I'm not sure we're reading the same paragraphs. To summarize your comment:
A federal agency established for a specific purpose over the course of 70+ years has out lived that initial purpose. It's mission has now broadend to encompases other utilities, which could theoretically keep it busy indefinitely. The primary services it provides is engineering and planning utilities projects as well as working with financial institutions specializing in funding these type of projects.
I can see how one might argue that they might be over staffed or hopelessly incompetent at their job as an agency. But I'm not sure why you would think its not filling a needed role. Municipalities are frequently expanding, as they grow so to does their utility infrastructure. Having a Federal agency to assist in the various stages of that growth strikes me as a very good idea and worthy use of my tax dollars.
That is certainly the case for me. I picked my current job specifically because it came with regular pay increases that weren't well below the rate of inflation. It also helped that the benefits were good, like real vacation and sick leave, retirement possibilities, 401k matching, And the kicker to my situation is that even with all of that I am a cheaper employee now than when I was a contractor for the same employer.
Personally I've got polarized sunglasses that help enourmously with this issue. But I have wondered why car makers, especially luxury brands, haven't added a polarized coating to the insides of their windscreens.
I grew up in a family with six kids, so trips of longer than ten minutes were likely to drive my Father crazy from all the noise. So my Mother would frequently read to us. I don't remember what books she read for the most part anymore. But I remeber really loving that she did that for us. I can still remember us begging her to read even though the light was bad because we just couldn't live with the some cliff hanger.
The one series that I do remember is The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander.
A number of those things were added a long time after the founding of the country. And the end bits of those Oaths likely crept in over time as it was commonly how people ended an oath. There are definitely large groups of people in the USA who would like to think of the nation as a "christian" nation. And I suppose by virtue of being largely christian it is. But by the leter of the law there is no officially endorsed religion.
From my reading of Wikipedia the USA could have likely produced a couple implosion style nuclear devices a month in short order. The implosion design only needed 6.2 kg of plutonium while the little boy design required more than 60 kg of enriched uranium. While plutonium was being produced more slowly the fact you needed one tenth as much material more than made up for it.
The main holdup on using implosion devices was that they required using explosive lenses, which were a bleeding edge field at the time.
If copyright really does fade out as an effective way for artists to leverage their talents for income I doubt it will kill the art culture. We would probably see a lot less people in it strictly for the money as a get rich quick scheme.
I have an uncle that for decades has made his living traveling the country performing folk music. He makes a very modest living but he loves it and that love is apparent in his music. He's a great showman and people are willing to pay for that.
As others have pointed out music as a commodity is a relatively recent invention. Arguably it is not a great boon to society at large when it becomes marketed as a commodity and live performances become a rarity. Thus far it has produced relatively few succesful musicians while creating a whole industry that leeches of the masses.
When the parent was talking about it only taking four years to build the first time around I think he was talking about the USA's Manhattan Project during world war II. Which produced a Nuke in around four years. Admittedly the US then probably had more resources to pump into the project than Iran does today, and there were some incredible geniuses on board. But much of the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb is now available to the public and has been for decades. And as backwards as many of us think Iran is they no doubt have their own smart people and it is suprising that they don't have a working bomb yet.
It could be that they do or have the ability to manufacture crude nuclear bombs but are trying for something more complex or powerful to showcase.
The AC didn't refute any of the bits about it possibly being a user security issue. He just rightly pointed out that it's impossible to rule out a problem regarding account security at Blizzard. Just look at the password rules they have, namely no case sensitivity, how is that not a glaring and ludicrously simple issue to fix that's been going on for years?
And like the AC pointed out people will do stupidly illogical things, both blizzard customers and employees. Who's to say that some employee isn't on the take and providing account names and password hashes for the thrill of it and a little pocket change? Where I work we have all kinds of security restrictions and access controls in place and it's touted as a very secure place. In reality though, like every other secure facility, it's one insider away from disaster. And that insider doesn't need to have a reason for doing it that makes sense to the rest of us. The Lego selling CEO isn't even an anomally, just look at most of the national spy cases over the decades, many of those guys while doing it for the money did it for very little. I mean seriously, they gambled the rest of their lives for a payout that didn't even let them immediately retire to some sandy beach in the tropics.
On the subject of getting hacked, I only once have thought my account might have been compromised. And even that might have been a server issue or something. I kept getting kicked offline within a minute or less of getting back into the game world. After three or four rounds of that I changed my account password using the website and the issue immediately stopped.
