If you just want to have fun, instead of going to the big, state-wide tournaments, go down to your local comic and games shop and play in one of their weekly booster drafts. I can guarantee you 50% less rules lawyering and a lot more simple fun. After all the "net decks" that I use to read about and all the cutthroat competition on Apprentice in hidden IRC rooms, it still warms my heart to see the nerds around here at work pull out decks containing cards from sets from over a decade ago combined with cards from the latest set, decks that should technically never win, and just play each other for the hell of it. Contrary to what you see on the wizards.com forums, casual play is still alive and well.
DS is only slightly ahead of the PSP in North America, where as in Japan, it's not even a race.
The DS vs. PSP war has a much better question to teach us: if Nintendo only sells half as many consoles as the other companies - a sale which does not produce profit for at least two of the big three, but sells three to four times as many first-party-developer game titles as the other systems, which one do you think is coming out happier about their share of the market? Did this guy not look at the E3 reports and see the number of titles that already looked exciting on the floor for the Wii, whereas the 360 is still having a tepid time getting good titles out for its platform? Let Microsoft sell all the 360's they want - they don't make a dime off of that. Show me the sales charts for their software division before you try to impress me.
In May, after a series of e-mails and phone calls, he picked her up at school, took her out to eat and to a movie, then drove her to an apartment complex parking lot in South Austin, where he sexually assaulted her, police said. He was arrested May 19.
So after being picked up by this 19-year-old at school, being taken out to eat by a 19-year-old, and being taken to a movie by a 19-year-old, at what point are you not thinking, "Wait a minute, this guy isn't legally allowed to date me?" Did we not recognize the potential for a sexual encounter with an older man during the entire date sequence that took place prior???
That sounds a bit like the infamous musician selling out question. Sure, it's nice to go for Hollywood and be a one-hit wonder, but then you turn up broke five years later when no one buys your new material. On the other hand, that wedding singer is making a stable five-figure salary. The question is risk vs. reward - is it worth it to bet everything on a system that might go bust, or would you rather opt for a simpler, more stable system that keeps you alive and eating?
I did RTFA, and the final paragraph made me chuckle: Having taken advantage of their hospitality for the better part of an afternoon, I stand to take my leave, but my hosts insist on driving me back to my hotel. Once there, we say our good-byes and, belatedly, a thought occurs to me -- an afterthought, perhaps. If Craigslist does what its users ask of it, and Craigslist doesn't need or seem to want all the ad revenue it declines to collect, maybe we, as end-users, should ask them to post some banner ads and give us the money instead. There's something wrong, I suppose, in that reasoning. But I like the idea.
If you've never read the WSJ editorial page, the one that prides itself on being the most conservative ed page in America, it gets to be a broken record - profit good, free market good, regulation bad, liberals ruining America, etc., etc. The author here shows a complete lack of empathy with the people he chooses to serve. When people visit Craigslist - we're talking a very general public and not the hardcore Slashdot crowd here - they came to post an ad. They aren't interested in making a few cents from a banner ad in addition to it. They want to post their advertisement, then get out. They don't want to wait for the page to load any more than someone who that someone wants to get lost in the want ads section of a newspaper looking for a job.
This is what truly scares me about corporate America, and perhaps why there's so much common respect for a certain Mr. Warren Buffett, who gained much of his wealth through investing in stable, bread-and-butter industries. The heart of entrepreneurship is about becoming self-subsistent on one's own creation more than become fantastically rich about it. If Mr. Carney knows so much about running a successful business, then what's he doing writing editorials for a living?
The ONLY way in WoW (et al) to do that is by playing the metagame of the endgame guild itself - on message boards, the blizzard forums, what have you - playing out social interactions out of game because the game itself does not value anything beyond the grind.
Interestingly enough, that's the same way you get social interaction in Halo. WoW was not built to be this incredibly deep social experience. It was meant to be about getting together with other people to kill stuff. There are a lot of games out there that have a much deeper, richer community than WoW has. They also have about one-tenth of the audience.
I don't know about your "endgame mods," but I played in a guild who was trying to defeat Ragnaros for the first time, and we died. We died over and over. We talked strategy, we tried different standpoints around the lava, my own class - the healer - talked a lot about how to conserve mana and where we needed to be in relation to the rest of the group. If your guild has decided to just google the answers to everything and leave it at that, then good for you, but we had a lot of fun trying to crack that hard egg.
