I just moved, and since my slowpoke ISP is slow, I won't have ADSL in my new place until one or two weeks from now. To cover the meantime I ordered mobile broadband which is a USB 3G dongle that you can connect to your computer. It can do HSPA, and EDGE and "3G". I'm pretty close to a tower, but I got 2mbps down and 0.2 up, and a latency of about 300ms, so I think I'll keep borrowing my neighbour's wifi instead and just return this instead. The mobile provider also had a campaign right now, so the monthly cost is 0. There is a 5GB cap though (if you hit it, they throttle you to 60kbps), and the regular price is $30 a month.
There, feel free to be envious, rant about how AT&T are screwing the US consumers, curse us Europeans, and possibly, just possibly start the whole broadband country ranking debate again.:-)
There are many vital issues, but if you think the existing alternatives are abouts equal for you, then there might be a point in voting for a single-issue party.
The biggest benefit of a party like this though is that they raise opinion, and they "force" the established parties to take a stand on the issue, hopefully moving them in the direction that this party wants.
I wouldn't vote on the Pirate Party in my national elections, because I think economical policy is more important, but I'm sure as hell going to vote for them in the EU parliament, because I don't really care about economical policy there. But having one representative from the Pirate Party in Brussels would make a huge difference, because that person could actively work against all the copyright maximalist crap that's coming from that direction lately, in a way that lobbying or interest organisations can't do. If you can't buy politicians like the lobby does, you can elect them instead.
you can't appeal just because you don't like the law. In common law,
...Sweden is not a common law country.
Nevertheless, this tactic of letting the highest court hear cases just because there are new and interesting points of law is stupid.
No, that's the way the Swedish legal system works, if the legal precedent is unclear, the case is appealed as far as it needs to go for a precedent to be set so that everyone knows how to apply the law in following cases.
Unless TPB has a lot of cash to burn.
Uh, they have no money, but again, Sweden is not the US. It's a criminal trial, so they have defense attorneys that are (for the time being) paid for by the public. The loser pays all attorney's fees, but only when you get to the final verdict. It won't cost them anything to appeal, so they'd be stupid not to try it.
If the appeal is successful and the case gets to be tried at a higher court, there will be more fees added to the final bill, but it's the final loser who gets that, not the intermediate loser.
No shit, Sherlock? Sweden doesn't have jury trials. Instead, the members of the court, led by the judge, judges each case. They discuss and vote among themselves, but since the judge in that group is the one with the most legal training, what he says carries a lot of weight, and if the judge is biased, the verdict will be biased.
Additionally, one original court member assigned to this case got replaced because of bias (he also works as a composer and was part of an organization of composers), but for some weird reason the judge neglected to inform the parties of the trial of his own bias.
Appeals also don't work like in the US system, municipal courts are good at handling small-time crimes and civil matters, but when it comes to controversial cases, not so. Cases where there's no legal precedent like this one are also almost guaranteed to get tried at a higher level and may even reach the supreme court.
For extra fun you can also appeal to the EU court if you think the verdict is in breach of a EU treaty or directive, such as the EU declaration of human rights, and if your case gets accepted there, it'll drag on and on and on.
This first verdict in the TPB trial was just a little bump in a long, long road.
The point which you are totally missing is that "kronor" is the English word for the currency of Sweden, in the exact same way that the English word for the currency of Malaysia is "ringgit", not "jagged", and the currency of the US is "dollar", not "valleys", and the currency of Japan is "yen", not "rounds", etc.
I know that in the Swedish language there are some (but not all) currencies that have a translated name, in the same way that some (but not all) countries have a translated name. I don't know if there are any currency names in English that are translated, I can't think of any, but there might be. However, the Scandinavian currencies are not among those, but many Scandinavians think they are.
It's a good idea to translate something when you want the listener to better understand you. Translating the name of Livrustkammaren makes it easier for readers here to understand that I was talking about a museum, and what kind of museum it was.
Calling the swedish currency "crowns" doesn't make it easier for people to understand what you're talking about. Crowns go on your head. Kronor goes in your wallet.
So in essence, the 7 parties group together and branch of into two parties for enough of the vote. I get it now... Well, no I don't. Tell me again what the big difference is?
If you have a two-party system, there will be some voters who love everything about party A, and votes for them, and voters who hate party B, and therefore will vote on party A, and voters who feel strongly about one issue that party A champions, and therefore votes on A. You get no differentiation, you get no voter influence of which issues are most important, which faction of the party should have the most power.
