It's especially horrifying if you take into consideration the monetary impact. I played from 11/04 til 07/06. So you've got $49.95 for the game and $284.05 in fees. But what really did it for me was the realization that if I had been doing productive work during my/played time, I could have held a full-time job.
When I quit playing, I had approx. 2880 hours/played; spread over my 19 months playing, I was playing on average 38 hours a week. If you consider even a minimum wage job, that's still $19,440 that I could have earned! Obviously this isn't entirely true since I wouldn't be working at 2:00AM on a Saturday, for example, but nevertheless I found it quite shocking when I did the math.
Even if you sell your account and get maybe $2000, you still are coming out far behind in the big picture.
I would prefer this as well - however, I don't think it's very realistic. Valve wants to make money, and a good way to make money is to sell both the content AND the engine. They sell the game and license the engine to other developers. From what I hear, the cost to license hot new engines is astronomical; Valve has no reason to turn that revenue down.
Republic, not democracy. The representatives are not required to vote with their constituents, AFAIK. They just usually do because we voted them into office.
I still think we should have a full-fledged democracy: one person, one vote.
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It's especially horrifying if you take into consideration the monetary impact. I played from 11/04 til 07/06. So you've got $49.95 for the game and $284.05 in fees. But what really did it for me was the realization that if I had been doing productive work during my /played time, I could have held a full-time job.
When I quit playing, I had approx. 2880 hours /played; spread over my 19 months playing, I was playing on average 38 hours a week. If you consider even a minimum wage job, that's still $19,440 that I could have earned! Obviously this isn't entirely true since I wouldn't be working at 2:00AM on a Saturday, for example, but nevertheless I found it quite shocking when I did the math.
Even if you sell your account and get maybe $2000, you still are coming out far behind in the big picture.
I would prefer this as well - however, I don't think it's very realistic. Valve wants to make money, and a good way to make money is to sell both the content AND the engine. They sell the game and license the engine to other developers. From what I hear, the cost to license hot new engines is astronomical; Valve has no reason to turn that revenue down.
I do not think sarcasm means what you think it means.
Perhaps you meant archaic?
Republic, not democracy. The representatives are not required to vote with their constituents, AFAIK. They just usually do because we voted them into office. I still think we should have a full-fledged democracy: one person, one vote.