So in other words, I could believe several years' archives of face-offs on multiple sites, not least Eurogamer, and the evidence of my own eyes over the last 5 years, all of which suggests that the two machines come out in broadly the same place.
Or I could believe you (and some of those anonymous coward sockpuppet posts you've also made in this thread). Given you seem to be contending for the title of "biggest asshole on slashdot" (which believe me, has some competition), I'm leaning away from that option.
Hah, so very true. I remember how close I came to buying the HD-DVD addon for the 360, before remembering the old-adage that console peripherals never really take off. On that basis, it was clear that even if the 360 sold the PS3, the PS3's inclusion of blu-ray as standard was going to carry that format over the line.
And yes, my parents bought a PS3 to go with their new HD-TV, not because they wanted to play games on it, but because it was indeed the cheapest blu-ray player around.
Eurogamer do some excellent "Digital Foundry" articles comparing PS3 and 360 versions of games (and where appropriate, PC and Wii-U versions as well). Let me find some links for you.
tl;dr version - in most cases, the graphical and performance differences between PS3 and 360 "top end" games are so miniscule that you need detailed frame-by-frame comparisons to spot them. Broadly speaking, what differences do exist show the 360 having an advantage on Unreal-tech games (which is a lot of the big shooters). There are a few games which do swing heavily in favour of one platform or another (eg. Skyrim towards the 360, Final Fantasy XIII towards the PS3), but these are the exception rather than the norm and tend to reflect a developer which is much more comfortable with one set of hardware than the other.
Neither console crushes the other in performance terms in the real world. End of.
There's more to dominating the market than installed base - as I said in my original post, the Wii managed PS2-style sales in its early years, but never really dominated the scene.
I think the thing with the 360 and PS3 has been that, from the user's point of view, they're probably more interchangable than any other two consoles in history. Their internal architectures might be completely different, but in terms of overall performance, they come out in about the same place. In a technical sense, if a game can run on the 360, it can be made to run on the PS3 and vice-versa. Just as importantly, they've got controllers which, while different in appearance, basically have the same number and configuration of buttons. So the same game can be released for both platforms in a near-identical state.
There aren't as many exclusives as in previous generations and nor are those exclusives as likely to be "best in genre" as they have been in the past. Even developers who started out this generation tied to one manufacturer's hardware have branched out since into cross-platform (eg. Insomniac).
So whether you buy a 360 or a PS3 (or if you own both, which one you spend most time with) is likely to be influenced by some distinctly secondary factors. Do you believe in "patriotic" buying? I suspect a lot of people do, as evidenced by the PS3's advantage in Japan and the 360's in the US (while Europe remains a dead heat). Which controller do you prefer the ergonomic fit of? Which console do most of your friends own? These are much narrower factors than the essentials that set apart the Xbox and the Gamecube, the SNES and the Genesis/Megadrive and the Playstation and the N64.
I don't think this console generation has had a winner. The Wii took an early lead but squandered it (check Nintendo's financials for the last couple of years, as opposed to the specifically gaming divisions of Sony and MS). The 360 and PS3 have remained neck and neck. And the Wii-U (which feels as much a current-gen console as a next-gen one based on the time I've had with mine)... who knows?
WoW increasingly looks like an anomaly. Very few MMOs have managed to go over 1 million subscribers and stay there. Old Republic almost hit 2 million at launch, but fell off very, very rapidly.
Having done a bit of reading since my original post, it seems FFXI managed to stay in the 500k-750k range for years and years. It's below that point now, but then, it's extremely old now. While it may only have managed not much more than 1/20th of WoW's peak subscriber base, it seems to have done better than almost all of the other competition.
Also massively better than its own successor, FF14, which remains one of the greatest MMO cock-ups of all time.
Ah... the PS2. I don't think I can ever remember a console that's dominated its generation in quite the same way. I'm not just talking about unit sales (though its figures there and its lead over the Xbox and Gamecube were impressive enough), but rather about the sheer scale of the influence it exercised over gaming in general.
Back in the PS2's generation, if you were developing a console game, then unless you were being given bags and bags of money by MS or Nintendo, you had no choice but to make the PS2 your primary target. It didn't matter that it had underpowered hardware that was known for pain a pain in the arse to develop for. The Xbox and the Cube were optional. The PC (which was on a back-foot for most of that console cycle) was even more optional. The PS2 was where you had to be to get the sales. It had games from every genre represented; and often the best titles in their respective genres were for the PS2.
In many ways, it wasn't a particularly brilliant console. Its UI was butt-ugly. Cross-platform ports tended to look like a dog next to their Xbox and Cube versions (though the latter were admittedly quite uncommon). The memory cards for savegames were tiny, expensive and prone to data corruption. But it had the games, so if you were at all passionate about console gaming, you had to own one.
The funny thing is that, despite its hardware being completely obsolete, I've often felt Sony sent it to the back burner (via the PS3 launch) too soon. Both the console and its games were still selling well when the PS3 launched, with the 360 having failed to take much wind out of its sales. I do wonder what would have happened if Sony had held back the PS3 for 6-9 months, to work out some of the oddities in the hardware, let the launch price fall, get a stronger launch-lineup and maybe get proper back-compatibility into the hardware as a standard across the world. As it is, when the PS3 launched, it was too expensive for most and still suffering fierce competition from its own predecessor (some of the PS2's best games launched after the PS3, such as Personas 3 and 4). Certainly, for the first 18 months I owned my imported US 60 gig model, it spent far more time running PS2 titles than PS3 ones.
Nothing in the 360/PS3/Wii console generation has come close to replicating the PS2's dominance. The Wii got a big installed sales base early (which later stagnated, with the result that its lead, while still there, is much eroded), but never even came close to converting that into PS2-style dominance of games development. The 360 and the PS3 have more or less run neck and neck; if I remember, the 360 has a small worldwide installed base lead despite its Japan deficit, but the gap between the two isn't much more than a rounding error. And if you're developing a game these days, then unless you are being given large amounts of cash by a console manufacturer, you need to target the 360, PS3 and PC (the latter is very much back in the game), while giving consideration to the idea of a Wii-U port or a scaled down Wii version.
