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Everything posted by Hurlshort
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Power Armor with built in beer belly support.
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I like the choice to liberate cities, but I liberated London and Queen Elizabeth still treats me like I've got the pox. The city-states are cool though.
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What took you so long? I realized I hated it by Act II. I never did complete the thing until after Hordes came out. I still don't even know why I gave Hordes a chance, but am glad I did. Seconded. I stopped at Act 2. I did finish both expansions, which were way better.
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In Risen, I went to the town first and leveled up there quite a bit. In fact I probably missed out on all the swamp quests because now I am an Order lackey, but I don't really like murky bogs anyways.
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Americans don't use toilet paper, we wipe our butts with the symbol of freedom, the bald eagle. The talons hurt like hell, but I'll pay that price any day for liberty.
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I've lost a few more units, but usually it is because I mess up trying to move them around because they don't stack anymore.
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I'm kind of looking forward to either Rock Band 3 or Power Gig. Both have you playing an actual 6-string guitar, and supposedly you can use them to learn to play. The guitars are about $150. I've always wanted to learn to play, and this seems like a good way to do it. I'll have to watch the reviews to see which one is better for actual guitar playing. I've never dug the music games in the past, but playing a real instrument has piqued my interest.
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I'm sure he is simply referring to German cuisine and the fact it will become quite popular among the ladies. It is October, after all.
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I am agreeable about agreeing with some of you. I believe the aggregate will find I am correct.
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In Risen, make sure you aren't going too far off the beaten path early on. It takes awhile before you are ready to handle much in the way of a fight.
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When did I ever say there was an age limit on ineptness? You could even argue the opposite, that older folks are less technically adept than the younger folks. I know I am way less knowledgeable about the current stuff than I was in my 20's. I just don't have the time that I used to to stay up on it.
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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.
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Aaliyah was fantastic in Queen of the Damned. Stupid overweight bodyguards.
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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.
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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.
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Weird, I quite enjoyed Brotherhood of the Wolf. I haven't watched it in awhile, maybe it didn't age well.
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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.
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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.
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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. Yeah, but is it a lost sale? It is more of a lost potential buyer, but from a business standpoint, that is the way they see it. When you have a product that is being used, but it hasn't been paid for, then of course it is considered a lost revenue source.
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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.
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Corporations are going to try and protect themselves from theft, no matter how small (sorry definition nazis, copyright infringement doesn't have the same ring to it.) I would say there is a good deal of over-reaction though, but I see it on both sides.
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I'd say it comes down to age more than anything. Most of the folks I know who pirate (or who I suspect pirate) are young. As you get older, two things happen. One, you get a bit more cash in your pocket, and two, you realize that cash was hard to get and you feel less comfortable taking stuff for free. The other day I bought Ice Cream, and they gave me my daughter's scoop for free. So I turned around and stuffed a couple bucks in the tip jar. I also wasn't charged for a drink at a local deli, so I went to the counter and let them know. I'm not sure if I would have done that as a teenager.
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Actually, a lot of universities, observatories, heck even churches were built as prestige projects by monarchs, trying to outdo each other. Not saying that none were ever built by a church, but the "all" is a wast exaggeration. Yeah, yet theology was quite often (I'm tempted to say generally) the first subject taught. (If it hadn't been, I wouldn't be a tenth generation university graduate) I'm definitely willing to recognize that nobles and monarchs had their hand in the local universities. I may have overstated the financial contribution of the church. I will say that the talent, as in the teachers and lecturers, did come out of religious and monastic orders more often than not. When Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, the literacy rate in Europe was less than 1%, so there wasn't a very large talent pool available for quite some time. If you wanted to learn to read and write, you either needed to be a wealthy lord or a monk.
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There are a lot of problems with what you just wrote. 1. If you bought AC2, then you aren't a pirate. 2. Waiting for a fix or returning it are the proper ways of handling the situation. I don't buy Ubisoft products because of their online always policy. 3. Non-technical consumers are not technical enough to turn to piracy. Applying cracks and using torrents requires a decent amount of know-how. Piracy isn't all that convenient. You are opening yourself up to all sorts of problems. Cracked software typically comes with plenty of problems on its own. People pirate because they are cheap or they are impatient.
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Say wut? Of the universities I know, none were either founded nor funded by a church. My highchool was founded by a church in 1184 (AD) or so, but the universities? Not really. While there is some debate over the details, Medieval Universities were a continuation of Cathedral and Monastic schools of the early Middle Ages. You can look it up if you'd like, it's an interesting history. The Catholic Church owned a lot of land and had a lot of power in the Middle Ages. There wasn't much that went on that they didn't have a hand in. That's not true in Australia. That might have something to do with Europeans not settling in Australia until the 18th Century. Does everyone understand that we are talking about Europe from 500 CE to about 1500 CE? Nightshape brought up that he believes Judeo-Christianity set the world back about 500 years. I assume he was talking about European history during the medieval era.