The counter example might be Diablo 3. It probably made people some good extra money so from a business sense it might have been a good idea, but the fun factor of the game was also broken in the process, so in the end I hope it can serve as an example that the core game must not be broken in order to tack on the extra monetization shit. Presumably something about the long term retention of the game ultimately turned out to be more negative than the the extra micro transaction revenue.

The one feature of the diablo series that was the carrot on the stick, the loot progression, they ruined in their core design to prop up the auction houses.

"I was part of the problem.. now excuse me while I go roll in my silo of money."

I don't understand why anyone downloading a large game of this scope and demand would expect a flawless experience on day one, or even within the first week.

What an over simplification that is. The entire childhood is a teaching of right and wrong. It's not like you teach them one day and they are good to go. There are many stumbling blocks on the way to learning that lesson, and even adults often don't have it down entirely. Some stumbling blocks like this can be rather expensive.

Seems to be fine with current devices requiring your password in order to make purchases. That should be enabled, kids or not.

Shame they are disabling the family share stuff. They could maintain that feature even without always online mode. It would be reasonable to have to be online to play games shared to you by a friend without enforcing a retarded global always online requirement. Also even if it is restricted to digital copies of a game, to avoid any worries about the disc floating around in addition to the shared copies. Provide an incentive for users to support the game through a digital purchase with digital perks, still let the people who want to play, sell, trade their hard copies. Everyone wins. The community would be singing a different tune if they went this sort of route from the start.

If you don't want skype interrupting your gaming why leave it running while you game?

Maybe the spyware ridden gullible people that would actually buy this solution in search of a problem.

The huge patches were a result of how steam can only(at the time), update content at the file level, and even minor updates to an unreal engine game results in large files changing, since most things are packaged together. A while back the game required converting to a 'new' steam format, which was so that binary diff sort of patches could be distributed rather than downloading entire files fresh.

I agree the game is fun, but it got old when my gear could only support my doing 2 levels of nightmare difficulty(ramparts and spires), and even that was snatched away when they patched in the stupidass sharken characters that push your shit out of the way. Now I'm relegated to not being able to do nightmare myself, so the game is effectively identical to Diablo 3 and the auction house, where you have to farm money and buy high level items from other players, and that's not fun at all. I can still get some enjoyment from helping other players tackle the nightmare challenges and giving away reward weapons and stuff, but it's annoying that the end game has such a huge progression stomping wall.

Let me know when they fix the brick wall progression in the end game of needing better loot than you can farm yourself

My single SSD cold boots win7 in 9 seconds. What kinda shitty SSDs are you running where a stripe SSD boot drive is not a giant waste of hardware?

Where do you even get resist gear? I've seen so few pieces drop with elemental resists and such compared to the primary stat buffs.

Not to troll or anything, but what are some examples of quests that you'd like to see in an MMO that don't fit the Kill X/Collect Y molds ? Seems like at the high level most things would fit into that.

you should quit gaming, because companies go where the money is

Peer to peer client authoritative with server verification seems reasonable. There is no way around latency for perceiving other players, but if the client is authoritative to his own character then at least their own character can be latency free. Presumably though since the AI monsters are server controlled latency will still affect them somewhat, but as long as you interact with whatever the client represents them as at the time it probably doesn't matter.

There are definately pickups in Rage

Cutter must have had a bad experience as an alter boy or something. Rape certainly is something to joke about, however bad taste one might perceive those jokes. Nothing is above ridicule, not rape, not religion, nothing. Your bullshit threats of violence for exercising free speech is laughable, especially the part "...in my right to be an asshole too and kick their fucking teeth in". Surely even a retard(speaking of 'sensitive' words) like you realizes that no such right exists. Even more pathetic is that you think physically attacking someone is a reasonable response to someone wearing something that you find offensive. I'm grossly offended by such a mindless rape of the first amendment, but a threat of violence is ludicrous no matter how offended.

Getting offended at merely using the word rape in a comic strip about imaginary game character questing is fucking stupid, victim or not. People who are in the business of mocking everything should not have to apologize for shit like that. Nobody finds it funny, implied or otherwise that there are rape victims, but the strip wasn't about mocking rape or the victims specifically, it was about lame MMO quest design. People surely have the right to express their disapproval of certain strips, but this one deserves no special treatment in the 'clarifying' and mocking response they followed up with.

Bhruic wrote on Feb 8, 2011, 16:20:
If just *one* person buys it, then they just made more money than they would have by releasing it for free. And while I can not buy it (as I've yet to pay for any DLC), and perhaps you can not buy it, as long as *someone* out there is buying it, they'll keep making it. And you and I have no control over other people buying them.

No. That's only true if the content was made at no cost to the studio(read: never). If few enough people bought DLC that they couldn't at least pay for the development time of the content and some profit, they wouldn't do it.

Bunch of cheap fucking douches people are to complain about DLC. If the content is worth 0$ to them, they wouldn't want it bad enough to be so offended by the idea of paying for it. Making maps for a modern game is a significant investment of time and effort. Clearly it's worth some money to enough people to justify a significant profit margin of purchases, yet the cheap fuckers still think they are entitled to something for nothing.

If this firmware allowed playing pirated games that would be a reasonable scare, but it doesn't.. yet

Studies based on self reported data are as good as toilet paper