It's easy to make a list of the download services everyone already knows are good. I think it would be doubly informative if a list of download services to avoid were listed as well.
For example, despite being a massive game company, EA's download manager is the biggest, broken piece of crap out there. You're lucky if you can get the download manager to install without problems. Even luckier if you can get the game to download and install without problems. You're forced to PAY to redownload any games you've had to reinstall. And, my favourite is EA's choice to implement regional pricing which allows EA to charge the most money the market will allow in that region despite what it's selling for everywhere else.
A couple years ago a wiki page was created about a friend of mine who ran a website, in addition to a wiki page about the website itself. It appeared to have been made by some fan who never made themselves known.
It wasn't long of course before these deletion-happy admins nominated it for speedy deletion. The decision was proving to be unanimous. And, I for one didn't blame them. A wiki page for an administrator of a website seemed rather silly.
My friend agreed. He didn't feel that he really should be on the site and decided to go to the deletion page and weigh in on the issue. He told the wiki admins who he was and that he wanted the page deleted thinking this would solidify the consensus that had for the most part already been reached. I think the quote was something along the lines of "I don't want to be on your gay-ass site, so I'd appreciate it if you just hurried up and deleted it before I leave you all with a fist-sized, mushroom-shaped bruise on all of your faces."
Not surprisingly, all of the admins had a change of heart and all decided they wanted to keep the page.
Team Fortress 2, to me has the ideal system. Acheivements AND rewards where the rewards don't unbalance game play.
For example, the first achievement for the Pyro class, a flare gun, replaces one of your existing weapons, a shotgun. It is by no means better than the shotgun, as it contains several drawbacks. It just provides a different style of play while keeping the whole thing balanced. It keeps things interesting for older players who decide to play with the new weapons and those who play in matches against them and have to adjust their strategies.
EA feels as if pirating is harming their bottom line so introduce a fairly harsh DRM to the game.
People pirate it anyways and increasing numbers of people download it BECAUSE of the DRM. Additionally, increasing numbers of people just don't play the game at all for the same reason.
EA notices how many people have been illegally downloading the game and combined with their lackluster sales they validate their decision to include such a harsh DRM.
In my opinion, they tried to be too many things and while they did anywhere from a fair to pretty good job at all those things, not one of them was anything spectacular.
Attempting to stitch together a deep story with an 'arcade'-like style of gameplay was a mistake from day one.
The USDA's job has, and always will be to protect the interests of the largest agriculture companies.
Sometimes that means doing a few BSE tests to convince the population their beef is safe. Sometimes it's running small meat processors out of business by flat out refusing to have the USDA send inspectors out to the plant (Operating without one would be illegal). Not too long ago they engaged in a campaign of banning all Canadian Beef after a single case of mad cow was discovered in an animal that never entered the food chain. They still claimed Canadian beef was unsafe even after multiple unrelated cases of BSE had shown up inside the US.
Big-Agriculture benefits from the minimum amount of testing and the USDA will ensure that it stays that way. Giving smaller processors the freedom to test more and that would put the big guys at a disadvantage.
Gamers have the right to play a game without sitting through 20 minutes of intro screens, displaying the animated logos of video card and sound card manufacturers, the logos of any company that the development team borrowed the engine from as well as the logos of the the team that the development team played in company softball, Lupe's Office Cleaning Service, Redbull, and a logo that the intro designer thought 'just looked cool' and really had nothing to do with the game.
1) The software developers profit by having hoards of students familiar with their software. This of course is going to make it much more likely the student is going to purchase the software on their home computers at some point.
2) (This one applies mostly to College level) The industry benefits from students who are trained on their software before they enter the workforce. When the software developers don't provide the discount, businesses often do. For my course, we had a lab full of a particular CAD program (the newest version with all the bells and whistles) that runs at around $13,000 a copy. The collge got it for free.
This situation isn't helped by the media who will aggressively report such a story for a few days until it burns itself out and then fail to report on the innocent verdict several weeks or months later.
In the eyes of the public, the accused often remains guilty.
The sad truth is that this kids will still be put through the same intensive training at age 14 (and likely much younger), whether they compete or not. The ban doesn't change that.
I used to buy PC games all the time, however as technology improved, so did the requirements for the games I wanted to play. It started becoming a hassle to make a game work on my PC, even if it met all the requirements. Despite that, I still continued to buy games because the store I bought them from had no issues with accepting a game that you couldn't get working on your system.
Of course, times change. Pretty much all stores since then have stopped allowing the return of games, for ANY reason. When that started happening, I stopped buying games.
Even if my computer met all the requirements, there was still a decent chance I wouldn't be able to get it to run, or run with decent performance. I wasn't going to spend $60 on something I wouldn't be able to use. It has happened to me before. I used to have games packed away in my closet waiting for the day I got a new computer or got an upgrade.
