For a start, ok, let's look at the server load issues. Other games had server load issues too. E.g., WoW at launch, EA's own TOR, etc. They just had a login queue, but the servers continued working, and whoever got a connection, actually kept having it.

In SimCity's case they supposedly had a "login queue"... except it wasn't actually a queue. It didn't keep an order or adjust its predictions based on how many quit in front of you. It was just an enormous time (20 minutes!) being blocked from trying again. The clue that it wasn't really a queue was that it didn't change or even start differently if you tried different servers. You always got blocked for the same time, and there is no indication that someone who wasn't blocked and tried at the right time wouldn't skip in ahead of you. So, yeah, in 20 minutes you'd just get blocked again for another 20 minutes.

Not that it mattered for most servers, because they just were down and weren't accepting connections at all. So you wouldn't even get that joke of a "queue", you'd just get a network error.

And not that it mattered if you actually managed to connect, the server would die and nix your connection before you even managed to actually claim a city, or while trying to claim a city. (I.e., get your empty map to start a city on.)

I'm sorry, making a server that can only take a finite number of connections is ok and natural. You don't have infinite memory, nor CPU power, nor bandwidth. Making a server that crashes and burns if too many people attempt to connect, though, is just bad quality.

Not that it's the only case of bad coding. The game for example seems to have serious trouble even remembering the fucking settings. E.g., I keep deactivating the option to publish my achievements, but it seems to randomly pop back on. Especially it seems that a server crash makes it forget that option, which is to say, they fail to persist it. (And on top of that, when they pester me with it at the main screen, the game can't seem to tell if it's on or off anyway.)

Really, how stupid and incompetent does one have to be to botch saving the options, e.g., as some simple key/value pairs? I'm pretty sure even complete novices would find it hard to screw that up.

And really, what did they need multiplayer for, anyway? Reading their blog makes it sound like it being multiplayer opens so many oportunities and, werily I say unto you, make it a whole new game... except it doesn't.

The game is multiplayer in the same sense as publishing your minesweeper score makes minesweeper multiplayer. I.e., I can't even imagine how much brain damage someone would need to think that.

You can't actually be in the same city with a friend or anything. At most you can have your cities in the same zone and have a look at each other's city.

Plus, the sad part is right on the main menu screen, where it pesters you with that publishing your city events. The game tells you something to the tune of "Playing is more fun with friends! We can publish your game events in the GameLog for your friends!" Not an exact quote, but close enough and the meaning is that.

I'm sorry, but that's not "playing with friends", it's just putting a frikken log on the web. It's no more "playing with friends" than keeping a list of your Minesweeper scores on a blog page is.

I can't even imagine what kind of sad moron are they aiming for as a target demographic, that actually thinks publishing a list of events from an essentially single player game, is anything like actually playing a game together with some friends. Where the heck is the "playing together" part, ffs?

Even skipping after that, who the heck even cares to read such drivel on a web page as, basically, "PigBenis City reached 50,000 people?" Seriously, if some marketroid moron from EA is reading this, trust me, even if I were your BFF, I still wouldn't give a flying fuck about mundane events from your single player video game. The only people who care about that are those who can get something out of that, e.g., the people in the raid group who need you to be able to tank the boss, so THEY get their own chance at their own epic loot and tokens. Trust me, they're not checking your equipment out of care for you, nor are going to envy your gigantic virtual penis because you got the epic Sword Of Ganking +5. And even that requires an ACTUAL multiplayer game, not just a web page.

But ok, let's say they do think there is a whole market segment of friendless morons, for whom having a site with their game log is the closest they'll ever come to "playing with friends." WTH does that need a permanent connection for, or being an online game at all? Can't the game just upload the list of achievements at the end or in the background? Steam manages to do that just fine, for example, without making every game be online.

So, anyway, to sum it up: it's not even just that it's DRM, or that it calls home (Steam can do those without being intrusive), or even the lack of infrastructure. It's that the DRM and infrastructure are stupidly and incompetently implemented, that caused the problems. And on top of that, what's causing insult to injury is that the whole hype about it being online, is just BS, and that thus what caused the whole problems was a "feature" that the game needed like we all need a hole in the head.