If you don't enjoy "the grind," then go play another game. That's what WoW is about, it's about grind, and if that's not what you're into, then go play something else. Although you certainly seemed to enjoy it long enough to have played long enough to figure out how to start using boss-specific UI's.
Or, imagine that the Horde players overrun Darnassus and kill the Arch Druid. Instead of him respawning 2 minutes later, what if he stayed dead? What if all the NPCs on the continent gathered for a funeral, followed by a power struggle for a replacement figurehead? What if this rippled out and shifted the balance and power and course of events in various ways across the whole game world? You get the idea.
Then I'm going to be a level 30 casual-playing character on that server and suddenly realize that the leader of my city has been killed by a bunch of uber-twinked 60's who ran the city over and over again until they could go through and cause the effect. Yes, serious life-changing events like that are great for the guild that manages to accomplishes them... and bullshit for everyone else. Of course, maybe they would just install a new leader, which would basically be the same as respawning the old one, and you'd see it happen three times a week.
It's not about re-integrating PvP. It's about removing the requirements of XP and equipment. This shifts the focus away from first growing ones power and then going to use it, allowing people to get into the action faster. That sounds like Planetside,
No, what that sounds like is Halo. Create a character, equal in power to anyone else, and just go fight against them? What's the point of it being an RPG if there's no reward for exploration and creation?
The issue is that repeating the same content ad nauseum has very limited appeal in general, an issue when added to just how limiting these games are.
Not to people who play Halo, who I'm sure play the same maps over and over. Surprisingly, the people at large aren't that objective to rerunning content. The idea that you have to constantly be doing something new seems largely new to the RPG community alone.
Allow me to sum up the article - "WoW sucks. I want to play something else."
Maybe I'm just getting old, but when the PS2 first came out, weren't its competitors and detractors talking about how it was a difficult system to design for in comparison to the Dreamcast? I'm not sure that having a steep learning curve is stopping anyone here.
How do we not know that the group who played GTA has fairly 'normal' responses, but that the group who played Simpsons: Hit and Run actually had their emotions and attitudes calmed as a result of playing the game?
If every incarnation of Mario Kart, Zelda, and Metroid wasn't worth playing, then I would be offended by that. But if that really was the launch list, then who's to say it wouldn't be worth it?
"...that several huge franchises that exist today started as small independent projects, silly games nobody knows like "Pokemon", "Metroid", "Prince of persia", "Doom" and that silly little project that was originally a small mac game RTS what was its name?."
This, IMHO, is where Nintendo has the edge on the competition. Let's play Count the Successful Nintendo Franchises, shall we? Pokemon, Zelda, Metroid, Mario, Mario Kart, Mario Party. Lesser franchises include Star Fox and Donkey Kong. When you look at that list, how many of those games require top-notch graphics and presentation? Metroid, maybe, but the others are games that consistently sell on their gameplay rather than their visuals. If Nintendo needs to print money, they announce a new Legend of Zelda game.
Once you have a brand name built up, you don't need to completely wow the consumer to sell it. Nintendo more than anyone has a library of possible titles that can be printed at low production costs while maintaining good gameplay. You could also say the same thing about Madden Football, or Dance Dance Revolution, each of which sells consistently whether or not the new versions are worth it. Anyone who thinks the little game isn't going to make it needs to tell it to Shiggy's bank account.
KCRW also produces The Business, To The Point, Left Right and Center, and manyo ther good news shows that I never get the chance to hear on the air but love to podcast.
* A reverend, whose brother was killed by a self-described gamer. Has no scientific degree, but argues that games must be causing violent behavior.
* A psychologist who believes videogames may have a negative impact on children, without specifically stating that they do have a negative impact.
* A professor of speech communications, who testifies that the impact of videogames on children are possibly overblown. (Here's a link that has an excerpt of some of Dmitri Williams's testimony.)
* A research scientist who states that violent media have an impact on children, and states that videogames may have a deeper impact by being more interactive, without saying that they are more influential.
* A videogame industry member, who points out how videogame laws rarely stand up to judicial review.
* A politician who plans on endorsing a new bill coming out against videogame violence. Has no scientific degree, but argues that videogames must be causing violent behavior
* A lawyer who has represented the videogame industry, who points out how these laws rarely stand up to judicial review.
* A lawyer who argues that there may be means to restrict sales of games to minors despite First Amendment claims.
