Portion that are 'alcohol related': 1/3rd, about 10k total
I'm always a little curious when I hear 'alcohol related' without a description of what information was gathered because MADD and others have done such a good job obscuring the number away form anything meaningful. Things they've included in the past:
Accidents caused by a sober driver hitting a driver who had been drinking.
Accidents where one or more passengers were intoxicated even if the driver wasn't
Accidents where beer cans or other alcohol containers were found in the wreckage regardless of circumstances.
I'm not really sure they are all as bad as everyone claims. I used one of the machines in colorado and it printed out all my votes on a piece of paper on the left hand side when i was finished and made me confirm 3 times over that all the information printed on that paper was correct. Seemed fairly straightforward with less worrying about whether a bubble was properly filled in.
His constituency is boulder, colorado. He's running against Kevin Lundberg.
It's not even expected to be close. Even a significant portion of the republicans around here like Polis. Being a college town and hippy/pot town its the liberal counter to the more conservative colorado springs. Hell, if a story broke about him having hentai I'd expect to see some guy down on pearl street holding a sign saying something like "I love polis and hentai"
This might not be the best example considering the various complaints about blizzards TOS making any custom map/game their property. That and the actual ability to find custom games has been pretty terrible (thus the update to arcade scheduled to come out tomorrow).
Sorry to double post, but I can't edit it 3 seconds after posted. The actual tweet the kid used was "Fuck is one of the fucking words you can fucking put anywhere in a fucking sentence and still fucking makes sense." Not used in a famous book, but if you can be expelled for that I would imagine you could be expelled for discussion of various pieces of literature.
just as he knows not to use it in the school building. (IMHO)
I'm not sure what high schools you are used to, but if you can be expelled for tweeting profanity he should be careful not to quote or to tweet quotes from books required by the English curriculum. He was expelled for use of the word "fuck". His quote is also pretty common and oddly enough deals with the different ways "fuck" can be used in the English language.
"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose." - J. D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye)
There are a lot of people out there that travel around for work or otherwise and would like to spend some of their downtime playing a game. That gets harder when every game released requires an internet connection completely unrelated to how a user intends to play. Sure you could simply not purchase the game, but it doesn't hurt to try and tell the game company "hey if you would just let me play it offline I'd hand you money" and hope they actually listen.
So they shot it out of the sky, and it doesn't have a single scratch on it?
First line of the summary: "Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls", which is why having it undamaged supports this claim.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 2
which can only lead to nostalgic Gen-Xer's wearing lame "Occupy Empire" and "Occupy Rebellion" Star Wars shirts.
We've already reached that point. This showed up on my facebook feed this morning.
Such notable quotes as: "End Galactic Corporate Greed", "Occupy Docking Bay 94 We are the 99%", "Get our troops off tatooine", and "Death Star Destruction was an inside job"
Monday Night Football is covered by ESPN and holds the record for most watched series on cable television with the 2008 season
The 2009 game of Favre playing against the packers is highest-rated cable program to date.
As somebody who has their television turned to espn more than most other channels (gotta keep up with my fantasy football team), there are plenty of other channels I could care less about having, but fork over cash for the whole package with HD. And for those of you who are fond of your high-definition programming keep in mind that the NFL and other sports are one of the main things that actually pushed out the widespread adoption.
Yes, people send out a bunch of emails to let people know about some new website OccupyWallSt.org (to a computer easily substituted with ch34pm3d7.com or other spam website) and a large percentage of the recipients click that little "mark as spam" button. The spam filter sees a bunch of messages it thinks are spam all containing the same website and decides that its a spammer's website. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Please don't assume everyone agrees with the cause or even if they do there are a lot of people that could care less about politics and think any political messages sent to them are spam. Speaking of which I still can't find anything that actually says what these protests are trying to accomplish besides saying they hate corporations.
While I didn't really pay much attention to it while watching Captain America does tend to be at least a bit kid friendly though some parts are probably too much for a 5 year old. There is not a lot of blood (a lot of the guns just vaporize people) though plenty of people do get shot. Which naturally involves death including somebody close to Rogers. The only part I can remember with foul language would be a soldier mooning Cap and saying "kiss my ass". There aren't any sex scenes (Caps is a classy guy).