The only version of Diablo 2 where item duping was a problem was the closed battlenet server games. And even there you didn't need duped items to trivialize the entire game. Some character builds certainly weren't very viable without specific super rare equipment, but that didn't invalidate everything else people were playing. And unless you were PvP'ing it didn't really matter at all what other people were doing. Again the only stuff that was being duped was a few very specific unique items, Stone of Jordan comes to mind, high demand items with perfect stat rolls, and highrunes. Everyone basically knew that if you were trading for a high rune there was a 95% or better chance it'd be a dupe.
If you wanted to build a character that could face roll the highest levels of the game you rolled a Sorc that you spec'd for either Blizard/Meteor or Frozen Orb/Meteor. A sorc in crap gear could quickly and easily farm the gear to make a Frenzy/Battle Orders/War Cry Barbarian that couldn't help but faceroll the game at all stages with relatively junk gear, no high runes or perfect roll items needed.
Diablo 3 seems to be heading much the same way, even without duping. Items are super cheap unless it has nearly perfect stats, in which case it'll cost hundreds of thousands if not millions. I've previously spent as much as 100K on single upgrades for my Barbarian. But when I hit Hell on him I was broke from finishing out my bank spaces. I spent just 42K on 5 different items and nearly doubled his damage, kicked HP up by 30% and damage mitigation by 4%.
I do not disagree with you in general but you are incorrect about the ways in which Diablo 2 characters could be played. The game options were as follows:
1. Single Player, entirely on the client.
2. LAN - Multiplayer, one game client did all the thinking for the others acting as the server, locally stored characters from your Single Player campaign could be used.
3. "Open" Bagglenet, same as #2 but game was hosted on Blizzard servers.
4. "Closed" Battlenet, games and characters all hosted on Blizzard servers.
5. Ladder Battlenet, games and characters all hosted on Blizzard servers with a running list of highest level characters.
Options 4 and 5 both came with extra perks in the form of special runewords, loot drops, and areas only available by playing on the Blizzard servers. Modders did come up with mods to enable these features on non-battlenet games though. Occassionally the Ladder servers would be reset and all the characters there would be pushed out to the "Closed" Battlenet servers. The perks of course were meant as a carrot of couse, to get people to sign in and hence validate their copy of the game.
Actually we already have Socialism so far as our schools are concerned. It just stops after High School for the most part. Which is a shame really. I had very little ambition so far as college was concerned, I could have afforded it but didn't want to put in the time and effort. Where as I have a number of friends who had to choose between working to survive or attending college.
I would very much support a system that provided the opportunity to attend college to any and all that were interested. I'm mildly surprised that no State Colleges have moved into online education yet.
That could be the private online schools working to keep them out though, as those online schools cost roughly three times what a regular campus college does. Obviously online classes don't work for every subject, but they could still be used to knock out a large percentage of the required courses.
$110 a month saved over a couple years could go a significant ways to paying for tuition at a community college or trade school. Although it's unlikely that you could cut the phone bill entirely. And the cost of college has been sky rocketing the last decade or so.
I wouldn't say that $110 a month is going to make someone rich. But it could indicate over spending in other areas. If all of that over spending was trimmed back a little it could make for some significant savings that could be used elsewhere to the individuals benefit.
I'm definitely not intending to cast stones here though. I've got a good job and living pretty comfortably. But I've been within a couple credits of earning an Associates degree for five or six years now and have just been too lazy to do it. People are poor for any number of reasons, some of which they can or could of helped and others they can't. Generalizing them, or any other large group of people is bound to be wrong and unjust.
Paying all your bills with mailed checks every month isn't really that much better and is probably prone to even more error. The money still has to be drawn against your bank, who's records are still all electronic and hence vulnerable. You have to count on your check being delivered, and on time. Someone at the recieving end has to not screw up the process of posting your check against your account balance with them and depositing it at the bank. The bank then still has to not screw up the handling of the paper check and posting it to your account.
The one single advantage you point out is the receipt from the bank acknowledging your deposit and possibly balance at some specific point in time. Which really means squat because anything could have happened after that receipt was issued. That is if you can even prove that the receipt is authentic and not a forgery.