At first, I'd use the demos as a way of checking if the game would run on my computer or not. Pick up a copy of PC Gamer or other gaming magazine. But then slowly the price of the magazines kept going up and the content of the demo discs kept going down. In addition to that, fewer demos were released.
It got to the point where the developers/retailers/publishers made it damn near impossible for me to buy the game without gambling the little money I had.
Sadly, little has changed. I have a brand new computer that even makes little revving sounds when I turn it on, but I still find myself struggling to get certain games or applications to work as they should. I'll spend hours trying to find patches for my video card, sound card, and OS. Things I really shouldn't be doing when I #1) Meet all the requirements. #2) Destroy all the requirements.
Secondly, demos are rarely released and when they are, they are of such huge file sizes that you might as well be downloading the entire damn game to begin with. Why spend hours or days trying to download something on fileplanet when you can download the entire thing in half the time on bittorrent? It doesn't help that these file hosting sites try to convince you to buy premium memberships by purposely throttling the speed of the download.
Everytime I bring my reusable bags to the store, one of two things usually happens.
1) The cashier puts the items in the plastic bags anyways, then puts the plastic bag in the reusable one.
2) The cashier refrains from putting the groceries in a plastic bag, but also ignores the reusable ones, leaving me to bag the groceries myself. (This is a store that normally bags the groceries for you)
If a store is going to sell and promote reusable bags, they need to stop giving those who use them inferior service, IMHO.
And for the record, by far the most environmentally friendly method of transporting your groceries home is the use of leftover corrugated boxes that the product was shipped in.
Here in Canada there is another option: Virgin Mobile. No connection fees, call waiting fees, etc. And certainly no fees for incoming text messages. But wait, doesn't Virgin Mobile rent space on Bell's network?
Oh yeah, that's right. Bell owns 50% of Virgin Mobile Canada and as part of the deal Virgin pays Bell the cost of using their system (plus a bit extra) and of course profits from being a 50% owner.
So what do they charge Virgin Mobile for each text message sent over their network?
About 1/10th of a penny.
So suffice to say, I don't buy it when Bell and Telus claim that the 15 cents is to cover the costs of receiving that text message.
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It's easy to make a list of the download services everyone already knows are good. I think it would be doubly informative if a list of download services to avoid were listed as well.
For example, despite being a massive game company, EA's download manager is the biggest, broken piece of crap out there. You're lucky if you can get the download manager to install without problems. Even luckier if you can get the game to download and install without problems. You're forced to PAY to redownload any games you've had to reinstall. And, my favourite is EA's choice to implement regional pricing which allows EA to charge the most money the market will allow in that region despite what it's selling for everywhere else.
A couple years ago a wiki page was created about a friend of mine who ran a website, in addition to a wiki page about the website itself. It appeared to have been made by some fan who never made themselves known.
It wasn't long of course before these deletion-happy admins nominated it for speedy deletion. The decision was proving to be unanimous. And, I for one didn't blame them. A wiki page for an administrator of a website seemed rather silly.
My friend agreed. He didn't feel that he really should be on the site and decided to go to the deletion page and weigh in on the issue. He told the wiki admins who he was and that he wanted the page deleted thinking this would solidify the consensus that had for the most part already been reached. I think the quote was something along the lines of "I don't want to be on your gay-ass site, so I'd appreciate it if you just hurried up and deleted it before I leave you all with a fist-sized, mushroom-shaped bruise on all of your faces."
Not surprisingly, all of the admins had a change of heart and all decided they wanted to keep the page.
Team Fortress 2, to me has the ideal system. Acheivements AND rewards where the rewards don't unbalance game play.
For example, the first achievement for the Pyro class, a flare gun, replaces one of your existing weapons, a shotgun. It is by no means better than the shotgun, as it contains several drawbacks. It just provides a different style of play while keeping the whole thing balanced. It keeps things interesting for older players who decide to play with the new weapons and those who play in matches against them and have to adjust their strategies.
The unlocked weapons,
EA feels as if pirating is harming their bottom line so introduce a fairly harsh DRM to the game.
People pirate it anyways and increasing numbers of people download it BECAUSE of the DRM. Additionally, increasing numbers of people just don't play the game at all for the same reason.
EA notices how many people have been illegally downloading the game and combined with their lackluster sales they validate their decision to include such a harsh DRM.
Repeat with increasingly worse DRMs.
In my opinion, they tried to be too many things and while they did anywhere from a fair to pretty good job at all those things, not one of them was anything spectacular.
Attempting to stitch together a deep story with an 'arcade'-like style of gameplay was a mistake from day one.
