Actually, Dan Brown write in the prologue something like all secret societies, rituals, ceremonies, history, symbols, etc., are real. It doesn't just seem to be part of the fiction he's writing.
If you watched some of the network TV documentaries there were also plenty of "expert authors" they invited on with books supporting the theories that claimed they were true.
Basically it's just people trying to make more money off of a debate that shouldn't be open on both sides.
The second is a restatement of the first with the terms reversed... All you're doing here is playing the word shuffle game.
Hey, glad to know that judging one thing better than the other is the same thing as saying the other is completely lacking. I was going to say that I was more particular about language, but I guess I can just jump to you being a neanderthal dumbass conspiracy theorist that can't discern meaning.
Contrast "commercial software is more reliable and dependable than open source" with "open source is neither reliable nor dependable." One is the basis for a discussion, the other is flamebait for the Slashdot crowd to lap up.
Sure, people can take issue that commercial code is more reliable than open source, but turning a fairly innocuous quote about how someone thinks commercial software has advantages in reliability and dependability into a smear against open source is a perversion of this guy's words. Poor job by both the editors at Cnet for choosing the headline and the editors at Slashdot for running with it.
And btw, in that infamous "last supper" picture, there is more than one character that looks like a woman...
Not to take this in a serious direction, but my favorite part about the amateur symbologists that graduated from Dan Brown University is how somehow a direct correlation is drawn between a painting and the truth.
Is it more likely that ol' Leo was just having a bit of fun with an androgynous figure in his painting, or that he was a member of a secret organization that knew about the cover-up of Jesus' wife and he decided to release this secret encoded in a painting because... oh wait, why would he do that again? And if the latter, do all the other androgynous people in his paintings hold a secret of enormous portent?
Come on people, there's a reason why in these documentaries the only people who actually promote any of these theories are second-rate authors looking to peddle their books and TV stations trying to build drama. When they actually talk to real historians they get a resounding no. Hell, even the people who wrote that Holy Blood, Holy Grail book just say it's a nice theory and they have no actual evidence. One of the people who invented the Priory of Sion has done a full disclosure and admitted it was a complete hoax.
Anyway, just a digression, sorry. Get back to your usual business:P
Howsabout I help you help yourself stop trying to help people that don't need it?
If I hold down a career that makes me enough money to survive and also contributes to the knowledgebase of society more than Programmer X. Websitedesign, why does it matter to you if I want to spend my free time in front of a computer or at the park? Obviously your friends prefer their computer to you. Do you feel threatened?
Everyone in the end looks back on their lives and wonders if they've really accomplished anything. And the deeper you get into philosophy, the more you start questioning if you're really going to find a meaningful accomplishment in anything you do. You're taking up this crusade because it makes you feel like you're doing something positive. It gives you self-righteousness. It confirms your view of a meaningful life.
I stopped going out with my friends in large part recently because, frankly, I've been bored going to the same old parties, having the same drunken conversations, pretending there's some deeper meaning where there really isn't. I'm not hiding from the world. I did not suddenly develop a social phobia in my twenty-second year on this world. And the patronizing kiddie-freud analysis that people try to subject me to with those conclusions (like you're doing to your friends) is one of the #1 reasons that I really don't want to hang out with them. If I told them the truth, that I'm bored with them, that I spend more time trying to entertain them than being entertained, that I think their deep philosophies and purposes and meanings are shallow, I don't think they'd want me around much longer. But I can't quite bring myself to do that.
I wish Square-Enix would revamp FF11 just a bit to be more accessible to casual gamers, with a robust, customizable interface for PC users, the ability to alt-tab without crippling the game enabled and rework the exp system so you're not so heavily penalized for having one player a few levels higher than the rest of the group (1 level 41 in a group of level 44's isn't bad, but 1 level 44 in a group of level 41's has an incredibly negative impact on your exp.) That, with a few graphical upgrades/reskins and it would be a great modern MMO. Oh, get rid of PlayOnline too, and don't make the install/registration process such a mess for new users.