I'm not in the 1% by a long shot, I think I'm in the 15% or maybe 14% bracket. But I have enough cash balances to cover close to a years worth of spending at current levels. I understand that many people don't have that much of a buffer, if they have one at all. But that's actually an advantage of the new systems since you can get near realtime account balances. The old method, balancing a check book, is good but which do you seriously think is more prone to error?
"and that Amazon was using their clout to get themselves a better deal at the expense of writers and publishers."
If I am remembering from the last time this came up Amazon was actually the one taking a lose on the books they were underpricing. They were using some ebooks as loss leaders in order to promote sales of the Kindle and draw in more customers. The only "loss" that the publishers and authors could possibly claim would be in percieved value of their product.
Brick and Mortar stores do this kind of thing every year on the first business day after Thanksgiving.
Of course not, but that isn't what is being proposed here. This is a candidate for elected office actually taking whatever position on an issue the people he represents dictate. The method used for polling is of debatable merit. But who would honestly complain about having a representative actually represent them?
The merit of such a system in my view is that it would help alleviate the absurdity of a two party system.
Well that and it'd be a nice way to grief someone. Just have a nasty breakup with a significant other, you might want to get a new phone and number because she might report your current one as stolen.
On top of all that, every dollar that the employee is paid is coming back into the economy through one avenue or the other unless they are stuffing it under their mattress. Although in many illegal immigrant's cases they are sending back home to relatives and so it's not being spent back into our national economy immediately.
I could be completely wrong about the following but I don't see where I could be. Money put into a savings account is better for our economy than buying stock. When you buy stock all you are doing is trading investments with another person. When you deposit a dollar in a bank account the bank will then leverage that dollar and loan it out to multiple people, hence allowing that dollar to be spent many times over.
I bought my Seiko Kinetic in 2005 I think. It's a quartz movement that is powered via a capacitor. The capacitor is charged by a pendulum of some sort. So in 7 years I've never needed to wind it up or replace a battery. That said I believe the capacitor does wear down eventually and the mechanical bits might need cleaning in the near future.
My only complaint with it stems from me picking the titanium case and band. Titanium is a neat metal and very useful but not suited for every purpose, in this case the clasp on the band. Part of the clasp flexed too much and too often and so eventually broke a little more than a year after I purchased it. Every watch place I talked to said I would have to purchase a new band or send it away to be fixed, maybe both. So I found a little shop where for $20 the guy replaced the clasp with a stainless one that has held up great for the last 5+ years.
The Seiko is easily the best watch I've ever purchased and I hope to keep it for decades to come. That said my Father is holding a train watch for me, which has been passed through several generations of my family. It is engraved with the initials of the original owner who's name I share. I look forward to some day passing it on myself.
I believe he's talking about athletic sports, specifically Basketball and Football here in the USA. For many kids this can seem like their only avenue of escape from poverty. Even if they aren't good enough for the pros it might get them a scholarship.
Personally I think a lot of the perceived laziness is attributable to a lack of hope. If you've grown up in poverty and watched your parent(s) struggle just to get by, what kind of chance do you think you've got at doing better? It's not entirely logical but logic rarely matters when it comes to personal perceptions of reality.
I would guess the Economy is actually what you are talking about. The auction house just facilitates the economic actions. And in game economies are a big part of many games. I've been playing Eve for over a month now and the Economy is pretty much the only part of the game I've really enjoyed so far. But I very much doubt that even a majority of players would agree that the Economy, especially in a Diablo game, is the most important aspect.
Diablo 2 has had a thriving economy on and off for more than a decade now. And it managed to support multiple modes of play ranging from offline single player to online only multiplayer. So are we going to call Diablo 2 a MMO now aswell? And why couldn't we have the same play options for Diablo 3 as we had for Diablo 2?
I didn't have a problem with the number of clicks required. I tend to setup my attacks so that the bread and butter is on the right click. So play largely requires holding down the right mouse button full time. This causes the character to move towards the cursor and attack anything that gets in the way with the bread and butter attack. This is the same thing that I did for most character builds in D2.
I was satisfied with it graphically for the most part. I think I prefered the cgi cut scenes in D2 to the game engine stuff in D3, it just feels cruder. Honestly Red vs. Blue comes across better in their Halo episodes.
You are dead on, in my opinion, with the bad class and character progression system though. This really feels like a huge step backwards from what was available in D2. Even once they added the respec tokens in D2 they were uncommon enough that people generally put some thought into how best to build their character.