If you have several small parties, they tend to profile themselves, they usually agree with some other parties on general economic policy, but have some profile issues. Voters can then know that party A, B and C have the same economic policy and voting on any of them will give the same results in that area, but can then choose exactly which party to support based on their differences. It's a lot more nuanced than "anything but party D".
Anyways, the problem isn't two parties. It's party lines. There should be nothing or very little that's a party stance or party line in government. Parties can group together but the legislation should already be a compromise between the senators and congressmen so that a majority will vote on something because of it's worth not because a political or party leader told them to. If that was to return, there would be no difference between the two party system and a 7 party system.
What, no? Politics is all about compromise if you want to get something done. Legislation that everyone agrees on would be toothless or inane, because you couldn't get anything radical agreed on, but sometimes you have to push something through even though it's not well liked among your voters, and in that case, the party line is a nice scapegoat.
The sad truth is that it's much easier to spin something as bad than explain why it's good, so the more dependent you are on your voter's good will, the more vulnerable to bad spin you become.
The *stories* are US-centric, yes, but the comments tend not to be. When i posted my comment this story had four or five different comment threads going on (including this one) about how the rest of the world definitely doesn't want US democracy, for multiple reasons.
This means that the comments doesn't really talk about the point of the story, but instead got sidetracked on an irrelevant detail that could have been avoided. Then again, this is Slashdot...
Imagine trying to get a simple majority in a country with 6 or 7 parties. You would never get anything done.
If all seven parties disagree on everything, then no. In most places with political systems like this, that is not the case. You have coalitions of parties where they agree to support each other on everything they agree on, and compromise on the things they don't. It works really well most of the time. Sometimes coalitions break and new ones form, or you have a re-election, but it's not like a system with a lot of political parties gets less done than a system with only two.
I'm not sure we all "agree" nor and I sure who "we" are.
The "we" would be the people who live in these democracies, and I think we all agree on which countries are such a democracy and which aren't.
The "western liberal" in democracy is pretty much what seems to be taking rights away and making things less free either directly or indirectly. If you think everyone agrees to that, your crazy.
Nice strawman. Yes, if you look at it from the very narrow perspective of the last seven years, and only in a certain north-american country, then yes, you could get that impression. I was kinda aiming for the larger picture, liberal democracies have been going strong for about 200 years now, and we are richer, happier, and much, much better off than the people living in countries that are dictatorships, oligarchies, theocracies or socialist republics. I'm not saying our system is perfect, but it sure as hell is the best we've seen so far.
I wish I could moderate the article "-1 flamebait". A better term is "Western Liberal Democracy", that's all the good things that we all agree on, and yet isn't exclusive to a single country.
Yeah, really effective, what a huge blow to filesharing in Sweden, how will it ever recover? Oh, let's wait half a year and it will definitely be back at the levels of late March again.
Yes, I know you can effectively share the same hardware, but you have to be able to handle peaks, you can't smooth it out as you like and tell people to wait their turn until there's room on a server for you to play on.
So yes, some sharing of hardware, but will it be enough to offset the costs of more expensive hardware, the costs of maintenance, the costs of bandwidth, and the costs of spare capacity? That's what I seriously doubt.
I haven't seen it in person, I have colleagues who did though. I am not in any way questioning that the experience at GDC was awesome, I'm pretty sure it was. But, it was a tech demo in a controlled environment. I am not saying that what they did is impossible on that scale, and obviously it isn't.
I am saying that I doubt they can make this profitable on a large scale, over the actual internet, using multiple hosting centers.
I don't doubt that this could work fine in the casual market, but I don't see how this could be cost-effective for the latest games, and I don't see how they would be able to convince the hardcore gamers to switch.
Of course they get some big game companies "on board", for them it's a clear win, because it would solve a lot of piracy problems and would give them a subscription-based revenue stream, and companies love those. The game companies won't lose anything if OnLive fails, but they will gain a lot if it succeeds, so they don't care if it really works or not.
Now, it's not FPS games, but if it's good enough for a video, it's probably good enough for pre-rendering and/or AI computation.
No, no, no. A video stream can be efficiently encoded because you can look at multiple frames when doing your compression. For a game that is rendered in real-time, you have to encode frame by frame. OnLive claims 30fps, so each frame you wait introduces 33ms lag, which is unacceptable given that you already will have lag from the game server being remote. You have to get the total lag below 150-100ms, otherwise it's really noticeable, and discerning gamers will probably react badly to lag above 50ms. Good luck getting those rates over the internet.
