And when you tell them to shove it, you are telling them that you don't need compensation. No. I'm telling them their "compensation" is worth less than dog piss. And I'm telling you you're an idiot.
That's how it works. When you get bad service in a restaurant and the manager offers to comp part of your meal, you don't get to demand $50 worth of free drinks. That's a terrible analogy. In fact it's so awful there's no way to even begin to make it fit the situation in this discussion.
And when you sign a contract that states no level of uptime is guaranteed, you don't get to sue when it goes down. Funny. Because that's exactly what they're doing, whether they "get to" or not. Thing you and the other clueless people aren't getting is that when you get enough people pissed off due to false advertising, a fucking contract doesn't matter. Especially when it's nothing more than a "digital" contract that no one actually signed. It's barely stronger than an EULA, and we all know how well those hold up in court.
And of course the irony of the whole deal is that the simple fact that people even want to do a class-action suit means MS has already lost. Whether the suit gets thrown out or not is relatively moot. Even if it goes through and MS loses, the cost of the suit (even including legal fees) will be a pittance compared to lost revenue from customers jumping ship.
Not so ridiculous. The customers are still paying for a service they're not getting. Yes, this includes even the silver members, who aren't paying extra for premium access. The use of basic XBL is part of the purchase price of an XBox. Companies can get in a lot of trouble for false advertising, even if they have no legal contractual obligations to fulfill their end of the bargain. It's been proven time and time again that disclaimers only mean so much. If you're selling a service to millions of customers, you damn well better be able to provide - or prepare to reap the consequences. If this were Blizzard in this situation over a 4-week global WoW outage they'd be facing a class-action suit as well. (And no, a generous offer of 50 *free* health potions would not be sufficient reparation.)
I disagree that the game is a kick in the balls, I seriously wonder though how many of their customers would agree with you. I know I wouldn't, if I were one of them. I'd tell 'em to take their free game and shove it.
but for the record: the fact that it's an Xbox Live Arcade game does not mean you'll need to play it over Xbox Live. Many of the Arcade games have a single-player, or local multiplayer, component. You do need to be able to download the thing from XBL, though. True... but who knows which game they're going to be "kind" enough to offer for free? And the bottom line of course (as you mentioned) is that it's moot anyway until it's at least accessible.
What makes you think the majority of the people who use XBox Live care about whether or not MS is legally obligated to keep the service operational? This is exactly the kind of issue that's liable to make a huge number of people start voting with their dollars and looking another direction for their video game entertainment. You really think anywhere close to the majority of the people affected by this are going to care jack shit about the "free game", and how it's a "good value" considering the cost of Live Gold? If so, you're a bigger fool than most of the people on/. People just don't think like that. People think in terms of "I'm entitled to this service because I bought their product, and if it's unavailable to me for what I consider an excessively long time there's gonna be hell to pay." These few weeks of service outage will do far more to destroy their console marketshare than anyone or anything else could have ever hoped to accomplish. I guarantee you they've already lost quite a few customers for good, and if it goes on much longer they're going to be bleeding marketshare like there's no tomorrow. It's far to early to tell yet, but there's a good possibility this might just be the beginning of the end of XBox.
Agreed, mostly. I strongly dislike the idea of having all my online games require any single online service (which unfortunately is pretty much unavoidable with ISPs...) but with this recent development, MS is showing they deserve this kind of trust even less than most similar providers. What is truly unfortunate for Microsoft is that Blizzard has already shown us that this size of customer base can be provided for successfully (and MS's influx of new customers this round was nothing compared to the hammering Blizzard got when they released their expansion) which leaves MS with very little excuse. Not to say Blizzard has done everything perfectly, or even close to it. But they've never had outages lasting more than a few hours.
Offering customers a *free* game that can only be obtained (not to mention used) through the non-functioning service is worse than a slap in the face. It's closer to a kick in the 'nads when you're already on the ground. MS really should have known better.
Just one small problem with that hypothesis. This is not the first Christmas since XBL was started. Not even close. I haven't seen any numbers, but I'd guess the number of new subscribers for during this time period was far lower than it has been in the past for similar time periods.
I would say the most plausible explanation is simply that MS fucked something up in the recent update. The good news about that is, if it's something they fucked up they can also fix it.
Given that the average adventure takes about 10 to 30 seconds, and you can stop at any time between adventures without losing anything whatsoever.. I'd have to say yes. The only real exception to this rule is if you're farming ultra-rares. And you and I both know that's nothing essential to enjoying the game. The game is as casual or hardcore as you make it. I'd say it fits the casual category better than most quick free games.