I wonder whether, to an extent, the PS2's dominance wasn't linked to Sony's ability to lock down what were, at the time, some of the biggest and most important franchises in the world to its console; Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid. Those were really the names that started shifting consoles (after what was actually a slightly lacklustre launch). These days, of course, all of the really big name franchises are cross-platform (and almost all Western, rather than Japanese). A couple of exceptions; the Nintendo first party games (not everybody's cup of tea), Forza (the 360's superior reflection of Gran Turismo) and the Halo/Gears vs Resistance/Killzone shooter pairings (where the games are essentially interchangable). But increasingly, it's cross-platform that dominates the charts (particularly when it features angry men with thick necks shouting "OSCAR MIKE" every 5 seconds).
PS. Another Final Fantasy XI expansion? My word. I stopped playing that years ago and didn't realise it was still going. It feels a bit like a relic from another world now; easy to forget it was probably the world's most successful MMO until World of Warcraft launched.
How do you sell a PSP in that condition? Or do you mean that a PSP has been sold along with a memory stick containing the images?
Storage for images etc on the PSP is all via removable memory sticks. The type of memory stick used (the pro duo if I recall, though I traded in my PSP when I bought a Vita, so can't check for sure) isn't even a PSP-only device... I've used them with PCs as well.
You've missed my point completely - it's absolutely nothing to do with the loot.
If all of the dungeons in an MMO could be beaten with no deaths on the first attempt, the game would be seriously lacking in challenge. The actual fun in WoWlike MMOs (and yes, they can be a lot of fun) is in overcoming difficult (sometimes extremely difficult) fights in a large group by the use of co-operative tactics. You're going to die. Repeatedly. That's part of the game. If you want permadeath, then you've either made the game impossibly difficult and time consuming, or you've compensated for this by turning it into a very different, much easier (and far inferior) game.
Saying that WoWlike MMOs need to have permadeath is like saying that fighting games should incorporate city-building elements. It's a gameplay mechanic that simply doesn't fit with the genre.
Contrary to the general cynicism displayed in these parts, WoWlike MMOs do have a fairly solid gameplay core that is much more than just "keep people playing the subs". Leaving player-vs-player aside for now, they are, at heart, large-group co-op games (and often very difficult ones).
At the heart of a WoWlike is raiding. And at the heart of raiding is fighting against bosses. Leaving aside casual-oriented "raid-finder" modes, raid bosses are generally tuned so that, at the level of gear players will have when they are first encountered, they are challenging fights with little room for error. The satisfaction in the game comes from overcoming that challenge and working with others to defeat the bosses. The level of co-operation required goes far beyond that found in most other genres. I have no shortage of criticisms of WoW, but I can attest from personal experience that the "rush" associated with my first kill of certain bosses (Illidan, Kil'Jaeden, the Lich King) was like nothing else in gaming - and that was irrespective of whether I got any gear from it.
But with the difficulty tuned as high as it is, death is inevitable and very much part of the game. You learn from your deaths and adapt accordingly. Imagine Dark Souls with permadeath? A WoWlike with permadeath would be like that... but worse.
It's a myth that every MMO besides WoW has failed. There have been successful ones before and since. Not on the scale of WoW, perhaps, but then they've generally not had the resources put into them that WoW has either.
Before WoW launched, 500,000 subscribers was considered a massive success and very profitable. Many people have been able to get by on similar figures since.
If Blizzard want to move people off WoW content and onto other projects, they need to work out something that gives players something to do without driving too many away. Daily quests overload isn't the answer.
If you really believed what you were saying, you wouldn't be posting AC.
Despite a recent partial recovery due to the release of MoP, WoW does seem to be in decline. Its player numbers have been in gradual retreat, with a few dips and bumps, at least since the middle days of Cataclysm and arguably since the latter days of Lich King.
However, most MMOs to date, including many commercially successful MMOs, have spent most of their lifespan in decline. Everquest and Ultima Online's subscriber counts both peaked in their first two years, but both games had a lifespan long beyond that point (indeed, the continued life of Everquest was one of the biggest obstacles to its own sequel). Final Fantasy XI launched in Japan in 2002, had a player count that peaked shortly after the European launch in 2004, but is still alive and well today (Square-Enix keep threatening to kill it, but probably won't dare until and unless they can turn things arounf with Final Fantasy XIV). Lord of the Rings Online launched fairly well, had a gradually declining player-base for years, then as that started to dip towards a critical mass, it went Free to Play and is, by all accounts, reinvigorated.
There are occasional exceptions; MMOs which have such dramatic subscriber-bleed that they go into a death-spiral. I have a feeling that despite the huge amounts invested in it, this will be the fate of Star Wars: Old Republic if the free to play relaunch doesn't succeed (and I doubt it will, the f2p offering is more like a demo than an actual game).
But by and large, successful MMOs continue to live on for many years after their subscriber base peaks. WoW's achievement was that it continued to grow for quite as long as it did. At some point, Blizzard can put it into a low-dev-costs "semi-hibernation" and continue to run it for years, possibly introducing a few pay-to-win elements along the way.
I wouldn't be surprised if WoW was still alive and (relatively) healthy in 2022.
The review touches upon the issue of the ridiculous number of daily quests required. I've been playing MoP myself and I can confirm that Blizzard have got something very, very badly wrong here. The daily quests are too numerous, too essential and far too boring. With a small number of exceptions, they all tend to be variations on the old "kill six snow moose" themes. Except this time it's panda-mooses. And you usually have to kill more than six of them.
It's worse still if you play as a tank or healer. DPS players can at least blitz through individual enemies quite quickly. As a tank or healer, the health pools for enemies take so long to chip down that the daily quest grind can actually take hours. Plus the daily quests are tied into the valor point system, so unless you are a hardcore raider, you're more or less tied into continuing with daily quest grinds even after you max out your reputation. JOY!
In all honesty, I can't see myself sticking with this much longer. I returned to the game in the late Cataclysm era, having quit in the late Lich King era, thinking I'd stick with it on a casual basis. MoP has just turned that into a chore.
It's hilarious to watch the official "blue" forum posters try to defend the daily quest overload. They can't claim that it's fun or enjoyable. They can't claim that it's interesting. All they can do is keep coming up with new ways of saying "yes, it's a boring timesink, but we're not changing it".
I suspect Blizzard are desperate for ways of getting WoW development costs down so they can focus on other things. Their end-game content model is horribly inefficient and expensive. They create new raid and dungeon content, go through an exhaustive and exhausting testing and balancing process, release it, then have it rendered obsolete by the next tier, 4-6 months later.
I suspect the best thing Blizzard could do in the longer term, if they really do want to concentrate on other projects (including a WoW successor) without cutting off their income stream from WoW subs, would be to get to more of a steady-state end-game. Stop raising the level cap (leave it at 100, perhaps, as that's a nice round number) and move from the current "vertical" end-game into more of a "horizontal" model, like the one used by Final Fantasy XI and some other older MMOs.