I think it this was the first game in the series fewer people would be complaing about it. But as it's the third installment and the previous two were able to be played single player and offline they have created an expectation that this one would be also. With Diablo 2 there were roughly four play mode options: True single player, nothing needed but your computer. LAN multiplayer, you could create games with friends over the internet or any network, using characters from singleplayer. Open Battlenet, same as LAN games but blizzard hosts the game for you. Laddered Battlenet, games and characters hosted on blizzards servers.
My memory is a little fuzzy here and I think there might actually have been another battlenet mode where you had characters and games hosted on battlenet servers.
Anyways as you can see there was a lot of choices in Diablo 2 simply in how you wanted to play. Many people never played anything but singleplayer. Most of the obvious cheating you are complaining about was on the open game options. Where since the player has access to the save game files of course it's going to happen. But in the closed game options there was a lot less of that, cheating was limited to boting and duping via networking bugs. And the only case where another player cheating in those ways could actually hurt you was where you had opted in, by either joining/creating a public game or pvp'ing on hardcore.
In diablo 3 they've taken the most heavy handed approach to resolving all of the supposed ills of the previous games. All it'll really do though is slow down the development of bots and dupes, it's not going to stop them, well at least not the bots. In the mean time we get a game with less features than the game preceding it. One of my complaints is that even if the blizzard servers are up 100% of the time my internet connection is not. And justifying the inability of people to play their new game on launch day by saying some other game had a worse problem is not a valid excuse.
Re:Is This Progress vs Tradition?
on
Diablo III Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Except even at it's best it doesn't come close to being an MMO. Games are limited to a player cap of what, 4? That's a Multi-player Online, although not massive in anyway except price and hype.
I had beta access since some time in November. I played it on and off a good bit. I frankly prefered the older skill swapping system although the skill system as a whole leaves a lot to be desired. One of my complaints about Torchlight was that the skills were so limited and 66% of the skill trees were identical between character classes. And now Diablo 3 has come along and taken a page from their book and gone with a dumbed down skill system.
And they completely nuked the idea of having individualized characters. With skill swaping the way it is everyone is practically speaking identical. That would be great if this were a Team Fortress style game, but it's in the Diablo franchise, character building was a large part of the fun.
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I'm not sure we're reading the same paragraphs. To summarize your comment:
A federal agency established for a specific purpose over the course of 70+ years has out lived that initial purpose. It's mission has now broadend to encompases other utilities, which could theoretically keep it busy indefinitely. The primary services it provides is engineering and planning utilities projects as well as working with financial institutions specializing in funding these type of projects.
I can see how one might argue that they might be over staffed or hopelessly incompetent at their job as an agency. But I'm not sure why you would think its not filling a needed role. Municipalities are frequently expanding, as they grow so to does their utility infrastructure. Having a Federal agency to assist in the various stages of that growth strikes me as a very good idea and worthy use of my tax dollars.
That is certainly the case for me. I picked my current job specifically because it came with regular pay increases that weren't well below the rate of inflation. It also helped that the benefits were good, like real vacation and sick leave, retirement possibilities, 401k matching, And the kicker to my situation is that even with all of that I am a cheaper employee now than when I was a contractor for the same employer.
Personally I've got polarized sunglasses that help enourmously with this issue. But I have wondered why car makers, especially luxury brands, haven't added a polarized coating to the insides of their windscreens.
I grew up in a family with six kids, so trips of longer than ten minutes were likely to drive my Father crazy from all the noise. So my Mother would frequently read to us. I don't remember what books she read for the most part anymore. But I remeber really loving that she did that for us. I can still remember us begging her to read even though the light was bad because we just couldn't live with the some cliff hanger.
The one series that I do remember is The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander.
A number of those things were added a long time after the founding of the country. And the end bits of those Oaths likely crept in over time as it was commonly how people ended an oath. There are definitely large groups of people in the USA who would like to think of the nation as a "christian" nation. And I suppose by virtue of being largely christian it is. But by the leter of the law there is no officially endorsed religion.
From my reading of Wikipedia the USA could have likely produced a couple implosion style nuclear devices a month in short order. The implosion design only needed 6.2 kg of plutonium while the little boy design required more than 60 kg of enriched uranium. While plutonium was being produced more slowly the fact you needed one tenth as much material more than made up for it.
The main holdup on using implosion devices was that they required using explosive lenses, which were a bleeding edge field at the time.