But the video part isn't that big a problem, I could imagine they have solved that, and there's plenty of custom video compression hardware. What doesn't exist though is custom graphics hardware that can be virtualized, and you need graphics hardware for the games they announced, you absolutely cannot CPU-render it.
Actually, the technical part of OnLive on a small scale isn't that impossible, you could imagine that if your ISP hosted some OnLive servers close to you, you'd get a pretty ok experience.
No, the thing that makes OnLive completely ridiculous is the economy of it. They're promising the latest games, that require the best gaming-specific hardware. So how is their datacenter going to cope with 1000 people playing Crysis at the same time? Are they virtualizing the games? I could imagine that for lesser games that can be entirely CPU-rendered, but you can't use the CPU for modern games, you need a GPU. Or two. Have they found a way to virtualize that? Or do they have multiple GPUs per server? How the hell are they gonna cool it and power it? And how are they gonna afford it? How could it possibly be cheaper to buy and host and manage a server that can serve, say, 10 players at the same time, than for those 10 players to just go to a store and pick up a game console each?
Console hardware is dirt cheap and has really good price/performance. Server hardware is very expensive, and has really bad price/performance. And on top of that, you need server hardware for the overhead of virtualizing, and you need server hardware for the video encoding.
And then, assuming they could magically assemble this hardware for a price that is competitive with cheap consoles, they choose to do GAMES with it? I could think of dozens of other uses for hardware like this, and games is way, way down on the list.
The Pirate Bay is about theft, plain and simple. It may be true that the monetary losses are not nearly what the record companies claim, and it may be true that the media conglomerates are really out for money for themselves rather than to support the starving artists, but the propaganda is propaganda on both sides.
No it is not, it's about copyright infringement. Calling it theft is part of the propaganda of one of the sides in the debate, and it's rather ironic that you argue against it in the same sentence.
Also, I think you are wrong in your assumption of why people pirate movies, it's not because it's free, it's because it's convenient.
Yes! That's exactly what happened to my 750GB Seagate I bought last summer. Three weeks after I bought it it just stopped being detected on bootup, and I couldn't access it in any way. I yanked it out, bought a new drive, cried a little about some small amounts of data I lost, restored a backup with the most important things, and went on with my life.
Luckily I saved the drive, and it was one of the models Seagate listed on their site, and I have the SD15 firmware, so I made a support case on their website just now (Contact us by email my ass!) and hoping for a solution.
"Go halfway around the world go get X and bring it back. Oh you did that...go back to where you were and get y. Oh..thanks...now go back and get z. Now that you have brought me all 3, go back and kill the mob that you killed twice already getting x,y and z"
This is much, much better in Wotlk than before. Generally, when you get to a new quest-hub, you'll get around two to four quests that can be done close to each other. When you've turned in all of those (they're usually linked) you get a new set of quests that point you to a different area where you can do those quests at the same time.
There is very little of that annoying backtracking, where you didn't know which quests to "combine" and which to save for later so that you could combine it with a better one. Now, you grab all quests, do them all, and you get a decent tour of the entire area. They've really worked hard on this, and it's like this for every zone I've been to so far.
Well, three months subscription of it equals the price of a single game, and I can't think of any recent game that got me three months of good gameplay. For me, it really does deliver bang for the buck.
Also, I hate having a running subscription, I always cancel it, so that each time my time runs out, I have to make the actual decision to continue paying for it. That makes it a helluva lot easier to quit, if you don't care that your paid time is up, then it's probably a good time to leave.
Except that trolling is taking an uncommon opinion just for the fun of it, to spark debate, to troll for comments, and to just piss people off.
The claim that the trolls are usually right is wrong, they're actually not interested in the factual matters, they're only interested in controversy....wait, did I just get trolled? Crap.
Slashdot Mirror
What, don't you people have this already?
I just moved, and since my slowpoke ISP is slow, I won't have ADSL in my new place until one or two weeks from now. To cover the meantime I ordered mobile broadband which is a USB 3G dongle that you can connect to your computer. It can do HSPA, and EDGE and "3G". I'm pretty close to a tower, but I got 2mbps down and 0.2 up, and a latency of about 300ms, so I think I'll keep borrowing my neighbour's wifi instead and just return this instead. The mobile provider also had a campaign right now, so the monthly cost is 0. There is a 5GB cap though (if you hit it, they throttle you to 60kbps), and the regular price is $30 a month.