They could re-tune all of the old raid content up to level 100 standards (which requires some work, but less than creating entirely new assets) and add multiple progression paths. They'd then be able to get away with adding new raid content far less frequently, while giving the player-base something to do that isn't an endless, tedious grind of soloed daily quests.
We've got a real plague of robocalls in the UK at the moment - I'll get a couple per weekend and if I'm at home for any reason during the week, I'll generally get 2-3 each afternoon. They're all from ambulance-chasing law firms trying to get people to bring lawsuits against banks following recent court verdicts on Payment Protection Insurance mis-selling.
Now, there's no denying that some of the banks were very naughty indeed on this issue. However, the robolawyers have no way of knowing whether the people they're contacting have ever taken out PPI and there have been many cases of people bringing suits on the basis of these calls despite never having taken out a loan with PPI.
My own modest proposal? Make the firms in question liable for a portion of the banks' own liabilities on PPI mis-selling (which are vast), remove any personal indemnities from the partners in said firms and do not allow them to apply for bankrupcy until they have disposed of absolutely all of their sale-able assets, including any internal organs that might have black market value.
Plagiarism does seem to be getting more and more common, with people getting ever more casual about it. When I was at University in the 90s, there were a small number of students caught engaging in plagiarism. If it was felt to be deliberate, it was basically immediate expulsion. If it was more likely to be carelessness or ignorance of proper academic processes, the consequences were still severe (being made to redo substantial chunks of work).
Speaking a couple of months ago to a niece who's now at University, I was told that around a third of the students in her year for her subject had been caught copying material from the net. The response, a few sessions where they were sat down and told "Plagiarism is bad, mkay".
I came across a hilarious example of (non academic) plagiarism a couple of months ago, while sifting a pile of job applications.
This was the first sift and I had a pile of about 50 in front of me (which I was aiming to get down to about 15 or so by weeding out the obvious no-hopers). We had three other people sitting down with a similar pile (200 applications for 2 posts - this has been the norm for us over the last couple of years - I guess the job market is a scary place right now).
Anyway, I'm only being fairly cursory about it, but even so, I spot that three of the applications seem to use the exact same stock few (clumsy, badly worded) paragraphs. I tap the first line of one of these paragraphs into google and the first hit is a "how to write a job application" site. A very poorly put together site (think site design that dates from the circa 1998 geocities era), written by somebody whose first language is probably not English. The paragraphs in question aren't even particularly relevant to our job application form (which is fairly specific and focussed).
A quick e-mail around to the other people on the panel turns up a total of 6 forms which use text from that site. Clearly it had somehow managed to get a high ranking for a few of the relevant search terms. But seriously, you're competing against hundreds of other people and you decide to use material you've copy/pasted from something that is only one step away from having animated gifs of dancing cats? Unless said site had itself plagiarised its content from somewhere else, of course..
Indeed - and it's no secret that the anime industry (both the Japanese creators and Western distributors) has often used levels of overseas piracy to determine which titles are worth licensing for release in the US/Europe.
It's not a foolproof method - it backfired badly during the industry-crash in the middle of the last decade when a lot of companies found that there are certain titles that people are just not going to walk up to a shop-counter with in the US or London, even though they'll nab them happily enough from a torrent. However, it can generally be a good way of spotting whether a title and/or similar titles are worth a subtitled streaming release, a physical DVD/BD release or potentially a fancy special edition box.
But yes, there's the reverse importation problem - and this is as relevant to gaming as it is for anime. For whatever reason, Japanese buyers of anime and video games are content to get ripped off to an utterly eye-watering degree. The "old" system for anime releases in the West was to set a price point of $30/£20 per volume of 4-5 episodes. These days, US/EU distributors struggle to get away with that model for all but the very biggest of releases (Puella Magi Madoka Magica is the most recent example I can think of) - it's more normal to get volumes of 13 or so episodes, for not much more than $40/£25 per volume. Meanwhile in Japan, that $40 equivalent gets you a volume containing... two episodes. The situation is broadly similar on games, where prices for many titles (particularly Japanese-developed ones) are utterly eye-watering in Japan.
Now if you've got a market that's willing to play along with prices like that, you're going to do everything you can to protect it - and that means doing whatever you can to block reverse importation. So yes, most Western (legal) streaming sites block Japanese IP addresses.
In the gaming sphere, Nintendo insist on full region locking (probably due to their Apple-style paternalist, authoritarian culture). Sony make it very hard to release region locked games on their console - there's only been one region locked PS3 game to date (Persona 4: Arena - and a worthy target for a boycott if ever there was one). But the 360... the 360 is more interesting. Microsoft neither ban nor mandate region locking; they leave it up to the publisher to decide (and don't lock the games they publish themselves). If you look at the trend for region locking on 360 games, while you can always find a few exceptions, a large of US releases will work on European consoles and vice versa, but very, very few will work on Japanese consoles. This at least partly explains why so many of the smaller Japanese developers have been willing to go the 360-exclusivity route during this console generation, despite the 360's poor installed base in Japan.
How long are you going to be there for? Because unless it's months and months, I would urge you to sort out your business affairs in advance and just not bother trying anything "clever" while you're out there. Because believe me, a bit of business inconvenience back home is nothing next to the world of hurt you will inflict upon yourself (albeit with some helpful assistance from others and their nice electrodes) in the admittedly fairly unlikely (but by no means impossible) scenario that you piss off the security side of what is still, despite a bit of spin and economic modernisation, a creepy totalitarian state apparatus.
Anyway... their country, their rules. When I travel to the USA, I'm generally struck by how stupidly low speed limits are, particularly given how well maintained, open and relatively quiet they are compared with ours here in the UK. But I don't plot and scheme for how I can drive at UK speeds - I follow the US speed limits. Now in the case of China, we're talking about rights that are rather more fundamental than "being allowed to drive fast" - but hey, you've chosen to go their on holiday (you've said you'll be a tourist) and you're a guest, so perhaps you should behave like on.
Besides, you'll get a lot more out of your holiday if you aren't constantly trying to work while you're out there. So as I said at the start, do whatever you can to organise things so you don't actually need to work while you're out there (or consider cancelling your trip and re-booking at a better time).
I'm posting on a website with a largely US audience. I know what the US terminology is and it does no harm to use it - and helps to eliminate the occasional misunderstanding.
