Dude, check out IGN's top 25 PS2 games article. Then check out IGN's top 25 Cube article. Now tell me the games on the PS2 list are better. Tell me that, and I'll show you a liar.
What I see on the GameCube list are mostly Mario games and crossplatform games that didn't make the list on the PS2. If I'm not mistaken, Resident Evil 4, Beyond Good and Evil, Resident Evil (Wow, twice for 1 system, they're really scraping the barrel), Soul Calibur 2, Killer 7, Timesplitters 2, Viewtiful Joe, and Super Monkey Ball 2 are available for the PS2 and none of them beat the PS2 games. One of the games, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, is a rerelease of a PS1 game.
But anyways thanks for calling me a liar, asshole. Go fuck yourself with you Nintendo dildo.
His statements are accurate. I own a GameCube, I have 2 games for it. There's a couple of games I might like to try, but I'm too busy playing some truly great games on my PS2 to go looking for the few games for the GameCube that don't suck.
It's quite possible to not like Resident Evil or Metroid. I have no desire to play either game.
The PS2 controller is, in my opinion, far superior to both the GameCube controller and the Xbox controller. And the PS2 can definitely outperform the Cube. There's one game that looks better on the Cube than it does on the PS2, and dozens of games on the PS2 that look better than anything I've ever seen on a GameCube.
I was reading through the comments to see if anyone else would write something like this. I have to agree entirely, Science Fiction is expansive, it's about big ideas and how they interact with the world. It's complicated. These things do not translate well to a two hour format.
Romance novels and action adventures, on the other hand, translate well because they spent a lot of time describe actions. Entire pages of explanation of actions can be reduced to seconds of movie time. In science fiction the opposite is true, paragraphs of science fiction can translate to minutes of explanation.
Shh! Are you trying to drive the Nintendo fan bois into a homicidal rage with your fancy-pants logic and reason?
They don't want the truth, they want the cool, sweet taste of propaganda. It's easy to tell because they're still raging about how much it sucks to have pretty games and how nobody in the whole world owns a HD TV or even wants one, and how Sony and (to a lesser extend) Microsoft are evil for producing consoles that can produce HD output, because as everyone knows graphics and gameplay are inversely proportional. Therehasneverbeenaprettygamethatwasalsofuntoplay.
You realize, of course, that he would then have to extract vengeance on you for that indignity, and as you well know, you don't want to be the subject of his vengeance.
He means honest as in, comparing the usage the same person would either vehicle to. When you're comparin two similar tools you have to also choose what job you're going to use them for. A hammer is a very poor saw, that doesn't means that hammers are bad tools, because saws are also very poor hammers.
This is a comparison between a Prius and Hummer, presumably for a purchaser who might be buying either one. That automatically rules out off-road rural usage, and large load hauling. Why because the Prius automatically fails in those usage cases, it can't accomplish the objectives so it doesn't matter which is more environmentally friendly under those circumstances. Instead you have to talk about urban usage of vehicles because that's the situation where the hypothetical person we're taling about can accomplish all of his or her goals using either a Hummer or a Prius. Thus, the triple lifespan argument for Hummers, even if it is true, which it likely is not, doesn't matter. We have to assume we're talking about an urbanite with urbanite behaviour patterns. I don't believe for a moment that a soccer mom is going to keep her SUV for 15-30 years.
Beyond that, I found the article rather obviously biased, once it got into the terrible environmental toll of one nickle mine, I stopped reading. It became obvious that the author cares more about the nickle plant than the legitimacy and correctness of the article.
This is the real world, most things aren't total successes or total failures.
Most likely the symantic web will fail to achieve all it's objectives but achieve some of them, and may eventually rise again after it's failed. This is the nature of progress. Good ideas that fail are usually resurrected later. However the blogger is probably right, as long as the symantic web is going to be "handed" to us by a group of established corporations it will most likely never succeed, there's too much incentive for back stabbing in that top-down implementation. For it to succeed it needs to be so obvious that there's more money and power available by playing nice that all but the most black hearted capitalists will play nice. We have to be aware that people like spammers exist, though, and anything that could potentially be used to generate advantage will be abused to death.