Despite one thing you should keep in mind is that part of the reason the latest set of movies have been PG-13 is because they are actually staying closer to the original comics. The majority of comics were written targeting a young-adult audience as the core group of comic readers tended to be aged 14-21. Despite whatever the marketing departments have done (and animated cartoon spinoffs) these superheroes were meant for kids just over 13.
Speaking as a resident, Boulder is primarily a college town so there are plenty of places with 5 bedrooms that are rented to students. It is not uncommon to find that one of the people living there simply isn't listed on the rental agreement because of this law. It's very rarely enforced and when it is it's almost always a group of students living together to try and afford the costs of rent and college.
The problem is that a lot of the times a game will try and do that they will add features but it won't revolutionize the genre. For every half life or portal game there are hundreds of titles that try something risky and completely flop.
Look at all the games that have tried to blend RTS and FPS games as examples (which in theory would work together well but is terrible in practice for a variety of reasons. Raven Squad on the xbox360 got terrible reviews. Battleswarm is a free to play game and seems fairly well done and is having difficulty gaining an audience.
It's more that I realize I can't force somebody to change their opinion. Or force them to not to voice their opinions about it for that matter. You can't force somebody not to be a bigot and you can't force those people to shutup either.
There's a difference between realizing the reality of the situation and putting a nice idealistic phrasing on it to talk about free speech, but in the end the point is the same.
People get offended over the stupidest and most serious of issues, but whether or not you consider it "legitimate" offense has little to do with how they feel about it. You can't for one second think the people that are offended by homosexuality will let you convince them that their offense isn't legitimate.
Considering your other posts advocate that people need to be "smacked down" for their beliefs, you might need to get a little bit of a grip on reality in that no amount of internet posts, iPhone apps, or slashdot articles will suddenly make people suddenly change their way of thinking.
For the record I'm not any more in favor of this app than you are. I'm just not under the idealistic impression trying to take down beliefs I disagree with will somehow lead to those beliefs changing or that its a good idea even if I could change those beliefs.
Also congrats on changing a discussion of whether somebody is entitled to their opinion into an inaccurate personal attack against a random person on the internet. You should try not to insult people when talking about the harmful effects of denigrating people as it off-topic, irrelevant to any point made besides as an unneeded distraction, and can in fact detract from your point.
Those actually should be considered morally the same. They are both a persons opinion and despite either sides beliefs neither are a statement of fact. Both statements offend a large portion of the population. Both are entitled to their opinion and neither should be censored.
He was kidding, and apart from simply recognizing the username and his common slashdot posts, you can guess the sarcastic nature of the post from the fact that every one of his arguments is a commonly expressed opinion here on slashdot turned on its head. From hiring more developers, to creating a better quality product, to finding alternate ways to make money off a product apart from charging users, to openness and internet freedom.
1) unknown 4-letter username + unknown 12 letter password
2) known 4-letter username + unknown 16 character password
Isn't this more a case of:
1) unknown 4-letter username + unknown 16 character password
2) known 4-letter username + unknown 16 character password
There's no reason why you should make the password on an unknown username less secure and no reason to leave a username like root or administrator for the botnets to take cracks at.
That's a slightly different problem. A quick google search for "Malwarebytes" shows legitimate results for at least the first 3 pages (I can't even find download links on any of those pages for scam products... though adblock plus may be interferring slightly). The problem I've seen with quite a few of the recent virii is that they redirect all the pages you can download malwarebytes from (and other legitimate anti-virus product pages) to fake pages offering an anti-virus scam. I can't really blame somebody for being fooled by that despite the URL change and the fact that the page is for a completely different product than the link, but that is still less than the average user will recognize. Regardless, if the malwarebytes pages are showing scam products it probably means the computer is already compromised.
The online gaming community definitely needs an overhaul as far as maturity is concerned. But yeah, at this point I coordinate game purchases with the few friends I play online with just so we can have a more friendly laid back match on occasion or some mode where we can screw around. Even then its hard to find times especially with differences in time zones. The single player does at least a little preparation for online play and the games that include the ability to play bots definitely helps, but none of that truly prepares people for playing against other people.