It's good to know that the issue's being worked on - are there any links? (I'm genuinely interested in this stuff.)
I can see that the standardisation issue could be a tricky one (in a world where we still have no standard mobile phone or laptop chargers), but it surely can't be beyond our capacity to solve.
I think the actual issue is that we might be thinking about what infrastructure is needed for this in the wrong way.
I don't currently own a car (lucky enough to live in a London suburb with great public transport), but if I did, then an electric vehicle would make a lot of sense for what I'd use it for - short shopping trips and the like. However, the apartment complex I live in has no charging facilities in its car-park, so even though I own a parking space there (which currently sits empty), I'd have no way of charging one. Getting charging facilities installed would be seriously expensive.
I've often wondered if the conceptual model we use for electric cars isn't the wrong one. The current assumption is that when you buy an electric car, you also buy and own the battery, and you are responsible for keeping it charged.
Now - maybe there are umpteen good reasons why this couldn't work - but has anybody ever tried a different approach? I'm talking about a model where the cars have easily-swapped batteries, which the driver leases, rather than owning. So... you buy your car and you pay an upfront deposit for the lease of a battery. When your battery runs low, you go into a gas station (or in this case, gas/charging station), the battery gets removed and replaced by a fresh one from the station's "charging room".
You pay a fee to the station covering your share of its electricity costs for charging the battery plus whatever profit margin it requires (much like paying for your gas at the moment), and you drive off a few minutes after arriving. Meanwhile, "your" old battery is charged up at the station and swapped with another customer's empty battery once it's finished recharging. This eliminates a lot of the charge-time complaints associated with electric vehicles at the moment and also means that we don't need charging points in homes or at the roadside.
I'm sure there must be good reasons why this wouldn't work, given it never seems to get consideration - but what are they?
Sadly, it's not that easy (at least not in the UK, where resources for these things are limited and the emphasis for mental health is on "care in the community"). In particular, it was complicated by the fact that she'd been the first one to raise a complaint with the authorities. That makes it very difficult to lodge counter-complaints without them being discarded as retaliatory actions. Besides, from about the mid-point of this sequence, I knew that I was going to be moving out in the near future, so my motivation to do more than try to minimise the immediate grief was pretty low.
But yes, she clearly needed to be removed from the environment she was in - to provide her with treatment if any was likely to be effective and to protect other people from her in any event. I feel very, very sorry for whoever got the flat after me (a young couple, I'm told by my former upstairs neighbour - god, I hope they have a baby soon, a really loud, cranky baby).
Yes, quite, I can also hear those mosquito devices, despite being well up into my 30s. When I was in my teens, my dad was a director in a small business that sold, serviced and provided training for medical electronics. It was a very small company and even the directors did a bit of hands-on engineering, so our garage was often full of bits of medical kit.
There was one weekend that I spent seriously ill - headaches, nausea, dizziness. Eventually, I tracked it down to a monitor in the garage. My dad didn't want to believe me, but it was proven int he end.
So when this came to a head earlier this year, I was actually perfectly happy to have my flat checked to see whether there was something even further up the range beyond what I could hear - but we proved that there wasn't.
And yes, I would not be the slightest bit surprised if this were behind at least some of the complaints of "magical computer waves give me headaches".
Went through something similar (though it didn't go to court) in my old flat, which I moved out of earlier this year. Middle-aged couple living downstairs, got on fine with them for years, then the woman's late-teenaged daughter from a previous marriage gets kicked out by her father and moves in with them in the summer of last year (putting 3 people in a flat which is, to be honest, a little small for one person and downright cramped for 2).
This is one deeply troubled youth - clear mental health problems and surrounded by a constant stench of strong cannabis. She can also - in her mothers' eyes, do no wrong. Anyway, my life very quickly becomes absolute hell. First it's the complaints about noise. I take these seriously at first and do everything I can to limit the noise I'm making. Doesn't help, indeed she calls the police on multiple occasions, though they don't actually do anything. She loses access that particular trick after she calls the police over a weekend when I'm away visiting my parents - they force open the door to my flat and find it empty. After that, they stopped responding to her calls.
Anyway, in the course of this, she gets to see inside my flat (while I'm not there, imagine how delighted I am) - and she notes the fairly large amount of electronic equipment. Her next move - a phone call to the council complaining that interference from the electronics in my flat is giving her headaches.
I get a very puzzled call from an environmental health officer. He's very apologetic about the whole thing and freely admits that he has no idea whether he has any legal basis to do anything. By this point, I've already got my escape in sight - I've finally, after 4 years, been able to save for the deposit needed to get a mortage and out of rental accomodation (and to move to a much better area in the process). So I'm quite prepared to be all reasonable and light. We agree that he can come and inspect my flat for anything that might be emitting either outside of the allowed spectrum, or high-pitched noises outside the normal hearing range (which can be a genuine issue for teenagers and for some adults - like me!).
Anyway, he comes, he waves a toolkit around and he agrees that there's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. He sends my neighbours a letter telling them this. He and I then get a very angry letter back (or rather, he gets a letter, I get a copy pushed through my letterbox with something obscene scribbed on it as well) saying that, among other things, my wireless network is "beaming words through her head".
Two days later, I load my possessions into a van and move off to my new home. I've not seen or heard from her since. I still see my old upstairs neighbour, who works at a station I pass through on my morning commute (and who I always got on very well with). He tells me that she continues to make life unbearable for the new occupants of my old flat and has started to turn her attention to him as well.
It would have been interesting on one level to see what would have happened if I hadn't been in a position to move out - but I'm glad I didn't have to find out.
By the way, this all happened in London, so it's definitely not a US-only phenomenon.
I've read TFA - even though the link in the summary is broken - and what I can't see is any detail on what the offending post actually said. I mean, are we talking about a "I see kids pestering their parents for $250 sneakers and sometimes I want to throttle them myself" type comment? If so... grotesque over-reaction, violation of constitutional rights etc.
Or are we talking about something which clearly expresses a credible intention to commit violence? If so... fine, go ahead and stop a major crime from occuring.
Were you playing on an Xbox360 without being signed into a user profile? That's the only possible means of replicating the symptoms you describe.
Unless it's one of those weird decay-based copy protection systems on the PC version. But I've never heard Borderlands mentioned in that context.
Slashdot Mirror
So in other words, I could believe several years' archives of face-offs on multiple sites, not least Eurogamer, and the evidence of my own eyes over the last 5 years, all of which suggests that the two machines come out in broadly the same place.