Sure, I can give you a link or two. Far from me to discourage a healthy dose of skepticism :p

http://definitions.uslegal.com/b/breach-of-fiduciary-duty/

"When one person does agree to act for another in a fiduciary relationship, the law forbids the fiduciary from acting in any manner adverse or contrary to the interests of the client, or from acting for his own benefit in relation to the subject matter."

So, yes, if you just decided to just give this year's profits to charity and it's not obvious what that does for your investors, you might just get sued.

Also, for an actual law, you can check out stuff like Fiduciary Obligations Act

Note that as per section 1, ""Fiduciary" includes a trustee under any trust, expressed, implied, resulting or constructive executor, administrator, guardian, conservator, curator, receiver, trustee in bankruptcy, assignee for the benefit of creditors, partner, agent, officer of a corporation, public or private, public officer, or any other person acting in a fiduciary capacity for any person, trust or estate." My emphasis.

So, yeah, if you thought being a CEO meant free hand to do whatever you wish with other people's money, think again.

That said, note that there is leeway in exactly what is the best for the principal, i.e., best for the person whose money you're entrusted with. Nobody is forbidding you, for example, from whitewashing the company image with ads, PR or, yes, by playing the charity card, if you can make a case that you expected more profits as a result of it. There's a lot of 'oh, we care so much' act that basically is ok if you can make a case that a corporate asshole image would hurt your clients' interests more.

That said, also note that most of the big charity is actually private. A guy like Bill Gates is perfectly within his rights to spend his own money however he sees fit. Basically if you decide to just give 20 million of the company's money to charity, you might get sued, but if you can pull a 20 million salary as a CEO (and God knows some people got paid even more even to drive a company into the ground) and then give that money to charity, well, nobody can tell you what to do with your own money.

Also note that the rules are a bit different from non-profit organizations. Those are by definition not supposed to make a profit for anyone. So if an organization is registered as a charity, well, it's safe to say it won't be sued for actually spending its money on charity.

Fair means they'll leave the customer with some money for other corporations to fleece.

I don't think it means even that. In fact, I don't think "fair" was ever meant to mean "for you".

From my subjective experience just means "we want more money". The idea is that what they're already getting is so incredibly unfair, when they could be getting more with just a little PR, disinformation and maybe a little collusion. Why, the CEO is probably still driving a Mercedes, while his neighbour is driving a Bugatti Veyron. Can you imagine how unfair that is?

Sarcasm aside... Not that it's necessarily a bad thing or evil. They're expected, and indeed the system is such that they have a legal obligation, to make as much money as possible for the investors. Not fleecing you as hard as physically possible, would be a breach of that obligation. Whether you have some money left after that, is more of a side-effect, than intended. Indeed, it would be a breach of trust if they actually intended to take less money for fairness sake.

I suppose the system just works. Might as well enjoy it. But the corollary is that whenever some large company is talking about something being for your own good in any way, better bring your own lube, they want to shaft you. They're supposed to, after all. Some just are more subtle than others.

The difference is that a wood deck is a simple thing and a thing that doesn't need any maintenance. There will be no point where someone will come and say, "you know, I thought about it, I want that deck to be able to reconfigure into a boat when I want to sail."

THAT is the problem with programming, and the one thing you won't learn by just building your own deck.

Making a thing that's written once and stays that way for ever, is EASY. Dealing with something that the client told you would be a deck, and next month he wants it to be a separate house, and next month he wants it to be a boat, THAT is the problem. Or even if the specification doesn't change now, next year someone comes with the idea that their business requirements changed a little, and now he wants that deck turned into a glider. The real art is to make something you can turn into something else without having to rip everything out and start from scratch.

The problem isn't with knowing how to cut wood and hammer nails, or in the case of programming, how to write functions and loops. That's the EASY part. At least half the population can do that, if they wanted to do a few tutorials.

And the problem is when everyone who barely learned to cut wood or respectively write a for loop, thinks they're somehow qualified to judge architecture. Or worse yet, be incompetent enough to think everyone is trying to scam him, if they try to do a good and maintainable design.

That's the nightmare boss. The kind who knows just enough to think you're trying to scam him if you want a real database, instead of going with his idea to use the Windows SDK and save all the date in .ini files. (Again, I'm not making it up. I actually saw a client throw a fuss about our not just using the Windows SDK to save his data in .ini files.)