If you're hinting that the game is so addictive it's hard to stop when you need to, well that can easily be true of any game worth playing. That's the problem of the player, not the game.
He's not an expert. You, on the other hand, are about as far from an expert on the subject as a person could possibly get. Burning calories is, in most cases, not even close to linear. Unless of course your "activity" involves so little energy output that you could do it all day. Do you have any idea how much energy your body expends just to keep itself cooled down as you go beyond those 15-minute sessions? Didn't think so.
You're absolutely correct. And the article is correct, due to the fact that their small 2% increase was because they were basically playing the Wii like you'd play any video game on any console. The only difference was, instead of pressing a button they flick their wrist. Of course you're not going to get much additional exercise from that. But if you play the Wii like it was *meant* to be played, you're going to get a whole hell of a lot more than a 2% increase. Probably closer to a 20,000% increase. It's all in how you use it. And I for one think using a Wii to exercise is a hell of a lot more fun and interesting than a treadmill.
Oh yeah, the Wii is more useful for exercise than TFA is for any purpose. That's all.
First, we're talking about racism as it currently exists in the US, not Nazi Germany in WW2. I don't see very many nazis over here beating up immigrants these days.
Second, yes racism is all in the mind. Why were the Nazis trying to eradicate all Jews, and perhaps go for world domination? Because in their minds, they were a superior race. Of course, as we all know it wasn't the truth - it was merely in their minds. Yes, it resulted in some extremely brutal actions, but it doesn't change what racism is. Nowhere did I say, nor imply, nor hint that the results of racism are only in the mind. Only that racism itself is.
The thing is, actual gameplay is influenced by your graphics card. Loading between levels might be annoying with an old HDD, but most games don't do much disk access during active gameplay. There's a world of difference between an old 20 or 40GB drive with 2MB cache compared to the newer ones with 16MB. And yes, there's plenty of disk access during gameplay with most games. Not only that, if you're stuck with a 40gig or smaller, you might not even have room to install those hot new games. For myself, I'm using a Radeon X1550 I bought at the beginning of the year, and it still runs the games I like. Granted, I'll probably have to upgrade to play Crysis or UT3, but I guarantee you it won't be to a $250 card. I'd rather drop a couple graphics settings a notch (and still have graphics easily superior to any console) and buy a few more upgrade parts for the extra dough I saved. Especially since in another 3 to 6 months I'll be able to buy that $250 card for ~$100, upgrade my main machine, and move my old card into a secondary box.
Another thing they don't even mention is that if you're going from a typical system from 3 years ago to one using the parts they priced, you're going to have to upgrade your power supply to. Unless of course you went way extreme and bought a honkin' big 500watt model back then, in which case you *might* be ok, but that won't be the case for most people. So unless you want to skimp and buy a cheapo PSU that may or may not last you a year, you'll be shelling out over $50 for that too. Keep adding in small things like that, and you're not spending $500 - you're spending $750.
Long story short, for me when I look at the difference in graphics card performance between $100 and $250, I just see so many other upgrades I'd rather have for that $150. IMO the $250 8800 is a midrange card belonging in a $1000 system, not a budget card.
Actually, he would find that the $500 is a lot less than what other people spend on hobbies. That $500 upgrade should last you at least a good 18 months. People spend that much on beer or cigs in 6 months, and most hobbies cost more than that.
First, you really can't buy a board for much less than the $80 and expect it to work well. They all come with tons of features these days - you just have to decide which you want. Going cheaper nowadays doesn't mean same quality with less features - it means similar features with lower quality.
Second, there's some very good reasons for going with a board that includes onboard video. It gives you the potential to run more than two monitors (which is, I admit, very unlikely) but more important, if/when your main graphics card bites the dirt, you've got your onboard to fall back on while you wait for your replacement to arrive. That means that while you'll go a week without playing Crysis and UT3 at max settings, you'll still be able to do pretty much everything else.
That said, my take on the article is that they spent way too much on the graphics. You can stretch that $500 quite a bit further by going with a much cheaper card that'll still run the newest games just fine at reduced settings. I'd say this would get the job done, and still give you some space in your budget to upgrade your hard drive and something else, which could be pretty important in that P4/Athlon XP system from 3 years ago.
Things like a firewall and anti-virus. Quite necessary if Phoenix are suggesting you might run an email client on this thing. Really? Why? The article doesn't give many specifics. It's possible that this "new technology" won't even have access to the hard drive. If it's limited to ROM and RAM, is there really anything a hacker or a virus could do, even if they somehow managed to get in? Reboot and you're back to normal.