So according to this hearing, the videogame industry is nothing but lawyers attempting to get judicial activist judges to repeal these laws on flimsy laws, and the counter-media side had a lawyer to provide a counter-argument. Researchers who said that videogames may have an effect on children and thus advocated for new laws outnumbered the one psychologist that pointed out that what we know is incomplete. And the pro-videogame crowd got no response to the ad hominem attacks from two people who know nothing about videogames except to say that they must be causing harm, as if having the Reverend on the panel would contribute anything to the discussion but rhetoric.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone not think a national bill involving the sales of videogames to minors is not now inevitable, considering just what kinds of testimony Congress is going to spend their time listening to?
This is true, as the BB2 system actually seemed less lifelike and interesting compared to the original, but BB1 lacked the two-player mode that really made the game, save for a first-person mode that required hooking up two televisions.
Back during junior high, a friend of mine and I used to whittle away many hours playing Bushido Blade 2 for the Playstation. I used to play a lot of Street Fighter type games, but my friends were never as big on them and didn't get into them much. So generally, if I got one of them to play me in Dead or Alive or something, I would get miles ahead of them.
Bushido Blade 2 was a simple 3D samurai fighting game based on the "one shot, one kill" theory. If you cut someone in the leg, it slowed them down. If you hit them in the head, they died instantly. Matches were generally fairly short, and the system would tally your win-loss record. The controls were simple, but there was a decent amount of tactics and strategy involved, focusing less on combos and more on timing and patience. Thus my friends who weren't Capcom freaks were an even match for me, and we always had fun watching a guy bounce backwards after getting stabbed in the chest.
Nightstalker with the short sword or Hongou with the broadsword. That's all I have to say.
I can appreciate your missatisfaction, but I still venture to say that: one, you are still in a majority, and most of those people that would switch would still want a medium-pop server at the very least, and two, Blizzard laughs at your complaint to the BBB, which has no control over what they do and certainly isn't impacting their sales.
To those people who say Blizzard should just add more servers - part of the problem is that people want to play on servers with high populations. Few people want to log onto a server that has a low population - it becomes harder to find a group, harder to get things at the auction house, harder to find good PvP. And certainly there is less fame to being the best player on a server with a low population. Many people also start playing WoW because of friends that they have playing the game, and the higher the population of the server, the more people that have friends that they want to invite and make the population even higher.
Some people want to play on low-pop servers. These people don't have much of a problem. Some people want to play on high-pop servers. So they go start a character on a high-pop server, raising the population higher in doing so and drawing the queue up even farther. Several people want to play on medium-pop servers to get the best of both worlds, but you can only have so many people join a med-pop server before it become high-pop, and by that point the server's reputation gets to the point that even more people want to join in. Basically, population gain works exponentially - the bigger you are, the faster it gets worse.
More servers just isn't going to cut it, not unless you can convince people on larger servers to cull themselves into new servers with smaller populations. There are plenty of servers out there that don't have queue lines, but queues just aren't enough justification for people to reroll. Ideally, Blizzard would set limits on population to cut off before queues become a problem in the first place. But then you run the risk of pissing off people who want to play on the same server as their friend does. There is no justice in this matter.
Anyone who has had to deal with the process of getting a violent movie hacked down from a NC-17 rating to an R rating could probably tell you that the movie business's process of rating a film has its own problems. Think about it - is that the kind of rating system we want, where a game has to be produced and sent in to a ratings board, who then nitpicks a series of random encounters that they think may the game too violent and send it back with a list of things that would need to be taken out to avoid an AO rating?
To this point, the ratings board has been very non-subjective, if I must say. They haven't tried to apply a lot of their own values to the games; they've mostly recognized that bloody games are just bloody games, and the only thing that constitutes pornography is actual, intended pornography. This is how other games with nudity and serious gore (God of War, anyone?) squeaked by with an M rating. It's too bad that the public pressure came down that they felt the rating on San Andreas had to be changed. Certainly the worst thing that could happen is that the public pressure causes them to apply the same kind of litmus test that has to be applied to film.
Anyone who takes a serious beef with the ESRB, I hope you happen to catch This Film Is Not Yet Rated when it comes out in a few months.
Lammy had a bit better interface, but it just didn't have the moments. With Parappa, you walked away with "Kick, Punch! It's all in the mind!" stuck in your head for days. Lammy was a lot of fun, but the music just didn't have the hook that Parappa did - with the massive exception of the maternity ward episode ("Mamamamamamamamamamamamaaaa mamama!").
