Oblarg

I'm going nowhere near SW:TOR, purely on principle (I'm disgusted at how they shat all over KotOR2's cliffhanger ending and removed all the complexity it had added to the character of Revan). The fact that the game is going to be crap is just extra justification. Also, fully voicing an MMO is gimmicky and unnecessary. The resources could be better spent improving the actual game - I find that text aids immersion, to be honest.

'Twas he players' choice to not play anything else. Irrelevant. DotA has, regardless, killed the wc3 modding community. There were a great many maps that were far more clever and impressive than DotA, which hardly anyone remembers now.

Well... interesting I guess? DotA is the cancer that killed the wc3 modding community.

It has? How? The design goal is flawed. They want a single-player RPG that they can charge a monthly subscription for, so they inevitably ended up with something that looks like a clunky half-cRPG half-MMO monstrosity.

SW:TOR is going to be crap. This has been overwhelmingly obvious for a very long period of time.

Nah, it's not possible that I legitimately didn't enjoy DA. I'm simply bashing it to make BioWare look bad, because Volourn said so!

This was pretty out of line, yeah.

That was only a demo level. I'm sure they wouldn't include it if there were not levels in which you could get lost.

That's not even the worst song title on the album. I've never really liked post-Walls of Jericho Helloween, regardless.

Doom metal:

Artillery - Time Has Come **** this is heavy. Heaviest thrash I've heard in ages, and it doesn't go anywhere near groove metal. On an unrelated note, does anyone know how to stop iTunes from reverting to sorting alphabetically at random intervals? I want my albums sorted by year, ffs.

I had forgotten about Team Gizka - I used to be fairly active on their forums, but it became abundantly clear that Dashus really had no desire to do anything but be a prick to everyone, so unsurprisingly interest in the project waned and died. And you know, it wasn't even the "two weeks" announcement that really pissed me off, because he did sort of announce some progress after it, it was the utter refusal to accept help from anyone when it became clear that he didn't have the will to finish it himself.

Never got through HL2. Too expansive and plodding - I just got bored after a while.

Yeah, Legionnaire is great. Transgressor is another good one. I have to say I prefer Comeau's voice to Michaud's, though. Comeau sounds like Bruce Dickinson on steroids - ****ing awesome. The entirety of Master Control is top-tier USPM.

Stardock publishes fairly niche products. I'm not being dismissive of them, but I think you can see why a major publisher would hesitate to adopt their business model when they don't run on the same scale or even appeal to the same demographics in most cases. Wasn't it just argued that piracy hits small companies more than big ones? Not by me. As I also said, the demographic is very different. You're right - Stardock's target demographic probably all are able to pirate and use cracked games, because their niche is a group of fairly "internet-savvy" people. How exactly does that minimize their losses to piracy, again? How many teenagers do you think are playing Sins of a Solar Empire and GalCiv2? Heck, my students barely know what Civ5 is, and that is fairly mainstream. Piracy is a young person's game. I'm not saying people don't pirate Stardock titles at all, but I am saying they have less to be worried about than Ubisoft and games like Assassin's Creed 2. Well, now you're arguing that the same demographic that you earlier said was too dumb/inept for widespread piracy are also the demographic for whom piracy is the biggest issue. What?

Either you like Liege Lord, or you have no business listening to metal.

Stardock publishes fairly niche products. I'm not being dismissive of them, but I think you can see why a major publisher would hesitate to adopt their business model when they don't run on the same scale or even appeal to the same demographics in most cases. Wasn't it just argued that piracy hits small companies more than big ones? Not by me. As I also said, the demographic is very different. You're right - Stardock's target demographic probably all are able to pirate and use cracked games, because their niche is a group of fairly "internet-savvy" people. How exactly does that minimize their losses to piracy, again?

Stardock publishes fairly niche products. I'm not being dismissive of them, but I think you can see why a major publisher would hesitate to adopt their business model when they don't run on the same scale or even appeal to the same demographics in most cases. Wasn't it just argued that piracy hits small companies more than big ones?

No question it is a negative. ANd for me personally, it is wrong to do simply out of respect for the time and effort put into making the product. But is the response appropiate to the level of the problem? Which to me is a completely valid question for me to ask, since corporate responses to piracy have generally a greater negative effect on me that they do on the pirates. I'd say the responses are all over the map. Some are terrible, like Ubisoft's solution. But I think they have an ulterior motive that isn't just about piracy. Some are meh, like Steamworks. I like Steam, I think it is a great service, but there are some kinks to work out there, mostly with the fact offline mode isn't perfect. Some I don't even notice. I just don't think they are ever going to go away though, at least not unless the world changes and everyone stops trying to infringe on other people's copyright. I also think Steamworks is the future, being that it is offered for free to publishers and is a solid DRM solution. Once again, I'd point to Stardock's business model, which is basically founded upon the idea that DRM loses you more customers than it gains. They seem to be doing fine.

De Bello Gallico was great. Caesar's prose is nice and consistent - no ****ing thesaurus abuse there!

Is it a potential buyer though? It's definitely a potential player, but would this person buy the game if they had no other way to get it? If some kid is pirating 20 games a month, it's very unlikely the kid would be buying all 20 games if he couldn't pirate. In other worlds not 20 lost sales, maybe not even 1 lost sale, if the kid has no money to begin with. To me, the concept of the lost sale is the crux of the pirating issue, since no property is being physically taken from someone else. I've been arguing strictly from a business perspective here. Logically there are a ton of variables when it comes to piracy, of course, but you can't really plug in all those variables in a business model. You can't account for Jimmy's allowance. All you can really look at is the fact that Jimmy is playing the game without paying, and so he is negatively affecting the business model. It doesn't have anything to do with physical copies either. The company is trying to make money off the product. When the product is used without making money, it is a negative. On the whole, yes, piracy is a negative. On a case-by-case basis, it varies. Because doing a case-by-case analysis is completely impractical for a business model, the best solution would be to estimate what percentage of pirates actually constitute lost sales. The problem is, when generating figures, most industries completely ignore this and jump to the conclusion that "every pirated copy is a lost sale." This is nonsensical. Have you seen the amount the RIAA sues for damages for piracy? It's absurd, especially when you consider that on average each pirated song is a much smaller loss to the industry than the retail value of that song.

A large chunk of those who pirate are not potential buyers. It's a smaller amount in video game piracy than in music piracy, sure, but considering every pirated copy a loss of revenue is, simply put, fallacious.

There is an incentive on the companies behalf to look at their losses as due to piracy rather than because their product is of low quality. The just see the peer numbers in some torrent sharing site and they automatically assume that they are all lost buyers. Which is completely reasonable, as those are people using their product, despite not paying for it. No, it's not. Not at all. The assumption that everyone who pirates a game is a lost sale is completely ****ing moronic.

No, it's not. Maybe not instantly, but with an hour or so of toying around, sure.