There, feel free to be envious, rant about how AT&T are screwing the US consumers, curse us Europeans, and possibly, just possibly start the whole broadband country ranking debate again. :-)
There are many vital issues, but if you think the existing alternatives are abouts equal for you, then there might be a point in voting for a single-issue party.
The biggest benefit of a party like this though is that they raise opinion, and they "force" the established parties to take a stand on the issue, hopefully moving them in the direction that this party wants.
I wouldn't vote on the Pirate Party in my national elections, because I think economical policy is more important, but I'm sure as hell going to vote for them in the EU parliament, because I don't really care about economical policy there. But having one representative from the Pirate Party in Brussels would make a huge difference, because that person could actively work against all the copyright maximalist crap that's coming from that direction lately, in a way that lobbying or interest organisations can't do. If you can't buy politicians like the lobby does, you can elect them instead.
you can't appeal just because you don't like the law. In common law,
...Sweden is not a common law country.
Nevertheless, this tactic of letting the highest court hear cases just because there are new and interesting points of law is stupid.
No, that's the way the Swedish legal system works, if the legal precedent is unclear, the case is appealed as far as it needs to go for a precedent to be set so that everyone knows how to apply the law in following cases.
Unless TPB has a lot of cash to burn.
Uh, they have no money, but again, Sweden is not the US. It's a criminal trial, so they have defense attorneys that are (for the time being) paid for by the public. The loser pays all attorney's fees, but only when you get to the final verdict. It won't cost them anything to appeal, so they'd be stupid not to try it.
If the appeal is successful and the case gets to be tried at a higher court, there will be more fees added to the final bill, but it's the final loser who gets that, not the intermediate loser.
I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a swedish lawyer
The judge didn't find them guilty, the jury did.
No shit, Sherlock? Sweden doesn't have jury trials. Instead, the members of the court, led by the judge, judges each case. They discuss and vote among themselves, but since the judge in that group is the one with the most legal training, what he says carries a lot of weight, and if the judge is biased, the verdict will be biased.
Additionally, one original court member assigned to this case got replaced because of bias (he also works as a composer and was part of an organization of composers), but for some weird reason the judge neglected to inform the parties of the trial of his own bias.
Appeals also don't work like in the US system, municipal courts are good at handling small-time crimes and civil matters, but when it comes to controversial cases, not so. Cases where there's no legal precedent like this one are also almost guaranteed to get tried at a higher level and may even reach the supreme court.
For extra fun you can also appeal to the EU court if you think the verdict is in breach of a EU treaty or directive, such as the EU declaration of human rights, and if your case gets accepted there, it'll drag on and on and on.
This first verdict in the TPB trial was just a little bump in a long, long road.
The point which you are totally missing is that "kronor" is the English word for the currency of Sweden, in the exact same way that the English word for the currency of Malaysia is "ringgit", not "jagged", and the currency of the US is "dollar", not "valleys", and the currency of Japan is "yen", not "rounds", etc.
I know that in the Swedish language there are some (but not all) currencies that have a translated name, in the same way that some (but not all) countries have a translated name. I don't know if there are any currency names in English that are translated, I can't think of any, but there might be. However, the Scandinavian currencies are not among those, but many Scandinavians think they are.
It's a good idea to translate something when you want the listener to better understand you. Translating the name of Livrustkammaren makes it easier for readers here to understand that I was talking about a museum, and what kind of museum it was.
Calling the swedish currency "crowns" doesn't make it easier for people to understand what you're talking about. Crowns go on your head. Kronor goes in your wallet.
The English name for the Swedish currency is "krona" in singular and "kronor" in plural. The fine in this case is therefore 30 million kronor.
There are only a few swedish crowns in existence, and you have to visit the Swedish Royal Armoury museum to see them.
So in essence, the 7 parties group together and branch of into two parties for enough of the vote. I get it now... Well, no I don't. Tell me again what the big difference is?
If you have a two-party system, there will be some voters who love everything about party A, and votes for them, and voters who hate party B, and therefore will vote on party A, and voters who feel strongly about one issue that party A champions, and therefore votes on A. You get no differentiation, you get no voter influence of which issues are most important, which faction of the party should have the most power.
If you have several small parties, they tend to profile themselves, they usually agree with some other parties on general economic policy, but have some profile issues. Voters can then know that party A, B and C have the same economic policy and voting on any of them will give the same results in that area, but can then choose exactly which party to support based on their differences. It's a lot more nuanced than "anything but party D".