Or the kind who's just barely competent to come with an idea like running the source code through an automated translation program, and maintain 3 different projects, one for each language, with the strings hard-coded in the text, and think you're trying to scam him if you want to do the extra work of extracting the strings into resource files. Strings which should have been in resource files in the first place, but, well, he didn't let the guys who programmed that monolithic monstrosity "unload him from money" by doing all that resource file stuff. (Again, true story.)

Etc.

Oh, each of those knew the programming equivalent of cutting wood and hammering nails. But they were just in the Dunning-Kruger zone when it came to judging a design. They didn't know how to design something more like a pagoda than a deck, but were stupid enough to think that knowing how to cut wood is making them an expert on that too.

That said, of course, testing a candidate is still a great idea.

I don't think that's enough.

Most of the problems with programming aren't writing the code. Anyone can do a write-only program. You can even deliberately go the wrong way about it (I used to do program flow with ONLY goto statements just to annoy a professor who hated goto religiously) and still bend it to do what you wanted.

IMHO to really understand why you need all those patterns, and refactoring, and unit tests, and why you don't just put a connection as a public variable in class X and directly assign it in classes Y and Z (true story, saw that done verbatim), you need to really be thrown into a team and be given a million lines of code written by someone else and be told to make it do something that goes against every assumption that was made at design time. Again, it's not a particularly large system these days, but it will serve to illustrate the point that it's different from immediately finding everything in your own 1000-line test program.

So, no, I don't think just a little BASIC experience will make them understand the real problems better. In fact, it might just make it worse IMHO.

IMHO part of being a good leader is knowing how to delegate. If you're an MBA with no real skills in programming, GUI design, database management, etc, IMHO the solution isn't to learn just enough of ALL of those as to move from "outsider" to "taking decision based on being dangerously incompetent in that field." The solution is to find some people who know that and delegate.

If you don't have anyone you can possibly trust, or, like in TFA, you've actually gotten to the point where you think you're at the mercy of the programmers... well, the first step would be to ask yourself WTH went wrong. But that's ok. You can ask a second opinion. You can get a consultant to eyeball the design and tell you what's wrong or right about it. Or, you know, whatever.

But delegate to those who are the experts. Don't think you've become an expert by learning just a little BASIC. In fact, the latter is the worst possible thing you could do. Or close enough to the worst.

(Of course, in all above it's a generic "you", not, you know, you personally.)

I'm not sure that learning some superficial idea of a language is going to help. And I'll give you a couple of reasons why:

1. Dunning-Kruger. The people with the least knowledge on the domain are those who overrate their knowledge the most.

Now I really wish to believe that some management or marketing guy is willing to sink 10,000 hours into becoming good at programming, and have a good idea of exactly what he's asking for. I really do. But we both know that even if he does a decent amount overtime, that's about 3 years of doing NOTHING BUT programming, i.e., he'd have to not do his real job at all any more. Or more like 15 years if he does some two-hours a day of hobby-style programming in the afternoon. And he probably won't even do that.

What is actually going to happen, if at all, is that he'll plod through it up to first peak of his own sense of how much it knows, i.e., the Dunning-Kruger sweet spot. The point where he thinks he knows it all, except, you know, maybe some minor esoteric stuff that doesn't matter anyway. But is actually the point where he doesn't know jack.

2. And from my experience, those are the worst problem bosses. The kind which is an illustration of Russell's, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." The kind who is cock-sure that he probably is better at programming than you anyway, he just, you know, doesn't have the time to actually do it. (Read: to actually get experience.)

That's the kind who's just moved from just a paranoid suspicion that your making a fuss about the 32414'th change request is taking advantage of him, to the kind who "knows" that you're just an unreasonable asshole. After all, he has no problem making changes to the 1000 line JSP or PHP page he did for practice (half of which being just HTML mixed in with the business code.) If he wants to add a button to that one, hey, his editor even lets him drag and drop it in 5 seconds. Why, he can even change it from displaying a fictive list of widgets to a fictive list of employees. So your wanting to redo a part of the design to accommodate his request to change the whole functionality of a 1,000,000 line program (which is actually quite small) must be some kind of trying to shaft him.

It's the kind who thinks that if he did a simple example program in Visual Fox Pro, a single-user "database", placed the database files on a file server, and then accessed them from another workstation, that makes him qualified to decide he doesn't need MySQL or Oracle for his enterprise system, he can just demand to have it done in Visual Fox Pro. In fact, he "knows" it can be done that way. No, really, this is an actual example that happened to me. Verbatim. I'm not making it up.