If copyright really does fade out as an effective way for artists to leverage their talents for income I doubt it will kill the art culture. We would probably see a lot less people in it strictly for the money as a get rich quick scheme.
I have an uncle that for decades has made his living traveling the country performing folk music. He makes a very modest living but he loves it and that love is apparent in his music. He's a great showman and people are willing to pay for that.
As others have pointed out music as a commodity is a relatively recent invention. Arguably it is not a great boon to society at large when it becomes marketed as a commodity and live performances become a rarity. Thus far it has produced relatively few succesful musicians while creating a whole industry that leeches of the masses.
When the parent was talking about it only taking four years to build the first time around I think he was talking about the USA's Manhattan Project during world war II. Which produced a Nuke in around four years. Admittedly the US then probably had more resources to pump into the project than Iran does today, and there were some incredible geniuses on board. But much of the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb is now available to the public and has been for decades. And as backwards as many of us think Iran is they no doubt have their own smart people and it is suprising that they don't have a working bomb yet.
It could be that they do or have the ability to manufacture crude nuclear bombs but are trying for something more complex or powerful to showcase.
The AC didn't refute any of the bits about it possibly being a user security issue. He just rightly pointed out that it's impossible to rule out a problem regarding account security at Blizzard. Just look at the password rules they have, namely no case sensitivity, how is that not a glaring and ludicrously simple issue to fix that's been going on for years?
And like the AC pointed out people will do stupidly illogical things, both blizzard customers and employees. Who's to say that some employee isn't on the take and providing account names and password hashes for the thrill of it and a little pocket change? Where I work we have all kinds of security restrictions and access controls in place and it's touted as a very secure place. In reality though, like every other secure facility, it's one insider away from disaster. And that insider doesn't need to have a reason for doing it that makes sense to the rest of us. The Lego selling CEO isn't even an anomally, just look at most of the national spy cases over the decades, many of those guys while doing it for the money did it for very little. I mean seriously, they gambled the rest of their lives for a payout that didn't even let them immediately retire to some sandy beach in the tropics.
On the subject of getting hacked, I only once have thought my account might have been compromised. And even that might have been a server issue or something. I kept getting kicked offline within a minute or less of getting back into the game world. After three or four rounds of that I changed my account password using the website and the issue immediately stopped.
The only version of Diablo 2 where item duping was a problem was the closed battlenet server games. And even there you didn't need duped items to trivialize the entire game. Some character builds certainly weren't very viable without specific super rare equipment, but that didn't invalidate everything else people were playing. And unless you were PvP'ing it didn't really matter at all what other people were doing. Again the only stuff that was being duped was a few very specific unique items, Stone of Jordan comes to mind, high demand items with perfect stat rolls, and highrunes. Everyone basically knew that if you were trading for a high rune there was a 95% or better chance it'd be a dupe.
If you wanted to build a character that could face roll the highest levels of the game you rolled a Sorc that you spec'd for either Blizard/Meteor or Frozen Orb/Meteor. A sorc in crap gear could quickly and easily farm the gear to make a Frenzy/Battle Orders/War Cry Barbarian that couldn't help but faceroll the game at all stages with relatively junk gear, no high runes or perfect roll items needed.
Diablo 3 seems to be heading much the same way, even without duping. Items are super cheap unless it has nearly perfect stats, in which case it'll cost hundreds of thousands if not millions. I've previously spent as much as 100K on single upgrades for my Barbarian. But when I hit Hell on him I was broke from finishing out my bank spaces. I spent just 42K on 5 different items and nearly doubled his damage, kicked HP up by 30% and damage mitigation by 4%.
I do not disagree with you in general but you are incorrect about the ways in which Diablo 2 characters could be played. The game options were as follows:
1. Single Player, entirely on the client.
2. LAN - Multiplayer, one game client did all the thinking for the others acting as the server, locally stored characters from your Single Player campaign could be used.
3. "Open" Bagglenet, same as #2 but game was hosted on Blizzard servers.
4. "Closed" Battlenet, games and characters all hosted on Blizzard servers.
5. Ladder Battlenet, games and characters all hosted on Blizzard servers with a running list of highest level characters.
Options 4 and 5 both came with extra perks in the form of special runewords, loot drops, and areas only available by playing on the Blizzard servers. Modders did come up with mods to enable these features on non-battlenet games though. Occassionally the Ladder servers would be reset and all the characters there would be pushed out to the "Closed" Battlenet servers. The perks of course were meant as a carrot of couse, to get people to sign in and hence validate their copy of the game.
