-_- many other things too. I'll put spoiler tags just in case Not that anybody will bother to read the text below
*** SPOILER ***
1. near the end of Broodwar, when Kerrigan screwed everyobody and killed Fenix, Raynor explicitly said
I'll see you dead for this, Kerrigan! For Fenix, and all the others who got caught between you and your mad quest for power!
In fact Fenix, supposedly Raynor's homie, is not mentioned even once in SC2, nor on the 'what happened so far' website for newcomers. It's clear. Fenix was too much of an obstacle for the SC2's happy end love story so he got retconned out of existence. Imagine playing all sc games in a continuous streak. End of brood war - Raynor vows reverge, 1 hr later you start SC2 - he sighs looking at Kerrigan's pic. wtf?!
2. Kerrigan and Mengsk were depicted in SC1 as extremely intelligent, manipulative persons. In SC2 they appear to be dumb like bricks and very primitive. Kerrigan does nothing witty nor particularly villainous all game and is only good at running head first into the wall and spewing cringeworthy stereotypical one-liners. Mengsk got very similar treatment.
3. Retcon with Tassadar's ghost (o.m.g.) that changes the whole lore of the Overmind - from a bad guy that has only one desire (to spread and assimilate all species) to an enslaved sorta-good guy who wanted to break his 'people' free. It's a 180 degree turn
imo these are the 3 biggest flaws lore-wise. There are also other problems - incoherent story with no focus with a sudden change of context out of nowhere for the last 3 missions, deus ex machina as a final plot device, repeating warcraft story all over (great external threat that will unite all), numerous plotholes.
lol, imagine the unrecoverable loss of loyalty among the sc fans if blizzard tried to do anything with iccup. That would be a PR suicide and they wouldn't sell a single copy of any game to the hardcore sc players, ever. I remember how people on sc portals reacted when that explicit 'iccup is a pirate server' talk happened. Everybody felt offended to the bone.
the episodic nature of sc2 strangely fits the activision doctrine of 'milk the franchise for at least $100M every year till it runs into the ground spectacularly'. 3 installments of sc2 were supposed to allow for a more epic feel but my experience with Wings of Liberty is the opposite. Story is watered down very badly, 2/3 of all missions are nothing but fillers, not to mention a considerable number of retcons that kill the continuity for old time sc1 fans.
look what they did to the custom map scene. They created that incredibly powerful editor that dwarfs anything that was done before but they pretty much killed it with ridiculous restrictions. Warcraft 3 thrived on map making, i suspect that half the people owning wc3 never bothered to play ladder matches.
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/ look at popular topics section: - Allow authors to cross-realm publish yup, people can't publish their maps globally, they do it on their server only
- A short rant on SC2 and general censorship list of censored words is very long and includes such words as suicide - if by any chance you want to write 'banelings suicide attack' somewhere in your map or words like bullshit that can be found in the single player, the map can be even banned. No idea if the words that are filtered out in other places like black, white trans(port), (g)rape cause problems but i think they do
- Want "Custom Game"? Go back to WC3 or SC1. says all - despite primitive editors you enjoy more fun and freedom in the realm of custom games. You have the control over the rules and players that join and you, also you can name your game to broadcast rules (people playing dota add a lot of codes to the game name so people know what they join) or desired skill level. People have none of that in sc2 and maps are sorted by populatity (self perpetuating scheme, new maps can't get high enough to get noticed by more than a handful of people, good luck autofilling all player slots in a reasonable time)
- The new Custom Game system? (What is wrong with it) other problems - without lan developing multiplayer scenarios is a chore after all debugging is all about running a map, finding a problem, trying to fix it, running a map again, wash rinse repeat. To do that you need to use bnet which adds considerable amount of time to the development process, testing from the editor level is not sufficient in all but the simpliest cases
- The Real Problem with Custom Maps
5 out of 10 most popular threads on the forum touch mapmaking/publishing alone. It shows how messed up it became thanks to the control freaks in actiblizz
i hope you are kidding. Why was a simple change of name not sufficient then? What they did mind was bnetd ignoring cd key checks and the fact that bnetd was a direct competition to their platform. If blizzard wanted, they could implement some cdkey authorization scheme for external servers and require all to use it, but they chose to kill the project entirely.
Not buying and complaining? You are promptly shot down by the zealous fanboys as a wannabe pirate, good luck complaining. I thought i may as well become one and now i am an example of this: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/2/19/ I DLed warezed copy of SC2 and I say this as someone who has most of the blizzard games. I decided they are not worthy getting my monies anymore. They changed so much after the merge with activision it's unbelievable. Axing tried and true features left and right does not win my sympathy. I checked crappy story of sc2 - mostly out of old sentiments - and never touched it again.