Exactly. The interface was painful. I couldn't use the mouse for 90% of the things I wanted to use it for. I couldn't play in a windowed mode. I couldn't tweak up graphics as high as I'd have liked to. I found the menus clunky and had a hell of a time with gear and comparing it (can't remember exactly why). You're dropped into the game with little-to-no instruction.
PlayOnline registration actually, swear to god, confused the hell outta me, and I've navigated a lot of clumsy registration systems in my time. When I quit the game for a couple months and wanted to come back, they told me that my PlayOnline ID or some shit had expired and I'd need to buy a new copy of the game if I wanted to continue playing. Thanks, but no thanks.
Thompson is a blowhard, if I remember correctly he was disbarred or at least investigated, I don't think he's actually made any inroads on this front recently. We don't need yet another story to tell us what Thompson's stance is, we know what it is already, he's 100% down the line pro-censorship in games.
Seriously, stop publicizing Jack Thompson and he'll go away. He feeds off your hate mail and your stories and your negative comments.
1. ESRB rates games that have slightly questionable content accessed via modding up to M.
2. Half the games on the market become M. When Little Johnny shows off some M games to mom and dad they learn the ratings don't mean much.
3. ???
4. Pro... err, The Coalition of Nipple strikes another blow at the moral underpinnings of American society. President finally has rallied enough support to officially declare his War on Boobies.
Not exactly. First off, quests are meant to be solved communally. Maybe not on exactly that level, but there's a quest in EQ2 that, for example, requires you to traverse the globe searching for 20-some-odd dragon runes. These things are tiny and hidden in relatively random locations across the entire world. There aren't really any clues as to where they are. If you didn't have some sort of resource pooling... *shrug*
Secondly, bugs happen quite frequently in MMOs. Whenever there's a possibility of hundreds of players to interact with something simultaneously and over an internet connection, there's a decent chance something will go wrong. Sites like these let you know what's supposed to happen so that you don't get burned. A recent example would be the large number of quests in EQ2 that were recently affected when ring events broke. I'm not going to explain them if you don't know what they are, but suffice it to say you could've been trying to get something to work for three hours and not know that it was broken and you had no chance of getting it done.
For a lot of people, Han Solo made Star Wars. I really don't care about the Jedi, good vs. evil, all that rehashed crap... the cool part is a cocky, badass smuggler with a cobbled-together tin can of a spaceship living on the frontier. Han's the only remotely interesting character in all six films aside from Obi-Wan, Lando, and a couple of minor players.
As a similar change, what if we edited it so that in the Emperor's room at the very end, Vader attacks first instead of Luke striking out in anger. That sorta changes the mood of the whole scene and Luke's entire character. Same thing with Han allowing Greedo to get a shot off at point blank range, and also Greedo somehow missing from two feet away.
They have nude models because all the characters in the game are dressed from the nude... you know, like real people. Maybe we should slap an M for mature on everyone's ass in the real world, just so that parents know that underneath all of their clothing they are naked, and nudity is the devils work.
QFE. I don't know much about computer graphics, but I bet it's really really hard to make them realistic if you don't start with a nude model to wrap your textures around.
We're setting a stupid precedent here where developers have to now not only worry about the game content, but every portion of the game that players can hack together to make something racy. Are you going to start actually encoding some sort of tamper protection into your game to score below an M?
The government needs to show me that all these extra wiretappings and detainments and searches have actually done something. I'm not saying they need to let me in on their super secret intel. I'm saying I want them to give me several clear-cut cases where their methods have achieved results that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten to. I don't need to know every detail -- I want to know that they've captured X terrorist who was associated with Y group, and has gone on such-and-such missions in the past. Again, I know they can't reveal everything or even some things in a lot of situations, but I want to see *some* result. "We haven't been attacked" doesn't cut it.