Similarly I don't think there's ever a time when I want to run just a word processor. I want an MP3 player for some tunes. I want a web browser for fact checking. I want Freecell because I'm lazy and rarely do any actual word processing.
Basically what I'm saying is that I want a proper OS, not something that runs one app at a time. I doubt I'm alone in that. Now, give me a decent OS that runs lots of things loaded into an area of Flash memory so it starts up quickly and I'm yours. Then clearly this stuff is not for you. I'd gladly take it, until we get a full-blown OS that loads quickly or instantly. Remember, this is being designed with portable laptops in mind. The kind of thing they expect you'll do with it is turn on your laptop and browse the web for a bit while waiting on your flight at the airport, or other similar scenarios. For those situations where you have a few minutes of wait time, but you're not sure how much... and you don't want to sit around doing nothing.
That's because of the $15/mo, not because of the MMO status. TES could do that with their next game too. Free single-player (as usual), but if you want to hook up with your friends online it's a monthly fee for the service. Or a per session fee or whatever they think would work. With their games I'd much rather pay for an online service like that than yet another MMO. Not that I don't think their MMO would be good (perhaps even the best) if they made one, it's just that they're the last company making good single-player RPGs for PC.
Oh, please. It's because of people with views like mine that racism's impact has been minimized in merely a generation in the US. Wrong. The people who had a good impact are the ones who took racism for what it was and dealt with it. Going on a witch hunt looking for racism in places like a Mario game is something entirely different from dealing with segregated schools and getting kids to realize they're all pretty much the same and work together.
Or did you conveniently forget that a mere human lifetime ago in the US, nonwhites were considered fourth-class citizens subject to vigilante lynchings and forbidden from using public property? (Irish and Italians were mistreated, as well.) Of course not. And thanks to people like you, we'll be constantly thinking about it, and everyone's going to be racist about it in one way or another, whether they want to or not. Either they'll be annoyed that people are still going on about something that happened decades ago and feel peeved at the particular minority group, or they'll feel like the minority group should get some special treatment for some injustice their ancestors endured in the past. Either way they're still seeing the minority group as something other than just regular humans, which is far more racist than any Mario game. And if these people in minority groups really do care about racism they don't want either response. They'd much rather be just another guy/chick in the neighborhood, chatting with the guy next door or going about their business.
You're trying to be sarcastic, but the irony is that what you said is true. Racism is entirely in the mind. As long as people hold petty perceived differences/inferiorities in their mind between different cultures, it exists. And as long as people keep looking for it, they'll keep thinking about it, and it won't go away. Only when people stop discussing and thinking about it and start thinking about everyone as just another human will it cease to exist. Sure, it'll never happen overnight. But the way things are going now, it's never going to happen at all.
Better for it to be MMO or stay as is I vote neither. I'd rather have a private server multiplayer mode. Something alone the lines of NWN, or perhaps just export your character and import it to a friend's game.
It's largely because of people like you that racism has stuck around as long as it has in many parts of the US.
Yes, there's still areas in the US where racism is a real and legitimate problem. Most places it would long since have faded into oblivion if people weren't constantly on a witch hunt trying to find racism in every little thing.
The only real way to ever get rid of racism is to stare it in the face for what it is, deal with it, and then move on.
If you're going to nitpick on something as unoffensive as Mario and Luigi being "racist" then everything is racist (or at least discriminatory) and offensive in some way. If you look hard enough for it you'll always find it, whether it really exists or not. Every single video game ever made has as much or more racism as any Mario game ever made. End of story.
All true. And I could have predicted it a good 5 years or more ago. I still find the original Unreal Tournament and Quake 2 as fun to play as any FPS since. And WoW, with it's highly-simplistic graphics is far and away the #1 MMO. And almost all the rest of the MMOs have "superior" graphics. Moral of the story is, while pretty graphics are nice, gameplay > graphics. Most gamers are content with the quality of graphics from '99. Perhaps they need to slow down and wait to make games with jaw-dropping graphics until the software tools to make them is efficient enough that it can be done without breaking the bank on development costs.
If this is an excuse to release crappier games, count me out. These things are expensive to make and I'd rather own 3 or 4 good games that have been invested in than 10 games that were just pounded out by some off-shore devs. Remember, this is EA we're talking about. I'd rather pay $10 for a crappy game than $50.
Slashdot Mirror
And of course the irony of the whole deal is that the simple fact that people even want to do a class-action suit means MS has already lost. Whether the suit gets thrown out or not is relatively moot. Even if it goes through and MS loses, the cost of the suit (even including legal fees) will be a pittance compared to lost revenue from customers jumping ship.