Matchmaking is a valid complaint as there isn't really any good way to rank players, especially when somebody gets good say with a shotgun and switches to learn a sniper rifle or switching factions in an RTS. Clans are supposed to help deal with that by helping introduce new players to the game and help them learn, but they usually require too much of a time commitment for the casual player. And there are smaller servers to join for PC gamers, I guess it is pretty hard to find a group of just average players to play unless you organize the group yourself.
I guess I do fit the single guy comment (hey, this is slashdot after all) and I can still find a saturday afternoon every now and then to devote 6-8 hours to learning to play at a competitive level, or maybe I just used to play enough similar games that I can catch on pretty quick, but I've never had to much of a problem learning to play at an average level. (The 6-8 hours seems to be needed for the small intricacies of learning nuances of the game or memorizing map layouts required to compete at a really high level). But it really doesn't seem that bad of a time commitment when compared playing basketball for a few hours or having a few people over for a 3 hour game of monopoly or risk or my new favorite addiction settler's of catan or even going to watch football or baseball game or movie. Though its definitely true that all of the time that list of stuff is a lot higher on the list of things to do than spend an hour learning how to rocket jump switch to a shock rifle and kill somebody with a plasma combo while still airborne.
Guess I find myself rambling again, but I guess it might just be because I'm really competitive that getting killed repeatedly without firing a shot just makes me try to figure out what I'm doing wrong than want to give up. I'm actually more likely to continue playing a game where everyone online destroys me than one where I win easily, just cause I don't want to give up till I can do better. meh.
In any game there will be people of varying skill levels and for the most part those with more skills and practice will win. If you don't want to play with people that are competitive and a lot better than you, you have to set up your own game or server to play with your friends and experiment at an easier level.
There seems to be a disconnect between video games and any other kind of game. With the exception of games that are pretty much all luck (monopoly and yahtzee I'm looking at you), I'd imagine the people that complain about losing horribly on an FPS or RTS game will likely hate a majority of games they initially lose at. Sure if you play with your friends they can go easy on you, but you can't exactly jump into a pickup basketball game and do well. Or join a chess or bowling league and not lose. Or instantly be able to play card games like pinochle, hearts, bridge, poker instantly. Or be able win a trivia football game against people that have played fantasy football for years.
Any time you play a game against other people and there is skill involved the new and worse players will lose the majority of the time. By its very nature playing against other people is a competition. The idea that people should be able to do well without being competitive in something that is by its very nature competitive astounds me. Video games are the only thing I have ever come across where people assume they should be able to routinely beat others better than them without trying their hardest to win. Nobody expects to pick up any sport and beat somebody who has played competitively or instantly be able to beat anyone at a game of stratego or khet. But put a controller/keyboard/mouse and put a video on the screen and everyone assumes they can join the largest group of players around and not lose.
And people need to realize that joining largest most populated server around is the equivalent to entering a giant open to anyone tournament. You will get beaten down pretty quick when you don't know what you are doing. If you want the slow introduction to anything you play against your friends who can go easy on you or are learning it like you or have somebody help train you - which is what a lot of clans in various games do for new players.
And sure there are a few games out there designed to be pick up and play. A lot of them are really fun to. Go get a wii and some of nintendo's games. Because if you want to relax an do well playing against somebody instantly FPS and RTS games are NOT what you are looking for.
I think most of the people (myself included) that think the games are getting easier are those that can play through the hardest difficulty settings without too much difficulty. I don't think anyone is arguing that there shouldn't be an easier mode for people to play through otherwise goldeneye levels wouldn't be referenced so often. Agent on goldeneye could make you feel invincible after playing 00 agent.
Levels used to require multiple tries and prior planning because sometimes you had to think how to deal with what's ahead of you. I've played through all the halo games on legendary and never once felt I couldn't get by just winging it (granted I haven't finished the halo 3 campaign yet as I've only spent about 2 hours on it so far). Playing through COD4 on the hardest difficulty I beat it in less than a day and only died on a few parts. The only level that really felt like a challenge was the bonus plane level at the end. Goldeneye made me thing about which enemies to take down in what order, what cover to hide behind and whether I'm better off charging forward or advancing slowly. Halo I can just charge forward and if it ever gets too tough I can just duck behind whatever is close.