The only things I've seen out of this administration have been intelligence failures (on several different levels). I'm not going to keep throwing my freedom blindly into this money pit in the hope that it'll do something.
But I think a better question to lead in to a counterargument is, "Is it sustainable?" You may say that what this guy is doing is fine, he's enjoying himself, and who cares about all of the trappings of life that other people consider to be "normal" as long as he's living his own life his own way. But if the problem is as serious as the OP suggests, then what happens when this guy loses his job? And his friends? And his home? I'd say that if you end up living on the street because of an addiction (regardless of whether that addiction is to a video game or a drug or whatever), then there's a problem. And if it ever got to that point, I think the guy might just feel a little regret for the way the past few years had turned out, as he's hustling people for spare change on the subway.
This is a good way to look at it, I think. I am a really, really addicted MMO player. I play insane amounts of time. But I'm not at a point where this is detracting from my ability to live. I am still getting good grades in classes, I've been recruited into a grad school with a fellowship. I meet up with my real-life friends over lunch and dinner typically once a day at least. It's just that honestly, on the whole, I can say that I enjoy playing my MMO more than most other activities at the moment.
For two or three years I've done the partying thing, I've gone to the bars, I've experienced all the drunken philosophy and "meaningful" discussions and juvenile sex drama that I care to. It was a fun time, and I wouldn't exchange it for anything, but it just really doesn't capture my interest anymore.
Amen. I feel exactly the same way. Counterarguments seem to be "that isn't normal" or "that isn't healthy." There's tons of crap that everyone does every day that's not healthy, and we didn't need MMOs to trigger our obesity epidemic. Normality, meh, I think everyone on this website can appreciate how much normality matters. A full and healthy life does not have to involve all the trappings we've associated it with throughout history.
I have to agree with this. My grandpa found a new age religion he really enjoys, and hell, I'm happy with him. As far as I'm concerned it's more innocuous than the other religions I've seen and teaches better values.
But the way the man is led to read and misinterpret physics and math are astounding. People keep seeing meaning that's not there, parroting it from books written by authors who have the same fundamental misunderstandings.
As far as I'm concerned, mathematics and physics parallel so closely because most of the rules we have in mathematics stem directly from real world experience somehow. If the real world and the mathematical model you're using start off with similar axioms, they're going to produce similar results.
Exactamundo. Someone mentioned in another thread that their nightmare scenario was the game crashing for twelve hours or running into gamestopping bugs.
Is it just me, or is PlayOnline really just a terrible platform for nearly anything?
I bought the computer version of FFXI a while back and after I finished installing all four CDs, it took me another half hour just to put in all the different keycodes and make two different accounts, one for FFXI and one for PlayOnline. Plus it's this terrible GUI that's a PITA to navigate to get to the game.
I decided that I would put FFXI on the backburner after the free month and cancelled my FFXI account, but apparently didn't cancel my PlayOnline account or something. A couple months later I decided to sign up again and pay for a month when I had some free time. I couldn't register my account again, so I checked my seldom-used e-mail that I had signed up the game with, and I have a months old e-mail saying if I didn't deactivate my PlayOnline account my game key would go bad.
It might just be me, but I've played a ton of MMOs, and none of them have made it such a pain in the ass to register, quit, and reactivate. If all of them worked through a kludgy system like PlayOnline, they would've lost quite a bit more of my money, because I wouldn't have taken the bother to reactivate accounts on a whim.
I don't think he's talking about a specific game. Console games, by far the biggest target of strategy guides, usually have neither terrain editors nor patches. The information in the strategy guide is thus timelessly accurate and provides information not available elsewhere (color maps for most console games are hard to come by online).
Games where this is handy are few and far between, but I do find myself wishing I had the strategy guide for certain games from time to time. Best left to the experienced purchaser, though, as they're hardly ever useful:P
Honestly, I haven't heard anyone mention crafting as an EQ2 strongpoint, but since you said they were "pimping it as the one thing that's better than WoW," I'm guessing it's in the kind of discussion I'd rather stay out of.
