Everything that happened in Eden occured within a closed system God designed and implemented. As such, any bugs in that system are his responsibility. If he couldn't abide having Adam and Eve around because they rebelled, that was God's choice. God made the decision that if Adam and Eve ate some fruit, they couldn't ever be with him unless they performed the right sacrifices or unless God's son died a horrific death. God designed the system, he wrote the book. if you turn the oven on and put a pot on one of the front burners and fill it with boiling water and have the handle facing out where a kid can grab it, it is not the kid's fault that he got boiling water on him, it's your fault.
I believe there may be a Supreme Being, but the "God" of Christianity seems like a fricking lunatic, an embodiment of the fears and flaws of his followers. A created universe makes a fair bit of sense. An eternal heaven and hell does not make sense. If you're determined to limit yourself by thinking of yourself as a dog compared to God, that's your fault, and honestly I think it makes you a smaller and more limited person for it. You're the sort of simple mortal that Q would love, because you're completely willing to bow down and worship a God you think is beyond your understanding. I'd rather keep looking and keep asking.
It also does not take too much "denial" to assume otherwise. It works both ways. However, the repurcussions for being wrong one way means you lived your life with a false assumption, then go into the ground to rot. Being wrong the other way means that when your body dies, something else occours to your soul. Fear of hell is a shitty reason to have faith, I'm not making that point.
It is just the old point that you can't prove, and you can't disprove, so being completely dispassionate, what do you use to determine your stance? Risk vs reward? Gut feeling?
I have enough reasons, enough doctrinal and theological differences, with Christianity to be entirely content not being a Christian. I'm enough of a decent and moral person now that I'm no longer a Christian that I don't think being one would really add anything to that. That means that the only motivations for me to go back to Christianity are either a fear of hell or a desire for heaven, and maybe a wish to get up early on Sunday and sing hymns with hypocrites.
For the repercussions, I look at it this way: If there is a hell and I die and go there, I wouldn't have liked going to heaven. I'm happy with who I am, if heaven doesn't want me I don't want to be there.
And yet so far. Your explanation seems reasonable, but is a bit off. God is not capricious.
Must not be reading the same bible...
My 20 month old son does not discern that touching a hot stove will burn him, but he does comprehend that he must not touch the stove. Adam and Eve knew what God said, and that breaking the rule was BAD. In fact, God told them, if you break this rule, you will die.
If he touches the hot stove, will you kick him out of the house and put him on the street? That's basically what the Biblical God did. Seriously, Adam and Eve ate some fricking fruit. And as a result, everything bad in the world that has happened since then happened. That's not a system structured by a rational being, and anybody who thinks that's rational is not themselves rational.
The hot oven argument, which I always hear (largely because it's in one of those ubiquitous books tossed around at Christian evangelism training courses), is completely invalid because the scale is completely different. Whole different ballpark, whole different team, whole different fricking league. If it proves anything, it proves what a monstrous and evil being the Christian God would be if, God forbid, he existed. If your kid touches a hot stove, you as a loving parent treat the burn and tell him that's why you don't touch a stove. And he will have learned from that mistake and won't ever do it again. If your kid was Adam and you were God, you'd boot him out onto the street and give him a terminal disease. That's not sanity. Oh sure, you can say that we can't understand the great big powerful God, that he's so much wiser then us, but to that I say first that if we're made in his image, we're capable of understanding him and that his actions should make sense to us, and seocndly if I'm going to worship something I don't understand, I'm no different then a caveman worshipping the sun. In fact, the caveman is a little smarter, because he can look up in the sky, see the sun, see it's light, feel it's warmth, and know that it's real and that it's doing something for him. Christianity is based on none of that.
Moon by 2020, Mars by 2035? Right. And in 1970 they were saying we'd be on mars now. NASA just wants to keep the money coming; if they do manage to even get back to the moon by 2020, they'll be staying at a Chinese or Brazilian base there. Maybe the Chinese will let us visit the Glorious People's Space Colony of Mars. If NASA wants to stay ahead, they've got to start running faster.
Wil Wheaton is a recognized leader in the gaming and geek community. Go check out his blog, http://www.wilwheaton.net/, and tell me he wouldn't qualify. Way more then frakking Paris Hilton.
