I really wanna see bias, I can always go to theinquirer and laugh at Charlie's nVidia and Vista rants

Oh ya, the AA thing is VERY annoying. If I see a review that doesn't have an AA test for each title, I just stop reading then. I want to see a non-AA test at 1920x1200 and then a heavy AA test at 1920x1200 so then I can get a good idea of just how strong the card is at the extremes.

Quote from "s0ur" »

I don't usually stand up to 13yolds who use the word "rape", but he's right on most points. Even though what he said doesn't stand as a full sentence. I wouldn't blame them though for keeping the 88xx and the 98xx overpriced when they could, it's called marketing. And they didn't lower the GTX280 price by $100 if that's what you mean, they lowered it by $250. (That got so many fanboys pissed off over at my gfx card forum, buy it at $650 only to have it lowered by $250 in 3 weeks time!! ;))

I laughed long and hard over that....and then looked over and remembered I payed full price for my 9800 GTX only to have it worth 200 a month later...lol that's how it goes though. Anyone who's been in the Computer Game as long as me knows that when you buy stuff when it first comes out, it's going to be inflated and cost considerably less down the road....though normally it isn't slashed in price a month after it comes out...

Quote from name="Elfen Lied" »

Tal Rasha's name is Tal Rasha. Tal is not his first name. Otherwise you could say the same thing about Bul Kathos. His name is Bul Kathos not Bul. Just because he has two parts to his name does not automatically make it first and names.

Many societies and cultures in Sanctuary as well as Earth give people names with two parts, yet neither one is last name. Both parts make up a full singular name.

Though generally this is done by using either ' or - Qual-Kehk Gul'dan. Or there are 3 parts to the name. Ahmed Ibn Falan. While Ibn means son of, thus Ahmed son of Falan, his name is always given as Ahmed Ibn Falan.

here I'll pull the same bs you just pulled with the "Cain" thing. Proof? Does it say anywhere directly that "Tal Rasha" is a single name?

In the English language a space indicates no relationship between the two words. A hyphen, apostrophe, as well as other characters denote a relationship between the two words. You can't say Billy Bob Jimmy Joe is anything other than "First name, middle name, second middle name, last name" unless there are hyphens like Billy-Bob Jimmy-Joe where "Billy-Bob" is now a first name and "Jimmy-Joe" is a last name which is often in southern culture, the Father's last name and the Mother's last name put together and the "Billy-Bob" being the combined First and Middle name but it is treated as a single first name.

The culture of Sanctuary may have combined names like that like Uldussian Ul'Domed (I misspelled it) but Blizzard still governs it all by the rules of the English Language. What gets confusing is when people say the full names all the time as like we do when we refer to "George W. Bush." If you do not personally know the man, you call him George Bush. If you are so misfortuned as to know him personally, you would call him "George." And if you are refferring of him to someone, you use his full name "George Bush" so then the individual knows you're talking about the President and not "George from down the street."

as far as "is Tal Rasha's name really Tal and then Rasha" no one knows, no one is really going to know and honestly, no one probably cares.

Quote from "Asynchronic" »

My main question here is "How does all of this new game play strategery affect the way that characters are to be designed?" Based on what we have seen so far it seems as though the character designing system will have to be fundamentally different.

D3 previews have shown that certain obstacles or monsters require that you have specific types of skills to overcome them (jumping the fallen bridge, stunning the shield skeletons etc). Well, what if I don't want to pick those skills, or I don't even use that skill tree (assuming they still exist). So then what? Do I just get stuck or are these skill mandatory. This issue could be handled several different ways:

1. You don't get to chose which skills you take next (boring).
2. There are other ways around certain obstacles, alternate routes and such for those without the skills.
3. You have to take certain skills or you risk getting "stuck" at certain points (unlikely)
4. All skill specific obstacles can be ignored (then what's the point in adding any strategy)
5. These necessary skills are inherent in each class (or item based) and don't need to be chosen.
6. Each possible character design route has the necessary skills needed to overcome specific obstacles so you can't make a potentilly bad decision.

Personally I'm in favor of option 6, although this seems to be a lot of work as each class would have to have several ways of dealing with a single obstacle, so it seems unlikely that it would be handled this way.

Perhaps there's an obvious solution I missed, but I think it's safe to say it must be different that D2 to incorporate the more advanced strategy effectively.

Blizzard directly said the bridge obstacle was written in ONLY for the demo as an example of what the barb can do and that there will not be any impassable areas like that in the actual game.

Quote from name="Elfen Lied" »

You still haven't disproved Cain as a title.

I am not saying with 100% certainty it is, but an easy was to prove that Cain is familiy name is to disprove it as a title.