EQ2's theme has been stripping down things that are boring. Long, boring travel times across terrain you've passed a million times. Long, boring steps to craft a final product that doesn't make it harder or more complicated, just a giant pain in the butt. Long, boring grinds with little to no experience in order to claw up to the next level.
These things really aren't terribly fun. Let's be honest, there are very few games in which the actual crafting process appeals to anyone except the obsessive compulsive grinder, and EQ2 was (is) no exception. Even with the changes, there are tons of people on the boards complaining about new Heritage Quests for which you need to have a high crafting level, because few really enjoy it.
I used to balk at such simplifications as well, but then I started thinking about why, exactly, crafting needs to be a drawn-out process as well as a sluggish bore. Point me to a game where crafting is exciting and I'll be on board. Until then, I am not going to complain if it gets made "easier."
I've actually done much the same during this, my last semester at college. It's lead me to done a lot of soul searching myself. What kind of life is this? Is it right? Is it good? Can it be natural or fulfilling?
What I've found is that people who I considered my closest friends, I really don't care about so much as use for company and entertainment, and validation that I'm a good enough human being to be their friend.
Even if I get off my addiction at some point, I really doubt I'll go back to partying and socializing the way I did before. I just don't think human-to-human interaction has the meaning that I once attached to it. And I think society will eventually head in that direction, we just have a myriad of taboos standing in the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Dan Brown write in the prologue something like all secret societies, rituals, ceremonies, history, symbols, etc., are real. It doesn't just seem to be part of the fiction he's writing.
If you watched some of the network TV documentaries there were also plenty of "expert authors" they invited on with books supporting the theories that claimed they were true.
Basically it's just people trying to make more money off of a debate that shouldn't be open on both sides.
The second is a restatement of the first with the terms reversed... All you're doing here is playing the word shuffle game.
Hey, glad to know that judging one thing better than the other is the same thing as saying the other is completely lacking. I was going to say that I was more particular about language, but I guess I can just jump to you being a neanderthal dumbass conspiracy theorist that can't discern meaning.
Contrast "commercial software is more reliable and dependable than open source" with "open source is neither reliable nor dependable." One is the basis for a discussion, the other is flamebait for the Slashdot crowd to lap up.
Sure, people can take issue that commercial code is more reliable than open source, but turning a fairly innocuous quote about how someone thinks commercial software has advantages in reliability and dependability into a smear against open source is a perversion of this guy's words. Poor job by both the editors at Cnet for choosing the headline and the editors at Slashdot for running with it.
And btw, in that infamous "last supper" picture, there is more than one character that looks like a woman...
:P
Not to take this in a serious direction, but my favorite part about the amateur symbologists that graduated from Dan Brown University is how somehow a direct correlation is drawn between a painting and the truth.
Is it more likely that ol' Leo was just having a bit of fun with an androgynous figure in his painting, or that he was a member of a secret organization that knew about the cover-up of Jesus' wife and he decided to release this secret encoded in a painting because... oh wait, why would he do that again? And if the latter, do all the other androgynous people in his paintings hold a secret of enormous portent?
Come on people, there's a reason why in these documentaries the only people who actually promote any of these theories are second-rate authors looking to peddle their books and TV stations trying to build drama. When they actually talk to real historians they get a resounding no. Hell, even the people who wrote that Holy Blood, Holy Grail book just say it's a nice theory and they have no actual evidence. One of the people who invented the Priory of Sion has done a full disclosure and admitted it was a complete hoax.
Anyway, just a digression, sorry. Get back to your usual business
Howsabout I help you help yourself stop trying to help people that don't need it?
If I hold down a career that makes me enough money to survive and also contributes to the knowledgebase of society more than Programmer X. Websitedesign, why does it matter to you if I want to spend my free time in front of a computer or at the park? Obviously your friends prefer their computer to you. Do you feel threatened?
