The game made an interesting decision that both you and the article completely missed.

A significant portion of the progress players is available via events.

Weekly and monthly events. Events on a rotating schedule give you bonuses for using each metagame system to the fullest.

Examples: - monthly Tavern complete X # of quests for guaranteed rewards - monthly fight X # of times in PVP for guaranteed rewards - monthly PVE battle for guaranteed rewards - weekly gacha summon - summon 500. During this event likelihood of 5* is doubled and guaranteed rewards - weekly random gem boxes - weekly blacksmith event - weekly campaign loot event - guaranteed 5* for logging in

Utilizing these events to the fullest separates the long-term players from short-term players.

Wasting $$ outside of these events is not recommended.

This turns the game back into a fair amount of idling as you collect the resources to fill each event and wait for the right opportunity to utilize them. Then you often get major boosts of power and multiple copies of high rated characters.

So a single month of playing is barely enough to make it through one rotation and probably not enough to utilize any of them.

we do a lot of demos, but why demoscene?

Here's a good explanation: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1096

http://scene.org/ is very active with news. http://pouet.net/ is the canonical site for searching demos, you can find most demos here. (Demos really should be run in real-time, but you can find video links if you don't have the hardware or don't want to download the program.)

I'll just highlight one example that shows application to CS research: Numb Res by CNCD and Fairlight, video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOC_ajkRkU and explanation https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/

The demoscene is at the intersection of art, music programming, hacking, online groups, tech festivals etc. It has a long history with a tremendous corpora of productions, techniques, culture, publications, etc. It's probably the biggest sub culture that nobody has ever heard of, with thousands of computing enthusiasts getting together in arenas to literally show off their code.

In the demoscene, code is art.

Its participants will literally consume years of their life on a production for nothing but the pleasure of it.

When I saw the title of the course I immediately assumed at least half the semester was going to be on the demoscene since no computing based cultural movement I'm aware of more succinctly speaks to the course title than the demoscene.

/\ That is exactly why some people would rather die than do CS course.

Sorry, were you replying to me or to ra66it? And what do you mean?

I am a senior in college from Cupertino. My biggest problem with working for Google is that if I sign to work for them I won't know what I'll be doing. That means I can get stuck in any job in any field, and that is a big turnoff.

Doesn't stop me from applying though :)

The transfer process isn't that hard, as long as you're transferring into one of the areas that is a top priority for the company (eg. Search, Infrastructure, Chrome, or Google+). If you do get stuck in a role you dislike, I'd highly recommend making friends with the people that are doing what you actually want to be doing, start contributing 20% stuff to them, and if you that it should be trivially easy to get a transfer as long as they have headcount.

One of my Noogler classmates was assigned to doing backend indexing work when he really wanted to be doing frontend UI stuff. He left for Facebook after 5 months, which was a total manager fail, because we had headcount in Search UI and would gladly have taken him had we known he was dissatisfied with his current job.