The stats part is true, however the single player progress bit is not. You can have more than one. Just hit new campaign.
how does that work when few people want to play alternately? does the new campaign destroy the old one or you get to reload from saves? Either way, inconvenient.
Social chat channels? They were just bots spamming for clans or (if some D1 or D2 was involved) item selling sites... The more private channels were useful for sure, but they have a party system for that now. Also how is a 3v a pita? Works just fine for me... Now a clan you might be spot on about, I wouldn't know.
they were spammed because it was trivial to create bunch of accounts, also blizzard never really cared about law and order on battle.net - after all when the copies are sold, money was made, why bother to police their network service. Now single account costs 60 bucks, i don't think many would try to spam and risk permaban. Another thing is you could always create your own channel, nobody forced you to sit in the public one. Now you don't get any of that, but as i said - try to organize anything with that pathetic IM.
This also isn't true. You can put maps in a map folder and play them just like in SC. And you can load them for single player use or fire up the editor and launch them from there.
i stand corrected. still if i am not mistaken you don't get to store maps downloaded from battle.net permanently, so you have to get them manually from dedicated sites. And running maps from editor is not what i would call a convenience more like 'jumping through the hoops'
Eh hopefully they add this for you. I think it is a valid request even if I am not interested in it personally. However I doubt the vast majority of players need "global ranks" to "feel good about themselves" so it probably wasn't given priority over making leagues that work well for prompt and equal matchmaking.
as if database cared how it presents its data. Majority of players probably don't need it, good for them but there are some that do - all the guys who play competitively. There is no coherent info who is where on the ladder, even for diamond and platinum leagues where it really counts - these guys couldn't care less about what is their position among 100 hundred random people, they want to know the truth.
This one is just kind of ridiculous. What POSSIBLE measurement do you use to get that figure? Did it take you 30 minutes to read the little quick story panels in SC1 or something? Might want to take off those rose-tinted glasses and actually go review the Story presented in vanilla StarCraft. It is fine that you don't like SC2. You made some good points (no real LAN play is sad, though you can still play over LAN provided you have internet to auth there. and the logging in every time can be annoying. can't sell the game etc) but some of that was distorted to say the least. Personally I rather enjoyed SC2. If I had to guess I would say a good number of people ragging on StarCraft II never played it. Hence comments that just aren't true or are exaggerated like some of the stuff you had or "graphics overhaul is all it is".
what? i played both and it's not like i played sc1 once 12 years ago and only have fond memories - i repeated sc1 like 5 times and i enjoyed it every single time despite its aging mechanics. I could go very deep into detail how much sc2 story sucks but i don't think you care much. Find any of 10-20 page long threads in the single player section of blizzard forums, you'll get all the info you need. The fact is that there was more substance story-wise in 10 terran missions in sc1 (which also had to introduce absolutely green players to the game) than in almost 30 in sc2 where for the half of the game you run after some artifacts with no other purpose but to get monies. Maybe you don't agree - but still proper comparison is full SC vanilla (30missions)
as a former blizzard fanboy who loved every single game they released in last 15 years (maybe except wow) let me say this: sc2 is bad - everything but core multiplayer pretty much sucks - you are 'encouraged' to be always online, you have to deal with authorizations to even dream about playing offline on some shitty guest account (your progress on your account and on guest are separate so you'd have to start campaign from scratch) - no LAN - regions with no possibility to play across borders (unless you drop another $60 for the other region's version) - only 1 account (no separate stats or single player progress for different people using it, in fact that $60 is not per game copy, but per account, you are not allowed to share) - pathetic ways of communication (no easy to use and very social at their core chat channels, instead you get poor man's instant messenger which makes it total pita to run a clan or organize anything bigger that 2v2) - no clan/tournament support - creators of custom maps pretty much hand the rights to blizzard and map distribution is solely through battle.net, pretty much no option to have custom maps on disk and play them offline, not to mention ridiculous restrictions (max 5 maps, total 20MB) - hard to understand, intransparent ladder with leagues and thousands of divisions that doesn't show anything even remotely resembling global ranks so players can feel good about themselves - horrible custom maps - maps are sorted by popularity and filled automatically - obscure maps are never played and players have no control over the rules and players joining - for sc1 lore nerds - poor story, an awful lot of retcons, completely redesigned personalities of core characters, large amounts of meaningless filler and everything you know and love going down the shitter. Only technical side to the campaign and missions themselves are good, everything else is incoherent, self-contradictory and cringeworthy. Watered down story means you need to pay 3times to get similar amount of action (story-wise) you got from sc1 vanilla alone.
doesn't sound like blizzard of old, eh?
read this rather blizzard-centric blog devoted to games for in depth analysis of the current state of affairs in blizzard http://www.the-ghetto.org/
Are you saying you've never heard of anyone taking out a loan to start a business, which eventually pays off the loan and provides a healthy stream of profit?