Amongst all the arguments over who's right and whether Google is profiting from Viacom or not. There's a couple things that have been overlooked:
1) Viacom split off most of it's assets to form a new corporation, CBS Networks at the start of 2006. Now it only owns the rights to Paramount Pictures' movies and TV Shows, MTV Networks' shows and BET's shows.
Notably most CBS TV shows are not included in the package that can be sued over, the most attractive things to redistribute would seem to be Viacom's movies, but only a masochist would attempt to watch an entire movie on YouTube. Much of the content that airs on Viacom's MTV Networks and BET are music videos which they don't own the rights to in the first place. The majority of the content I could find of Viacom's property tended to be remixes of their shows/movies to create a music video. In other words, there seems to be a small percentage that is their actual copyright material available and the majority is fair use use of their copyright material.
2) Viacom just signed a deal with Joost to distribute it's copyrighted content for free to end users.
This is really the heart of the lawsuit. Joost is likely paying Viacom for the right to distribute Viacom material. I would guess Google didn't offer them enough money as part of their proposed agreement so Viacom has decided to make an example of them to boost future tribute payments.
The point being that Viacom's doesn't care about it's materials being distributed for free, they just want a bigger piece of GooTube's action than GooTube is willing to offer them. They likely figure a little legal pressure will strongarm Google into coughing up that extra cash, and if it doesn't well, they'll hurt a company they don't have any financial interests in and scare everyone else into giving them more money in the future. It's an investment in the future, really.
In the end, this is just more of the typical corporate gunboat diplomacy.
It's really a simple case of say what you mean. "Blu Ray is stupid" is a really bad way of saying "The PS3 costs too much, they probably should have used a DVD drive so they could the price by 200 USD."
What if parts of a company are good are parts are evil?
Actually, I don't think you can really stop companies from behaving like insane sociopaths. It's what they're supposed to do. It's what they're designed to do. It's what they're doing all the time. It's always only about the money. Good corporate reputation? It's an angle to get more money. Creating a great product? It's an angle to get more money. Creating a crappy rip-off product? It's a shortcut to get more money.
You're right in some ways, that rewarding companies that make good products is a good idea, but I don't think refusing to buy a PS3 because of a rootkit that Sony-BMG Music put on some of the CDs is remotely effective. It's like punishing a cat who broke a vase by refusing to feed it, two days after it broke the vase. You're not sending a clear message to it. By all means, go ahead refuse to buy anything from Sony-BMG ever again but be aware that most of the people who work at Sony BMG are the same people who worked for BMG before Sony bought it. Sony didn't make BMG "evil", it was "evil" long before Sony bought it. Punishing the rest of Sony for the mistakes of Sony-BMG might be sastisfying to some people, but it's probably misdirected and ineffectual anger.
Yeah, the Wii controller is so much more fun for like 5 minutes, then you get bored with it. The games are like cotton candy, they're ok if you like insubstancial sugary stuff.
Meh, Lik-Sang was breaking the law and complaining about Blu-Ray is just stupid. They built it into the PS3, get over it already. If you hate Blu-Ray that much don't buy it, but enough with the endless complaining over it. So no, neither of your pathetic excuses is as important as the fact the price is too high.
Yes I'm aware your counterpoint will be that it wouldn't be so expensive if the Blu-Ray drive wasn't in there, but my point is that it may be foolish for Sony to pass on the price of the Blu-Ray drive, it's not foolish for them to put one in the PS3.
Indeed, if you had proof that He existed, it would no longer be faith. Of course, what does that mean for all the people who claim that there is, in fact, proof that He exists? Are they without faith? Or do they have faith, but are without honesty?
Truly, it a question to cloud the mind of even the most ardent Pastafarian.
Really, there's no point in dropping the price right now. Until Sony gets a couple of killer games out, dropping the price isn't going to really excite anyone.
Actually a lot people said you shouldn't have done it before the fact. They said "your own inspectors say there isn't anything there". The White House fired two weapons inspectors for failing to find weapons of mass destruction and then without any real evidence that there actually were WMDs there they grabbed hold of the flimsey story of a drunken lout and proclaimed that had absolute proof there was evidence.
