A FOV of 100 is a lot. Us humans have a "real" FOV of less than 10°, while we gather enough visual information to have the illusion of a FOV of 180°. Make this experiment: Take a random playing card from a deck of cards, and move it into your FOV from the side - keep your eyes very straight while doing that. Then try to find out what colour the card is. Personally, I don't see the colour before maybe 15° away from the focal point.
What I'm trying to say is that a FOV of 100 means some visual tricks and oversimplifications, to keep straight lines visually straight. Otherwise you'd see things as you do in those
panoramic pictures, they're actually way more correct. The thing now is that the link beam doesn't fall under the "let's oversimplify this" category, and thus is calculated more correct than the rest - which means that it appears bent. But come on, it's not like that hurts your aim, or does it?
Anyway. The Epic forums are a typical victim of what I call the "official forum syndrome". It's probably a big part of the reason why I always hated the WoW forums, and Tabula Rasa never had official forums in the first place. If there's anything with the tag of "official", people are gonna complain and flame and whine and generally be incredibly annoying idiots all day long - even if they're perfectly reasonable and actually nice people usually (and I have to add a disclaimer, I'm not talking about anybody in particular here). While some forums have quite lax guidelines, official forums who only show some sign of rule sleaziness
will be swamped in complaints and
won't be of any use to those who don't happen to be either having fun at the expense of whiners or whiners themselves. Or in other words, the official forums that don't enforce strict rules are utterly useless in what they're trying to accomplish, which is, to create and strengthen a community.
Long story short, I love the way Epic keeps their forums clean, and the fact that some valuable contributors who happened to have a bad day fall victim to the strict forum policies is a small price to pay for actually having forums with useful information, as opposed to the whinefest that other official forums are.
Point in case, random pick:
WoW US Paladin forums. Every other thread is a whine - "CS does less damage than White Hits", "I QUIT PLZ UNDERSTAND", "RET doesn't need SWEEPING CHANGES!!!", "Paladins: Why We Suck (Part 2, Continued)" (!) ... looking for having a good time with the game you like? No way, the whiners are in charge. And that's with a very successful game (let's not go into whether it's good or not, that has nothing to do with the issue), so don't tell me there's just justified whines when and because a game fails (and another disclaimer, I don't mean to say that UT3 fails or failed, personally I think it's the best game I ever played so far, and that's starting with
Digger back in like 1985).
Edit: Well, they still could try and resolve issues with personal messages before using the banhammer, of course. That'd be the more sensible, but admittedly also more time- and burnout-intensive, way to go about it.