Anyways, the problem isn't two parties. It's party lines. There should be nothing or very little that's a party stance or party line in government. Parties can group together but the legislation should already be a compromise between the senators and congressmen so that a majority will vote on something because of it's worth not because a political or party leader told them to. If that was to return, there would be no difference between the two party system and a 7 party system.
What, no? Politics is all about compromise if you want to get something done. Legislation that everyone agrees on would be toothless or inane, because you couldn't get anything radical agreed on, but sometimes you have to push something through even though it's not well liked among your voters, and in that case, the party line is a nice scapegoat.
The sad truth is that it's much easier to spin something as bad than explain why it's good, so the more dependent you are on your voter's good will, the more vulnerable to bad spin you become.
The *stories* are US-centric, yes, but the comments tend not to be. When i posted my comment this story had four or five different comment threads going on (including this one) about how the rest of the world definitely doesn't want US democracy, for multiple reasons.
This means that the comments doesn't really talk about the point of the story, but instead got sidetracked on an irrelevant detail that could have been avoided. Then again, this is Slashdot...
Imagine trying to get a simple majority in a country with 6 or 7 parties. You would never get anything done.
If all seven parties disagree on everything, then no. In most places with political systems like this, that is not the case. You have coalitions of parties where they agree to support each other on everything they agree on, and compromise on the things they don't. It works really well most of the time. Sometimes coalitions break and new ones form, or you have a re-election, but it's not like a system with a lot of political parties gets less done than a system with only two.
I'm not sure we all "agree" nor and I sure who "we" are.
The "we" would be the people who live in these democracies, and I think we all agree on which countries are such a democracy and which aren't.
The "western liberal" in democracy is pretty much what seems to be taking rights away and making things less free either directly or indirectly. If you think everyone agrees to that, your crazy.
Nice strawman. Yes, if you look at it from the very narrow perspective of the last seven years, and only in a certain north-american country, then yes, you could get that impression. I was kinda aiming for the larger picture, liberal democracies have been going strong for about 200 years now, and we are richer, happier, and much, much better off than the people living in countries that are dictatorships, oligarchies, theocracies or socialist republics. I'm not saying our system is perfect, but it sure as hell is the best we've seen so far.
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=western+liberal+democracy
I wish I could moderate the article "-1 flamebait". A better term is "Western Liberal Democracy", that's all the good things that we all agree on, and yet isn't exclusive to a single country.
You're looking at the bandwidth graph of all of Sweden, as measured by http://www.netnod.se/, not a single university.
Also, if you look at the two-year graph, http://stats.autonomica.se/mrtg/sums/all_twoyear_sum.png, you can see that the drop now down to 90Gbps only means that we're back at the levels of October last year.
Yeah, really effective, what a huge blow to filesharing in Sweden, how will it ever recover? Oh, let's wait half a year and it will definitely be back at the levels of late March again.
Ooooh, nifty, I didn't know they made those yet. Well, makes the hardware setup a bit more believable then. :-)
Yes, I know you can effectively share the same hardware, but you have to be able to handle peaks, you can't smooth it out as you like and tell people to wait their turn until there's room on a server for you to play on.
So yes, some sharing of hardware, but will it be enough to offset the costs of more expensive hardware, the costs of maintenance, the costs of bandwidth, and the costs of spare capacity? That's what I seriously doubt.
I haven't seen it in person, I have colleagues who did though. I am not in any way questioning that the experience at GDC was awesome, I'm pretty sure it was. But, it was a tech demo in a controlled environment. I am not saying that what they did is impossible on that scale, and obviously it isn't.
I am saying that I doubt they can make this profitable on a large scale, over the actual internet, using multiple hosting centers.
I don't doubt that this could work fine in the casual market, but I don't see how this could be cost-effective for the latest games, and I don't see how they would be able to convince the hardcore gamers to switch.
Of course they get some big game companies "on board", for them it's a clear win, because it would solve a lot of piracy problems and would give them a subscription-based revenue stream, and companies love those. The game companies won't lose anything if OnLive fails, but they will gain a lot if it succeeds, so they don't care if it really works or not.
Now, it's not FPS games, but if it's good enough for a video, it's probably good enough for pre-rendering and/or AI computation.