I could suppose that Guitar Freaks made the list while IIDX didn't because Guitar Freaks is a bit easier to get a grip on, is a bit more accessible, whereas the easiest IIDX tracks can horribly confuse people for quite a while. Or it could be that this is just another Gamespot wankfest that doesn't truly give credit where credit is due. But still, how the hell did Bust-A-Groove get a better score than Parappa?
If you can't get a GM to respond to an issue within six hours on your average server, then how are you going to get them to stop a kid from shouting "faggot!" on the general chat at the time that it happens? Indeed, we would all be grateful if you would start reporting these kids who spam up the chat with this sort of elementary school garbage, but they just aren't going to be able to keep track of everyone. Having a guild advertising a GLBT alliance is much easier to track down and is likely only getting attention from Blizzard because, well, it's asking for attention, in trying to get people to join it for that reason.
But seriously, start reporting people who use that language in the chats and let us know how the GMs respond to that. I'd hope the response would be good, but I'm not holding my breath. Raise enough of an outcry that the language issue isn't being enforced, and that could really turn some heads.
Dear resident: while we have no issue with you leaving your bright red 2006 Ferrari F430 Spider parked on the street at night, we feel that calling each and every one of your neighbors to tell them that you have a bright red Ferrari, inviting them to come out and see it, and calling on the other Ferrari owners of the city to join your 'Italian Racer Pwnage Club' is unnecessarily drawing attention to yourself and generally pissing off your neighbors. We ask that you kindly use your garage, or we will refer back to the contract you signed when you joined our association stating that you would not cause trouble to the rest of your neighborhood. Thank you and good day.
Mod parent down for near flamebait, maybe, but he's got a point. Right now, the administration is trying very hard to persuade European countries to sign on on keeping Iran at an embargo over its nuclear production capabilities. I'm not going to violate Godwin's Law like the OP just yet, but certainly this announcement could stir up sentiment further against the U.S. in a region of the world where we're trying to "win over hearts and minds." I'm not personally afraid of nuclear power, at least not in comparison to other power sources, but I'm not sure that this is the right time to be pursuing additional nuclear facilities when there are parts of the world that want us to let them do the same.
And don't forget the old maxims about planting a tree next to your house. The tree absorbs/reflects/whatever the heat coming onto your house, thus reducing your cooling bill in the summer, thus reducing the amount of fuel spent on keeping your house cool, reducing the amount of greenhouse gas created in burning that fuel, etc. etc. Planting trees may not have a direct effect on cooling, but the long-term process points in a better direction.
Slashdot Mirror
If you just want to have fun, instead of going to the big, state-wide tournaments, go down to your local comic and games shop and play in one of their weekly booster drafts. I can guarantee you 50% less rules lawyering and a lot more simple fun. After all the "net decks" that I use to read about and all the cutthroat competition on Apprentice in hidden IRC rooms, it still warms my heart to see the nerds around here at work pull out decks containing cards from sets from over a decade ago combined with cards from the latest set, decks that should technically never win, and just play each other for the hell of it. Contrary to what you see on the wizards.com forums, casual play is still alive and well.
DS is only slightly ahead of the PSP in North America, where as in Japan, it's not even a race.
The DS vs. PSP war has a much better question to teach us: if Nintendo only sells half as many consoles as the other companies - a sale which does not produce profit for at least two of the big three, but sells three to four times as many first-party-developer game titles as the other systems, which one do you think is coming out happier about their share of the market? Did this guy not look at the E3 reports and see the number of titles that already looked exciting on the floor for the Wii, whereas the 360 is still having a tepid time getting good titles out for its platform? Let Microsoft sell all the 360's they want - they don't make a dime off of that. Show me the sales charts for their software division before you try to impress me.
So after being picked up by this 19-year-old at school, being taken out to eat by a 19-year-old, and being taken to a movie by a 19-year-old, at what point are you not thinking, "Wait a minute, this guy isn't legally allowed to date me?" Did we not recognize the potential for a sexual encounter with an older man during the entire date sequence that took place prior???
That sounds a bit like the infamous musician selling out question. Sure, it's nice to go for Hollywood and be a one-hit wonder, but then you turn up broke five years later when no one buys your new material. On the other hand, that wedding singer is making a stable five-figure salary. The question is risk vs. reward - is it worth it to bet everything on a system that might go bust, or would you rather opt for a simpler, more stable system that keeps you alive and eating?