Actually we already have Socialism so far as our schools are concerned. It just stops after High School for the most part. Which is a shame really. I had very little ambition so far as college was concerned, I could have afforded it but didn't want to put in the time and effort. Where as I have a number of friends who had to choose between working to survive or attending college.
I would very much support a system that provided the opportunity to attend college to any and all that were interested. I'm mildly surprised that no State Colleges have moved into online education yet.
That could be the private online schools working to keep them out though, as those online schools cost roughly three times what a regular campus college does. Obviously online classes don't work for every subject, but they could still be used to knock out a large percentage of the required courses.
$110 a month saved over a couple years could go a significant ways to paying for tuition at a community college or trade school. Although it's unlikely that you could cut the phone bill entirely. And the cost of college has been sky rocketing the last decade or so.
I wouldn't say that $110 a month is going to make someone rich. But it could indicate over spending in other areas. If all of that over spending was trimmed back a little it could make for some significant savings that could be used elsewhere to the individuals benefit.
I'm definitely not intending to cast stones here though. I've got a good job and living pretty comfortably. But I've been within a couple credits of earning an Associates degree for five or six years now and have just been too lazy to do it. People are poor for any number of reasons, some of which they can or could of helped and others they can't. Generalizing them, or any other large group of people is bound to be wrong and unjust.
Paying all your bills with mailed checks every month isn't really that much better and is probably prone to even more error. The money still has to be drawn against your bank, who's records are still all electronic and hence vulnerable. You have to count on your check being delivered, and on time. Someone at the recieving end has to not screw up the process of posting your check against your account balance with them and depositing it at the bank. The bank then still has to not screw up the handling of the paper check and posting it to your account.
The one single advantage you point out is the receipt from the bank acknowledging your deposit and possibly balance at some specific point in time. Which really means squat because anything could have happened after that receipt was issued. That is if you can even prove that the receipt is authentic and not a forgery.
I'm not in the 1% by a long shot, I think I'm in the 15% or maybe 14% bracket. But I have enough cash balances to cover close to a years worth of spending at current levels. I understand that many people don't have that much of a buffer, if they have one at all. But that's actually an advantage of the new systems since you can get near realtime account balances. The old method, balancing a check book, is good but which do you seriously think is more prone to error?
"and that Amazon was using their clout to get themselves a better deal at the expense of writers and publishers."
If I am remembering from the last time this came up Amazon was actually the one taking a lose on the books they were underpricing. They were using some ebooks as loss leaders in order to promote sales of the Kindle and draw in more customers. The only "loss" that the publishers and authors could possibly claim would be in percieved value of their product.
Brick and Mortar stores do this kind of thing every year on the first business day after Thanksgiving.
Of course not, but that isn't what is being proposed here. This is a candidate for elected office actually taking whatever position on an issue the people he represents dictate. The method used for polling is of debatable merit. But who would honestly complain about having a representative actually represent them?
The merit of such a system in my view is that it would help alleviate the absurdity of a two party system.
Well that and it'd be a nice way to grief someone. Just have a nasty breakup with a significant other, you might want to get a new phone and number because she might report your current one as stolen.
On top of all that, every dollar that the employee is paid is coming back into the economy through one avenue or the other unless they are stuffing it under their mattress. Although in many illegal immigrant's cases they are sending back home to relatives and so it's not being spent back into our national economy immediately.
I could be completely wrong about the following but I don't see where I could be. Money put into a savings account is better for our economy than buying stock. When you buy stock all you are doing is trading investments with another person. When you deposit a dollar in a bank account the bank will then leverage that dollar and loan it out to multiple people, hence allowing that dollar to be spent many times over.
I bought my Seiko Kinetic in 2005 I think. It's a quartz movement that is powered via a capacitor. The capacitor is charged by a pendulum of some sort. So in 7 years I've never needed to wind it up or replace a battery. That said I believe the capacitor does wear down eventually and the mechanical bits might need cleaning in the near future.
My only complaint with it stems from me picking the titanium case and band. Titanium is a neat metal and very useful but not suited for every purpose, in this case the clasp on the band. Part of the clasp flexed too much and too often and so eventually broke a little more than a year after I purchased it. Every watch place I talked to said I would have to purchase a new band or send it away to be fixed, maybe both. So I found a little shop where for $20 the guy replaced the clasp with a stainless one that has held up great for the last 5+ years.