No, no, no. A video stream can be efficiently encoded because you can look at multiple frames when doing your compression. For a game that is rendered in real-time, you have to encode frame by frame. OnLive claims 30fps, so each frame you wait introduces 33ms lag, which is unacceptable given that you already will have lag from the game server being remote. You have to get the total lag below 150-100ms, otherwise it's really noticeable, and discerning gamers will probably react badly to lag above 50ms. Good luck getting those rates over the internet.
But the video part isn't that big a problem, I could imagine they have solved that, and there's plenty of custom video compression hardware. What doesn't exist though is custom graphics hardware that can be virtualized, and you need graphics hardware for the games they announced, you absolutely cannot CPU-render it.
Actually, the technical part of OnLive on a small scale isn't that impossible, you could imagine that if your ISP hosted some OnLive servers close to you, you'd get a pretty ok experience.
No, the thing that makes OnLive completely ridiculous is the economy of it. They're promising the latest games, that require the best gaming-specific hardware. So how is their datacenter going to cope with 1000 people playing Crysis at the same time? Are they virtualizing the games? I could imagine that for lesser games that can be entirely CPU-rendered, but you can't use the CPU for modern games, you need a GPU. Or two. Have they found a way to virtualize that? Or do they have multiple GPUs per server? How the hell are they gonna cool it and power it? And how are they gonna afford it? How could it possibly be cheaper to buy and host and manage a server that can serve, say, 10 players at the same time, than for those 10 players to just go to a store and pick up a game console each?
Console hardware is dirt cheap and has really good price/performance. Server hardware is very expensive, and has really bad price/performance. And on top of that, you need server hardware for the overhead of virtualizing, and you need server hardware for the video encoding.
And then, assuming they could magically assemble this hardware for a price that is competitive with cheap consoles, they choose to do GAMES with it? I could think of dozens of other uses for hardware like this, and games is way, way down on the list.
No, this whole thing smells fishy...
The Pirate Bay is about theft, plain and simple. It may be true that the monetary losses are not nearly what the record companies claim, and it may be true that the media conglomerates are really out for money for themselves rather than to support the starving artists, but the propaganda is propaganda on both sides.
No it is not, it's about copyright infringement. Calling it theft is part of the propaganda of one of the sides in the debate, and it's rather ironic that you argue against it in the same sentence.
Also, I think you are wrong in your assumption of why people pirate movies, it's not because it's free, it's because it's convenient.
Yes! That's exactly what happened to my 750GB Seagate I bought last summer. Three weeks after I bought it it just stopped being detected on bootup, and I couldn't access it in any way. I yanked it out, bought a new drive, cried a little about some small amounts of data I lost, restored a backup with the most important things, and went on with my life.
Luckily I saved the drive, and it was one of the models Seagate listed on their site, and I have the SD15 firmware, so I made a support case on their website just now (Contact us by email my ass!) and hoping for a solution.
Thank you Slashdot. :)
"Go halfway around the world go get X and bring it back. Oh you did that...go back to where you were and get y. Oh..thanks...now go back and get z. Now that you have brought me all 3, go back and kill the mob that you killed twice already getting x,y and z"
This is much, much better in Wotlk than before. Generally, when you get to a new quest-hub, you'll get around two to four quests that can be done close to each other. When you've turned in all of those (they're usually linked) you get a new set of quests that point you to a different area where you can do those quests at the same time.
There is very little of that annoying backtracking, where you didn't know which quests to "combine" and which to save for later so that you could combine it with a better one. Now, you grab all quests, do them all, and you get a decent tour of the entire area. They've really worked hard on this, and it's like this for every zone I've been to so far.
Well, three months subscription of it equals the price of a single game, and I can't think of any recent game that got me three months of good gameplay. For me, it really does deliver bang for the buck.
Also, I hate having a running subscription, I always cancel it, so that each time my time runs out, I have to make the actual decision to continue paying for it. That makes it a helluva lot easier to quit, if you don't care that your paid time is up, then it's probably a good time to leave.
If I weren't playing WoW, I'd simply be playing some other computer game, it's just that WoW is a really, really good game.
I've played a lot of RPGs over the years, and WoW is actually better than most single-player ones, and is a MMO on top of that.
I stopped playing over a year ago, but returned now for the expansion. Really, really worth it. Will see how long I'll keep on playing this time. :)
Except that trolling is taking an uncommon opinion just for the fun of it, to spark debate, to troll for comments, and to just piss people off.
The claim that the trolls are usually right is wrong, they're actually not interested in the factual matters, they're only interested in controversy. ...wait, did I just get trolled? Crap.