If someone is willing to lend him the money that means he has 'something' to back the loan up, viable business plan with nice profits on the horizon, credibility, whatever. It's an absolutely voluntary action of the lender. He 'buys' something from the borrower. The government is different - it is not interested in creating viable businesses providing a healthy stream of profit, long term non-bogus employement and stuff. The individuals in the private sector do that. Government spends money for the sake of doing it, but it's not productive, so it has no money on its own. To spend it has to take first from someone who is with higher taxes or steal his purchasing power with inflation - both are involuntary. All you get is an illusion that the government does _something_ and it costs the society an arm and a leg.
You've never heard of anyone taking out a loan to go to college, learning skills that they use to get a higher-paying job, eventually paying off the loans and keeping the increased income?
taking a loan to go to college is not a good example. Everybody and his dog has some MD so MD is greatly devalued and people start their adult life 5 years later, are generally not better off and on top of that they get the 5-6 digit debt in not so nice economic climate. ROI on the higher education is less than stellar.
No, you're wrong. What got us out of the Great Depression was FDR's policies of keeping the economy alive via government spending on and investing in the poor and middle class, so that they in turn could spend the money they needed to live back into the economy.
mainstream point of view but arguable, look at the recession of 1920 which was more severe than 1929. Nobody did anything, it ended in less than 2 years.
And this is ***exactly what WWII was***, from a fiscal point of view: a massive government spending program that put the entire workforce to work, increased production, and poured all that money back into the economy.
it can only work if you are the last man standing and get to reap profits of having an untouched production capacity in the completely ruined world. Broken window fallacy at its finest but on a global scale. The US got all the work to replace all the stuff destroyed.
ww3 to raze every trace of civilization to the ground? i don't see any other way to achieve the reset and i don't think i am in a hurry to see it in practice.
they have the privilege to create money out of thin air and charge very real interest on it. In the ancient times of common sense that would be called state granted monopoly on counterfeiting.
gold is almost universal symbol of wealth, which is much more than what can be said about a piece of paper with some ink on it. Sooner or later all fiat currencies reach their intristic value of 0. Care to guess what people used to buy food or even freedom in the times of hell known as WW2? Banknotes were worthless, precious metals and necessities of life were the only things cosidered even remotely valuable.
i'd expect that the end of depression is when you are as good as you were before it happened and millions of unemployed generally agree. If for some reason GDP dropped by 95% and you had to work 50 years to get the same level back, would you call it a prosperity without precedence in the history of mankind?
it all depends who interprets the facts - keynesianism is the mainstream doctrine so pretty much everybody believes it's the best thing that could happen to the economic thought. Austrian school argues that the Great Depression was in fact strengthened by the intervention and only after WW2 the US got out thanks to the fact that every other major power was completely ruined during the war and the US was the only one that had production capacity intact. As a counterexample they show the recession of 1920 (which most probably you never heard about) - it was deeper in terms of the drop in stock markets and ended in less than 2 years 'despite' the government doing nothing.
well, it's not my fault people don't know anything about the important people in their country. They should have their voter's badge revoked or something. It's not like there is no info on Paul's views on the internet. He is a strict constitutionalist, wants sound, commodity-backed money, independent from politicians' whims, limited government reduced to its explicitly enumerated powers, non-interventionist foreign policy, majority of rulemaking reserved for the state. He is very consistent an it's quite easy to predict his view on pretty much any matter - "if something is not in the constitution, feds have no business there, that's the domain of the states" Imagine how much easier would be to follow laws if only congress critters didn't feel in power to produce shoddy laws which require wheelbarrows of paper to print them on.
medieval commodities-based currency: So you say that medieval economy tanked and world collapsed or what? If the world managed to go from commodity-based to fiat, it can go opposite way. Besides what's so inherently wrong with commodity based currency? Paul thinks that there should be competition allowed and that currencies with intristic value would win. It's very simple - fiat money is a scam. It's end scenario is always value of 0, it has a built-in inflation and inflation is a hidden tax or, if you prefer, stealing the purchasing power from everybody. Precious metals (or whatever you want your currency backed by) can't be printed so they would end all the keynesian nonsense that ruled supreme for the last 100 years and they would FORCE governments to be fiscally responsible. That's why politicians love fiat. They can promise, get elected and pay with printed money which steals purchasing power of everyone's paycheck. Also it reeks of central planning - someone has to decide arbitrarily how many units of fiat currency are supposed to be in circulation and how many to add/substract. Commodity based currency performance is decided only by the market forces, once you throw it into the market machine you can't really infuence it.
the FED: Nobody knows what's going on there and these are the people who hold entire nation or even world by the balls. It's an organization created by private banks. Sorry, it's a flawed and extremely dangerous concept.