I did RTFA, and the final paragraph made me chuckle: Having taken advantage of their hospitality for the better part of an afternoon, I stand to take my leave, but my hosts insist on driving me back to my hotel. Once there, we say our good-byes and, belatedly, a thought occurs to me -- an afterthought, perhaps. If Craigslist does what its users ask of it, and Craigslist doesn't need or seem to want all the ad revenue it declines to collect, maybe we, as end-users, should ask them to post some banner ads and give us the money instead. There's something wrong, I suppose, in that reasoning. But I like the idea.
If you've never read the WSJ editorial page, the one that prides itself on being the most conservative ed page in America, it gets to be a broken record - profit good, free market good, regulation bad, liberals ruining America, etc., etc. The author here shows a complete lack of empathy with the people he chooses to serve. When people visit Craigslist - we're talking a very general public and not the hardcore Slashdot crowd here - they came to post an ad. They aren't interested in making a few cents from a banner ad in addition to it. They want to post their advertisement, then get out. They don't want to wait for the page to load any more than someone who that someone wants to get lost in the want ads section of a newspaper looking for a job.
This is what truly scares me about corporate America, and perhaps why there's so much common respect for a certain Mr. Warren Buffett, who gained much of his wealth through investing in stable, bread-and-butter industries. The heart of entrepreneurship is about becoming self-subsistent on one's own creation more than become fantastically rich about it. If Mr. Carney knows so much about running a successful business, then what's he doing writing editorials for a living?
The ONLY way in WoW (et al) to do that is by playing the metagame of the endgame guild itself - on message boards, the blizzard forums, what have you - playing out social interactions out of game because the game itself does not value anything beyond the grind.
Interestingly enough, that's the same way you get social interaction in Halo. WoW was not built to be this incredibly deep social experience. It was meant to be about getting together with other people to kill stuff. There are a lot of games out there that have a much deeper, richer community than WoW has. They also have about one-tenth of the audience.
I don't know about your "endgame mods," but I played in a guild who was trying to defeat Ragnaros for the first time, and we died. We died over and over. We talked strategy, we tried different standpoints around the lava, my own class - the healer - talked a lot about how to conserve mana and where we needed to be in relation to the rest of the group. If your guild has decided to just google the answers to everything and leave it at that, then good for you, but we had a lot of fun trying to crack that hard egg.
If you don't enjoy "the grind," then go play another game. That's what WoW is about, it's about grind, and if that's not what you're into, then go play something else. Although you certainly seemed to enjoy it long enough to have played long enough to figure out how to start using boss-specific UI's.
Or, imagine that the Horde players overrun Darnassus and kill the Arch Druid. Instead of him respawning 2 minutes later, what if he stayed dead? What if all the NPCs on the continent gathered for a funeral, followed by a power struggle for a replacement figurehead? What if this rippled out and shifted the balance and power and course of events in various ways across the whole game world? You get the idea.
Then I'm going to be a level 30 casual-playing character on that server and suddenly realize that the leader of my city has been killed by a bunch of uber-twinked 60's who ran the city over and over again until they could go through and cause the effect. Yes, serious life-changing events like that are great for the guild that manages to accomplishes them... and bullshit for everyone else. Of course, maybe they would just install a new leader, which would basically be the same as respawning the old one, and you'd see it happen three times a week.
It's not about re-integrating PvP. It's about removing the requirements of XP and equipment. This shifts the focus away from first growing ones power and then going to use it, allowing people to get into the action faster. That sounds like Planetside,
No, what that sounds like is Halo. Create a character, equal in power to anyone else, and just go fight against them? What's the point of it being an RPG if there's no reward for exploration and creation?
The issue is that repeating the same content ad nauseum has very limited appeal in general, an issue when added to just how limiting these games are.
Not to people who play Halo, who I'm sure play the same maps over and over. Surprisingly, the people at large aren't that objective to rerunning content. The idea that you have to constantly be doing something new seems largely new to the RPG community alone.
Allow me to sum up the article - "WoW sucks. I want to play something else."
Maybe I'm just getting old, but when the PS2 first came out, weren't its competitors and detractors talking about how it was a difficult system to design for in comparison to the Dreamcast? I'm not sure that having a steep learning curve is stopping anyone here.
No, actually, I couldn't hear the scream over the sound of thousands of other gold farmers furiously clicking their mice.