Or I could believe you (and some of those anonymous coward sockpuppet posts you've also made in this thread). Given you seem to be contending for the title of "biggest asshole on slashdot" (which believe me, has some competition), I'm leaning away from that option.
Hah, so very true. I remember how close I came to buying the HD-DVD addon for the 360, before remembering the old-adage that console peripherals never really take off. On that basis, it was clear that even if the 360 sold the PS3, the PS3's inclusion of blu-ray as standard was going to carry that format over the line.
And yes, my parents bought a PS3 to go with their new HD-TV, not because they wanted to play games on it, but because it was indeed the cheapest blu-ray player around.
Eurogamer do some excellent "Digital Foundry" articles comparing PS3 and 360 versions of games (and where appropriate, PC and Wii-U versions as well). Let me find some links for you.
Far Cry 3
Need for Speed: Most Wanted
Mass Effect 3
Darksiders 2
There are lots more if you want to look.
tl;dr version - in most cases, the graphical and performance differences between PS3 and 360 "top end" games are so miniscule that you need detailed frame-by-frame comparisons to spot them. Broadly speaking, what differences do exist show the 360 having an advantage on Unreal-tech games (which is a lot of the big shooters). There are a few games which do swing heavily in favour of one platform or another (eg. Skyrim towards the 360, Final Fantasy XIII towards the PS3), but these are the exception rather than the norm and tend to reflect a developer which is much more comfortable with one set of hardware than the other.
Neither console crushes the other in performance terms in the real world. End of.
There's more to dominating the market than installed base - as I said in my original post, the Wii managed PS2-style sales in its early years, but never really dominated the scene.
I think the thing with the 360 and PS3 has been that, from the user's point of view, they're probably more interchangable than any other two consoles in history. Their internal architectures might be completely different, but in terms of overall performance, they come out in about the same place. In a technical sense, if a game can run on the 360, it can be made to run on the PS3 and vice-versa. Just as importantly, they've got controllers which, while different in appearance, basically have the same number and configuration of buttons. So the same game can be released for both platforms in a near-identical state.
There aren't as many exclusives as in previous generations and nor are those exclusives as likely to be "best in genre" as they have been in the past. Even developers who started out this generation tied to one manufacturer's hardware have branched out since into cross-platform (eg. Insomniac).
So whether you buy a 360 or a PS3 (or if you own both, which one you spend most time with) is likely to be influenced by some distinctly secondary factors. Do you believe in "patriotic" buying? I suspect a lot of people do, as evidenced by the PS3's advantage in Japan and the 360's in the US (while Europe remains a dead heat). Which controller do you prefer the ergonomic fit of? Which console do most of your friends own? These are much narrower factors than the essentials that set apart the Xbox and the Gamecube, the SNES and the Genesis/Megadrive and the Playstation and the N64.
I don't think this console generation has had a winner. The Wii took an early lead but squandered it (check Nintendo's financials for the last couple of years, as opposed to the specifically gaming divisions of Sony and MS). The 360 and PS3 have remained neck and neck. And the Wii-U (which feels as much a current-gen console as a next-gen one based on the time I've had with mine)... who knows?
And nor has much since...
WoW increasingly looks like an anomaly. Very few MMOs have managed to go over 1 million subscribers and stay there. Old Republic almost hit 2 million at launch, but fell off very, very rapidly.
Having done a bit of reading since my original post, it seems FFXI managed to stay in the 500k-750k range for years and years. It's below that point now, but then, it's extremely old now. While it may only have managed not much more than 1/20th of WoW's peak subscriber base, it seems to have done better than almost all of the other competition.
Also massively better than its own successor, FF14, which remains one of the greatest MMO cock-ups of all time.
Ah... the PS2. I don't think I can ever remember a console that's dominated its generation in quite the same way. I'm not just talking about unit sales (though its figures there and its lead over the Xbox and Gamecube were impressive enough), but rather about the sheer scale of the influence it exercised over gaming in general.
Back in the PS2's generation, if you were developing a console game, then unless you were being given bags and bags of money by MS or Nintendo, you had no choice but to make the PS2 your primary target. It didn't matter that it had underpowered hardware that was known for pain a pain in the arse to develop for. The Xbox and the Cube were optional. The PC (which was on a back-foot for most of that console cycle) was even more optional. The PS2 was where you had to be to get the sales. It had games from every genre represented; and often the best titles in their respective genres were for the PS2.
In many ways, it wasn't a particularly brilliant console. Its UI was butt-ugly. Cross-platform ports tended to look like a dog next to their Xbox and Cube versions (though the latter were admittedly quite uncommon). The memory cards for savegames were tiny, expensive and prone to data corruption. But it had the games, so if you were at all passionate about console gaming, you had to own one.
The funny thing is that, despite its hardware being completely obsolete, I've often felt Sony sent it to the back burner (via the PS3 launch) too soon. Both the console and its games were still selling well when the PS3 launched, with the 360 having failed to take much wind out of its sales. I do wonder what would have happened if Sony had held back the PS3 for 6-9 months, to work out some of the oddities in the hardware, let the launch price fall, get a stronger launch-lineup and maybe get proper back-compatibility into the hardware as a standard across the world. As it is, when the PS3 launched, it was too expensive for most and still suffering fierce competition from its own predecessor (some of the PS2's best games launched after the PS3, such as Personas 3 and 4). Certainly, for the first 18 months I owned my imported US 60 gig model, it spent far more time running PS2 titles than PS3 ones.
Nothing in the 360/PS3/Wii console generation has come close to replicating the PS2's dominance. The Wii got a big installed sales base early (which later stagnated, with the result that its lead, while still there, is much eroded), but never even came close to converting that into PS2-style dominance of games development. The 360 and the PS3 have more or less run neck and neck; if I remember, the 360 has a small worldwide installed base lead despite its Japan deficit, but the gap between the two isn't much more than a rounding error. And if you're developing a game these days, then unless you are being given large amounts of cash by a console manufacturer, you need to target the 360, PS3 and PC (the latter is very much back in the game), while giving consideration to the idea of a Wii-U port or a scaled down Wii version.
I wonder whether, to an extent, the PS2's dominance wasn't linked to Sony's ability to lock down what were, at the time, some of the biggest and most important franchises in the world to its console; Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid. Those were really the names that started shifting consoles (after what was actually a slightly lacklustre launch). These days, of course, all of the really big name franchises are cross-platform (and almost all Western, rather than Japanese). A couple of exceptions; the Nintendo first party games (not everybody's cup of tea), Forza (the 360's superior reflection of Gran Turismo) and the Halo/Gears vs Resistance/Killzone shooter pairings (where the games are essentially interchangable). But increasingly, it's cross-platform that dominates the charts (particularly when it features angry men with thick necks shouting "OSCAR MIKE" every 5 seconds).
