Out of Ten
Out of ten scales have gone terribly wrong. This isn’t particularly geared towards out of ten, it works equally well with out of one hundred as well but out of ten is used rather frequently.
The idea of an out of ten scale is that 5 is the middle, which should represent average. Or at least it used to. When a book is rated 6/10 that is an above average book. But when a movie is given 6/10 that is an average or below average movie. And these days a video games has to be an 8/10 or it is not even worth playing by the general consensus. More recently I’ve been looking at guitar reviews where almost every reviewer seems to give 9/10 or more to every guitar I see reviewed.
Now these average numbers don’t matter in and of themselves, as long as you know what the average score is you can judge based on that. But as a reviewer it allows no freedom in scoring. A book that is a 7/10 is certainly worse than one that is 9/10 and there are specific reasons to point out why. But both are good books. A 9/10 video game and a 9.5/10 video game have about the same difference in score as the those two books compared to the average. The same 2 point difference has to be squished into a .5 difference now. There are no in-between points. But you can still say that the 9.5 game is better.
The problem actually comes in low scoring games. Since everything below 8/10 is seen as a failure in video games, how can you accurately score things? 6/10 and 7/10 might seem natural. These scores are just below a good game. But what exactly is the difference between 3/10, 4/10 and 5/10? These seem like they are arbitrarily given out. Any score within this 3-5/10 range can effectively be given the same score.
The other problem lies with how something is reviewed. As price is highly variable in many of today’s products, in order to compare the high end and low end products on the same spectrum you have justify the higher scores on low end products as “for the price”. This is a good camera “for the price.” The downside to this is that you cannot compare things that are not “for the price.” My newest guitar receives mostly 9/10 and 10/10 on review sites yet it is also apparently “significantly worse” to the $2000+ guitars. None of these reviews can accurately score that.
So we should stay with a very easy to use four point system. Or maybe even less than 4 points. Bad, Satisfactory, Good, Great. Just as arbitrary as what we are using now, but with less of the fluff. There are still awards given out at the end of the year anyway, and rankings could be done entirely separately to distinguish the greatest games.
What Affects the Sound of Your Guitar
Everything.
Depending on who you ask, the most important part is different, but I’ve heard different people say that each part affect your sound vastly. From the strings, which are sometimes made by the same manufacturing company even for different brands to the distance where you pick the strings from the tail.
But the most important part of all of this is that there is not a ‘correct’ sound there are only different sounds. Unless you want the exact sound someone else is making, whatever sound you make (as long as it’s in tune of course) is ‘correct’, just different.
So stop worrying about the specific for a guitar and play a bunch then buy the one you like. And if you can’t play anything, buy a $50 guitar in the classified or borrow a friend’s guitar to try it out.
Rift – One Step Closer to Guild Wars 2
So there Trion finally came out with a 7 day trial of Rift last month. I gave that whirl and ended up buying it after 3 days. It is one step farther from the old MMO and one step closer to Guild Wars 2′s questless system. I still employs a full range of quests, but many of them are outleveled because of the rift system.
The invasion system is almost like the GW2 system but without much of the longer term effects. A zone is invaded with many rifts and invasion forces at once and you have to group up to complete a goal and then defeat a boss. Which is basically one of two major factors that differentiate Rift from other contemporary MMOs.
I love these invasions. The problem is that it still seems like the side part of the game. During most of the game I’m still doing lame “kill 15 squirrel quests” which is exactly the part of WoW that drives me to rush through it all and try to hit the end game.
What Guild Wars 1 did best was having a series of chained plot quests that got you through the game. There was a little gear progression after that in certain dungeons and some higher level dungeons but in general you level did not determine your progression, the plot did. It was not a matter of being a certain level to progress, it was a matter of doing certain plot missions to progress, like you do in most single player RPGs. Of course you could still run ahead and skip bits, but the natural progression was that you completed missions and did plot quests to ‘beat the game’.
Guild Wars is the still the only MMO I’ve played where I’m not looking at an experience bar but just playing the game.
Last Sip
I don’t know what it is but everyone is very sentimental about the last sip of anything.
We will drink almost all of something but be compelled to offer that last tiny bit to the original owner.
Lesson? Don’t share your drink.