The Seiko is easily the best watch I've ever purchased and I hope to keep it for decades to come. That said my Father is holding a train watch for me, which has been passed through several generations of my family. It is engraved with the initials of the original owner who's name I share. I look forward to some day passing it on myself.
I believe he's talking about athletic sports, specifically Basketball and Football here in the USA. For many kids this can seem like their only avenue of escape from poverty. Even if they aren't good enough for the pros it might get them a scholarship.
Personally I think a lot of the perceived laziness is attributable to a lack of hope. If you've grown up in poverty and watched your parent(s) struggle just to get by, what kind of chance do you think you've got at doing better? It's not entirely logical but logic rarely matters when it comes to personal perceptions of reality.
I would guess the Economy is actually what you are talking about. The auction house just facilitates the economic actions. And in game economies are a big part of many games. I've been playing Eve for over a month now and the Economy is pretty much the only part of the game I've really enjoyed so far. But I very much doubt that even a majority of players would agree that the Economy, especially in a Diablo game, is the most important aspect.
Diablo 2 has had a thriving economy on and off for more than a decade now. And it managed to support multiple modes of play ranging from offline single player to online only multiplayer. So are we going to call Diablo 2 a MMO now aswell? And why couldn't we have the same play options for Diablo 3 as we had for Diablo 2?
Titan quest also had way more character customization in the skills department than any of the Diablo games.
I didn't have a problem with the number of clicks required. I tend to setup my attacks so that the bread and butter is on the right click. So play largely requires holding down the right mouse button full time. This causes the character to move towards the cursor and attack anything that gets in the way with the bread and butter attack. This is the same thing that I did for most character builds in D2.
I was satisfied with it graphically for the most part. I think I prefered the cgi cut scenes in D2 to the game engine stuff in D3, it just feels cruder. Honestly Red vs. Blue comes across better in their Halo episodes.
You are dead on, in my opinion, with the bad class and character progression system though. This really feels like a huge step backwards from what was available in D2. Even once they added the respec tokens in D2 they were uncommon enough that people generally put some thought into how best to build their character.
I think it this was the first game in the series fewer people would be complaing about it. But as it's the third installment and the previous two were able to be played single player and offline they have created an expectation that this one would be also. With Diablo 2 there were roughly four play mode options:
True single player, nothing needed but your computer.
LAN multiplayer, you could create games with friends over the internet or any network, using characters from singleplayer.
Open Battlenet, same as LAN games but blizzard hosts the game for you.
Laddered Battlenet, games and characters hosted on blizzards servers.
My memory is a little fuzzy here and I think there might actually have been another battlenet mode where you had characters and games hosted on battlenet servers.
Anyways as you can see there was a lot of choices in Diablo 2 simply in how you wanted to play. Many people never played anything but singleplayer. Most of the obvious cheating you are complaining about was on the open game options. Where since the player has access to the save game files of course it's going to happen. But in the closed game options there was a lot less of that, cheating was limited to boting and duping via networking bugs. And the only case where another player cheating in those ways could actually hurt you was where you had opted in, by either joining/creating a public game or pvp'ing on hardcore.
In diablo 3 they've taken the most heavy handed approach to resolving all of the supposed ills of the previous games. All it'll really do though is slow down the development of bots and dupes, it's not going to stop them, well at least not the bots. In the mean time we get a game with less features than the game preceding it. One of my complaints is that even if the blizzard servers are up 100% of the time my internet connection is not. And justifying the inability of people to play their new game on launch day by saying some other game had a worse problem is not a valid excuse.
Except even at it's best it doesn't come close to being an MMO. Games are limited to a player cap of what, 4? That's a Multi-player Online, although not massive in anyway except price and hype.
I had beta access since some time in November. I played it on and off a good bit. I frankly prefered the older skill swapping system although the skill system as a whole leaves a lot to be desired. One of my complaints about Torchlight was that the skills were so limited and 66% of the skill trees were identical between character classes. And now Diablo 3 has come along and taken a page from their book and gone with a dumbed down skill system.
And they completely nuked the idea of having individualized characters. With skill swaping the way it is everyone is practically speaking identical. That would be great if this were a Team Fortress style game, but it's in the Diablo franchise, character building was a large part of the fun.