Everyone in the end looks back on their lives and wonders if they've really accomplished anything. And the deeper you get into philosophy, the more you start questioning if you're really going to find a meaningful accomplishment in anything you do. You're taking up this crusade because it makes you feel like you're doing something positive. It gives you self-righteousness. It confirms your view of a meaningful life.
I stopped going out with my friends in large part recently because, frankly, I've been bored going to the same old parties, having the same drunken conversations, pretending there's some deeper meaning where there really isn't. I'm not hiding from the world. I did not suddenly develop a social phobia in my twenty-second year on this world. And the patronizing kiddie-freud analysis that people try to subject me to with those conclusions (like you're doing to your friends) is one of the #1 reasons that I really don't want to hang out with them. If I told them the truth, that I'm bored with them, that I spend more time trying to entertain them than being entertained, that I think their deep philosophies and purposes and meanings are shallow, I don't think they'd want me around much longer. But I can't quite bring myself to do that.
I wish Square-Enix would revamp FF11 just a bit to be more accessible to casual gamers, with a robust, customizable interface for PC users, the ability to alt-tab without crippling the game enabled and rework the exp system so you're not so heavily penalized for having one player a few levels higher than the rest of the group (1 level 41 in a group of level 44's isn't bad, but 1 level 44 in a group of level 41's has an incredibly negative impact on your exp.) That, with a few graphical upgrades/reskins and it would be a great modern MMO. Oh, get rid of PlayOnline too, and don't make the install/registration process such a mess for new users.
Exactly. The interface was painful. I couldn't use the mouse for 90% of the things I wanted to use it for. I couldn't play in a windowed mode. I couldn't tweak up graphics as high as I'd have liked to. I found the menus clunky and had a hell of a time with gear and comparing it (can't remember exactly why). You're dropped into the game with little-to-no instruction.
PlayOnline registration actually, swear to god, confused the hell outta me, and I've navigated a lot of clumsy registration systems in my time. When I quit the game for a couple months and wanted to come back, they told me that my PlayOnline ID or some shit had expired and I'd need to buy a new copy of the game if I wanted to continue playing. Thanks, but no thanks.
Thompson is a blowhard, if I remember correctly he was disbarred or at least investigated, I don't think he's actually made any inroads on this front recently. We don't need yet another story to tell us what Thompson's stance is, we know what it is already, he's 100% down the line pro-censorship in games.
Seriously, stop publicizing Jack Thompson and he'll go away. He feeds off your hate mail and your stories and your negative comments.
1. ESRB rates games that have slightly questionable content accessed via modding up to M.
2. Half the games on the market become M. When Little Johnny shows off some M games to mom and dad they learn the ratings don't mean much.
3. ???
4. Pro... err, The Coalition of Nipple strikes another blow at the moral underpinnings of American society. President finally has rallied enough support to officially declare his War on Boobies.
Not exactly. First off, quests are meant to be solved communally. Maybe not on exactly that level, but there's a quest in EQ2 that, for example, requires you to traverse the globe searching for 20-some-odd dragon runes. These things are tiny and hidden in relatively random locations across the entire world. There aren't really any clues as to where they are. If you didn't have some sort of resource pooling... *shrug*
Secondly, bugs happen quite frequently in MMOs. Whenever there's a possibility of hundreds of players to interact with something simultaneously and over an internet connection, there's a decent chance something will go wrong. Sites like these let you know what's supposed to happen so that you don't get burned. A recent example would be the large number of quests in EQ2 that were recently affected when ring events broke. I'm not going to explain them if you don't know what they are, but suffice it to say you could've been trying to get something to work for three hours and not know that it was broken and you had no chance of getting it done.
For a lot of people, Han Solo made Star Wars. I really don't care about the Jedi, good vs. evil, all that rehashed crap... the cool part is a cocky, badass smuggler with a cobbled-together tin can of a spaceship living on the frontier. Han's the only remotely interesting character in all six films aside from Obi-Wan, Lando, and a couple of minor players.