Maybe it's also because I'm not that much of a halo fan, but the skulls for me never felt like they were part of the game, but instead just cheats that make things more difficult. Skulls are something that requires you hunt down and find them before you can use them. It just doesn't occur to me that I should play through on, well I guess you'd consider it an easier difficulty, just to hunt down objects in obscure locations so I could play back through the same thing with a challenge. That and even since goldeneye games had things to make the game harder that you could turn on, but weren't considered part of the difficulty of the game. Saying play legendary with all skulls on just sounds like playing goldeneye with enemy rockets turned on. Sure, it gives more of a challenge (00-agent train level is impossible (well unless you are this guy) but people don't usually consider this part of the difficulty of the game
Easy difficulties are good so that everyone can play through the game, but on the hardest difficulty there is nothing wrong with making it so hard that people get frustrated and have to get up and leave before they try again. Sure, some of the audience might get frustrated and give up, but some of us liked trying to overcome levels that seemed impossible like keeping Natalya alive or the water level in teenage mutant ninja turtles or pretty much all of ninja gaiden, because as angry as it makes everyone to actually fail to beat it, it feels that much greater when you do. There is nothing wrong with having levels that 90% of gamers can't beat on the hardest difficulty. That's why its the hardest difficulty.
If you want to tinker with the game, there IS a "play offline" feature, where achievements cannot be earned; I dont think Blizzard would have much to say about you cheating offline.
I haven't really played in awhile, but last I had played the "play offline" feature didn't actually allow you to play offline unless you already connect to the blizzard server, and restarting the application removes the offline feature till you connect again. Emailing blizzard support just got me a response saying offline play was not implemented in the game despite the "play offline" message. That and even things like playing games against the AI requires a connection to be able to pull up the map list to play a map you haven't played yet.
I can't imagine people being banned for using the cheats in single player even had much of a desire to be connected to blizzards servers to play in the first place. Blizzard is forcing people to be connected to their servers and seems surprised somehow that people would want to play in ways blizzard didn't intend.
Slashdot Mirror
Portion that are 'alcohol related': 1/3rd, about 10k total
I'm always a little curious when I hear 'alcohol related' without a description of what information was gathered because MADD and others have done such a good job obscuring the number away form anything meaningful. Things they've included in the past: Accidents caused by a sober driver hitting a driver who had been drinking.
Accidents where one or more passengers were intoxicated even if the driver wasn't
Accidents where beer cans or other alcohol containers were found in the wreckage regardless of circumstances.
I'm not really sure they are all as bad as everyone claims. I used one of the machines in colorado and it printed out all my votes on a piece of paper on the left hand side when i was finished and made me confirm 3 times over that all the information printed on that paper was correct. Seemed fairly straightforward with less worrying about whether a bubble was properly filled in.
His constituency is boulder, colorado. He's running against Kevin Lundberg.
It's not even expected to be close. Even a significant portion of the republicans around here like Polis. Being a college town and hippy/pot town its the liberal counter to the more conservative colorado springs. Hell, if a story broke about him having hentai I'd expect to see some guy down on pearl street holding a sign saying something like "I love polis and hentai"
This might not be the best example considering the various complaints about blizzards TOS making any custom map/game their property. That and the actual ability to find custom games has been pretty terrible (thus the update to arcade scheduled to come out tomorrow).
Unless I missed something it still has to be voted on in the senate and make it past Obama's threatened veto
Sorry to double post, but I can't edit it 3 seconds after posted. The actual tweet the kid used was "Fuck is one of the fucking words you can fucking put anywhere in a fucking sentence and still fucking makes sense." Not used in a famous book, but if you can be expelled for that I would imagine you could be expelled for discussion of various pieces of literature.
just as he knows not to use it in the school building. (IMHO)
I'm not sure what high schools you are used to, but if you can be expelled for tweeting profanity he should be careful not to quote or to tweet quotes from books required by the English curriculum. He was expelled for use of the word "fuck". His quote is also pretty common and oddly enough deals with the different ways "fuck" can be used in the English language.
"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose." - J. D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye)
There are a lot of people out there that travel around for work or otherwise and would like to spend some of their downtime playing a game. That gets harder when every game released requires an internet connection completely unrelated to how a user intends to play. Sure you could simply not purchase the game, but it doesn't hurt to try and tell the game company "hey if you would just let me play it offline I'd hand you money" and hope they actually listen.