"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes... "
- Napoleon Bonaparte
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws."
- Mayer Amschel Rothschild Their monetary policy pumped the bubble - that's what happens when you make money way to cheap to borrow (because people love to live in a mirage of the debt-fueled prosperity) with disregard to natural equilibrium. Only bankers benefit from the FED's existence (they are all buddies, FED, Treasury, Wall Street - same shit), they make money both ways, on ups and downs... and nobody likes them.
climate change, clean air and water: yeah, prove decisively first that human activity is the main culprit. Also i don't think that the times of serious economic meltdown are good for doing something about. Unemployed people don't give two shits about it, they need food and shelter first and foremost. You see, you have to be able to afford enjoying all that clean air and water, you don't care when you live under the bridge and eat stuff from trash cans. If you want to drive away even more jobs to China with high costs of environmental compliance - it's your choice, but don't be surprised when all the negatives hit. Chinese certainly don't mind and will take every job you don't want.
what disastrous promises are you talking about? care to elaborate? bringing troops home, paying attention to a supposedly outdated idea of fiscal responsibility, going back to the principles of the US constitution are considered disastrous nowadays?
because founding fathers thought that armed citizens act as a counterbalance to the force the government has and if the oppresive regime ever came to life it wouldn't be able to take liberties of citizens away with no resistance? Considering they had quite recent experiences with the british, it's completely understandable. What do i win?
and why people sell falling stocks before they hit the ground? They want to get at least some value back. With or without their actions China's investment loses value. If they try to sell - value of dollar reserves drops, they don't sell but USA print more money to monetize debts which they do all the time to cover gigantic deficits - value of dollar reserves drops. USA have snowball's chance in hell to pay their debt so they are forced to roll it over. The treasury issues bonds to cover maturing ones, it's enough to not buy the next tranches to put the US in a really deep shit. The FED will be forced to buy bonds from the treasury (which is the act of money creation, because money used to pay didn't exist before) and then you have a high inflation.
Chinese 'help' the US only because that accelerates the rate of wealth transfer from the US to China. They are like a drug pusher - every trillion they lend the to the US fuels the addiction to foreign money so they get a bigger leverage over the US with each passing day. The truth is that the US is the China's bitch now as the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Chinese continue to throw good money after bad, but when they suck out as much as they can, they'll drop the US with no second thought and let them rot.
I'd love to see how you can patch a game that is released with lan option included just like sc1 was. Koreans and any serious tournament totally ignored battle.net infrastructure and went for 0 latency on local network.
Yes, you can say that it's up to people to decide if they want to buy or not. Either way sc2 is everything sc1, diablo 2 or wc3 were not. Battle.net was a convenience, you could use or not - if you wanted low latency you played lan with homies. Now everything runs through servers created solely for total control, farming (deals with facebook and shit) and other forms of monetization. You can't create sub-accounts for other people in your household on your copy even for singleplayer purposes, even if you have only 1 pc - that's 60 bucks a pop, don't forget there are 2 expansions on the way, for the total of many many dollars. You used to be able to play with people from other regions of the world by default, now you are locked to your area (official solution: another $60 for the other region's copy) You are into mapmaking? You agree to give all your rights away and the only way to propagate maps is through battle.net. Forget about playing them offline. Also don't forget censorship of words like black, white, trans, suicide, xbox... Even battle.net is a poor copy of xbox live and current ladder is an antithesis of transparency. In theory they require that every tournament has to be rubberstamped - of course they don't care about small tournaments on some campus network with $50 prize, but the ToS is there if they need it and they got you by the balls. It's up to them to decide if they want to squeeze or not. This is what you become when you team up with Activision.
shameless plug: now he competes with Linda McMahon and Rob Simmons for the republican spot in the senate race in Connecticut (against Dick Blumenthal). Voting in few days so wake up, republicans of CT.
economies of scale alone should bring prices down. Each year population of gamers grows. Ten years ago computers in general and gaming were a despised activity reserverd for basement dwellers. The only problem for the profitability is that everyone thinks that games lay golden eggs and now there are hundreds of titles released every year and they all pursue limited amount of money in a highly crowded market. Still you don't have to pay 50million for development and another 100mil for marketing which would require 5 million sales to break even.
Slashdot Mirror
-_-
many other things too. I'll put spoiler tags just in case
Not that anybody will bother to read the text below
*** SPOILER ***
1. near the end of Broodwar, when Kerrigan screwed everyobody and killed Fenix, Raynor explicitly said
I'll see you dead for this, Kerrigan! For Fenix, and all the others who got caught between you and your mad quest for power!
