I'll join the fray attempting to boil this down to its essence, and probably failing somewhere along the way.
For me, this has nothing to do with legal/moral/ethical arguments. I'm not saying I don't have my opinions on all of those fronts, but what it boils down to for me is control. I'm utterly sick of being forced to enjoy my media on someone else's terms. I stopped watching broadcast TV years ago because I worked nights. The absence of having to plan my time around when the station decided to air my show and the absence of commercials didn't seem so profound to me until I started working days again and tried to watch broadcast TV again. Yeah, I know about DVR's, but I don't use them because of crap like the "broadcast flag". It's just another system of control and I am steering clear.
My advice for the content providers involves far more change than they would even read through, let alone seriously consider, so I'll save it and just say, if you don't like it you can sit and spin.
If I see one more franchise going "MMO" to try to get a bite of the WoW pie, I think I'm going to puke. After playing WoW for five months, grinding to 60 and grinding on "end game" content, I've come to the conclusion that offline games (i.e. games with ENDINGS) are actually a much more rewarding expenditure of time.
Practically every MMO out there is either a glorified chat room, or a grindfest-turned-second-career because it want's to be WoW without being WoW and all it succeeds in doing is becoming one more WoW or EQ clone and even the most ardent fanboys would have a hard time saying otherwise. The guys doing Warhammer Online claim that even WoW was largely a ripoff of DAoC, and popular though it was, DAoC was not a super smash hit like WoW.
There's nothing earth shattering about WoW except being in the right place at the right time. It's moronic to speculate on what the next big thing is because it's as likely to be random dumb luck as anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll join the fray attempting to boil this down to its essence, and probably failing somewhere along the way.
For me, this has nothing to do with legal/moral/ethical arguments. I'm not saying I don't have my opinions on all of those fronts, but what it boils down to for me is control. I'm utterly sick of being forced to enjoy my media on someone else's terms. I stopped watching broadcast TV years ago because I worked nights. The absence of having to plan my time around when the station decided to air my show and the absence of commercials didn't seem so profound to me until I started working days again and tried to watch broadcast TV again. Yeah, I know about DVR's, but I don't use them because of crap like the "broadcast flag". It's just another system of control and I am steering clear.
My advice for the content providers involves far more change than they would even read through, let alone seriously consider, so I'll save it and just say, if you don't like it you can sit and spin.
If I see one more franchise going "MMO" to try to get a bite of the WoW pie, I think I'm going to puke. After playing WoW for five months, grinding to 60 and grinding on "end game" content, I've come to the conclusion that offline games (i.e. games with ENDINGS) are actually a much more rewarding expenditure of time.
Practically every MMO out there is either a glorified chat room, or a grindfest-turned-second-career because it want's to be WoW without being WoW and all it succeeds in doing is becoming one more WoW or EQ clone and even the most ardent fanboys would have a hard time saying otherwise. The guys doing Warhammer Online claim that even WoW was largely a ripoff of DAoC, and popular though it was, DAoC was not a super smash hit like WoW.
There's nothing earth shattering about WoW except being in the right place at the right time. It's moronic to speculate on what the next big thing is because it's as likely to be random dumb luck as anything else.
Did you see how happy those nerds were? Here they were waiting to get bored out of their skulls with piles of the technical jargon of how to upgrade to MS DOS 5 (It's a HIT and no PC should be without IT!©®*) and instead they were treated to a multi-media presentation complete with a nerd-core soundtrack that straight up rocked the hizzie. *Warning, "it" and all associated words are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation, may not be reproduced or read without prior written authorization. If you feel that you have become a victim of "it" piracy, please contact Microsoft Corporation via http://www.microsoft.com/piracy. Before submitting your blood test, please be aware that Microsoft has identified 238 patent violations in the human genome, although we do not intend legal action at this time.