There is only one obvious conclusion, they didn't care whether there was or wasn't because they could fathom that they could do anything wrong. This is a common theme that has run through the Bush white house, and will likely run through any Republican successors white house. They censor science unless the results are what they want them to be.
Those marines were lied to by their leaders, their lives were wasted in a country that obviously posed no threat to the United States. While the soldiers themselves should be honored for serving their country, their leaders (especially Bush and Co.) are the ones who should be paying the price for playing games with the facts to try and make them fit their warped view of reality.
I'm afraid you misunderstand the nature of my epiphany. What you say is obvious, what I realized is that I can not trust Vivendi to manage the game properly any more, they have betrayed the trust of the players for a short term boost in cash.
Well, actually I expect the uber level 60 gear to decay to "good" status, and the level 70 gear to be the new "uber" equipment. That's not the case, the level 60 gear dwindles to "trash" status by level 70. Resources that you gathered at level 60 are now essentially worthless except for skill grinding. Recipes for gear and enchantments that have outrageously expensive mats are now out performed by random green items that drop from common world monsters.
It's not the fact that the level 60 content is diminished it's that in one fell swoop, it was rendered utterly obsolete. The World of Warcraft is obsolete, only the Outlands of Warcraft matter at all anymore.
That was kind of my point, the "core classes" have been greatly diminished by the expansion. Warriors are worse tanks than druids, rogues and mages are worse dps than warlocks and shadow priests. Priests are worse healers than druids and paladins. All the classes with "primary roles" have just been rendered worse than the hybrid classes.
I feel for ya on the rage nerf, that was uncalled for.
But stamina probably hurts the mage class more. We have a limited pool of damage we can deal out defined by our mana pool. A common complaint is that at level 70 the mana pool of mages is smaller than it was at level 60 and your opponents have twice as many hit points, and your damage has increased a mere 10% or so from 60 (well for characters who were well geared before BC, the casual player who didn't have very good gear goes up a lot more). What that means is you need to use 190% of the mana you used to have to use to kill an opponent at level 60. Against good opponent(s) you're in real danger of running out of mana before you kill them and then you're dead. Without mana, a mage has no offence nor any defence.
I'm not sure you fully appreciate the changes in BC for several reasons:
1) Most players know that set items pre-BC weren't very good in the first place, they are easily replaced by non-set items gained through questing. True, the epic items will mostly be replaced by blue quest items, but they will be replaced. Many of the bonuses on your level 60 gear actually scale downwards as you level. Your "crit rating" becomes less effective as you level up, going from level 60 to level 70 you will loose about 50% of the crit bonus that you had at level 60, for example.
2) You will never again see a 40 man raid, the new raid content is 25 man raid content and the old stuff offers nothing to justify the time expenditure. The only reason to do the 40 man raid content is curiousity or nostalgia, because even the legendary staff from Naxx pales in comparison to epic level 70 one-handed weapons. There are simply no rewards worth delving into the 40 man content for. Even then, the level 60 content should be so trivialized by level 70 players that you probably won't need more than 10-20 players to complete MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx. Heck, it's only a matter of time before someone starts soloing the level 60 raid bosses for fame and kicks.
3) There are no rewards worth earning from any factiont that you can rep grind outside the Outlands. Almost everything of value is concentrated in the outlands. This means the time invested in grinding those level 60 reputations is now worthless, just as the time invested in earning equipment from Naxx is now pointless, you gear will be superceded by new gear on the way to 70. To some people that will seem justifiable, but the case was that did not happen on your way to level 60 from level 50. If you had the good fortune to have a level 50 epic weapon, you most likely kept it until you replaced with a high-end level 60 blue item, rather than a quest reward from some random level up quest. The only exceptions are the new instances Caverns of Times and Medivh's Tower that are in the "old world".
That's why everything pre-61 has been rendered pointless. In some ways that's a good thing, someone who just made level 60 before the expansion came out will essentially be on an even footing with someone who started at release and spent almost 2 years at level 60, but in my opinion and that of many others, that's going too far. This is a MMORPG, part of the point is to build up your character, to reduce someone who put 2 years of effort into their character to the same level as someone who put 2 weeks into it, just doesn't sit right.
