Cmon, that's silly.

If you're supposed to be controlling the character, then the "natural" lag should be all that I have to deal with. We don't need the character emulating input lag when my own real life body already takes care of it.

And if you were confused, I'm talking about mouse lag. If it takes a little bit to accelerate to a speed when moving, that's fine and to be expected. If it takes time to draw my sword I will, of course, accept that. However, if moving my mouse a little bit to the left has noticeable delay, why would that be a "feature?" The lag between me deciding to move my neck and it moving is *NOT* 133 milliseconds.

On an unrelated note (and somewhat pointless/rantlike), why couldn't they have been bothered to animate an up+strafe animation? It's incredible that holding W and D at the same time in Third Person Mode has the same animation as running forward, but you're magically sliding sideways. Obviously first person is better, but it's a silly lack of detail.

Only in the ports that the PC gets from the consoles (or even ones that happen to be released on both systems) do I notice the horrible latency. It's awful in Oblivion, Fallout 3, Bioshock, and plenty of others. Part of it has to do with V-Sync, but turning that off doesn't eliminate all of it. I can't believe that 133ms is the norm. I've grown up a PC gamer, and that's definitely one of the top reasons I *hate* console FPS games.

I can't understand gamers' "I will not budge" on in-game advertising. The "I've already paid money for it, why should I have to see advertisements" argument pops up EVERYWHERE. Consider that maybe the cost of making the game outweighs the amount made from 1-time sales? Games are becoming increasingly expensive to produce, with everyone expecting beautiful art, a well-made story, good voice acting, good music/sounds, an amazing graphics engine... etc. Yet the normal cost of a new game ($50) has been pretty static, at least for the last 5 years. Regardless of whether you think that the products that these people are producing are worth even that, it doesn't change the fact that they're expensive little things that the people in charge are trying to turn into a profit.

You pay for *some* TV (HBO) yet there's lots of subtle in-show advertisements there. You pay for magazine subscriptions, and those are practically 90% ads. I'm not saying that those advertisements aren't obnoxious, just that there's nothing "sacred" about advertising in game.

The biggest point that I'd like to make is the potential for in-game advertising to be both there AND non-obtrusive. In a game where I'm driving through a city, I don't care if a billboard has an actual company or a fake company. A game would be MORE believable if you could include real-world advertisements. Obviously the "you have to watch this 30 second clip before you play" bit would be too much. There's also the problem fo tracking advertisements, updating them, and the conflict of those two things and privacy. All are solvable... but advertisements are coming to games whether you like it or not.

When the trilogy was first announced, I had been under the impression that they were going to release all 3 games, but they'd be standalone and I'd get to pick which one I wanted to buy/play. Maybe I'd misunderstood, or I'd extrapolated that out of facts that weren't there, but now it seems even more like a blatant "we're GOING to make you play lots of money for these games" than it did back then.

Based on my past experience with "expansion sets," I also wonder if each new chapter in the trilogy is going to be full priced. Starcraft 2's site says :

I won't go into the current price of video games at this point, and I'm sure that I'll enjoy Starcraft 2 quite a bit when it finally ships, but I'm starting to sway away from the "Blizzard is amazing and can do no wrong" crowd and towards the "Activision merging thingy means more attempts to get our money" crowd. They've even said that they're looking into monetizing some Battle.net features. I just really, really hope they don't turn into EA.

They're basically stating that each game will be an "expansion pack." From the FAQ:

Annnnnnd

I've been defending Blizzard's no LAN support decision, but this is getting ridiculous.

Can you freaking jump?

Ok, ok, jumping (aka platforming) isn't what the game is "about." I should be focusing on other things like "combat" and "immersive storyline." Jumping also isn't what WoW is about, but it makes it a HELL of a lot more entertaining to run around.

I have absolutely NO clue why, but something about being about to hit a key and see my character bounce around on the screen adds TONS of entertainment value. Call me a silly person for being easily entertained... I know that most people I've talked to agree.

Not including jumping not only ruins immersion, but it seems like a developer who's too lazy to add a 3rd dimension to his 3D game.

You clearly have no understanding of how evolution works.

Evolution isn't some "magic memory" passed on magically from one cow that dies to all other cows that are born after that. Evolution is the result of tiny mutations that for one reason or another have been continuously passed down from generation to generation. All of the cows that have "realized" that they were about to be slaughtered (not that they would be capable of that kind of realization in the first place) have also been... well, slaughtered.

Not that this study had much to do with evolution. It just has to do with dog's current levels of intelligence.

I'm glad you attack the 99% number (which is clearly not a real statistic) right after you state that "most people" abandoned it to go back to Starcraft. While I'd like to pretend that that's enough to disregard your reply, I'll go a bit further.

From the wikipedia article:

That's not really my definition of a "disappointment," at least not in terms of review scores and sales. If we're talking about people playing, currently on US West there are 68807 people playing Warcraft 3 and 52367 on Starcraft. Pretty impressive numbers for Starcraft, but it's still not "most people." Not to mention that Warcraft 3 mods can be MUCH more diverse than Starcraft mods. I've gotten more gameplay time out of Warcraft 3 than I have with any other game.

I never played WotLK (I only played WoW for the first year or so after release), but I've heard bad things. However, I do know that WoW on release was pretty impressive and fun (though the release was a bit bumpy as all MMO releases are). However, I'm willing to forgive *one* questionable release that I've never played.