PS. Another Final Fantasy XI expansion? My word. I stopped playing that years ago and didn't realise it was still going. It feels a bit like a relic from another world now; easy to forget it was probably the world's most successful MMO until World of Warcraft launched.
How do you sell a PSP in that condition? Or do you mean that a PSP has been sold along with a memory stick containing the images?
Storage for images etc on the PSP is all via removable memory sticks. The type of memory stick used (the pro duo if I recall, though I traded in my PSP when I bought a Vita, so can't check for sure) isn't even a PSP-only device... I've used them with PCs as well.
Nethack is not an MMO. No persistent world, no game economy. Saying MMOs should be like Nethack is like saying Street Fighter should be like Sim City.
Nothing wrong with either game, but they have fundamental and irreconcilable differences.
You've missed my point completely - it's absolutely nothing to do with the loot.
If all of the dungeons in an MMO could be beaten with no deaths on the first attempt, the game would be seriously lacking in challenge. The actual fun in WoWlike MMOs (and yes, they can be a lot of fun) is in overcoming difficult (sometimes extremely difficult) fights in a large group by the use of co-operative tactics. You're going to die. Repeatedly. That's part of the game. If you want permadeath, then you've either made the game impossibly difficult and time consuming, or you've compensated for this by turning it into a very different, much easier (and far inferior) game.
Saying that WoWlike MMOs need to have permadeath is like saying that fighting games should incorporate city-building elements. It's a gameplay mechanic that simply doesn't fit with the genre.
Contrary to the general cynicism displayed in these parts, WoWlike MMOs do have a fairly solid gameplay core that is much more than just "keep people playing the subs". Leaving player-vs-player aside for now, they are, at heart, large-group co-op games (and often very difficult ones).
At the heart of a WoWlike is raiding. And at the heart of raiding is fighting against bosses. Leaving aside casual-oriented "raid-finder" modes, raid bosses are generally tuned so that, at the level of gear players will have when they are first encountered, they are challenging fights with little room for error. The satisfaction in the game comes from overcoming that challenge and working with others to defeat the bosses. The level of co-operation required goes far beyond that found in most other genres. I have no shortage of criticisms of WoW, but I can attest from personal experience that the "rush" associated with my first kill of certain bosses (Illidan, Kil'Jaeden, the Lich King) was like nothing else in gaming - and that was irrespective of whether I got any gear from it.
But with the difficulty tuned as high as it is, death is inevitable and very much part of the game. You learn from your deaths and adapt accordingly. Imagine Dark Souls with permadeath? A WoWlike with permadeath would be like that... but worse.
It's a myth that every MMO besides WoW has failed. There have been successful ones before and since. Not on the scale of WoW, perhaps, but then they've generally not had the resources put into them that WoW has either.
Before WoW launched, 500,000 subscribers was considered a massive success and very profitable. Many people have been able to get by on similar figures since.
If Blizzard want to move people off WoW content and onto other projects, they need to work out something that gives players something to do without driving too many away. Daily quests overload isn't the answer.
If you really believed what you were saying, you wouldn't be posting AC.
Almost certainly wrong.
Despite a recent partial recovery due to the release of MoP, WoW does seem to be in decline. Its player numbers have been in gradual retreat, with a few dips and bumps, at least since the middle days of Cataclysm and arguably since the latter days of Lich King.
However, most MMOs to date, including many commercially successful MMOs, have spent most of their lifespan in decline. Everquest and Ultima Online's subscriber counts both peaked in their first two years, but both games had a lifespan long beyond that point (indeed, the continued life of Everquest was one of the biggest obstacles to its own sequel). Final Fantasy XI launched in Japan in 2002, had a player count that peaked shortly after the European launch in 2004, but is still alive and well today (Square-Enix keep threatening to kill it, but probably won't dare until and unless they can turn things arounf with Final Fantasy XIV). Lord of the Rings Online launched fairly well, had a gradually declining player-base for years, then as that started to dip towards a critical mass, it went Free to Play and is, by all accounts, reinvigorated.
There are occasional exceptions; MMOs which have such dramatic subscriber-bleed that they go into a death-spiral. I have a feeling that despite the huge amounts invested in it, this will be the fate of Star Wars: Old Republic if the free to play relaunch doesn't succeed (and I doubt it will, the f2p offering is more like a demo than an actual game).
But by and large, successful MMOs continue to live on for many years after their subscriber base peaks. WoW's achievement was that it continued to grow for quite as long as it did. At some point, Blizzard can put it into a low-dev-costs "semi-hibernation" and continue to run it for years, possibly introducing a few pay-to-win elements along the way.
I wouldn't be surprised if WoW was still alive and (relatively) healthy in 2022.
The review touches upon the issue of the ridiculous number of daily quests required. I've been playing MoP myself and I can confirm that Blizzard have got something very, very badly wrong here. The daily quests are too numerous, too essential and far too boring. With a small number of exceptions, they all tend to be variations on the old "kill six snow moose" themes. Except this time it's panda-mooses. And you usually have to kill more than six of them.
It's worse still if you play as a tank or healer. DPS players can at least blitz through individual enemies quite quickly. As a tank or healer, the health pools for enemies take so long to chip down that the daily quest grind can actually take hours. Plus the daily quests are tied into the valor point system, so unless you are a hardcore raider, you're more or less tied into continuing with daily quest grinds even after you max out your reputation. JOY!
In all honesty, I can't see myself sticking with this much longer. I returned to the game in the late Cataclysm era, having quit in the late Lich King era, thinking I'd stick with it on a casual basis. MoP has just turned that into a chore.
It's hilarious to watch the official "blue" forum posters try to defend the daily quest overload. They can't claim that it's fun or enjoyable. They can't claim that it's interesting. All they can do is keep coming up with new ways of saying "yes, it's a boring timesink, but we're not changing it".
I suspect Blizzard are desperate for ways of getting WoW development costs down so they can focus on other things. Their end-game content model is horribly inefficient and expensive. They create new raid and dungeon content, go through an exhaustive and exhausting testing and balancing process, release it, then have it rendered obsolete by the next tier, 4-6 months later.