So they shot it out of the sky, and it doesn't have a single scratch on it?
First line of the summary: "Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls", which is why having it undamaged supports this claim.
which can only lead to nostalgic Gen-Xer's wearing lame "Occupy Empire" and "Occupy Rebellion" Star Wars shirts.
We've already reached that point. This showed up on my facebook feed this morning.
Such notable quotes as: "End Galactic Corporate Greed", "Occupy Docking Bay 94 We are the 99%", "Get our troops off tatooine", and "Death Star Destruction was an inside job"
Monday Night Football is covered by ESPN and holds the record for most watched series on cable television with the 2008 season
The 2009 game of Favre playing against the packers is highest-rated cable program to date.
As somebody who has their television turned to espn more than most other channels (gotta keep up with my fantasy football team), there are plenty of other channels I could care less about having, but fork over cash for the whole package with HD. And for those of you who are fond of your high-definition programming keep in mind that the NFL and other sports are one of the main things that actually pushed out the widespread adoption.
Yes, people send out a bunch of emails to let people know about some new website OccupyWallSt.org (to a computer easily substituted with ch34pm3d7.com or other spam website) and a large percentage of the recipients click that little "mark as spam" button. The spam filter sees a bunch of messages it thinks are spam all containing the same website and decides that its a spammer's website. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Please don't assume everyone agrees with the cause or even if they do there are a lot of people that could care less about politics and think any political messages sent to them are spam. Speaking of which I still can't find anything that actually says what these protests are trying to accomplish besides saying they hate corporations.
While I didn't really pay much attention to it while watching Captain America does tend to be at least a bit kid friendly though some parts are probably too much for a 5 year old. There is not a lot of blood (a lot of the guns just vaporize people) though plenty of people do get shot. Which naturally involves death including somebody close to Rogers. The only part I can remember with foul language would be a soldier mooning Cap and saying "kiss my ass". There aren't any sex scenes (Caps is a classy guy).
Despite one thing you should keep in mind is that part of the reason the latest set of movies have been PG-13 is because they are actually staying closer to the original comics. The majority of comics were written targeting a young-adult audience as the core group of comic readers tended to be aged 14-21. Despite whatever the marketing departments have done (and animated cartoon spinoffs) these superheroes were meant for kids just over 13.
Just residents per house
Speaking as a resident, Boulder is primarily a college town so there are plenty of places with 5 bedrooms that are rented to students. It is not uncommon to find that one of the people living there simply isn't listed on the rental agreement because of this law. It's very rarely enforced and when it is it's almost always a group of students living together to try and afford the costs of rent and college.
The problem is that a lot of the times a game will try and do that they will add features but it won't revolutionize the genre. For every half life or portal game there are hundreds of titles that try something risky and completely flop.
Look at all the games that have tried to blend RTS and FPS games as examples (which in theory would work together well but is terrible in practice for a variety of reasons. Raven Squad on the xbox360 got terrible reviews. Battleswarm is a free to play game and seems fairly well done and is having difficulty gaining an audience.
It's more that I realize I can't force somebody to change their opinion. Or force them to not to voice their opinions about it for that matter. You can't force somebody not to be a bigot and you can't force those people to shutup either.
There's a difference between realizing the reality of the situation and putting a nice idealistic phrasing on it to talk about free speech, but in the end the point is the same.
People get offended over the stupidest and most serious of issues, but whether or not you consider it "legitimate" offense has little to do with how they feel about it. You can't for one second think the people that are offended by homosexuality will let you convince them that their offense isn't legitimate.
Considering your other posts advocate that people need to be "smacked down" for their beliefs, you might need to get a little bit of a grip on reality in that no amount of internet posts, iPhone apps, or slashdot articles will suddenly make people suddenly change their way of thinking.
For the record I'm not any more in favor of this app than you are. I'm just not under the idealistic impression trying to take down beliefs I disagree with will somehow lead to those beliefs changing or that its a good idea even if I could change those beliefs.
Also congrats on changing a discussion of whether somebody is entitled to their opinion into an inaccurate personal attack against a random person on the internet. You should try not to insult people when talking about the harmful effects of denigrating people as it off-topic, irrelevant to any point made besides as an unneeded distraction, and can in fact detract from your point.