3. Well, it doesn't work on other domains either, so I don't see why programming would be any different. People can have a superficial understanding of how a map editor for Skyrim works, and it won't prevent them from coming with some unreasonable idea like that someone should make him every outfit from [insert Anime series] and not just do it for free, but credit him, because, hey, he had the idea. No, seriously, just about every other idiot thinks that the reason someone hasn't done a total conversion from Skyrim to Star Wars is that they didn't have the precious idea.

Basically it's Dunning-Kruger all over again.

I think more than understanding programming, what people need is understanding that ideas are a dime a dozen. What matters is the execution.

What they need to understand is that, no, you're probably not the next Edison or Ford or Steve Jobs or whatever. There are probably a thousand other guys who had the same idea, some may have even tried it, and there might actually be a reason why you never heard of it being actually finished. And even those are remembered for actually having the management skills to make those ideas work, not just for having an idea.

Ford didn't just make it for having the idea of making a cheap car, nor for being a mechanic himself. Why it worked was managing to sort things out like managing to hire and hold onto some good subordinates, reduce the turnover that previously had some departments literally hire 300 people a year to fill 100 positions, etc. It's the execution that mattered, not just having an idea.

Once they get disabused of the idea all that matters is that their brain farted a vague idea, I think it will go a longer way towards less frustration both for them and their employees.

On the contrary. I already mentioned that there are choices that matter, and choices that don't really matter. And that WoW did increase complexity in the areas that actually are part of the game, like raid tactics (used to be you didn't need pretty much any), while reducing the complexity of, yes, that kind of metagaming.

I don't see how that counts as a dichotomy.

I'd be all for more choices in the actual game, but I can't say I see what's the mourning about when it comes to choices that were at best illusionary (like whether you really want to buy your next tier of spells) and at worst just a metagaming exercise that nobody but the alpha nerds were into (like the talents.)

Look, let's put it like this. For you, who not doubt know the system, and studied the spell rotation, and may have solved the puzzle of how to shave 0.5 seconds off a cooldown to get a better attack chain... yeah, I can imagine you'd get some satisfaction out of that.

But... let me give you an example of what a day in the life of a real newbie is like. And I swear I'm not making it up.

This is quite literally what happened the second day of trying to get mom addicted to WoW.

So I log in and invite her to a group, and she's a ghost. Well, that kinda thing happens. She runs straight past me to her corpse, resses, and keeps running straight into the next group of troggs, and starts swinging her axe at them. Plants, runs back to her corpse and does it again. And plants again.

Well, I figure she's getting into character as a dwarf warrior with a big axe. After all, the previous day she had exterminated every single rabbit and squirrel within range. In retrospect, I think even that was just a case of not yet grasping what she was supposed to kill and what not.

Well, anyway, I had rolled a priest for just that kind of occasion, so I switch characters and keep healing her on the next try. It wasn't easy. She kept fighting with no regards to any self-preservation, like someone trying in all earnest to earn her place in Valhalla or maybe Sto'vo'kor (Klingon Valhalla;)). She done me proud, she did.

Then I ask her where was she going. Says she doesn't know. I ask her to follow me to go repair and replace her equipment, she asks where am I. I'm kinda surprised at that point, because her character was some 10 yards from mine and looking at me. I start jumping up and down and ask whether she sees me now. No, she doesn't.

Well, to cut a long story short, at some point she had apparently yanked the mouse while using the right mouse button. I swear to the FSM, she was literally seeing just the top of her head and maybe 2 ft in front and behind, and maybe 3 ft to each side. She was running into those troggs just by sheer virtue of not seeing them.

You'd think that including a line about being able to turn the camera would do the trick, but... it actually took another 15 levels or so, and drowning about a dozen times, before it turned out she doesn't understand wth is that "camera" I'm talking about. For her the only camera she knew about, was that thing on her desk she had photographed squirrels in the park with. She kept looking in her in-game bags for anything that might be a camera.

THAT is the kind of problems the newbies have, not min-maxing stuff in a talent tree. When you're that green, you don't even understand wth they're asking you to do, much less feel any accomplishment for clicking randomly and then turning out it's the wrong choice. And, as I was trying to illustrate, you have much more pressing problems than that.