Not so ridiculous. The customers are still paying for a service they're not getting. Yes, this includes even the silver members, who aren't paying extra for premium access. The use of basic XBL is part of the purchase price of an XBox. Companies can get in a lot of trouble for false advertising, even if they have no legal contractual obligations to fulfill their end of the bargain. It's been proven time and time again that disclaimers only mean so much. If you're selling a service to millions of customers, you damn well better be able to provide - or prepare to reap the consequences. If this were Blizzard in this situation over a 4-week global WoW outage they'd be facing a class-action suit as well. (And no, a generous offer of 50 *free* health potions would not be sufficient reparation.)
And I'm sure XBL has had those types of people since day 1 as well. That's not what this discussion is about.
What makes you think the majority of the people who use XBox Live care about whether or not MS is legally obligated to keep the service operational? This is exactly the kind of issue that's liable to make a huge number of people start voting with their dollars and looking another direction for their video game entertainment. You really think anywhere close to the majority of the people affected by this are going to care jack shit about the "free game", and how it's a "good value" considering the cost of Live Gold? If so, you're a bigger fool than most of the people on /. People just don't think like that. People think in terms of "I'm entitled to this service because I bought their product, and if it's unavailable to me for what I consider an excessively long time there's gonna be hell to pay." These few weeks of service outage will do far more to destroy their console marketshare than anyone or anything else could have ever hoped to accomplish. I guarantee you they've already lost quite a few customers for good, and if it goes on much longer they're going to be bleeding marketshare like there's no tomorrow. It's far to early to tell yet, but there's a good possibility this might just be the beginning of the end of XBox.
Agreed, mostly. I strongly dislike the idea of having all my online games require any single online service (which unfortunately is pretty much unavoidable with ISPs...) but with this recent development, MS is showing they deserve this kind of trust even less than most similar providers. What is truly unfortunate for Microsoft is that Blizzard has already shown us that this size of customer base can be provided for successfully (and MS's influx of new customers this round was nothing compared to the hammering Blizzard got when they released their expansion) which leaves MS with very little excuse. Not to say Blizzard has done everything perfectly, or even close to it. But they've never had outages lasting more than a few hours.
Offering customers a *free* game that can only be obtained (not to mention used) through the non-functioning service is worse than a slap in the face. It's closer to a kick in the 'nads when you're already on the ground. MS really should have known better.
Maybe now people will see why having all your online PC games tied to a MS Live service is a terrible idea.
Just one small problem with that hypothesis. This is not the first Christmas since XBL was started. Not even close. I haven't seen any numbers, but I'd guess the number of new subscribers for during this time period was far lower than it has been in the past for similar time periods.
I would say the most plausible explanation is simply that MS fucked something up in the recent update. The good news about that is, if it's something they fucked up they can also fix it.
Given that the average adventure takes about 10 to 30 seconds, and you can stop at any time between adventures without losing anything whatsoever.. I'd have to say yes. The only real exception to this rule is if you're farming ultra-rares. And you and I both know that's nothing essential to enjoying the game. The game is as casual or hardcore as you make it. I'd say it fits the casual category better than most quick free games.
If you're hinting that the game is so addictive it's hard to stop when you need to, well that can easily be true of any game worth playing. That's the problem of the player, not the game.
Of course no list like this is complete without a mention of
Kingdom of Loathing
An Adventurer is You!
He's not an expert. You, on the other hand, are about as far from an expert on the subject as a person could possibly get. Burning calories is, in most cases, not even close to linear. Unless of course your "activity" involves so little energy output that you could do it all day. Do you have any idea how much energy your body expends just to keep itself cooled down as you go beyond those 15-minute sessions? Didn't think so.
You're absolutely correct. And the article is correct, due to the fact that their small 2% increase was because they were basically playing the Wii like you'd play any video game on any console. The only difference was, instead of pressing a button they flick their wrist. Of course you're not going to get much additional exercise from that. But if you play the Wii like it was *meant* to be played, you're going to get a whole hell of a lot more than a 2% increase. Probably closer to a 20,000% increase. It's all in how you use it. And I for one think using a Wii to exercise is a hell of a lot more fun and interesting than a treadmill.
Oh yeah, the Wii is more useful for exercise than TFA is for any purpose. That's all.
Wow, lack of reading comprehension FTL.
First, we're talking about racism as it currently exists in the US, not Nazi Germany in WW2. I don't see very many nazis over here beating up immigrants these days.
Second, yes racism is all in the mind. Why were the Nazis trying to eradicate all Jews, and perhaps go for world domination? Because in their minds, they were a superior race. Of course, as we all know it wasn't the truth - it was merely in their minds. Yes, it resulted in some extremely brutal actions, but it doesn't change what racism is. Nowhere did I say, nor imply, nor hint that the results of racism are only in the mind. Only that racism itself is.