In fact Fenix, supposedly Raynor's homie, is not mentioned even once in SC2, nor on the 'what happened so far' website for newcomers. It's clear. Fenix was too much of an obstacle for the SC2's happy end love story so he got retconned out of existence.
Imagine playing all sc games in a continuous streak. End of brood war - Raynor vows reverge, 1 hr later you start SC2 - he sighs looking at Kerrigan's pic. wtf?!
2. Kerrigan and Mengsk were depicted in SC1 as extremely intelligent, manipulative persons. In SC2 they appear to be dumb like bricks and very primitive. Kerrigan does nothing witty nor particularly villainous all game and is only good at running head first into the wall and spewing cringeworthy stereotypical one-liners. Mengsk got very similar treatment.
3. Retcon with Tassadar's ghost (o.m.g.) that changes the whole lore of the Overmind - from a bad guy that has only one desire (to spread and assimilate all species) to an enslaved sorta-good guy who wanted to break his 'people' free. It's a 180 degree turn
imo these are the 3 biggest flaws lore-wise. There are also other problems - incoherent story with no focus with a sudden change of context out of nowhere for the last 3 missions, deus ex machina as a final plot device, repeating warcraft story all over (great external threat that will unite all), numerous plotholes.
lol, imagine the unrecoverable loss of loyalty among the sc fans if blizzard tried to do anything with iccup. That would be a PR suicide and they wouldn't sell a single copy of any game to the hardcore sc players, ever. I remember how people on sc portals reacted when that explicit 'iccup is a pirate server' talk happened. Everybody felt offended to the bone.
the episodic nature of sc2 strangely fits the activision doctrine of 'milk the franchise for at least $100M every year till it runs into the ground spectacularly'. 3 installments of sc2 were supposed to allow for a more epic feel but my experience with Wings of Liberty is the opposite. Story is watered down very badly, 2/3 of all missions are nothing but fillers, not to mention a considerable number of retcons that kill the continuity for old time sc1 fans.
with frivolous lawsuits of course :)
look what they did to the custom map scene. They created that incredibly powerful editor that dwarfs anything that was done before but they pretty much killed it with ridiculous restrictions. Warcraft 3 thrived on map making, i suspect that half the people owning wc3 never bothered to play ladder matches.
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/
look at popular topics section:
- Allow authors to cross-realm publish
yup, people can't publish their maps globally, they do it on their server only
- A short rant on SC2 and general censorship
list of censored words is very long and includes such words as suicide - if by any chance you want to write 'banelings suicide attack' somewhere in your map or words like bullshit that can be found in the single player, the map can be even banned. No idea if the words that are filtered out in other places like black, white trans(port), (g)rape cause problems but i think they do
- Want "Custom Game"? Go back to WC3 or SC1.
says all - despite primitive editors you enjoy more fun and freedom in the realm of custom games. You have the control over the rules and players that join and you, also you can name your game to broadcast rules (people playing dota add a lot of codes to the game name so people know what they join) or desired skill level. People have none of that in sc2 and maps are sorted by populatity (self perpetuating scheme, new maps can't get high enough to get noticed by more than a handful of people, good luck autofilling all player slots in a reasonable time)
- The new Custom Game system? (What is wrong with it)
other problems - without lan developing multiplayer scenarios is a chore after all debugging is all about running a map, finding a problem, trying to fix it, running a map again, wash rinse repeat. To do that you need to use bnet which adds considerable amount of time to the development process, testing from the editor level is not sufficient in all but the simpliest cases
- The Real Problem with Custom Maps
5 out of 10 most popular threads on the forum touch mapmaking/publishing alone. It shows how messed up it became thanks to the control freaks in actiblizz
i hope you are kidding. Why was a simple change of name not sufficient then?
What they did mind was bnetd ignoring cd key checks and the fact that bnetd was a direct competition to their platform. If blizzard wanted, they could implement some cdkey authorization scheme for external servers and require all to use it, but they chose to kill the project entirely.
Not buying and complaining? You are promptly shot down by the zealous fanboys as a wannabe pirate, good luck complaining. I thought i may as well become one and now i am an example of this:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/2/19/
I DLed warezed copy of SC2 and I say this as someone who has most of the blizzard games. I decided they are not worthy getting my monies anymore. They changed so much after the merge with activision it's unbelievable. Axing tried and true features left and right does not win my sympathy. I checked crappy story of sc2 - mostly out of old sentiments - and never touched it again.