I suppose you could argue that "Cain" is not a title because of Tal Rasha who was considered the strongest of the Horadrum. I'm not sure if he was in fact their leader, but you could argue that because he is not Tal Rasha "Cain" then it is not a title. Common sense dictates that "Cain" is nothing more than a last name just as "Rasha" is Tal's last name and it is assumed that Deckard is a decendent of Jered due to the relationship of them both being Horadrum and both having the same last name. Granted there is absolutely zero evidence supporting any of this, nor can any evidence be found. Also there is no evidence to the contrary so this is all meaningless. This falls under the banner of "Lets ask Blizzard" though I have a feeling if we ask, they'll probably look at us and say "What are you some kind of stupid? Of course Deckard is his decendent! Thats why they have the same last name you know..."

But what we do know is they are NOT the same person. That much we know for certain

and yet they took their time with Diablo 2 and StarCraft and we're at version 1.15 for SC and version 1.12 for D2 with more errors that still haven't been fixed in D2 that have existed since day 1.

There's going to be stuff that'll slip through. You can't test for everything but I assure you, not having to do LAN code will eliminate a nice amount of time out of their schedual that they'll probably fill with more B.net testing and coding. And who said they were going to rush anything through. All eliminating LAN does is it eliminates the time that would have been spent working on LAN functionality

rofl, the top island city reminds me of New York (only a lot smaller and probably without smelly cabbies)

Quote from "Xapti" »

Diablo 2 does have flaws in it's code which allows duping... you don't need the exploiting programs to prove it. The map system in the game is also flawed, which is why you can maphack. But in a design where the information is stored server-side, you are only shown the information that your character is supposed to know about (diablo 3).
Bots/farmers, obviously can't be done much about, but those aren't hacks really, just exploitation of the system.

Using battle net will prevent duping and maphacking. While it's not much of an issue on LANs really (since it's usually friends playing), LANs are not protected from that.

assuming of course they can keep from making flawed code again =\

Quote from "Krauser" »

Are you kidding me? The 4850 will CRUSH that game with max settings and the largest resolution, as well as an 8800GT. After reading every post you made in this thread, you're obviously lacking hardware knowledge, no offense. This is a Blizzard game after all.



Sadly you're incorrect, Nvidia still has a performance edge on ATI thanks to SLI - when it comes down to money and single card configs, your best bet by far is to go with ATI's 4870 for $260 or 9800GX2 for $310. Unless you can do SLI, then by all means pick up two 8800GT's for $220. I do say this because as of late there is many conflicting webpages that sway to both ATI and Nvidia. For example, on tomshardware Nvidia is crushing ATI and on anandtech, ATI is crushing Nvidia - which is it? Good question, we won't really find out for a couple more months. But so far, after trading in my 8800 GTX that I've had since the card was released for an ATI 4870, I could not be more happier.

sorry pal but you don't know what you're talking about. There is a little thing called Crossfire X where you can put two 4870 X2's together though I'm not even going to bother going into that. The Geforce GTX280 in a card to card comparison does NOT stack up to the 4870 X2 at the ultra high end which was what I was talking about to begin with. In SLi, two GTX280's outperform a single 4870 X2, as it should. However dual 4870 X2's outperform two and and match three card SLi GTX280's in most games. As always, it boils down to scailing and drivers which are always in a state of constent evolution.

HOWEVER! What I was talking about before you decided to erroniously correct me was in a SINGLE card to SINGLE card comparison, the 4870 X2 wins by large margins at the ultra-high resolutions. And by ULTRA-high, I mean 2560x1600 AKA: 30" monitors where the GTX280's 1GB of RAM bottlenecks the card.

The reason I made a single card to single card comparason is mainly cuz, who do you think here is going to drop 1300 dollars in Tri SLi? (slightly more than that but I'm going with easy to quote numbers). Hell, people aren't even going to spend 1100 on Dual 4870 X2's because spending 550 on a single card is a bit of a stretch for the common Computer User. If anything I should have expanding my post to include the 4870 and the 4850 and explain my recommendations for them though my original argument was to suggest to Diablo 3 fans to WAIT before investing in a graphics card until the game actually comes out. It's not a question of "can the card run Diablo 3 now or not" but "Can it play all games in the future or not." As good as Diablo 3 may or may not be, people use their computers for more than just to play one game. They're going to pick up other games and they're going to want to play it with reasonable performance and I want them to know that they don't have to run out and buy a card now when the game isn't even out yet because if they do, they're only going to get screwed in the long run because something is going to come out that they are going to be interested in and instead of waiting, they have to deal with poor graphics performance in a 2 year old card.

If by "Tom's hardware has so and so leading and Anandtech has who cares leading" you have to look at real world tests and you have to look and see what they are testing the cards on. 3Dmark06 and 3Dmark Vantage are cute little tests with big numbers to make overclockers feel special and that's about it. It doesn't really prove anything mainly because ATi and nVidia can fudge the numbers very easilly with drivers. For the longest time ATi had higher 3Dmark06 scores than nVidia and the 8800 GTX was mopping the floor with ATi's cards. Why is that? Cuz ATi wrote better 3Dmark drivers. Hell, nVidia is doing it right now with their current drivers by having the card offload PhysX from the CPU onto the GPU during the physics test in Vantage. It drastically boosts their scores in Vantage. However, if you know how a game works, in a single card configuration, you don't have your GPU offload physics from the CPU and have it do the graphics processing at the same time because it only slows down framerates and isn't very effecient. In SLi or Crossfire, it works and works very well, but in single slots, it doesn't work very well. Is it cheating to boost scores? Probably, but the fact that the test itself is a flawed representation of real-world performance, you take it with a grain of salt.