As a similar change, what if we edited it so that in the Emperor's room at the very end, Vader attacks first instead of Luke striking out in anger. That sorta changes the mood of the whole scene and Luke's entire character. Same thing with Han allowing Greedo to get a shot off at point blank range, and also Greedo somehow missing from two feet away.
Lucas: Okay, these VHS tapes? Yeah, last time we'll ever be releasing Star Wars. Evar. Hate DVDs.
Fans: WTF. Oh well, sure, I'll buy them. Even though they're that special edition crap. Can't we just get the original version?
Lucas: No they are perfect now as only I can make them. And, oh wait, OLO changed my mind. They're out on DVD now. Still Special Edition though.
Fans: Can't you give us a regular edition?
Lucas: Naw, never gonna happen. This is my SPECIAL ORIGINAL VISION.
Fans: Grrr... okay.
Lucas: Hahahaha you suckers. I need more money. Now I'm going to release the original version on DVD again.
They have nude models because all the characters in the game are dressed from the nude... you know, like real people. Maybe we should slap an M for mature on everyone's ass in the real world, just so that parents know that underneath all of their clothing they are naked, and nudity is the devils work.
QFE. I don't know much about computer graphics, but I bet it's really really hard to make them realistic if you don't start with a nude model to wrap your textures around.
We're setting a stupid precedent here where developers have to now not only worry about the game content, but every portion of the game that players can hack together to make something racy. Are you going to start actually encoding some sort of tamper protection into your game to score below an M?
The government needs to show me that all these extra wiretappings and detainments and searches have actually done something. I'm not saying they need to let me in on their super secret intel. I'm saying I want them to give me several clear-cut cases where their methods have achieved results that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten to. I don't need to know every detail -- I want to know that they've captured X terrorist who was associated with Y group, and has gone on such-and-such missions in the past. Again, I know they can't reveal everything or even some things in a lot of situations, but I want to see *some* result. "We haven't been attacked" doesn't cut it.
The only things I've seen out of this administration have been intelligence failures (on several different levels). I'm not going to keep throwing my freedom blindly into this money pit in the hope that it'll do something.
Yes! Project Justice still makes me salivate with desire. I lost it somewhere though D:
But I think a better question to lead in to a counterargument is, "Is it sustainable?" You may say that what this guy is doing is fine, he's enjoying himself, and who cares about all of the trappings of life that other people consider to be "normal" as long as he's living his own life his own way. But if the problem is as serious as the OP suggests, then what happens when this guy loses his job? And his friends? And his home? I'd say that if you end up living on the street because of an addiction (regardless of whether that addiction is to a video game or a drug or whatever), then there's a problem. And if it ever got to that point, I think the guy might just feel a little regret for the way the past few years had turned out, as he's hustling people for spare change on the subway.
This is a good way to look at it, I think. I am a really, really addicted MMO player. I play insane amounts of time. But I'm not at a point where this is detracting from my ability to live. I am still getting good grades in classes, I've been recruited into a grad school with a fellowship. I meet up with my real-life friends over lunch and dinner typically once a day at least. It's just that honestly, on the whole, I can say that I enjoy playing my MMO more than most other activities at the moment.
For two or three years I've done the partying thing, I've gone to the bars, I've experienced all the drunken philosophy and "meaningful" discussions and juvenile sex drama that I care to. It was a fun time, and I wouldn't exchange it for anything, but it just really doesn't capture my interest anymore.
Amen. I feel exactly the same way. Counterarguments seem to be "that isn't normal" or "that isn't healthy." There's tons of crap that everyone does every day that's not healthy, and we didn't need MMOs to trigger our obesity epidemic. Normality, meh, I think everyone on this website can appreciate how much normality matters. A full and healthy life does not have to involve all the trappings we've associated it with throughout history.