I suspect the best thing Blizzard could do in the longer term, if they really do want to concentrate on other projects (including a WoW successor) without cutting off their income stream from WoW subs, would be to get to more of a steady-state end-game. Stop raising the level cap (leave it at 100, perhaps, as that's a nice round number) and move from the current "vertical" end-game into more of a "horizontal" model, like the one used by Final Fantasy XI and some other older MMOs.
They could re-tune all of the old raid content up to level 100 standards (which requires some work, but less than creating entirely new assets) and add multiple progression paths. They'd then be able to get away with adding new raid content far less frequently, while giving the player-base something to do that isn't an endless, tedious grind of soloed daily quests.
We've got a real plague of robocalls in the UK at the moment - I'll get a couple per weekend and if I'm at home for any reason during the week, I'll generally get 2-3 each afternoon. They're all from ambulance-chasing law firms trying to get people to bring lawsuits against banks following recent court verdicts on Payment Protection Insurance mis-selling.
Now, there's no denying that some of the banks were very naughty indeed on this issue. However, the robolawyers have no way of knowing whether the people they're contacting have ever taken out PPI and there have been many cases of people bringing suits on the basis of these calls despite never having taken out a loan with PPI.
My own modest proposal? Make the firms in question liable for a portion of the banks' own liabilities on PPI mis-selling (which are vast), remove any personal indemnities from the partners in said firms and do not allow them to apply for bankrupcy until they have disposed of absolutely all of their sale-able assets, including any internal organs that might have black market value.
Feels reasonable, all things considered.
Plagiarism does seem to be getting more and more common, with people getting ever more casual about it. When I was at University in the 90s, there were a small number of students caught engaging in plagiarism. If it was felt to be deliberate, it was basically immediate expulsion. If it was more likely to be carelessness or ignorance of proper academic processes, the consequences were still severe (being made to redo substantial chunks of work).
Speaking a couple of months ago to a niece who's now at University, I was told that around a third of the students in her year for her subject had been caught copying material from the net. The response, a few sessions where they were sat down and told "Plagiarism is bad, mkay".
I came across a hilarious example of (non academic) plagiarism a couple of months ago, while sifting a pile of job applications.
This was the first sift and I had a pile of about 50 in front of me (which I was aiming to get down to about 15 or so by weeding out the obvious no-hopers). We had three other people sitting down with a similar pile (200 applications for 2 posts - this has been the norm for us over the last couple of years - I guess the job market is a scary place right now).
Anyway, I'm only being fairly cursory about it, but even so, I spot that three of the applications seem to use the exact same stock few (clumsy, badly worded) paragraphs. I tap the first line of one of these paragraphs into google and the first hit is a "how to write a job application" site. A very poorly put together site (think site design that dates from the circa 1998 geocities era), written by somebody whose first language is probably not English. The paragraphs in question aren't even particularly relevant to our job application form (which is fairly specific and focussed).
A quick e-mail around to the other people on the panel turns up a total of 6 forms which use text from that site. Clearly it had somehow managed to get a high ranking for a few of the relevant search terms. But seriously, you're competing against hundreds of other people and you decide to use material you've copy/pasted from something that is only one step away from having animated gifs of dancing cats? Unless said site had itself plagiarised its content from somewhere else, of course..
Indeed - and it's no secret that the anime industry (both the Japanese creators and Western distributors) has often used levels of overseas piracy to determine which titles are worth licensing for release in the US/Europe.
It's not a foolproof method - it backfired badly during the industry-crash in the middle of the last decade when a lot of companies found that there are certain titles that people are just not going to walk up to a shop-counter with in the US or London, even though they'll nab them happily enough from a torrent. However, it can generally be a good way of spotting whether a title and/or similar titles are worth a subtitled streaming release, a physical DVD/BD release or potentially a fancy special edition box.
But yes, there's the reverse importation problem - and this is as relevant to gaming as it is for anime. For whatever reason, Japanese buyers of anime and video games are content to get ripped off to an utterly eye-watering degree. The "old" system for anime releases in the West was to set a price point of $30/£20 per volume of 4-5 episodes. These days, US/EU distributors struggle to get away with that model for all but the very biggest of releases (Puella Magi Madoka Magica is the most recent example I can think of) - it's more normal to get volumes of 13 or so episodes, for not much more than $40/£25 per volume. Meanwhile in Japan, that $40 equivalent gets you a volume containing... two episodes. The situation is broadly similar on games, where prices for many titles (particularly Japanese-developed ones) are utterly eye-watering in Japan.
Now if you've got a market that's willing to play along with prices like that, you're going to do everything you can to protect it - and that means doing whatever you can to block reverse importation. So yes, most Western (legal) streaming sites block Japanese IP addresses.
In the gaming sphere, Nintendo insist on full region locking (probably due to their Apple-style paternalist, authoritarian culture). Sony make it very hard to release region locked games on their console - there's only been one region locked PS3 game to date (Persona 4: Arena - and a worthy target for a boycott if ever there was one). But the 360... the 360 is more interesting. Microsoft neither ban nor mandate region locking; they leave it up to the publisher to decide (and don't lock the games they publish themselves). If you look at the trend for region locking on 360 games, while you can always find a few exceptions, a large of US releases will work on European consoles and vice versa, but very, very few will work on Japanese consoles. This at least partly explains why so many of the smaller Japanese developers have been willing to go the 360-exclusivity route during this console generation, despite the 360's poor installed base in Japan.
How long are you going to be there for? Because unless it's months and months, I would urge you to sort out your business affairs in advance and just not bother trying anything "clever" while you're out there. Because believe me, a bit of business inconvenience back home is nothing next to the world of hurt you will inflict upon yourself (albeit with some helpful assistance from others and their nice electrodes) in the admittedly fairly unlikely (but by no means impossible) scenario that you piss off the security side of what is still, despite a bit of spin and economic modernisation, a creepy totalitarian state apparatus.
Anyway... their country, their rules. When I travel to the USA, I'm generally struck by how stupidly low speed limits are, particularly given how well maintained, open and relatively quiet they are compared with ours here in the UK. But I don't plot and scheme for how I can drive at UK speeds - I follow the US speed limits. Now in the case of China, we're talking about rights that are rather more fundamental than "being allowed to drive fast" - but hey, you've chosen to go their on holiday (you've said you'll be a tourist) and you're a guest, so perhaps you should behave like on.
Besides, you'll get a lot more out of your holiday if you aren't constantly trying to work while you're out there. So as I said at the start, do whatever you can to organise things so you don't actually need to work while you're out there (or consider cancelling your trip and re-booking at a better time).