Yeah, I mean, why should I listen to my doctor? He's just been to medical school, what does he know? My feelings tell me that the witch doctor down the street with the herbal remedy is the way to go. People with long titles like Medical Doctor or Doctor of Optometry raise a red flag.
We have a long way to go in the question of global warming.
And refusing to do a damn thing because 'all the data is not in' isn't going to get you anywhere. We already know that some things harm the planet, some things don't. It's not too hard to do your part.
Dunno if you missed it, but the guy you're quoting IAL (Is A Lawyer). A Housing lawyer no less. I'm guessing he knows the trues and the falses better then you do.
You might be interested to know that you're proving some of the theories I've had about why China remains so stable despite a government few westerners would tolerate. Chinese value stability over the western ideals of liberty and freedom, it's a cultural difference, and not any better or any worse. I wouldn't like it, but my ideals are Western and not Eastern. I think it would be great if you guys had Democracy (and not the idiot Bush version of "democracy" where democracy is whoever has the money), but China is going to have the government China wants.
What I don't see is how greater access to information, and an end to censorship, endangers a stable society. If the Chinese are overall intelligent and mature, a self-policing information-based website like Wikipedia wouldn't be any threat. If it's filled with crap from kids, the intelligent readers would realize that it's not worthwhile. The objection I have is to the decision being made not by the individual, but by the government. I object to a government telling its people what they can read, it is a decision that should be left to the individual, and I can't see a logical reason why it shouldn't be. When the government tells me I can't watch TV with bad language, I object to that. I should, as a 25 year old adult and veteran of the military, be able to decide for myself whether I want to watch TV with violence and foul language. You should, as an independent and intelligent Chinese person, be able to decide for yourself that a website is a waste of time, and not have the government make that decision for you. You have already decided that the website is not worth your time, which is your choice. However, your government has made the decision for all of your countrymen that the website is not worth anyone's time, and that is overstepping the authority that a government should have.
Of course, that's my Western liberterian (not Bushie Republican) opinion on censorship, and with the cultural differences, we may as well be speaking a foreign language to each other.
Honestly, I wish China the best of luck, you've got the U.S. in debt to you for billions of dollars, which is genius, and you lot have the best odds of establishing a credible space program that actually advances past what Nasa has. I'd guess that inside of the next hundred years, if somebody wants to go into space, they'll have to speak Chinese. In the next two hundred years, it'll be the global trade language. Which will suck, because Mandarin is a hard language to learn.
...that I'm the only person anywhere ever who preferred Ralph Bakshi's version of Lord of the Rings (the first book and a half of the trilogy anyway) to the Peter Jackson version.
When I was deployed to the desert, I had a Bible-thumper there tell me that I couldn't be a moral person if I (a pagan) didn't have a holy book to base my morality on. I replied to him that "If you require a book to tell you right from wrong, and can't figure that out for yourself, you have more moral problems then a book with solve."
How do you know when you have done enough to earn your way to heaven / nirvana / not being reincarated as a rat / StoVoKor? Karma points? Where can I check my current count?
As someone with a belief in a karmic reincarnation system, you don't. That's the whole point, you shouldn't need to know. If you're trying to precisely balance your life by doing just enough good to cancel out all the evil you've done, you're wrong anyway. The point is to minimize suffering whenever possible. The more you work to alleviate suffering, the better the world is. Maybe that gets you into heaven or nirvana or Stovokor, or maybe it just means you left the world better then you found it. If you've heard of a religion that clashes with a life lived that way, I'd like to hear of it. From what I remember of Christianity from being one, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" figures in pretty prominently, but strictly speaking, you can sin as much as you like if you're saved, and so long as you don't commit an unforgivable sin (like blasphemy against the Holy Spirit) you're never able to be unsaved.
Is screwing someone while married to someone else ok, if it is ok with our own moral code and legal?
Absent book morals, common frakking sense provides a great guide for this situation. I wouldn't screw around with somebody married because of the problems it would cause. Maybe I get her pregnant and have to pay child support, maybe the husband gets angry and comes after me, maybe I get an STD from her, who knows? There's plenty of logical reasons not to get involved with somebody who is married. Now, to really blow your mind, what if the ancient Israelites knew those same reasons? In a fairly small nomadic camp-based community, sexual tensions between families could tear the camp apart, and create strife and discord among the tribe. What if that's why it was set down in law? No morality involved, just cold hard logic. It's an interesting possibility isn't it?