I have to agree with this. My grandpa found a new age religion he really enjoys, and hell, I'm happy with him. As far as I'm concerned it's more innocuous than the other religions I've seen and teaches better values.
But the way the man is led to read and misinterpret physics and math are astounding. People keep seeing meaning that's not there, parroting it from books written by authors who have the same fundamental misunderstandings.
As far as I'm concerned, mathematics and physics parallel so closely because most of the rules we have in mathematics stem directly from real world experience somehow. If the real world and the mathematical model you're using start off with similar axioms, they're going to produce similar results.
It's actually sort of funny, because the mathematicians I've met take sort of a delight in inventing odd terminology for things.
For example, "index gymnastics" is actually a mathematical term you can look up on mathworld, hehe.
Hehe, I bet there's at least one "supported" hardware configuration that renders it unplayable.
Exactamundo. Someone mentioned in another thread that their nightmare scenario was the game crashing for twelve hours or running into gamestopping bugs.
On a console, chances of that go waaay downhill.
Is it just me, or is PlayOnline really just a terrible platform for nearly anything?
I bought the computer version of FFXI a while back and after I finished installing all four CDs, it took me another half hour just to put in all the different keycodes and make two different accounts, one for FFXI and one for PlayOnline. Plus it's this terrible GUI that's a PITA to navigate to get to the game.
I decided that I would put FFXI on the backburner after the free month and cancelled my FFXI account, but apparently didn't cancel my PlayOnline account or something. A couple months later I decided to sign up again and pay for a month when I had some free time. I couldn't register my account again, so I checked my seldom-used e-mail that I had signed up the game with, and I have a months old e-mail saying if I didn't deactivate my PlayOnline account my game key would go bad.
It might just be me, but I've played a ton of MMOs, and none of them have made it such a pain in the ass to register, quit, and reactivate. If all of them worked through a kludgy system like PlayOnline, they would've lost quite a bit more of my money, because I wouldn't have taken the bother to reactivate accounts on a whim.
I don't think he's talking about a specific game. Console games, by far the biggest target of strategy guides, usually have neither terrain editors nor patches. The information in the strategy guide is thus timelessly accurate and provides information not available elsewhere (color maps for most console games are hard to come by online).
:P
Games where this is handy are few and far between, but I do find myself wishing I had the strategy guide for certain games from time to time. Best left to the experienced purchaser, though, as they're hardly ever useful
Honestly, I haven't heard anyone mention crafting as an EQ2 strongpoint, but since you said they were "pimping it as the one thing that's better than WoW," I'm guessing it's in the kind of discussion I'd rather stay out of.
EQ2's theme has been stripping down things that are boring. Long, boring travel times across terrain you've passed a million times. Long, boring steps to craft a final product that doesn't make it harder or more complicated, just a giant pain in the butt. Long, boring grinds with little to no experience in order to claw up to the next level.
These things really aren't terribly fun. Let's be honest, there are very few games in which the actual crafting process appeals to anyone except the obsessive compulsive grinder, and EQ2 was (is) no exception. Even with the changes, there are tons of people on the boards complaining about new Heritage Quests for which you need to have a high crafting level, because few really enjoy it.
I used to balk at such simplifications as well, but then I started thinking about why, exactly, crafting needs to be a drawn-out process as well as a sluggish bore. Point me to a game where crafting is exciting and I'll be on board. Until then, I am not going to complain if it gets made "easier."
I've actually done much the same during this, my last semester at college. It's lead me to done a lot of soul searching myself. What kind of life is this? Is it right? Is it good? Can it be natural or fulfilling?
What I've found is that people who I considered my closest friends, I really don't care about so much as use for company and entertainment, and validation that I'm a good enough human being to be their friend.
Even if I get off my addiction at some point, I really doubt I'll go back to partying and socializing the way I did before. I just don't think human-to-human interaction has the meaning that I once attached to it. And I think society will eventually head in that direction, we just have a myriad of taboos standing in the way.