The stats part is true, however the single player progress bit is not. You can have more than one. Just hit new campaign.
how does that work when few people want to play alternately? does the new campaign destroy the old one or you get to reload from saves? Either way, inconvenient.
Social chat channels? They were just bots spamming for clans or (if some D1 or D2 was involved) item selling sites... The more private channels were useful for sure, but they have a party system for that now. Also how is a 3v a pita? Works just fine for me... Now a clan you might be spot on about, I wouldn't know.
they were spammed because it was trivial to create bunch of accounts, also blizzard never really cared about law and order on battle.net - after all when the copies are sold, money was made, why bother to police their network service. Now single account costs 60 bucks, i don't think many would try to spam and risk permaban.
Another thing is you could always create your own channel, nobody forced you to sit in the public one. Now you don't get any of that, but as i said - try to organize anything with that pathetic IM.
This also isn't true. You can put maps in a map folder and play them just like in SC. And you can load them for single player use or fire up the editor and launch them from there.
i stand corrected. still if i am not mistaken you don't get to store maps downloaded from battle.net permanently, so you have to get them manually from dedicated sites. And running maps from editor is not what i would call a convenience more like 'jumping through the hoops'
Eh hopefully they add this for you. I think it is a valid request even if I am not interested in it personally. However I doubt the vast majority of players need "global ranks" to "feel good about themselves" so it probably wasn't given priority over making leagues that work well for prompt and equal matchmaking.
as if database cared how it presents its data. Majority of players probably don't need it, good for them but there are some that do - all the guys who play competitively. There is no coherent info who is where on the ladder, even for diamond and platinum leagues where it really counts - these guys couldn't care less about what is their position among 100 hundred random people, they want to know the truth.
This one is just kind of ridiculous. What POSSIBLE measurement do you use to get that figure? Did it take you 30 minutes to read the little quick story panels in SC1 or something? Might want to take off those rose-tinted glasses and actually go review the Story presented in vanilla StarCraft. It is fine that you don't like SC2. You made some good points (no real LAN play is sad, though you can still play over LAN provided you have internet to auth there. and the logging in every time can be annoying. can't sell the game etc) but some of that was distorted to say the least. Personally I rather enjoyed SC2. If I had to guess I would say a good number of people ragging on StarCraft II never played it. Hence comments that just aren't true or are exaggerated like some of the stuff you had or "graphics overhaul is all it is".
what? i played both and it's not like i played sc1 once 12 years ago and only have fond memories - i repeated sc1 like 5 times and i enjoyed it every single time despite its aging mechanics. I could go very deep into detail how much sc2 story sucks but i don't think you care much. Find any of 10-20 page long threads in the single player section of blizzard forums, you'll get all the info you need. The fact is that there was more substance story-wise in 10 terran missions in sc1 (which also had to introduce absolutely green players to the game) than in almost 30 in sc2 where for the half of the game you run after some artifacts with no other purpose but to get monies. Maybe you don't agree - but still proper comparison is full SC vanilla (30missions)
as a former blizzard fanboy who loved every single game they released in last 15 years (maybe except wow) let me say this:
sc2 is bad - everything but core multiplayer pretty much sucks
- you are 'encouraged' to be always online, you have to deal with authorizations to even dream about playing offline on some shitty guest account (your progress on your account and on guest are separate so you'd have to start campaign from scratch)
- no LAN
- regions with no possibility to play across borders (unless you drop another $60 for the other region's version)
- only 1 account (no separate stats or single player progress for different people using it, in fact that $60 is not per game copy, but per account, you are not allowed to share)
- pathetic ways of communication (no easy to use and very social at their core chat channels, instead you get poor man's instant messenger which makes it total pita to run a clan or organize anything bigger that 2v2)
- no clan/tournament support
- creators of custom maps pretty much hand the rights to blizzard and map distribution is solely through battle.net, pretty much no option to have custom maps on disk and play them offline, not to mention ridiculous restrictions (max 5 maps, total 20MB)
- hard to understand, intransparent ladder with leagues and thousands of divisions that doesn't show anything even remotely resembling global ranks so players can feel good about themselves
- horrible custom maps - maps are sorted by popularity and filled automatically - obscure maps are never played and players have no control over the rules and players joining
- for sc1 lore nerds - poor story, an awful lot of retcons, completely redesigned personalities of core characters, large amounts of meaningless filler and everything you know and love going down the shitter. Only technical side to the campaign and missions themselves are good, everything else is incoherent, self-contradictory and cringeworthy. Watered down story means you need to pay 3times to get similar amount of action (story-wise) you got from sc1 vanilla alone.
doesn't sound like blizzard of old, eh?
read this rather blizzard-centric blog devoted to games for in depth analysis of the current state of affairs in blizzard
http://www.the-ghetto.org/
Are you saying you've never heard of anyone taking out a loan to start a business, which eventually pays off the loan and provides a healthy stream of profit?