Actually, since I played a mage, it was much worse than that for me. Mages received a ton of nerfs for the expansion to force one of the original 2 pure dps classes into the position of doing only average damage. At that point, why play a mage, and since it was obvious that Vivendi doesn't understand how to run or balance their game, why bother playing? Mages in particular are now inferior in every way to warlock character. Less dps, more downtime, less hit points, less pvp viabilitiy, worse AoE. If I was running a hard core raiding guild, I wouldn't take more than 1 mage into a 25 man instance, and the mage would be there solely to buff warlock dps with scorch (and hand out food and water and AB). I played the class, and that would be my recommendation.
Heck you hardly need any diversity in the game for an ideal raid. You want Druids to tank, and Druids to heal, warlocks to dps, and shadow priests for support dps (2 SP and 3 Warlocks for every dps group), and a few paladins for healing and buffing. The other classes are all hinderances. They lessen the effectiveness of your raid. If you're horde you might want a shaman or a warrior to deal with a fear spamming boss.
This is because Vivendi makes money from forcing players to play longer to complete the content.
Grinding = $$$ for Vivendi
The game is no longer about serving the player's interests and thus acquiring new players and making $$$, it's about wresting as much $$$ you can from the existing player base as they can. That's why everything is grind, grind, grind. It's why the new pvp system runs on "seasons" so you have to play for 3 months at level 70 everytime you want to try to for the special pvp rewards. That's why they charge $25 to transfer a character from one server to another, or from one account to another. That's why they stopped restoring items to hacked accounts (so they reduce the number of gamemasters required and save $$$), why they stopped helping players who accidentally master looted a BoP item to the wrong person (so they can reduce the number of gamemasters required and save $$$). It's why there are 3 active CMs for over 1 million north american players. Vivendi has settled down to extract the most money they can from the player base before the game crashes, after all why should they care? When the game eventually crashes and burns it'll be Blizzard that gets blamed, and the people who used to work for Blizzard have all left Vivendi anyway.
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What I see on the GameCube list are mostly Mario games and crossplatform games that didn't make the list on the PS2. If I'm not mistaken, Resident Evil 4, Beyond Good and Evil, Resident Evil (Wow, twice for 1 system, they're really scraping the barrel), Soul Calibur 2, Killer 7, Timesplitters 2, Viewtiful Joe, and Super Monkey Ball 2 are available for the PS2 and none of them beat the PS2 games. One of the games, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, is a rerelease of a PS1 game.
But anyways thanks for calling me a liar, asshole. Go fuck yourself with you Nintendo dildo.
Yes, Yes, and Yes.
His statements are accurate. I own a GameCube, I have 2 games for it. There's a couple of games I might like to try, but I'm too busy playing some truly great games on my PS2 to go looking for the few games for the GameCube that don't suck.
It's quite possible to not like Resident Evil or Metroid. I have no desire to play either game.
The PS2 controller is, in my opinion, far superior to both the GameCube controller and the Xbox controller.
And the PS2 can definitely outperform the Cube. There's one game that looks better on the Cube than it does on the PS2, and dozens of games on the PS2 that look better than anything I've ever seen on a GameCube.
I was reading through the comments to see if anyone else would write something like this. I have to agree entirely, Science Fiction is expansive, it's about big ideas and how they interact with the world. It's complicated. These things do not translate well to a two hour format.
Romance novels and action adventures, on the other hand, translate well because they spent a lot of time describe actions. Entire pages of explanation of actions can be reduced to seconds of movie time. In science fiction the opposite is true, paragraphs of science fiction can translate to minutes of explanation.
Shh! Are you trying to drive the Nintendo fan bois into a homicidal rage with your fancy-pants logic and reason?
They don't want the truth, they want the cool, sweet taste of propaganda. It's easy to tell because they're still raging about how much it sucks to have pretty games and how nobody in the whole world owns a HD TV or even wants one, and how Sony and (to a lesser extend) Microsoft are evil for producing consoles that can produce HD output, because as everyone knows graphics and gameplay are inversely proportional. There has never been a pretty game that was also fun to play.
You realize, of course, that he would then have to extract vengeance on you for that indignity, and as you well know, you don't want to be the subject of his vengeance.
