fundamentally unethical
Woah... full stop, where does "fundamentally unethical" even originate in your fabricated world? We're talking about laws here that people have invented. You can wave your hands all you like, but randomly injecting terms like that doesn't make you right about anything. Breaking a law does not have some kind default automatic ethics association.
What if I get the holy water and find out that it hasn't been properly sanctified? Should I get my money back?
Sure... if you can come up with a scientifically repeatable test where I can independently verify your results of improperly sanctified water. Oh right... maybe not.
No, Blizzard realized there were still people selling runes 10 years after D2's release and thought: Christ, why aren't we getting a piece of that action?
This is demonstrably not precisely what they thought. Diablo 3 has no runes to sell, because that game mechanic was clearly not fun enough. IMO removal of runes and runewords for sockets was probably the stupidest itemization decision Blizzard made on the game.
So in general perhaps Blizzard wanted to make more money on the game, but by design it pretty much doesn't have an ideal setup for it.
I find Frank Herbert's view of humanity, as in "God Emperor of Dune" very pessimistic around human nature
God Emperor was really the high point of the series for me. Far more intellectually driven than the other books. Although I suppose for those who strongly disagree with Herbert's ideas maybe not so good then.
From 20 years ago. What has he done recently that has had any real effect?
How about his recent efforts on VR/Stereoscopic, and getting people excited about progressing that and addressing the relevant issues with the hardware? Because that's what 99% of the damn presentation is about.
Of course, with typical slashdot accuracy, the summary has singled out the most minute part of the presentation and pretended like that is what it is about.
willing to support anything if they think there's a dollar in it
I think Oracle would request a great deal more cash than 1 dollar.
This allows a company to rip many of its customers off with little or no repercussions. It's not really about the money.
I suppose at some future time if Steam did decide ripping people off was in their best interest it could, at least briefly. However I think Steam at present is smart enough not to do so.
With the disaster that was the RAGE release, a lot of people had a non-working product in their library. Some were willing to wait out driver releases and some just wanted their money back. From everything I read on the forums, it sounded like people were quite easily able to get refunded for their purchases (I'm assuming the game is somehow removed from their library, at least that's how it worked when I asked for a refund from Impulse). I think in most cases, Steam is willing to work with users.
Perhaps in some hypothetical future Steam will turn to the dark side and this will matter, but it doesn't seem likely.
+1 to that. A global flag in steam to hide them. With 30%+ using this flag devs would wise up.
Unlikely, would probably just cause another outbreak of "Our sales are dropping from piracy again!"
I really would like that toggle, if Steam could manage to make it accurate anyway.
auto install keys for all available linux/hurd/bsd distros
Couldn't everyone just leech off the "shim" boot loader that Redhat is going to have? Once you are in Grub I'd think you could boot whatever else you wanted (either that or I don't understand how they are implementing this). Is this somehow going to be made technically impossible by Redhat?
Of course this creates a much unwanted dependency on something which other distributions might not be able to include legally in their builds.
WTF are you downloading that you would do that in two hours?
Not really that hard to hit actually. Several HD quality multi-season TV shows would do it. Assuming you can find that many worth actually watching, that's the hard part.
you get more pleasure per minute from shooting
Hmm, maybe this should be a box statistic. [ Xbox Live ] [ 16 Players ] [ 80 Pleasure Per Minute! ]
Assuming this research has some idea of objectively tracking it.
The last game where I actually gave a shat about MP was MechWarrior 4
If you liked that, then you should probably take a look at Mechwarrior Online (yes, just MP). It's currently in closed beta but founders can all start playing next month I think. The concern I have is I'm not sure how their free-to-play with premium options is going to balance out. Hopefully they lean more towards League of Legends but I'm feeling some WoT influence getting mixed in there.
Anyway, so far MWO closed beta has 6v6 with what I assume is matchmaking tonnage balancing (I hope). Victory is either elimination or base capture, no respawns. I'd expect more game types opening up over time. Mechlab is fairly functional at the moment, allows a fair amount of gear swapping, although some parts of the Mechs are restricted as far as weapon selection goes.
League has evolved the genre whereas Dota 2 is basically just a graphic UI and matchmaking upgrade of Dota. Dota is ridiculously unbalanced in low and mid tier play as well, although I'm not entirely certain about high tier play either way. League at least tries to maintain a consistent experience across all levels of players.
Really there is only a couple features which Dota 2 will have to compete with League. The biggest one is that you don't have to individually purchase each champion or just use the champions of the week. And the second is strongly related which is more selection in game modes, many of which have some impact on champion selection.
Overall, the market for Dota 2 players is existing Dota players (what's left of it) and maybe a few new people checking it out because it's on steam. Anyone who is heavily invested in League at this point has no real incentive to switch.
Adding features does not necessarily increase functionality -- it just makes the manuals thicker.