And I'm sure that if someone with one of those non-censored blogs criticized the Party, or brought up Falun Gong, benefits of democracy, the Dalai Lama and the movement to free Tibet, police brutality, political prisoners, or Tiananmen Square, you'd find out how far the freedom of those 20 million bloggers goes. Wikipedia is not some Western or American plot to collapse your government, while we may be interested in talking about the topic, I for one don't care what you do with your country. I don't like the Chinese government or the Party, but I'm not Chinese and I don't live there so I don't have to like or dislike it. Governments exist by the will of the people, and if the Chinese people didn't like their government and the censorship, they wouldn't have it. China's had revolutions before, even if they haven't accomplished anything more then replacing one aristocracy lording it over the peasantry with another aristocracy lording it over the peasantry.
Firstly, the censorship shouldn't exist in a free and modern society, there's no good reason for it. Secondly, not sure what you're saying there, if you knew anything about Americans you'd know we're actually not big on free stuff, Wikipedia is more of an exception. Third, it doesn't matter if you aren't asking for free, clearly from the explosion of content and activity on the Chinese Wikipedia many of your countrymen are.
At best, the Great Firewall of China is like the monitoring and blocking programs my parents used on my computer when I was a kid. Yes, I could find a way around them, but I would have preferred not to have them at all, and now that I'm an adult I don't have them. Your government is treating you like a child and making your decisions for you. If you want to be treated like a child, go right ahead.
Typically I self-censor when talking to obvious Party flaks (yes, I know full bloody well there's plenty of you floating around out there on the internet) to keep from getting you guys in trouble, but you don't seem too worried about that, so you're probably high up enough that you're loyalty won't be questioned. Yi lu pyang an (have a pleasant journey, assuming I got the pinyin right).
Wasn't it American Dad that did a MMO episode? Even so, while the episode was hilarious and had a true RPG moment ("The Castle Roodpart? Who comes up with these names?"), it wasn't WoW and didn't have Blizzard's backing and support. The South Park episode did. Also, from TFA, Trey Parker got the idea last season around the time of "In the Closet".
I think SP has been going downhill for a while, not because of reliance on fanboy references (because that is EXACTLY what the target audience wants, if you don't like it, you're not gonna like Comedy Central), but because they've started to focus more on the message then the joke. Old South Park didn't try to be constantly relevant and constantly dealing with current events. They'd make a funny episode. If it had something to do with what was going on, so be it, but first and foremost it was funny. Now they're doing the message first and the joke second, and it's not nearly as funny. On the few occasions these days when they forget the message and tell the joke instead, they're pretty funny. Season ten they've put the message first nearly every time, and it's failed nearly every time. Some of the best later episodes like Ginger Kids, Die Hippie Die, Raisins, Good Times with Weapons, they haven't really had any other point to them except to be funny, and it's worked. Raisins was effing hilarious. Smug Alert, Cartoon Wars, Million Little Fibers, Manbearpig, and so on, have all failed because they're episodes where the message takes precedence over the funny.
So who in The Party do you work for? That's clearly a pro-Chinese Government piece, clearly written by someone with English as a second language, and appears to be raw propaganda.
Guess you missed out on the Gates of Ahn Qiraj event, the introduction of cross-realm battlegrounds, the invasion of the Scourge when the Lich Kings fortresses were over Ironforge itself, the continuing battles between the Horde and the Alliance in Silithus and Eastern Plaguelands, and so on. No, you heard that people fight Onyxia once a week, and based off that decided that there's no way to have a lasting effect on the world.
I have tons of fun getting there. I leveled my mage fast because I'd already leveled a warrior, and had fun on the way up, and now I've got a hunter, a warlock, a rogue, and a priest. And I'm always finding new things, always finding quests I hadn't done before. The play differences between the classes keep me interested and entertained, as do the similarities.
Dunno, I get plenty of economy, I travel the world mining, and selling the ore to other characters in the auction house. I go all over the place killing stuff for fun, get stuff off them, and I sell that stuff at the auction house. That's how I bought my 2 epic mounts, my racial mount and the pvp mount.