He means honest as in, comparing the usage the same person would either vehicle to. When you're comparin two similar tools you have to also choose what job you're going to use them for. A hammer is a very poor saw, that doesn't means that hammers are bad tools, because saws are also very poor hammers.
This is a comparison between a Prius and Hummer, presumably for a purchaser who might be buying either one. That automatically rules out off-road rural usage, and large load hauling. Why because the Prius automatically fails in those usage cases, it can't accomplish the objectives so it doesn't matter which is more environmentally friendly under those circumstances. Instead you have to talk about urban usage of vehicles because that's the situation where the hypothetical person we're taling about can accomplish all of his or her goals using either a Hummer or a Prius. Thus, the triple lifespan argument for Hummers, even if it is true, which it likely is not, doesn't matter. We have to assume we're talking about an urbanite with urbanite behaviour patterns. I don't believe for a moment that a soccer mom is going to keep her SUV for 15-30 years.
Beyond that, I found the article rather obviously biased, once it got into the terrible environmental toll of one nickle mine, I stopped reading. It became obvious that the author cares more about the nickle plant than the legitimacy and correctness of the article.
This is the real world, most things aren't total successes or total failures.
Most likely the symantic web will fail to achieve all it's objectives but achieve some of them, and may eventually rise again after it's failed. This is the nature of progress. Good ideas that fail are usually resurrected later. However the blogger is probably right, as long as the symantic web is going to be "handed" to us by a group of established corporations it will most likely never succeed, there's too much incentive for back stabbing in that top-down implementation. For it to succeed it needs to be so obvious that there's more money and power available by playing nice that all but the most black hearted capitalists will play nice. We have to be aware that people like spammers exist, though, and anything that could potentially be used to generate advantage will be abused to death.
Looks like Jack's been reading the Left Behind series.
Amongst all the arguments over who's right and whether Google is profiting from Viacom or not. There's a couple things that have been overlooked:
1) Viacom split off most of it's assets to form a new corporation, CBS Networks at the start of 2006. Now it only owns the rights to Paramount Pictures' movies and TV Shows, MTV Networks' shows and BET's shows.
Notably most CBS TV shows are not included in the package that can be sued over, the most attractive things to redistribute would seem to be Viacom's movies, but only a masochist would attempt to watch an entire movie on YouTube. Much of the content that airs on Viacom's MTV Networks and BET are music videos which they don't own the rights to in the first place. The majority of the content I could find of Viacom's property tended to be remixes of their shows/movies to create a music video. In other words, there seems to be a small percentage that is their actual copyright material available and the majority is fair use use of their copyright material.
2) Viacom just signed a deal with Joost to distribute it's copyrighted content for free to end users.
This is really the heart of the lawsuit. Joost is likely paying Viacom for the right to distribute Viacom material. I would guess Google didn't offer them enough money as part of their proposed agreement so Viacom has decided to make an example of them to boost future tribute payments.
The point being that Viacom's doesn't care about it's materials being distributed for free, they just want a bigger piece of GooTube's action than GooTube is willing to offer them. They likely figure a little legal pressure will strongarm Google into coughing up that extra cash, and if it doesn't well, they'll hurt a company they don't have any financial interests in and scare everyone else into giving them more money in the future. It's an investment in the future, really.
In the end, this is just more of the typical corporate gunboat diplomacy.
Not only that, if they could they'd charge for every time you thought or talked about anything they had ever made, thought or talked about.
It's really a simple case of say what you mean. "Blu Ray is stupid" is a really bad way of saying "The PS3 costs too much, they probably should have used a DVD drive so they could the price by 200 USD."
What if parts of a company are good are parts are evil?
Actually, I don't think you can really stop companies from behaving like insane sociopaths. It's what they're supposed to do. It's what they're designed to do. It's what they're doing all the time. It's always only about the money. Good corporate reputation? It's an angle to get more money. Creating a great product? It's an angle to get more money. Creating a crappy rip-off product? It's a shortcut to get more money.