Also you have to look to see if they actually stress the cards. Big deal if you can get 100 FPS in Crysis if you don't have it completely maxed out with high amounts of AA and AF at a resolution of 1920x1200 or higher.

Also you have to look at the test bed. What processor was it paired with? What motherboard? Ram? Clock speeds? What good is the data if it isn't gathered on an appropriate test bed?

I do this shit for a living. I know what I'm talking about. If I say something is better than something else, I'm rarely wrong. Not because I magically know it is better, but because I make sure I'm not wrong. I gather information, I look for proof, I do tests, I interview people, and then I make my decision to recommend a product or not. However I'm man enough to say "If I'm proved wrong, I'll take what I said back." Only thing is what you said has nothing to do with what I said and I think I deserve an apology for you claiming my information to be erronious especially since in my argument, I said nothing about Crossfire or SLi and was only speaking of single card configurations.

huh...I think it might be a sandstorm around a city located in a canyon but it's very poorly done in Photoshop...it makes it nearly impossible to figure out what is going on in that picture.

I honestly don't care if there's LAN for Diablo 3 or not. I was never going to use it. I never did for Diablo 2. I didn't even do it for Diablo 1 (only it was on the older IPX networks, LAN wasn't around yet). They can take away LAN for all I care. They're just trying to streamline Diablo 3 and get it done faster. By removing LAN that means they don't have to code Diablo 3 to make it work on a LAN they instead only have to make it work on B.net.

And honestly, I really really wish people would stop jumping at shadows to proove that Blizzard is going to sell us out and force P2P on Diablo 3. I mean comeon, the two aren't even remotely related. They've already stated before they don't intend to make Diablo 3 pay to play and hell, it's a flippin' single player game. We already know it's going to be single player with multiplayer just like the old games so lets stop with the "oh woe is me D3 better not be pay to play or I won't let the moths out of my wallet" cuz it isn't going to happen and you tight wads are gonna get to save your precious money. Jesus, next you guys are going to complain because you have to pay for internet service...

yes, right now AMD/ATi have the fastest graphics cards. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a high resolution beast that makes the nVidia GTX280 look like a joke. However, the 4870 X2 only gets to strut its stuff at ultra-high resolutions of 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 where all other graphics cards struggle considerably (in some games at those resolutions, the 4870 X2 is twice as fast as a GTX280). However, in low resolutions, the 4870 X2 is overkill.

Diablo 3 is not coming out for at least a full year from now (try more than a year). When it comes out, there will have been at least 3 new graphics card generations so I highly recommend that unless you play other games and want a new card now, just wait cuz you will be paying for outdated parts. And by paying for outdated parts, I mean you will buy a 300 dollar graphics card now and only get to stress it in 2 years whereas you can wait 2 years, buy a 300 dollar graphics card then and have a card that will play Diablo 3 and then any game that comes out from then until about 2 years later at max settings.

it was just an old teaser trailer from way back when used at E3 I believe. It has no baring on the story even though it looks absolutely fantastic for being a "meaningless" trailer.

if you want less lvl 99's make blizzard actually crack down on bots and you'll see nothing but legit level 90s. It is easy to hit 90, it's hard as hell to get to 99 legit. And yes, almost all current top 10 ladder characters are botted. I've seen almost all of them running baal bots. It gets annoying to watch them cheat to the top whereas I gain my top-end levels from MFing. Really cheap...

all Blizzard has to do is actually do their job and eliminate any glitch leveling and be proactive in stopping bots and we'll be good. It's an RPG, you're going to grind the same shit nonstop so get used to it.

Quote from "radiant_knight" »

the spellcaster in Diablo I was called Mage if i remember correctly.

My copy of Diablo I is overseas at the moment.

Can someone who still has an actual copy verify the class name?

whirlwind is a staple skill of current ladder builds. i wouldn't mind seeing other skills increased in effectiveness so other skillsets will have more play.

it would be nice if barbarians can specialize in more than one weapon.

you're kidding right?

Diablo 1 Classes:

Warrior

Rogue

Sorcerer

Diablo 2 Classes:

Barbarian

Amazon

Paladin

Necromancer

Sorceress

Assassin

Druid

Diablo 3 Classes: (so far)

Barbarian

Witch Doctor




Now no one has an excuse for not knowing the classes...seriously...how could you call yourself a Diablo fan and not know the class names no matter how long ago you played...