Wow has been able to retain many aging people by making the game more and more accessible with each expansion release. In WOTLK me and my friends could get on at any time and get a decent pickup group that could do most of the current raid tier. As of cataclysm the "join a raid guild and dedicate yourself or **** off" mantra has forced many people who have other responsibilities to quit.

PS: I chuckled to myself when I got the latest "Please come back" e-mail telling me that the nearly year old raids are now pug-able... gee thanks blizzard.
 

I was in beta...
During peak internet trafic my mouse lag would vary between .3-.9 seconds.
Games ran on low settings and looked like complete ass.

A 500$ value computer made with parts from newegg would do better.

The original master server went down but another one went up the take its place.

Google TribesFTW for a fan updated version of tribes 1 with the new master server configured.

So every time you buy a car do you inspect every single part and serial number to make sure no parts were stolen?

By what fucked up logic should MSFT be held responsible when they themselves were ripped off?

They also agreed to the same set of rules as everyone else... Such as no boting/exploiting.

If you don't agree with the rules, don't play. If you break the rules, don't bitch when you have to face the consequences.

Except for web applications theirs no need to working about patching clients, or weird hardware issues.

Is there a minor bug in foo.js? it will take less then a day to fix,test and push out the fix.
Got a bug in your local app... well on out next patch release in 3 to 5 weeks it will be fix.

Hardware/os issue causing your app to crash? good thing we piss away money on lots of tech support to solve strange isolated issues or common dependency issues. For a web app if it runs in IE,FF, and safari we're set, at worst we will get some miss aligned element.

well that depends on the Linux distro....

you mean like one of the many usenet providers and one of the many usenet index sites?

How prejudice. I would say the vast majority of college educated Americans (the kind that would be working for MS) have an interest in at least one other country/culture.

The FMV may have been a failure with the sega CD, but i recall a playstation game with a 7 on the end that used FMV and to this day is one of the most popular games in history.

Just because the first implementations are poor, does not mean the concept is flawed.

Not everyone, but if you look at posts above. You can see people taking flaws and spinning them.

"Its not a flaw its a feature that takes several weeks to adjust to!"

Simple same code, but the new guys are cheaper.

The guys who copied the code did not pay a dime, while the original developers need to cover the cost of developing it.

Halo, Gears of War, Bioshock, wow.

None of these games are hard core with maybe the exception of wow. Bioshock is single player and Halo and gears are games 20 times simpler then what had come before them. Compared to games like starsiege tribes, rainbow six, and counter stirke.

Starsiege tribes was a high speed FPS with flight, where your shots inhered your speed. Not only did you have to understand how your shot would move, you would also need to account for where the opponent would be when you mortar or disk landed. This is quite a bit more complicated then LOL auto aim LOL of Halo.

Im sure Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 will be sanctuaries for the hardcore for many of years.

In wow i can get on for an hour and do several quests, get some money and exp.

In say Dark age of Camelot thats enough time to get to where i need to level to find out theirs only 1 full group, with 2 other people on the waiting list to join it.