If someone is willing to lend him the money that means he has 'something' to back the loan up, viable business plan with nice profits on the horizon, credibility, whatever. It's an absolutely voluntary action of the lender. He 'buys' something from the borrower.
The government is different - it is not interested in creating viable businesses providing a healthy stream of profit, long term non-bogus employement and stuff. The individuals in the private sector do that. Government spends money for the sake of doing it, but it's not productive, so it has no money on its own. To spend it has to take first from someone who is with higher taxes or steal his purchasing power with inflation - both are involuntary. All you get is an illusion that the government does _something_ and it costs the society an arm and a leg.
You've never heard of anyone taking out a loan to go to college, learning skills that they use to get a higher-paying job, eventually paying off the loans and keeping the increased income?
taking a loan to go to college is not a good example. Everybody and his dog has some MD so MD is greatly devalued and people start their adult life 5 years later, are generally not better off and on top of that they get the 5-6 digit debt in not so nice economic climate. ROI on the higher education is less than stellar.
No, you're wrong. What got us out of the Great Depression was FDR's policies of keeping the economy alive via government spending on and investing in the poor and middle class, so that they in turn could spend the money they needed to live back into the economy.
mainstream point of view but arguable, look at the recession of 1920 which was more severe than 1929. Nobody did anything, it ended in less than 2 years.
And this is ***exactly what WWII was***, from a fiscal point of view: a massive government spending program that put the entire workforce to work, increased production, and poured all that money back into the economy.
it can only work if you are the last man standing and get to reap profits of having an untouched production capacity in the completely ruined world. Broken window fallacy at its finest but on a global scale. The US got all the work to replace all the stuff destroyed.
ww3 to raze every trace of civilization to the ground? i don't see any other way to achieve the reset and i don't think i am in a hurry to see it in practice.
they have the privilege to create money out of thin air and charge very real interest on it. In the ancient times of common sense that would be called state granted monopoly on counterfeiting.
gold is almost universal symbol of wealth, which is much more than what can be said about a piece of paper with some ink on it. Sooner or later all fiat currencies reach their intristic value of 0.
Care to guess what people used to buy food or even freedom in the times of hell known as WW2? Banknotes were worthless, precious metals and necessities of life were the only things cosidered even remotely valuable.
i'd expect that the end of depression is when you are as good as you were before it happened and millions of unemployed generally agree. If for some reason GDP dropped by 95% and you had to work 50 years to get the same level back, would you call it a prosperity without precedence in the history of mankind?
it all depends who interprets the facts - keynesianism is the mainstream doctrine so pretty much everybody believes it's the best thing that could happen to the economic thought.
Austrian school argues that the Great Depression was in fact strengthened by the intervention and only after WW2 the US got out thanks to the fact that every other major power was completely ruined during the war and the US was the only one that had production capacity intact. As a counterexample they show the recession of 1920 (which most probably you never heard about) - it was deeper in terms of the drop in stock markets and ended in less than 2 years 'despite' the government doing nothing.
well, it's not my fault people don't know anything about the important people in their country. They should have their voter's badge revoked or something.
It's not like there is no info on Paul's views on the internet. He is a strict constitutionalist, wants sound, commodity-backed money, independent from politicians' whims, limited government reduced to its explicitly enumerated powers, non-interventionist foreign policy, majority of rulemaking reserved for the state. He is very consistent an it's quite easy to predict his view on pretty much any matter - "if something is not in the constitution, feds have no business there, that's the domain of the states"
Imagine how much easier would be to follow laws if only congress critters didn't feel in power to produce shoddy laws which require wheelbarrows of paper to print them on.
medieval commodities-based currency:
So you say that medieval economy tanked and world collapsed or what? If the world managed to go from commodity-based to fiat, it can go opposite way. Besides what's so inherently wrong with commodity based currency?
Paul thinks that there should be competition allowed and that currencies with intristic value would win. It's very simple - fiat money is a scam. It's end scenario is always value of 0, it has a built-in inflation and inflation is a hidden tax or, if you prefer, stealing the purchasing power from everybody.
Precious metals (or whatever you want your currency backed by) can't be printed so they would end all the keynesian nonsense that ruled supreme for the last 100 years and they would FORCE governments to be fiscally responsible. That's why politicians love fiat. They can promise, get elected and pay with printed money which steals purchasing power of everyone's paycheck. Also it reeks of central planning - someone has to decide arbitrarily how many units of fiat currency are supposed to be in circulation and how many to add/substract. Commodity based currency performance is decided only by the market forces, once you throw it into the market machine you can't really infuence it.
the FED:
Nobody knows what's going on there and these are the people who hold entire nation or even world by the balls. It's an organization created by private banks. Sorry, it's a flawed and extremely dangerous concept.