Those actually should be considered morally the same. They are both a persons opinion and despite either sides beliefs neither are a statement of fact. Both statements offend a large portion of the population. Both are entitled to their opinion and neither should be censored.
He was kidding, and apart from simply recognizing the username and his common slashdot posts, you can guess the sarcastic nature of the post from the fact that every one of his arguments is a commonly expressed opinion here on slashdot turned on its head. From hiring more developers, to creating a better quality product, to finding alternate ways to make money off a product apart from charging users, to openness and internet freedom.
Wrong... Answer this: which is more secure?
1) unknown 4-letter username + unknown 12 letter password
2) known 4-letter username + unknown 16 character password
Isn't this more a case of:
1) unknown 4-letter username + unknown 16 character password
2) known 4-letter username + unknown 16 character password
There's no reason why you should make the password on an unknown username less secure and no reason to leave a username like root or administrator for the botnets to take cracks at.
That's a slightly different problem. A quick google search for "Malwarebytes" shows legitimate results for at least the first 3 pages (I can't even find download links on any of those pages for scam products... though adblock plus may be interferring slightly). The problem I've seen with quite a few of the recent virii is that they redirect all the pages you can download malwarebytes from (and other legitimate anti-virus product pages) to fake pages offering an anti-virus scam. I can't really blame somebody for being fooled by that despite the URL change and the fact that the page is for a completely different product than the link, but that is still less than the average user will recognize. Regardless, if the malwarebytes pages are showing scam products it probably means the computer is already compromised.
The online gaming community definitely needs an overhaul as far as maturity is concerned. But yeah, at this point I coordinate game purchases with the few friends I play online with just so we can have a more friendly laid back match on occasion or some mode where we can screw around. Even then its hard to find times especially with differences in time zones. The single player does at least a little preparation for online play and the games that include the ability to play bots definitely helps, but none of that truly prepares people for playing against other people.
Matchmaking is a valid complaint as there isn't really any good way to rank players, especially when somebody gets good say with a shotgun and switches to learn a sniper rifle or switching factions in an RTS. Clans are supposed to help deal with that by helping introduce new players to the game and help them learn, but they usually require too much of a time commitment for the casual player. And there are smaller servers to join for PC gamers, I guess it is pretty hard to find a group of just average players to play unless you organize the group yourself.
I guess I do fit the single guy comment (hey, this is slashdot after all) and I can still find a saturday afternoon every now and then to devote 6-8 hours to learning to play at a competitive level, or maybe I just used to play enough similar games that I can catch on pretty quick, but I've never had to much of a problem learning to play at an average level. (The 6-8 hours seems to be needed for the small intricacies of learning nuances of the game or memorizing map layouts required to compete at a really high level). But it really doesn't seem that bad of a time commitment when compared playing basketball for a few hours or having a few people over for a 3 hour game of monopoly or risk or my new favorite addiction settler's of catan or even going to watch football or baseball game or movie. Though its definitely true that all of the time that list of stuff is a lot higher on the list of things to do than spend an hour learning how to rocket jump switch to a shock rifle and kill somebody with a plasma combo while still airborne.
Guess I find myself rambling again, but I guess it might just be because I'm really competitive that getting killed repeatedly without firing a shot just makes me try to figure out what I'm doing wrong than want to give up. I'm actually more likely to continue playing a game where everyone online destroys me than one where I win easily, just cause I don't want to give up till I can do better. meh.
This.
In any game there will be people of varying skill levels and for the most part those with more skills and practice will win. If you don't want to play with people that are competitive and a lot better than you, you have to set up your own game or server to play with your friends and experiment at an easier level.
There seems to be a disconnect between video games and any other kind of game. With the exception of games that are pretty much all luck (monopoly and yahtzee I'm looking at you), I'd imagine the people that complain about losing horribly on an FPS or RTS game will likely hate a majority of games they initially lose at. Sure if you play with your friends they can go easy on you, but you can't exactly jump into a pickup basketball game and do well. Or join a chess or bowling league and not lose. Or instantly be able to play card games like pinochle, hearts, bridge, poker instantly. Or be able win a trivia football game against people that have played fantasy football for years.