You know, in 3-4 months, I can have a character up to 60 in full tier 1 and enjoying end game content. And a few decent alts. And that's not even with obsessive life-controlling playing either, just casual play. I don't have the attention span to drudge through "the first 3-4 months". If they can't make a game that's interesting in a day, I'm not interested at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything that happened in Eden occured within a closed system God designed and implemented. As such, any bugs in that system are his responsibility. If he couldn't abide having Adam and Eve around because they rebelled, that was God's choice. God made the decision that if Adam and Eve ate some fruit, they couldn't ever be with him unless they performed the right sacrifices or unless God's son died a horrific death. God designed the system, he wrote the book. if you turn the oven on and put a pot on one of the front burners and fill it with boiling water and have the handle facing out where a kid can grab it, it is not the kid's fault that he got boiling water on him, it's your fault.
I believe there may be a Supreme Being, but the "God" of Christianity seems like a fricking lunatic, an embodiment of the fears and flaws of his followers. A created universe makes a fair bit of sense. An eternal heaven and hell does not make sense. If you're determined to limit yourself by thinking of yourself as a dog compared to God, that's your fault, and honestly I think it makes you a smaller and more limited person for it. You're the sort of simple mortal that Q would love, because you're completely willing to bow down and worship a God you think is beyond your understanding. I'd rather keep looking and keep asking.
It also does not take too much "denial" to assume otherwise. It works both ways. However, the repurcussions for being wrong one way means you lived your life with a false assumption, then go into the ground to rot. Being wrong the other way means that when your body dies, something else occours to your soul. Fear of hell is a shitty reason to have faith, I'm not making that point.
It is just the old point that you can't prove, and you can't disprove, so being completely dispassionate, what do you use to determine your stance? Risk vs reward? Gut feeling?
I have enough reasons, enough doctrinal and theological differences, with Christianity to be entirely content not being a Christian. I'm enough of a decent and moral person now that I'm no longer a Christian that I don't think being one would really add anything to that. That means that the only motivations for me to go back to Christianity are either a fear of hell or a desire for heaven, and maybe a wish to get up early on Sunday and sing hymns with hypocrites.
For the repercussions, I look at it this way: If there is a hell and I die and go there, I wouldn't have liked going to heaven. I'm happy with who I am, if heaven doesn't want me I don't want to be there.
That's my point. When it comes down to it, I prefer to trust the guy with an education.
Must not be reading the same bible...
If he touches the hot stove, will you kick him out of the house and put him on the street? That's basically what the Biblical God did. Seriously, Adam and Eve ate some fricking fruit. And as a result, everything bad in the world that has happened since then happened. That's not a system structured by a rational being, and anybody who thinks that's rational is not themselves rational.
The hot oven argument, which I always hear (largely because it's in one of those ubiquitous books tossed around at Christian evangelism training courses), is completely invalid because the scale is completely different. Whole different ballpark, whole different team, whole different fricking league. If it proves anything, it proves what a monstrous and evil being the Christian God would be if, God forbid, he existed. If your kid touches a hot stove, you as a loving parent treat the burn and tell him that's why you don't touch a stove. And he will have learned from that mistake and won't ever do it again. If your kid was Adam and you were God, you'd boot him out onto the street and give him a terminal disease. That's not sanity. Oh sure, you can say that we can't understand the great big powerful God, that he's so much wiser then us, but to that I say first that if we're made in his image, we're capable of understanding him and that his actions should make sense to us, and seocndly if I'm going to worship something I don't understand, I'm no different then a caveman worshipping the sun. In fact, the caveman is a little smarter, because he can look up in the sky, see the sun, see it's light, feel it's warmth, and know that it's real and that it's doing something for him. Christianity is based on none of that.
Moon by 2020, Mars by 2035? Right. And in 1970 they were saying we'd be on mars now. NASA just wants to keep the money coming; if they do manage to even get back to the moon by 2020, they'll be staying at a Chinese or Brazilian base there. Maybe the Chinese will let us visit the Glorious People's Space Colony of Mars. If NASA wants to stay ahead, they've got to start running faster.
I really want a shirt like that, where'd you get it from?
Wil Wheaton is a recognized leader in the gaming and geek community. Go check out his blog, http://www.wilwheaton.net/, and tell me he wouldn't qualify. Way more then frakking Paris Hilton.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/11/21/climate .species.ap/index.html
Global Warming, nothing to worry about.
Yeah, I mean, why should I listen to my doctor? He's just been to medical school, what does he know? My feelings tell me that the witch doctor down the street with the herbal remedy is the way to go. People with long titles like Medical Doctor or Doctor of Optometry raise a red flag.