You're right in some ways, that rewarding companies that make good products is a good idea, but I don't think refusing to buy a PS3 because of a rootkit that Sony-BMG Music put on some of the CDs is remotely effective. It's like punishing a cat who broke a vase by refusing to feed it, two days after it broke the vase. You're not sending a clear message to it. By all means, go ahead refuse to buy anything from Sony-BMG ever again but be aware that most of the people who work at Sony BMG are the same people who worked for BMG before Sony bought it. Sony didn't make BMG "evil", it was "evil" long before Sony bought it. Punishing the rest of Sony for the mistakes of Sony-BMG might be sastisfying to some people, but it's probably misdirected and ineffectual anger.
Yeah, the Wii controller is so much more fun for like 5 minutes, then you get bored with it. The games are like cotton candy, they're ok if you like insubstancial sugary stuff.
Meh, Lik-Sang was breaking the law and complaining about Blu-Ray is just stupid. They built it into the PS3, get over it already. If you hate Blu-Ray that much don't buy it, but enough with the endless complaining over it. So no, neither of your pathetic excuses is as important as the fact the price is too high.
Yes I'm aware your counterpoint will be that it wouldn't be so expensive if the Blu-Ray drive wasn't in there, but my point is that it may be foolish for Sony to pass on the price of the Blu-Ray drive, it's not foolish for them to put one in the PS3.
No, first he has to kill off the Norse gods, then he heads south to Egypt and then he heads for India.
The scientists have concluded that this new drug, tentatively named Rohypnol, shows great promise for "all kinds of treatments".
Indeed, if you had proof that He existed, it would no longer be faith. Of course, what does that mean for all the people who claim that there is, in fact, proof that He exists? Are they without faith? Or do they have faith, but are without honesty?
Truly, it a question to cloud the mind of even the most ardent Pastafarian.
Really, there's no point in dropping the price right now. Until Sony gets a couple of killer games out, dropping the price isn't going to really excite anyone.
Isn't a libertarian politician an oxymoron?
How can you trust someone who claims to despise the job he's trying to convince you to give to him?
Actually a lot people said you shouldn't have done it before the fact. They said "your own inspectors say there isn't anything there". The White House fired two weapons inspectors for failing to find weapons of mass destruction and then without any real evidence that there actually were WMDs there they grabbed hold of the flimsey story of a drunken lout and proclaimed that had absolute proof there was evidence.
There is only one obvious conclusion, they didn't care whether there was or wasn't because they could fathom that they could do anything wrong. This is a common theme that has run through the Bush white house, and will likely run through any Republican successors white house. They censor science unless the results are what they want them to be.
Those marines were lied to by their leaders, their lives were wasted in a country that obviously posed no threat to the United States. While the soldiers themselves should be honored for serving their country, their leaders (especially Bush and Co.) are the ones who should be paying the price for playing games with the facts to try and make them fit their warped view of reality.
I'm afraid you misunderstand the nature of my epiphany. What you say is obvious, what I realized is that I can not trust Vivendi to manage the game properly any more, they have betrayed the trust of the players for a short term boost in cash.
Thus I quit the game.
Well, actually I expect the uber level 60 gear to decay to "good" status, and the level 70 gear to be the new "uber" equipment. That's not the case, the level 60 gear dwindles to "trash" status by level 70. Resources that you gathered at level 60 are now essentially worthless except for skill grinding. Recipes for gear and enchantments that have outrageously expensive mats are now out performed by random green items that drop from common world monsters.
It's not the fact that the level 60 content is diminished it's that in one fell swoop, it was rendered utterly obsolete. The World of Warcraft is obsolete, only the Outlands of Warcraft matter at all anymore.
That was kind of my point, the "core classes" have been greatly diminished by the expansion. Warriors are worse tanks than druids, rogues and mages are worse dps than warlocks and shadow priests. Priests are worse healers than druids and paladins. All the classes with "primary roles" have just been rendered worse than the hybrid classes.
I feel for ya on the rage nerf, that was uncalled for.
But stamina probably hurts the mage class more. We have a limited pool of damage we can deal out defined by our mana pool. A common complaint is that at level 70 the mana pool of mages is smaller than it was at level 60 and your opponents have twice as many hit points, and your damage has increased a mere 10% or so from 60 (well for characters who were well geared before BC, the casual player who didn't have very good gear goes up a lot more). What that means is you need to use 190% of the mana you used to have to use to kill an opponent at level 60. Against good opponent(s) you're in real danger of running out of mana before you kill them and then you're dead. Without mana, a mage has no offence nor any defence.