"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes... "
- Napoleon Bonaparte
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws."
- Mayer Amschel Rothschild
Their monetary policy pumped the bubble - that's what happens when you make money way to cheap to borrow (because people love to live in a mirage of the debt-fueled prosperity) with disregard to natural equilibrium. Only bankers benefit from the FED's existence (they are all buddies, FED, Treasury, Wall Street - same shit), they make money both ways, on ups and downs... and nobody likes them.
climate change, clean air and water:
yeah, prove decisively first that human activity is the main culprit. Also i don't think that the times of serious economic meltdown are good for doing something about. Unemployed people don't give two shits about it, they need food and shelter first and foremost. You see, you have to be able to afford enjoying all that clean air and water, you don't care when you live under the bridge and eat stuff from trash cans. If you want to drive away even more jobs to China with high costs of environmental compliance - it's your choice, but don't be surprised when all the negatives hit. Chinese certainly don't mind and will take every job you don't want.
what disastrous promises are you talking about? care to elaborate?
bringing troops home, paying attention to a supposedly outdated idea of fiscal responsibility, going back to the principles of the US constitution are considered disastrous nowadays?
because founding fathers thought that armed citizens act as a counterbalance to the force the government has and if the oppresive regime ever came to life it wouldn't be able to take liberties of citizens away with no resistance? Considering they had quite recent experiences with the british, it's completely understandable.
What do i win?
and why people sell falling stocks before they hit the ground? They want to get at least some value back. With or without their actions China's investment loses value. If they try to sell - value of dollar reserves drops, they don't sell but USA print more money to monetize debts which they do all the time to cover gigantic deficits - value of dollar reserves drops. USA have snowball's chance in hell to pay their debt so they are forced to roll it over. The treasury issues bonds to cover maturing ones, it's enough to not buy the next tranches to put the US in a really deep shit. The FED will be forced to buy bonds from the treasury (which is the act of money creation, because money used to pay didn't exist before) and then you have a high inflation.
Chinese 'help' the US only because that accelerates the rate of wealth transfer from the US to China. They are like a drug pusher - every trillion they lend the to the US fuels the addiction to foreign money so they get a bigger leverage over the US with each passing day. The truth is that the US is the China's bitch now as the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Chinese continue to throw good money after bad, but when they suck out as much as they can, they'll drop the US with no second thought and let them rot.
I'd love to see how you can patch a game that is released with lan option included just like sc1 was. Koreans and any serious tournament totally ignored battle.net infrastructure and went for 0 latency on local network.
Yes, you can say that it's up to people to decide if they want to buy or not. Either way sc2 is everything sc1, diablo 2 or wc3 were not. Battle.net was a convenience, you could use or not - if you wanted low latency you played lan with homies. Now everything runs through servers created solely for total control, farming (deals with facebook and shit) and other forms of monetization.
You can't create sub-accounts for other people in your household on your copy even for singleplayer purposes, even if you have only 1 pc - that's 60 bucks a pop, don't forget there are 2 expansions on the way, for the total of many many dollars.
You used to be able to play with people from other regions of the world by default, now you are locked to your area (official solution: another $60 for the other region's copy)
You are into mapmaking? You agree to give all your rights away and the only way to propagate maps is through battle.net. Forget about playing them offline. Also don't forget censorship of words like black, white, trans, suicide, xbox...
Even battle.net is a poor copy of xbox live and current ladder is an antithesis of transparency.
In theory they require that every tournament has to be rubberstamped - of course they don't care about small tournaments on some campus network with $50 prize, but the ToS is there if they need it and they got you by the balls. It's up to them to decide if they want to squeeze or not.
This is what you become when you team up with Activision.
disclaimer: former blizzard fanboy
analysis of the guy who predicted the economic meltdown at the peak of bubble and had the balls to speak about it, Peter Schiff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIcfMMVcYZg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwEbO_t30cg
shameless plug: now he competes with Linda McMahon and Rob Simmons for the republican spot in the senate race in Connecticut (against Dick Blumenthal). Voting in few days so wake up, republicans of CT.
economies of scale alone should bring prices down. Each year population of gamers grows. Ten years ago computers in general and gaming were a despised activity reserverd for basement dwellers. The only problem for the profitability is that everyone thinks that games lay golden eggs and now there are hundreds of titles released every year and they all pursue limited amount of money in a highly crowded market. Still you don't have to pay 50million for development and another 100mil for marketing which would require 5 million sales to break even.
what? don't pirated games come with the right crack included?