And refusing to do a damn thing because 'all the data is not in' isn't going to get you anywhere. We already know that some things harm the planet, some things don't. It's not too hard to do your part.
Dammit, you're right.
Guess I have problems that English I would solve.
Dunno if you missed it, but the guy you're quoting IAL (Is A Lawyer). A Housing lawyer no less. I'm guessing he knows the trues and the falses better then you do.
You might be interested to know that you're proving some of the theories I've had about why China remains so stable despite a government few westerners would tolerate. Chinese value stability over the western ideals of liberty and freedom, it's a cultural difference, and not any better or any worse. I wouldn't like it, but my ideals are Western and not Eastern. I think it would be great if you guys had Democracy (and not the idiot Bush version of "democracy" where democracy is whoever has the money), but China is going to have the government China wants.
What I don't see is how greater access to information, and an end to censorship, endangers a stable society. If the Chinese are overall intelligent and mature, a self-policing information-based website like Wikipedia wouldn't be any threat. If it's filled with crap from kids, the intelligent readers would realize that it's not worthwhile. The objection I have is to the decision being made not by the individual, but by the government. I object to a government telling its people what they can read, it is a decision that should be left to the individual, and I can't see a logical reason why it shouldn't be. When the government tells me I can't watch TV with bad language, I object to that. I should, as a 25 year old adult and veteran of the military, be able to decide for myself whether I want to watch TV with violence and foul language. You should, as an independent and intelligent Chinese person, be able to decide for yourself that a website is a waste of time, and not have the government make that decision for you. You have already decided that the website is not worth your time, which is your choice. However, your government has made the decision for all of your countrymen that the website is not worth anyone's time, and that is overstepping the authority that a government should have.
Of course, that's my Western liberterian (not Bushie Republican) opinion on censorship, and with the cultural differences, we may as well be speaking a foreign language to each other.
Honestly, I wish China the best of luck, you've got the U.S. in debt to you for billions of dollars, which is genius, and you lot have the best odds of establishing a credible space program that actually advances past what Nasa has. I'd guess that inside of the next hundred years, if somebody wants to go into space, they'll have to speak Chinese. In the next two hundred years, it'll be the global trade language. Which will suck, because Mandarin is a hard language to learn.
...that I'm the only person anywhere ever who preferred Ralph Bakshi's version of Lord of the Rings (the first book and a half of the trilogy anyway) to the Peter Jackson version.
"...then a book *will solve."
I'm at work and in a hurry, my bad. Should have preview'd.
When I was deployed to the desert, I had a Bible-thumper there tell me that I couldn't be a moral person if I (a pagan) didn't have a holy book to base my morality on. I replied to him that "If you require a book to tell you right from wrong, and can't figure that out for yourself, you have more moral problems then a book with solve."
As someone with a belief in a karmic reincarnation system, you don't. That's the whole point, you shouldn't need to know. If you're trying to precisely balance your life by doing just enough good to cancel out all the evil you've done, you're wrong anyway. The point is to minimize suffering whenever possible. The more you work to alleviate suffering, the better the world is. Maybe that gets you into heaven or nirvana or Stovokor, or maybe it just means you left the world better then you found it. If you've heard of a religion that clashes with a life lived that way, I'd like to hear of it. From what I remember of Christianity from being one, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" figures in pretty prominently, but strictly speaking, you can sin as much as you like if you're saved, and so long as you don't commit an unforgivable sin (like blasphemy against the Holy Spirit) you're never able to be unsaved.
Absent book morals, common frakking sense provides a great guide for this situation. I wouldn't screw around with somebody married because of the problems it would cause. Maybe I get her pregnant and have to pay child support, maybe the husband gets angry and comes after me, maybe I get an STD from her, who knows? There's plenty of logical reasons not to get involved with somebody who is married. Now, to really blow your mind, what if the ancient Israelites knew those same reasons? In a fairly small nomadic camp-based community, sexual tensions between families could tear the camp apart, and create strife and discord among the tribe. What if that's why it was set down in law? No morality involved, just cold hard logic. It's an interesting possibility isn't it?