Any time you play a game against other people and there is skill involved the new and worse players will lose the majority of the time. By its very nature playing against other people is a competition. The idea that people should be able to do well without being competitive in something that is by its very nature competitive astounds me. Video games are the only thing I have ever come across where people assume they should be able to routinely beat others better than them without trying their hardest to win. Nobody expects to pick up any sport and beat somebody who has played competitively or instantly be able to beat anyone at a game of stratego or khet. But put a controller/keyboard/mouse and put a video on the screen and everyone assumes they can join the largest group of players around and not lose.
And people need to realize that joining largest most populated server around is the equivalent to entering a giant open to anyone tournament. You will get beaten down pretty quick when you don't know what you are doing. If you want the slow introduction to anything you play against your friends who can go easy on you or are learning it like you or have somebody help train you - which is what a lot of clans in various games do for new players.
And sure there are a few games out there designed to be pick up and play. A lot of them are really fun to. Go get a wii and some of nintendo's games. Because if you want to relax an do well playing against somebody instantly FPS and RTS games are NOT what you are looking for.
I think most of the people (myself included) that think the games are getting easier are those that can play through the hardest difficulty settings without too much difficulty. I don't think anyone is arguing that there shouldn't be an easier mode for people to play through otherwise goldeneye levels wouldn't be referenced so often. Agent on goldeneye could make you feel invincible after playing 00 agent.
Levels used to require multiple tries and prior planning because sometimes you had to think how to deal with what's ahead of you. I've played through all the halo games on legendary and never once felt I couldn't get by just winging it (granted I haven't finished the halo 3 campaign yet as I've only spent about 2 hours on it so far). Playing through COD4 on the hardest difficulty I beat it in less than a day and only died on a few parts. The only level that really felt like a challenge was the bonus plane level at the end. Goldeneye made me thing about which enemies to take down in what order, what cover to hide behind and whether I'm better off charging forward or advancing slowly. Halo I can just charge forward and if it ever gets too tough I can just duck behind whatever is close.
Maybe it's also because I'm not that much of a halo fan, but the skulls for me never felt like they were part of the game, but instead just cheats that make things more difficult. Skulls are something that requires you hunt down and find them before you can use them. It just doesn't occur to me that I should play through on, well I guess you'd consider it an easier difficulty, just to hunt down objects in obscure locations so I could play back through the same thing with a challenge. That and even since goldeneye games had things to make the game harder that you could turn on, but weren't considered part of the difficulty of the game. Saying play legendary with all skulls on just sounds like playing goldeneye with enemy rockets turned on. Sure, it gives more of a challenge (00-agent train level is impossible (well unless you are this guy) but people don't usually consider this part of the difficulty of the game
Easy difficulties are good so that everyone can play through the game, but on the hardest difficulty there is nothing wrong with making it so hard that people get frustrated and have to get up and leave before they try again. Sure, some of the audience might get frustrated and give up, but some of us liked trying to overcome levels that seemed impossible like keeping Natalya alive or the water level in teenage mutant ninja turtles or pretty much all of ninja gaiden, because as angry as it makes everyone to actually fail to beat it, it feels that much greater when you do. There is nothing wrong with having levels that 90% of gamers can't beat on the hardest difficulty. That's why its the hardest difficulty.
If you want to tinker with the game, there IS a "play offline" feature, where achievements cannot be earned; I dont think Blizzard would have much to say about you cheating offline.
I haven't really played in awhile, but last I had played the "play offline" feature didn't actually allow you to play offline unless you already connect to the blizzard server, and restarting the application removes the offline feature till you connect again. Emailing blizzard support just got me a response saying offline play was not implemented in the game despite the "play offline" message. That and even things like playing games against the AI requires a connection to be able to pull up the map list to play a map you haven't played yet.
I can't imagine people being banned for using the cheats in single player even had much of a desire to be connected to blizzards servers to play in the first place. Blizzard is forcing people to be connected to their servers and seems surprised somehow that people would want to play in ways blizzard didn't intend.
It's utter madness. If someone wanted to make the "Game Genie" nowadays, Nintendo would sue them into oblivion and prevent it from ever happening.
Funny you should mention that as Nintendo did sue them and lost. If anything goes right, maybe this lawsuit will turn out the same way.