I'm not sure you fully appreciate the changes in BC for several reasons:
1) Most players know that set items pre-BC weren't very good in the first place, they are easily replaced by non-set items gained through questing. True, the epic items will mostly be replaced by blue quest items, but they will be replaced. Many of the bonuses on your level 60 gear actually scale downwards as you level. Your "crit rating" becomes less effective as you level up, going from level 60 to level 70 you will loose about 50% of the crit bonus that you had at level 60, for example.
2) You will never again see a 40 man raid, the new raid content is 25 man raid content and the old stuff offers nothing to justify the time expenditure. The only reason to do the 40 man raid content is curiousity or nostalgia, because even the legendary staff from Naxx pales in comparison to epic level 70 one-handed weapons. There are simply no rewards worth delving into the 40 man content for. Even then, the level 60 content should be so trivialized by level 70 players that you probably won't need more than 10-20 players to complete MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx. Heck, it's only a matter of time before someone starts soloing the level 60 raid bosses for fame and kicks.
3) There are no rewards worth earning from any factiont that you can rep grind outside the Outlands. Almost everything of value is concentrated in the outlands. This means the time invested in grinding those level 60 reputations is now worthless, just as the time invested in earning equipment from Naxx is now pointless, you gear will be superceded by new gear on the way to 70. To some people that will seem justifiable, but the case was that did not happen on your way to level 60 from level 50. If you had the good fortune to have a level 50 epic weapon, you most likely kept it until you replaced with a high-end level 60 blue item, rather than a quest reward from some random level up quest. The only exceptions are the new instances Caverns of Times and Medivh's Tower that are in the "old world".
That's why everything pre-61 has been rendered pointless. In some ways that's a good thing, someone who just made level 60 before the expansion came out will essentially be on an even footing with someone who started at release and spent almost 2 years at level 60, but in my opinion and that of many others, that's going too far. This is a MMORPG, part of the point is to build up your character, to reduce someone who put 2 years of effort into their character to the same level as someone who put 2 weeks into it, just doesn't sit right.
Actually, since I played a mage, it was much worse than that for me. Mages received a ton of nerfs for the expansion to force one of the original 2 pure dps classes into the position of doing only average damage. At that point, why play a mage, and since it was obvious that Vivendi doesn't understand how to run or balance their game, why bother playing? Mages in particular are now inferior in every way to warlock character. Less dps, more downtime, less hit points, less pvp viabilitiy, worse AoE. If I was running a hard core raiding guild, I wouldn't take more than 1 mage into a 25 man instance, and the mage would be there solely to buff warlock dps with scorch (and hand out food and water and AB). I played the class, and that would be my recommendation.
Heck you hardly need any diversity in the game for an ideal raid. You want Druids to tank, and Druids to heal, warlocks to dps, and shadow priests for support dps (2 SP and 3 Warlocks for every dps group), and a few paladins for healing and buffing. The other classes are all hinderances. They lessen the effectiveness of your raid. If you're horde you might want a shaman or a warrior to deal with a fear spamming boss.
This is because Vivendi makes money from forcing players to play longer to complete the content.
Grinding = $$$ for Vivendi
The game is no longer about serving the player's interests and thus acquiring new players and making $$$, it's about wresting as much $$$ you can from the existing player base as they can. That's why everything is grind, grind, grind. It's why the new pvp system runs on "seasons" so you have to play for 3 months at level 70 everytime you want to try to for the special pvp rewards. That's why they charge $25 to transfer a character from one server to another, or from one account to another. That's why they stopped restoring items to hacked accounts (so they reduce the number of gamemasters required and save $$$), why they stopped helping players who accidentally master looted a BoP item to the wrong person (so they can reduce the number of gamemasters required and save $$$). It's why there are 3 active CMs for over 1 million north american players. Vivendi has settled down to extract the most money they can from the player base before the game crashes, after all why should they care? When the game eventually crashes and burns it'll be Blizzard that gets blamed, and the people who used to work for Blizzard have all left Vivendi anyway.