Another thing they don't even mention is that if you're going from a typical system from 3 years ago to one using the parts they priced, you're going to have to upgrade your power supply to. Unless of course you went way extreme and bought a honkin' big 500watt model back then, in which case you *might* be ok, but that won't be the case for most people. So unless you want to skimp and buy a cheapo PSU that may or may not last you a year, you'll be shelling out over $50 for that too. Keep adding in small things like that, and you're not spending $500 - you're spending $750.
Long story short, for me when I look at the difference in graphics card performance between $100 and $250, I just see so many other upgrades I'd rather have for that $150. IMO the $250 8800 is a midrange card belonging in a $1000 system, not a budget card.
Actually, he would find that the $500 is a lot less than what other people spend on hobbies. That $500 upgrade should last you at least a good 18 months. People spend that much on beer or cigs in 6 months, and most hobbies cost more than that.
First, you really can't buy a board for much less than the $80 and expect it to work well. They all come with tons of features these days - you just have to decide which you want. Going cheaper nowadays doesn't mean same quality with less features - it means similar features with lower quality.
Second, there's some very good reasons for going with a board that includes onboard video. It gives you the potential to run more than two monitors (which is, I admit, very unlikely) but more important, if/when your main graphics card bites the dirt, you've got your onboard to fall back on while you wait for your replacement to arrive. That means that while you'll go a week without playing Crysis and UT3 at max settings, you'll still be able to do pretty much everything else.
That said, my take on the article is that they spent way too much on the graphics. You can stretch that $500 quite a bit further by going with a much cheaper card that'll still run the newest games just fine at reduced settings. I'd say this would get the job done, and still give you some space in your budget to upgrade your hard drive and something else, which could be pretty important in that P4/Athlon XP system from 3 years ago.
Basically what I'm saying is that I want a proper OS, not something that runs one app at a time. I doubt I'm alone in that. Now, give me a decent OS that runs lots of things loaded into an area of Flash memory so it starts up quickly and I'm yours. Then clearly this stuff is not for you. I'd gladly take it, until we get a full-blown OS that loads quickly or instantly. Remember, this is being designed with portable laptops in mind. The kind of thing they expect you'll do with it is turn on your laptop and browse the web for a bit while waiting on your flight at the airport, or other similar scenarios. For those situations where you have a few minutes of wait time, but you're not sure how much... and you don't want to sit around doing nothing.
That's because of the $15/mo, not because of the MMO status. TES could do that with their next game too. Free single-player (as usual), but if you want to hook up with your friends online it's a monthly fee for the service. Or a per session fee or whatever they think would work. With their games I'd much rather pay for an online service like that than yet another MMO. Not that I don't think their MMO would be good (perhaps even the best) if they made one, it's just that they're the last company making good single-player RPGs for PC.
You're trying to be sarcastic, but the irony is that what you said is true. Racism is entirely in the mind. As long as people hold petty perceived differences/inferiorities in their mind between different cultures, it exists. And as long as people keep looking for it, they'll keep thinking about it, and it won't go away. Only when people stop discussing and thinking about it and start thinking about everyone as just another human will it cease to exist. Sure, it'll never happen overnight. But the way things are going now, it's never going to happen at all.
Going full-blown MMO would ruin it IMO.
It's largely because of people like you that racism has stuck around as long as it has in many parts of the US.
Yes, there's still areas in the US where racism is a real and legitimate problem. Most places it would long since have faded into oblivion if people weren't constantly on a witch hunt trying to find racism in every little thing.
The only real way to ever get rid of racism is to stare it in the face for what it is, deal with it, and then move on.
If you're going to nitpick on something as unoffensive as Mario and Luigi being "racist" then everything is racist (or at least discriminatory) and offensive in some way. If you look hard enough for it you'll always find it, whether it really exists or not. Every single video game ever made has as much or more racism as any Mario game ever made. End of story.
All true. And I could have predicted it a good 5 years or more ago. I still find the original Unreal Tournament and Quake 2 as fun to play as any FPS since. And WoW, with it's highly-simplistic graphics is far and away the #1 MMO. And almost all the rest of the MMOs have "superior" graphics. Moral of the story is, while pretty graphics are nice, gameplay > graphics. Most gamers are content with the quality of graphics from '99. Perhaps they need to slow down and wait to make games with jaw-dropping graphics until the software tools to make them is efficient enough that it can be done without breaking the bank on development costs.