If enjoying all of the games that a company has released makes me a "fanboy" then yes, that's what I am. However, they've never disappointed me, so I don't expect them to. If it sucks, then maybe I'll be more skeptical of games to come... but if it's good, the lack of LAN support will be a tiny annoyance that will only really matter at LANs where not everybody has bought the game.

So keep playing the originals? Or play any of the thousands of other games that do include LAN support? Being pissed that you can't play one new game is silly.

Point being: you and others who also, for any reason, can't connect to battle.net, represent a tiny portion of their audience. You might even say that you're not even part of their target audience... much like you're not part of World of Warcraft's target audience. This is the direction that games are moving... and for the vast majority of people it's not a problem. You may not buy the game, but there are thousands of others that will. Maybe when you get back, you can be one of them.

Oh really? You know this for a fact? Do you KNOW Blizzard at all? They are notorious for waiting to release a game "when it's done," and when it satisfies them. Warcraft 3 came out 7 years after Warcraft 2. Starcraft was not only bigger than Warcraft 2, but after it Blizzard released expansion packs to current games and World of Warcraft (along with 2 expansions). They have extremely long development times, and are known to never announce a release date unless the game is DONE to THEIR standards.

Maybe you're used to companies that announce the release date when they're halfway done and release a game on time but full of bugs? I daresay that that's the norm these days. Now you want to complain about a company that actually finishes their games?

No LAN may suck, but it's nowhere close to a dealbreaker. If you live in some rural area or a country that has poor internet service, that sucks... but it doesn't apply to me or the other 99% of players. I'll cry for this loss as much as I cried for no IPX support in Warcraft 3.

Current Battle.net games are ALL peer-to-peer. If you play Starcraft 1 with a friend over Battle.net but are on a LAN it works fine without lag.

Why would Blizzard need to receive packets other than those sent in logging onto Battle.net, creating a game, joining it, starting it, and then transmitting the endgame results back to it? There aren't any games out there that make the player host that would need to contact the master server with as much data as it needs to send the actual server (you). I'm sure that 50-100ms latency to Battle.net's server is going to be a dealbreaker when joining a game takes 1/10th of a second longer (even when the game itself is fine)

Regardless, this is all speculation. People need to stop freaking out and wait until the game comes out until you complain. I know you people love to assume that "requiring an online server" is akin to "they want to force you to name your firstborn child Raynor," but nobody actually KNOWS anything except Blizzard. We'll also know soon enough... the Beta will start at least a few months before the game is released.

You're assuming morality is specific and concrete! The lawmakers behind any law obviously thought that their law was morally right.

There's a huge difference between a cop saying "man, it doesn't seem right that a kid has to be arrested for running a business modifying consoles" and the actual debate that happens in a courtroom. Why would we place our definition of "moral right" in the hands of the individual that happens to be there? There's a reason we don't. In a courtroom at least you can make your argument and persuade the judge and jury. If they rule against you, you can appeal and put your case before ANOTHER judge and ANOTHER jury. If a cop thought that it was morally wrong for people wearing green t-shirts to be alive, should the cop have the freedom to act on that belief and start shooting everyone with a green t-shirt?

I still think you're missing the point.

First of all, the cops were merely arresting him so that he could be brought to trial. They were not deciding the punishment.

Second, laws are created for the sole purpose of eliminating moral relativism (at least in the bounds of our society). We created laws so that we could agree on standards that can be enforced. This doesn't necessarily mean that a law is always morally right... nor does it mean that everybody agrees that the law is morally right. However, it hopefully means that we've agreed that there's a problem with the action the law is restricting, and that law was the solution thought up to deal with that problem. If the law is problematic... well, that's what the courts are for.

Third, this is a technical issue that not everybody has knowledge or experience in. Once again, this is why we have the courts and a justice system... cops aren't supposed to be making decisions on morality, they're there to "protect and serve" the people and the law. If a law told them to gun down 15 year olds with freckles... hell yes they can protest! But if they get a warrant for the arrest of somebody who's broken a law that they don't know or understand... then they leave it to the courts to decide. You really can't expect people to have a moral stance and knowledge of the law on every single possible issue.

Because the OP was taking a shot at the officers arresting the kid and not the people making up the laws, maybe the point then is the ignorance of the officers involved. While everybody (hopefully) knows the "wrongness" of killing people (thus making the "I was just doing my job when I killed 30 people" argument null), it's different here.

Obviously us slashdotters (who are 100% right all the time) know how silly the prescribed punishment is for an offense like this. However, people in other areas of expertise don't really understand the laws they are enforcing (currently modding consoles IS illegal... whether it should be is another story). All the officers know is that a kid was doing something against the law, thus they arrested him for it. They probably don't know what console modding is, nor are they the ones deciding the punishment.

The real question is - should we expect law enforcement officers to be the interpreters of "moral right" and not enforce the law when they take issue with it? Clearly we'd have many issues if each officer were to do this. Should we expect the officers to know and understand every facet of the law, as well as the technicalities of very specific offenses? I'd argue that this is too much. This is why we have the justice system, and not Robocop.

But the comparison is still dumb because of the differences in "moral wrong." It's very clear that what the Nazi's did was wrong, but it's not as clear when it comes to modding consoles (especially since the officers probably didn't even know what "modding xboxes" was).

We really went to Godwin's law fast, eh?