How do we not know that the group who played GTA has fairly 'normal' responses, but that the group who played Simpsons: Hit and Run actually had their emotions and attitudes calmed as a result of playing the game?
If every incarnation of Mario Kart, Zelda, and Metroid wasn't worth playing, then I would be offended by that. But if that really was the launch list, then who's to say it wouldn't be worth it?
"...that several huge franchises that exist today started as small independent projects, silly games nobody knows like "Pokemon", "Metroid", "Prince of persia", "Doom" and that silly little project that was originally a small mac game RTS what was its name?."
This, IMHO, is where Nintendo has the edge on the competition. Let's play Count the Successful Nintendo Franchises, shall we? Pokemon, Zelda, Metroid, Mario, Mario Kart, Mario Party. Lesser franchises include Star Fox and Donkey Kong. When you look at that list, how many of those games require top-notch graphics and presentation? Metroid, maybe, but the others are games that consistently sell on their gameplay rather than their visuals. If Nintendo needs to print money, they announce a new Legend of Zelda game.
Once you have a brand name built up, you don't need to completely wow the consumer to sell it. Nintendo more than anyone has a library of possible titles that can be printed at low production costs while maintaining good gameplay. You could also say the same thing about Madden Football, or Dance Dance Revolution, each of which sells consistently whether or not the new versions are worth it. Anyone who thinks the little game isn't going to make it needs to tell it to Shiggy's bank account.
KCRW also produces The Business, To The Point, Left Right and Center, and manyo ther good news shows that I never get the chance to hear on the air but love to podcast.
* A reverend, whose brother was killed by a self-described gamer. Has no scientific degree, but argues that games must be causing violent behavior.
* A psychologist who believes videogames may have a negative impact on children, without specifically stating that they do have a negative impact.
* A professor of speech communications, who testifies that the impact of videogames on children are possibly overblown. (Here's a link that has an excerpt of some of Dmitri Williams's testimony.)
* A research scientist who states that violent media have an impact on children, and states that videogames may have a deeper impact by being more interactive, without saying that they are more influential.
* A videogame industry member, who points out how videogame laws rarely stand up to judicial review.
* A politician who plans on endorsing a new bill coming out against videogame violence. Has no scientific degree, but argues that videogames must be causing violent behavior
* A lawyer who has represented the videogame industry, who points out how these laws rarely stand up to judicial review.
* A lawyer who argues that there may be means to restrict sales of games to minors despite First Amendment claims.
So according to this hearing, the videogame industry is nothing but lawyers attempting to get judicial activist judges to repeal these laws on flimsy laws, and the counter-media side had a lawyer to provide a counter-argument. Researchers who said that videogames may have an effect on children and thus advocated for new laws outnumbered the one psychologist that pointed out that what we know is incomplete. And the pro-videogame crowd got no response to the ad hominem attacks from two people who know nothing about videogames except to say that they must be causing harm, as if having the Reverend on the panel would contribute anything to the discussion but rhetoric.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone not think a national bill involving the sales of videogames to minors is not now inevitable, considering just what kinds of testimony Congress is going to spend their time listening to?
This is true, as the BB2 system actually seemed less lifelike and interesting compared to the original, but BB1 lacked the two-player mode that really made the game, save for a first-person mode that required hooking up two televisions.
Bushido Blade 2 was a simple 3D samurai fighting game based on the "one shot, one kill" theory. If you cut someone in the leg, it slowed them down. If you hit them in the head, they died instantly. Matches were generally fairly short, and the system would tally your win-loss record. The controls were simple, but there was a decent amount of tactics and strategy involved, focusing less on combos and more on timing and patience. Thus my friends who weren't Capcom freaks were an even match for me, and we always had fun watching a guy bounce backwards after getting stabbed in the chest.
Nightstalker with the short sword or Hongou with the broadsword. That's all I have to say.
I can appreciate your missatisfaction, but I still venture to say that: one, you are still in a majority, and most of those people that would switch would still want a medium-pop server at the very least, and two, Blizzard laughs at your complaint to the BBB, which has no control over what they do and certainly isn't impacting their sales.
Some people want to play on low-pop servers. These people don't have much of a problem. Some people want to play on high-pop servers. So they go start a character on a high-pop server, raising the population higher in doing so and drawing the queue up even farther. Several people want to play on medium-pop servers to get the best of both worlds, but you can only have so many people join a med-pop server before it become high-pop, and by that point the server's reputation gets to the point that even more people want to join in. Basically, population gain works exponentially - the bigger you are, the faster it gets worse.