And I'm sure that if someone with one of those non-censored blogs criticized the Party, or brought up Falun Gong, benefits of democracy, the Dalai Lama and the movement to free Tibet, police brutality, political prisoners, or Tiananmen Square, you'd find out how far the freedom of those 20 million bloggers goes. Wikipedia is not some Western or American plot to collapse your government, while we may be interested in talking about the topic, I for one don't care what you do with your country. I don't like the Chinese government or the Party, but I'm not Chinese and I don't live there so I don't have to like or dislike it. Governments exist by the will of the people, and if the Chinese people didn't like their government and the censorship, they wouldn't have it. China's had revolutions before, even if they haven't accomplished anything more then replacing one aristocracy lording it over the peasantry with another aristocracy lording it over the peasantry.
Firstly, the censorship shouldn't exist in a free and modern society, there's no good reason for it.
Secondly, not sure what you're saying there, if you knew anything about Americans you'd know we're actually not big on free stuff, Wikipedia is more of an exception.
Third, it doesn't matter if you aren't asking for free, clearly from the explosion of content and activity on the Chinese Wikipedia many of your countrymen are.
At best, the Great Firewall of China is like the monitoring and blocking programs my parents used on my computer when I was a kid. Yes, I could find a way around them, but I would have preferred not to have them at all, and now that I'm an adult I don't have them. Your government is treating you like a child and making your decisions for you. If you want to be treated like a child, go right ahead.
Typically I self-censor when talking to obvious Party flaks (yes, I know full bloody well there's plenty of you floating around out there on the internet) to keep from getting you guys in trouble, but you don't seem too worried about that, so you're probably high up enough that you're loyalty won't be questioned. Yi lu pyang an (have a pleasant journey, assuming I got the pinyin right).
Wasn't it American Dad that did a MMO episode? Even so, while the episode was hilarious and had a true RPG moment ("The Castle Roodpart? Who comes up with these names?"), it wasn't WoW and didn't have Blizzard's backing and support. The South Park episode did. Also, from TFA, Trey Parker got the idea last season around the time of "In the Closet".
I think SP has been going downhill for a while, not because of reliance on fanboy references (because that is EXACTLY what the target audience wants, if you don't like it, you're not gonna like Comedy Central), but because they've started to focus more on the message then the joke. Old South Park didn't try to be constantly relevant and constantly dealing with current events. They'd make a funny episode. If it had something to do with what was going on, so be it, but first and foremost it was funny. Now they're doing the message first and the joke second, and it's not nearly as funny. On the few occasions these days when they forget the message and tell the joke instead, they're pretty funny. Season ten they've put the message first nearly every time, and it's failed nearly every time. Some of the best later episodes like Ginger Kids, Die Hippie Die, Raisins, Good Times with Weapons, they haven't really had any other point to them except to be funny, and it's worked. Raisins was effing hilarious. Smug Alert, Cartoon Wars, Million Little Fibers, Manbearpig, and so on, have all failed because they're episodes where the message takes precedence over the funny.
IMO, anyway.
So who in The Party do you work for? That's clearly a pro-Chinese Government piece, clearly written by someone with English as a second language, and appears to be raw propaganda.
Yeah, I only know about Turing because I'm a dedicated Virtual Adept player.
Fight the Technocracy!
Guess you missed out on the Gates of Ahn Qiraj event, the introduction of cross-realm battlegrounds, the invasion of the Scourge when the Lich Kings fortresses were over Ironforge itself, the continuing battles between the Horde and the Alliance in Silithus and Eastern Plaguelands, and so on. No, you heard that people fight Onyxia once a week, and based off that decided that there's no way to have a lasting effect on the world.
I have tons of fun getting there. I leveled my mage fast because I'd already leveled a warrior, and had fun on the way up, and now I've got a hunter, a warlock, a rogue, and a priest. And I'm always finding new things, always finding quests I hadn't done before. The play differences between the classes keep me interested and entertained, as do the similarities.
Dunno, I get plenty of economy, I travel the world mining, and selling the ore to other characters in the auction house. I go all over the place killing stuff for fun, get stuff off them, and I sell that stuff at the auction house. That's how I bought my 2 epic mounts, my racial mount and the pvp mount.
You know, in 3-4 months, I can have a character up to 60 in full tier 1 and enjoying end game content. And a few decent alts. And that's not even with obsessive life-controlling playing either, just casual play. I don't have the attention span to drudge through "the first 3-4 months". If they can't make a game that's interesting in a day, I'm not interested at all.