The problem is that I have gamed with some 'real noobs' as some would put it (and I mean, seriously, I got mom addicted and the most she was playing online at the time was backgammon, and ALMOST got grandma addicted who didn't even have a computer) and I kinda paid attention. Especially to those family members. If nothing else, because I ended up having to answer questions instead of just muttering something self-flattering about stupid noobs and why they don't just RTFM. It was an enlightening experience in what people think when they're not uber-l33t.

And point in case, I never got the feeling that they got so much achievement from clicking through the talent trees. It was just some never-ending frustration, because the game kept asking them to choose something they hadn't even figured out yet.

And as an aside, even as a veteran gamer, I still have that frustration. I have the TOR skill trees very fresh in memory, and a LOT of time the choices I have contain stuff like "reduces the cooldown of skill X by 0.Y seconds"... but I don't have skill X and have no idea even when I'll get it. Turns out I'd only get skill X in 10-20 levels. So what cooldown will it have? Do those 0.Y seconds actually make much of a difference? How often will I use skill X in that nebulous future? Will I even use it at all? WTH are they expecting from me? Clairvoyance?

I find even myself spending hours on various sites to try to figure it out, instead of actually playing. And those newbies spent even more... ... and then I have to tell them that they misunderstood horribly. (No, mom, Arms spec is NOT the dual-wield spec.)

Now I'm no Betazoid counsellor ;) but I can tell you it's not satisfaction or accomplishment they were feeling there.

Why not make it so all classes have 1 button names "I Win", and the character plays itself when you're not there?

At what point do you stop fucking with stuff and stop dumbing down the game?

Did you miss the part where some classes actually used to be played with one button? I guess nostalgia is a funny thing. It makes thing look great in retrospect that were probably the #1 whine back then.

But anyway, "when" is a good question... Let me propose a when: when the meaningless chores are gone?

I'll actually go with Brian Reynolds there. You may have heard of him as the designer of such games as Colonization or Civ 2. He actually had an article back then on IGN way back about game design, though sadly it seems to be gone by now.

He said something like that something is not really a choice, if all but one one of the alternatives aren't viable. Like, if a piano is falling towards you and you have the choice to get out of the way, or stay there, that's not really a choice. You WILL choose to get out of the way.

Or let's put it another way: "dumbed down" implies that previously it was somehow "smarter". And it wasn't.

There wasn't anything smart about, say, running back to the quest giver to get your rewards and take the next quest in the arc. It wasn't even much of a choice, much less one that required any intelligence. You COULD have just dropped the quest after you completed it, but it wasn't really a viable choice for most people.

There wasn't anything smart either about, say, running back to the trainer to learn Arcane Shot 2 or then 3, instead of sticking with 1. There wasn't even any viable choice about it, much less one that requires any kind of intelligence to make. It's not like you could come to a raid and convince anyone that having all skills at 1 is some kind of smart (or even viable) alternate way to build your character. You just HAD to run back and do that.

Exactly how does their absence count as "dumbing down"? In what way was it smarter when you had such "options", because that's the implication? Did doing those mandatory chores actually count as a mental exercise? Anyone who considers those to require applying intelligence, and the lack of them to be "dumber"... well, if that's intelligent for them, then they must find it downright challenging to figure out what to do with the power on button to start the computer, not to mention the really smart puzzle of how to use shoelaces to make the shoes stay on :p

Well, before I start, I'm not (or rather for a long while no longer) a WoW fan, but I did briefly try it again recently. So, you know, I'm only having a superficial impression. I don't think I'll bother much with it, but...

I think that as far as "dumbing down" goes, it really sounds worse than it really is, when you do the Vulcan thing and think about it logically.

1. Most of the stuff you'll only notice if you've played it before and have any particular attachment (even if just for nostalgia sake) about the old system. Truth is, I most other recent games are just about as "dumbed down".

You can play TOR for example as a DPS Trooper with little more than Grav Round, Full Auto and High Impact Bolt as the only three buttons you'll ever have to press. Heck, you could play it with Grav Round only, if you don't mind losing a little DPS. Trust me, that's actually less skill needed than WoW even now. (And obviously the Bounty Hunter is the same deal, just with different names on the buttons you press.)