More servers just isn't going to cut it, not unless you can convince people on larger servers to cull themselves into new servers with smaller populations. There are plenty of servers out there that don't have queue lines, but queues just aren't enough justification for people to reroll. Ideally, Blizzard would set limits on population to cut off before queues become a problem in the first place. But then you run the risk of pissing off people who want to play on the same server as their friend does. There is no justice in this matter.
Anyone who has had to deal with the process of getting a violent movie hacked down from a NC-17 rating to an R rating could probably tell you that the movie business's process of rating a film has its own problems. Think about it - is that the kind of rating system we want, where a game has to be produced and sent in to a ratings board, who then nitpicks a series of random encounters that they think may the game too violent and send it back with a list of things that would need to be taken out to avoid an AO rating?
To this point, the ratings board has been very non-subjective, if I must say. They haven't tried to apply a lot of their own values to the games; they've mostly recognized that bloody games are just bloody games, and the only thing that constitutes pornography is actual, intended pornography. This is how other games with nudity and serious gore (God of War, anyone?) squeaked by with an M rating. It's too bad that the public pressure came down that they felt the rating on San Andreas had to be changed. Certainly the worst thing that could happen is that the public pressure causes them to apply the same kind of litmus test that has to be applied to film.
Anyone who takes a serious beef with the ESRB, I hope you happen to catch This Film Is Not Yet Rated when it comes out in a few months.
Lammy had a bit better interface, but it just didn't have the moments. With Parappa, you walked away with "Kick, Punch! It's all in the mind!" stuck in your head for days. Lammy was a lot of fun, but the music just didn't have the hook that Parappa did - with the massive exception of the maternity ward episode ("Mamamamamamamamamamamamaaaa mamama!").
I could suppose that Guitar Freaks made the list while IIDX didn't because Guitar Freaks is a bit easier to get a grip on, is a bit more accessible, whereas the easiest IIDX tracks can horribly confuse people for quite a while. Or it could be that this is just another Gamespot wankfest that doesn't truly give credit where credit is due. But still, how the hell did Bust-A-Groove get a better score than Parappa?
If you can't get a GM to respond to an issue within six hours on your average server, then how are you going to get them to stop a kid from shouting "faggot!" on the general chat at the time that it happens? Indeed, we would all be grateful if you would start reporting these kids who spam up the chat with this sort of elementary school garbage, but they just aren't going to be able to keep track of everyone. Having a guild advertising a GLBT alliance is much easier to track down and is likely only getting attention from Blizzard because, well, it's asking for attention, in trying to get people to join it for that reason.
But seriously, start reporting people who use that language in the chats and let us know how the GMs respond to that. I'd hope the response would be good, but I'm not holding my breath. Raise enough of an outcry that the language issue isn't being enforced, and that could really turn some heads.
"From your homeowners' association:
Dear resident: while we have no issue with you leaving your bright red 2006 Ferrari F430 Spider parked on the street at night, we feel that calling each and every one of your neighbors to tell them that you have a bright red Ferrari, inviting them to come out and see it, and calling on the other Ferrari owners of the city to join your 'Italian Racer Pwnage Club' is unnecessarily drawing attention to yourself and generally pissing off your neighbors. We ask that you kindly use your garage, or we will refer back to the contract you signed when you joined our association stating that you would not cause trouble to the rest of your neighborhood. Thank you and good day.
Mod parent down for near flamebait, maybe, but he's got a point. Right now, the administration is trying very hard to persuade European countries to sign on on keeping Iran at an embargo over its nuclear production capabilities. I'm not going to violate Godwin's Law like the OP just yet, but certainly this announcement could stir up sentiment further against the U.S. in a region of the world where we're trying to "win over hearts and minds." I'm not personally afraid of nuclear power, at least not in comparison to other power sources, but I'm not sure that this is the right time to be pursuing additional nuclear facilities when there are parts of the world that want us to let them do the same.
And don't forget the old maxims about planting a tree next to your house. The tree absorbs/reflects/whatever the heat coming onto your house, thus reducing your cooling bill in the summer, thus reducing the amount of fuel spent on keeping your house cool, reducing the amount of greenhouse gas created in burning that fuel, etc. etc. Planting trees may not have a direct effect on cooling, but the long-term process points in a better direction.