I'm posting on a website with a largely US audience. I know what the US terminology is and it does no harm to use it - and helps to eliminate the occasional misunderstanding.
It's good to know that the issue's being worked on - are there any links? (I'm genuinely interested in this stuff.)
I can see that the standardisation issue could be a tricky one (in a world where we still have no standard mobile phone or laptop chargers), but it surely can't be beyond our capacity to solve.
I think the actual issue is that we might be thinking about what infrastructure is needed for this in the wrong way.
I don't currently own a car (lucky enough to live in a London suburb with great public transport), but if I did, then an electric vehicle would make a lot of sense for what I'd use it for - short shopping trips and the like. However, the apartment complex I live in has no charging facilities in its car-park, so even though I own a parking space there (which currently sits empty), I'd have no way of charging one. Getting charging facilities installed would be seriously expensive.
I've often wondered if the conceptual model we use for electric cars isn't the wrong one. The current assumption is that when you buy an electric car, you also buy and own the battery, and you are responsible for keeping it charged.
Now - maybe there are umpteen good reasons why this couldn't work - but has anybody ever tried a different approach? I'm talking about a model where the cars have easily-swapped batteries, which the driver leases, rather than owning. So... you buy your car and you pay an upfront deposit for the lease of a battery. When your battery runs low, you go into a gas station (or in this case, gas/charging station), the battery gets removed and replaced by a fresh one from the station's "charging room".
You pay a fee to the station covering your share of its electricity costs for charging the battery plus whatever profit margin it requires (much like paying for your gas at the moment), and you drive off a few minutes after arriving. Meanwhile, "your" old battery is charged up at the station and swapped with another customer's empty battery once it's finished recharging. This eliminates a lot of the charge-time complaints associated with electric vehicles at the moment and also means that we don't need charging points in homes or at the roadside.
I'm sure there must be good reasons why this wouldn't work, given it never seems to get consideration - but what are they?
Sadly, it's not that easy (at least not in the UK, where resources for these things are limited and the emphasis for mental health is on "care in the community"). In particular, it was complicated by the fact that she'd been the first one to raise a complaint with the authorities. That makes it very difficult to lodge counter-complaints without them being discarded as retaliatory actions. Besides, from about the mid-point of this sequence, I knew that I was going to be moving out in the near future, so my motivation to do more than try to minimise the immediate grief was pretty low.
But yes, she clearly needed to be removed from the environment she was in - to provide her with treatment if any was likely to be effective and to protect other people from her in any event. I feel very, very sorry for whoever got the flat after me (a young couple, I'm told by my former upstairs neighbour - god, I hope they have a baby soon, a really loud, cranky baby).
Yes, quite, I can also hear those mosquito devices, despite being well up into my 30s. When I was in my teens, my dad was a director in a small business that sold, serviced and provided training for medical electronics. It was a very small company and even the directors did a bit of hands-on engineering, so our garage was often full of bits of medical kit.
There was one weekend that I spent seriously ill - headaches, nausea, dizziness. Eventually, I tracked it down to a monitor in the garage. My dad didn't want to believe me, but it was proven int he end.
So when this came to a head earlier this year, I was actually perfectly happy to have my flat checked to see whether there was something even further up the range beyond what I could hear - but we proved that there wasn't.
And yes, I would not be the slightest bit surprised if this were behind at least some of the complaints of "magical computer waves give me headaches".
Went through something similar (though it didn't go to court) in my old flat, which I moved out of earlier this year. Middle-aged couple living downstairs, got on fine with them for years, then the woman's late-teenaged daughter from a previous marriage gets kicked out by her father and moves in with them in the summer of last year (putting 3 people in a flat which is, to be honest, a little small for one person and downright cramped for 2).
This is one deeply troubled youth - clear mental health problems and surrounded by a constant stench of strong cannabis. She can also - in her mothers' eyes, do no wrong. Anyway, my life very quickly becomes absolute hell. First it's the complaints about noise. I take these seriously at first and do everything I can to limit the noise I'm making. Doesn't help, indeed she calls the police on multiple occasions, though they don't actually do anything. She loses access that particular trick after she calls the police over a weekend when I'm away visiting my parents - they force open the door to my flat and find it empty. After that, they stopped responding to her calls.
Anyway, in the course of this, she gets to see inside my flat (while I'm not there, imagine how delighted I am) - and she notes the fairly large amount of electronic equipment. Her next move - a phone call to the council complaining that interference from the electronics in my flat is giving her headaches.
I get a very puzzled call from an environmental health officer. He's very apologetic about the whole thing and freely admits that he has no idea whether he has any legal basis to do anything. By this point, I've already got my escape in sight - I've finally, after 4 years, been able to save for the deposit needed to get a mortage and out of rental accomodation (and to move to a much better area in the process). So I'm quite prepared to be all reasonable and light. We agree that he can come and inspect my flat for anything that might be emitting either outside of the allowed spectrum, or high-pitched noises outside the normal hearing range (which can be a genuine issue for teenagers and for some adults - like me!).
Anyway, he comes, he waves a toolkit around and he agrees that there's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. He sends my neighbours a letter telling them this. He and I then get a very angry letter back (or rather, he gets a letter, I get a copy pushed through my letterbox with something obscene scribbed on it as well) saying that, among other things, my wireless network is "beaming words through her head".
Two days later, I load my possessions into a van and move off to my new home. I've not seen or heard from her since. I still see my old upstairs neighbour, who works at a station I pass through on my morning commute (and who I always got on very well with). He tells me that she continues to make life unbearable for the new occupants of my old flat and has started to turn her attention to him as well.
It would have been interesting on one level to see what would have happened if I hadn't been in a position to move out - but I'm glad I didn't have to find out.
By the way, this all happened in London, so it's definitely not a US-only phenomenon.
I've read TFA - even though the link in the summary is broken - and what I can't see is any detail on what the offending post actually said. I mean, are we talking about a "I see kids pestering their parents for $250 sneakers and sometimes I want to throttle them myself" type comment? If so... grotesque over-reaction, violation of constitutional rights etc.
Or are we talking about something which clearly expresses a credible intention to commit violence? If so... fine, go ahead and stop a major crime from occuring.
Were you playing on an Xbox360 without being signed into a user profile? That's the only possible means of replicating the symptoms you describe. Unless it's one of those weird decay-based copy protection systems on the PC version. But I've never heard Borderlands mentioned in that context.