2. For that matter, it's not really dumber than WoW used to be to start with. Anyone remember the pre-Burning Crusade raids that some classes only needed one button to get through? Ironically, for all its reputation of a noob class, the Hunter was technically the most "complex" to play since it needed a whole THREE buttons. Yeah, you also needed to set the hunter mark and send the pet, so, yeah, that's a whole two whole extra buttons :p

(Not to mention you had more typing or talking to do than the raid leader, what with having to tell everyone that yes, the pet was on passive, every time anything went wrong, no matter who started it or what actually happened. You could be still running back from the cemetery when the rest of the group did something stupid, and they'd still insist that it's somehow the pet not being on passive that caused it. I mean, it wasn't even in the dungeon, but it must have caused it. Somehow.;))

Yeah, it didn't really start as a sort of modern day chess or go or other complex thinking game. Nor had the geekiest and smartest population. Really, it was from the start a game that 6 year olds can master.

So let's get on to what really changed:

3. So now for a bunch of quests you don't have to run back to the quest giver to get the next step of it. Well, it takes some getting used to it, but at the end of the day, it's not like running back and forth was actually the fun part.

4. You don't have to keep buying skill upgrades every 2 levels; they now increase in effect with your level. Not only it's like how a bunch of other games were working already (e.g., COH), but basically if you've been on the game long enough to have a valid whine about being used to the old system... guess what? Paying a few coppers to buy the skills on a new alt wasn't really a balance factor any more anyway.

Plus, again, running back to wherever your trainer was, and then back, was hardly something that added any fun.

5. The talent trees. Well, the issue with those is two-fold:

A) Most people were going for cookie-cutter builds from some site anyway. Not just in COH, but generally. Whether it's actually talent trees (e.g., TOR, RIFT, etc) or putting points in some skill (e.g., STO), most people just want something that works, not to solve a puzzle. If there had been some way to tell the computer "just go by this build off that site" automatically, most people would have just done it. And in effect that's what the new system does.

B) You haven't actually lost much. In addition to the choice every 15 levels now, many of which are actually new extras, a bunch of the old talents everyone took for a given spec are now automatic passive skills, that you get automatically when reaching a certain level. So, you know, you haven't actually lost them or anything, and they were not that much of a choice in the first place anyway. Now you just get them automatically instead of having to click through the tree.

C) Basically it doesn't let you make many mistakes. And believe me, a lot of people did make mistakes on their spec.

6. Stuff like that now hunters don't get a melee weapon too, or mages don't get a staff AND a wand. But if you think about it, those never really made a difference, except for causing all the drama about whether the hunter or the rogue should roll for those daggers.

Actually fighting with the staff auto-attacks was never viable past, say, the first 20 levels, as any of the magic classes, so that having both wand and staff didn't actually add any tactical choices or anything. It used to be just a meaningless extra accessory slot, and the new system just does the same thing with one less slot.

And for hunters it's not like it was much of a meaningful choice either.

Plus, again, it's not like the other choices of a game do it any differently. It's not like TOR lets you do any meaningful switching between rifle and melee weapons, for example. Even when you have vibro-knife as a second weapon (e.g., Imperial Agent), it's not like it's used for more than one situational attack that you do mechanically.

And so on.

Basically it seems to me like you haven't really lost anything in the process. If anything, the game is actually a bit more complex where it matters, namely dungeon tactics and the like, than when it started. The simplifications in the parts that at best offered an illusion of choice (e.g., the talents) don't even come close to offsetting that.

Plus in the meantime you actually do have more choices than when the game launched. Granted, it's not Pandaria-speciffic, but a lot of stuff that was previously at best a noob mistake to take, is in the meantime actually a viable choice.

E.g., have you actually tried to play a survival-spec hunter at launch? Yeah, it used to be the joke spec. Now it's a viable choice.

Oh, it can be an "investment" all right. Take my parents, for a start. No, seriously, take them ;)

They used to take trips into France and whatnot every weekend, buy the most expensive cameras to photograph stuff, etc. It cost a bunch, lemme tell you. They used to be in the red as far as their credit card limit went every month end.