The USDA's job has, and always will be to protect the interests of the largest agriculture companies.
Sometimes that means doing a few BSE tests to convince the population their beef is safe. Sometimes it's running small meat processors out of business by flat out refusing to have the USDA send inspectors out to the plant (Operating without one would be illegal). Not too long ago they engaged in a campaign of banning all Canadian Beef after a single case of mad cow was discovered in an animal that never entered the food chain. They still claimed Canadian beef was unsafe even after multiple unrelated cases of BSE had shown up inside the US.
Big-Agriculture benefits from the minimum amount of testing and the USDA will ensure that it stays that way. Giving smaller processors the freedom to test more and that would put the big guys at a disadvantage.
Gamers have the right to play a game without sitting through 20 minutes of intro screens, displaying the animated logos of video card and sound card manufacturers, the logos of any company that the development team borrowed the engine from as well as the logos of the the team that the development team played in company softball, Lupe's Office Cleaning Service, Redbull, and a logo that the intro designer thought 'just looked cool' and really had nothing to do with the game.
There are two reasons why they get discounts.
1) The software developers profit by having hoards of students familiar with their software. This of course is going to make it much more likely the student is going to purchase the software on their home computers at some point.
2) (This one applies mostly to College level) The industry benefits from students who are trained on their software before they enter the workforce. When the software developers don't provide the discount, businesses often do. For my course, we had a lab full of a particular CAD program (the newest version with all the bells and whistles) that runs at around $13,000 a copy. The collge got it for free.
This situation isn't helped by the media who will aggressively report such a story for a few days until it burns itself out and then fail to report on the innocent verdict several weeks or months later. In the eyes of the public, the accused often remains guilty.
The sad truth is that this kids will still be put through the same intensive training at age 14 (and likely much younger), whether they compete or not. The ban doesn't change that.
I used to buy PC games all the time, however as technology improved, so did the requirements for the games I wanted to play. It started becoming a hassle to make a game work on my PC, even if it met all the requirements. Despite that, I still continued to buy games because the store I bought them from had no issues with accepting a game that you couldn't get working on your system.
Of course, times change. Pretty much all stores since then have stopped allowing the return of games, for ANY reason. When that started happening, I stopped buying games.
Even if my computer met all the requirements, there was still a decent chance I wouldn't be able to get it to run, or run with decent performance. I wasn't going to spend $60 on something I wouldn't be able to use. It has happened to me before. I used to have games packed away in my closet waiting for the day I got a new computer or got an upgrade.
At first, I'd use the demos as a way of checking if the game would run on my computer or not. Pick up a copy of PC Gamer or other gaming magazine. But then slowly the price of the magazines kept going up and the content of the demo discs kept going down. In addition to that, fewer demos were released.
It got to the point where the developers/retailers/publishers made it damn near impossible for me to buy the game without gambling the little money I had.
Sadly, little has changed. I have a brand new computer that even makes little revving sounds when I turn it on, but I still find myself struggling to get certain games or applications to work as they should. I'll spend hours trying to find patches for my video card, sound card, and OS. Things I really shouldn't be doing when I #1) Meet all the requirements. #2) Destroy all the requirements.
Secondly, demos are rarely released and when they are, they are of such huge file sizes that you might as well be downloading the entire damn game to begin with. Why spend hours or days trying to download something on fileplanet when you can download the entire thing in half the time on bittorrent? It doesn't help that these file hosting sites try to convince you to buy premium memberships by purposely throttling the speed of the download.
Everytime I bring my reusable bags to the store, one of two things usually happens. 1) The cashier puts the items in the plastic bags anyways, then puts the plastic bag in the reusable one. 2) The cashier refrains from putting the groceries in a plastic bag, but also ignores the reusable ones, leaving me to bag the groceries myself. (This is a store that normally bags the groceries for you) If a store is going to sell and promote reusable bags, they need to stop giving those who use them inferior service, IMHO. And for the record, by far the most environmentally friendly method of transporting your groceries home is the use of leftover corrugated boxes that the product was shipped in.
I always thought it was Bell, but I guess you're right. That explains the massive amount of Koodo advertising I see everywhere.
Here in Canada there is another option: Virgin Mobile. No connection fees, call waiting fees, etc. And certainly no fees for incoming text messages. But wait, doesn't Virgin Mobile rent space on Bell's network?
Oh yeah, that's right. Bell owns 50% of Virgin Mobile Canada and as part of the deal Virgin pays Bell the cost of using their system (plus a bit extra) and of course profits from being a 50% owner.
So what do they charge Virgin Mobile for each text message sent over their network?
About 1/10th of a penny.
So suffice to say, I don't buy it when Bell and Telus claim that the 15 cents is to cover the costs of receiving that text message.