Then I got them addicted to WoW. Fast forward some years of being on WoW every waking hour when the servers aren't off for maintenance. No really, they do most of the shopping on Wednesday mornings. And now they actually have money for a change :p

Sounds to me like getting to keep one's money would technically qualify as a return :p

Plus, with Blizzard skipping maintenance on some Wednesdays, I think they even lost a few kilos. Think of the health benefits, man. Surely that counts as a return :p

Or take my getting them addicted. Sure, I had to sink some time into answering stuff like "HELP! I'M DROWNING!" followed by (I swear I'm not making it up) "WHAT CAMERA TO TURN UPWARDS? NO, I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA! I LOOKED IN ALL BAGS AND I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA!!!!" But after that? They've been out of my hair for years now. Plus now mom has more interesting stuff to talk about when she calls. Not that she calls as much, either. Those newbies aren't gonna just kill themselves in the warzones, you know?

I don't know about you, but I'd say that's worth something. That's my return on investment right there :p

Or as the Bored Of The Rings version goes...

"He would have finished Goddam off then and there, but pity stayed his hand. 'It's a pity I've run out of bullets', he thought"

Actually, the funny thing is that just about everyone agreed that dodo didn't taste very good. In fact, the accounts seem to be in agreement that while the breast and stomach were good enough, the rest of the bird was some rather tough and insipid meat. We have accounts like

"These we used to call 'Walghvogel', for the reason that the longer and oftener they were cooked, the less soft and more insipid eating they became."

Or

"These were given the name Walghvogel during Van Neck's voyage, because even with long stewing they would hardly become tender, but stayed tough and hard"

If the dodo had been most excellent eating, they would have been bred like turkeys. But as it was, the small amount of tasty meat on one made it not worth it. Or rather, it was worth every penny only if it was free. If you could just go club a bird over the head and make a bad meal out of it, well, it was free meat anyway.

But even so, actually there is very little evidence that they were hunted for meat much. There are actually very little dodo bones found around the human settlements. Even when they were hunted, a lot of times it was more or less just for the lulz of killing a mind-bogglingly defenseless and passive bird. I.e., humans being fucktards.

But be that as it may, the MAIN reason for the extinction of the dodo was more like habitat destruction and the inability to compete with animals introduced on the island by the Europeans.

But, really, think about it. It was a bird that was already as domesticated as you can possibly get. It was passive, flightless, didn't have any reflex to run away from humans, etc. It would have been even more trivial to keep in captivity than chickens are. I mean, you wouldn't even have to clip its wings. They were even trivial to get all in one place, whether for feeding or locking them up over night, or just to pick the most plump one, due to the fact that you could make one squawk a call to the others that made them gather.

If it had been tasty, SOMEONE would have put a few in a pen and raised them for meat, same as they did with turkeys elsewhere. Again, bearing in mind that it was trivial to do so with dodos, if you wanted to.

In fact, if it had been tasty, instead of being extinct, nowadays there would be millions of dodos raised on farms all over the world.

I don't think for many people it was about "cool". I've never used Foursquare myself, but I would assume I'd treat it more or less like a game.

In fact like any other game. Just because, say, Star Trek Online gives out achievements, it doesn't mean I'd define my self-worth based on those, or on anyone knowing I have those.

If I were to define anything "cool" about myself based on a game, it would be more like helping decrypt the binary .esm format in the early Fallout 3 days, before there even was a construction kit for it. Or stuff like making the first lightsabers for Fallout 3. (Yeah, I'm the same Moraelin as on the Nexus.) Or helping a buttload of newbies get started on modding.

Or my tens of thousands of hours sunk into studying history. Which, for game purposes, does give me enough knowledge to recreate an exact replica of a high-medieval European arming sword, or exactly an Edo period lady's naginata.

Not that even those would be my first choices to base self-worth on, but, you know, it's still actually involving more skills than visiting the same Starbucks every day. Stuff that if I were to brag about, it would still show, basically, "look at the skills I have! Look at the things I can DO!" Or something like that.

You know, stuff that takes some RL knowledge and skill.

Now I don't doubt that some people do base their self-worth on a game score, but not everyone, and in Foursquare's case I don't suspect there were that many who actually thought that their "cool" factor is based on how often they visited the same Starbucks. Even hipsters tend to think they're hip, you know, for doing other stuff than the rest of the population, not by some random thing that everyone else is doing.

What I'm getting at is that I don't think many people now deserve having their privacy violated and their personal data sold to the highest bidder, just for using a silly automated GPS game. Chances are a lot of those didn't even think they're "cool" for it, nor really used it for more than some silly lulz,