Coyote_Seven

After re-reading the original "Santa Claus" post, this response of yours here makes no sense to me whatsoever.

That's kind of hard to do when that person is your supervisor. :P

I kinda get harassed for not believing in their god. There's not much I can really do about it tho. I've gotten rather good at ignoring them, but... you know, I really shouldn't have to do that.

Except I don't do that. I don't go into their churches and announce how silly I think their beliefs are. No, they come knocking on my door, or bothering me while I'm at work, or trying to eat, or any of the other things that everyone else does in their daily life where it's otherwise not OK to be bothered by total strangers. But what they're doing is OK because... why? No one's actually ever answered that one!

So, there you go!

Now you know how us atheists feel each and every single day. *sigh*

So you admit the new AmigaOne X1000 is a perfectly viable platform that everyone can use, and you will make sure that Project Z will make a compatible version. Excellent!

EDIT: Seriously, that group of rather die-hard CoH fans trying to continue the "community" after the game is dead is looking rather frighteningly familiar to me. I've already been there and done that with the Amiga community. Never again!

Whining is about the only thing almost everyone is very good at. Most people never learn how to take constructive criticism, so if you point out a problem with something they've created, they'll take it as an attack and respond accordingly.

That rep system was just so totally abused. I really despised it because all it did was help to ensure groupthink and smash down anything that went against the little subculture that had developed here. Certain posters were given immunity against this base solely on their status as a local celebrity; they could pretty much say anything they wanted and get away with it. But if you disagreed with them, and you were not a celebrity on this board yourself, you'd be pretty much drowning in the red marks forever and ever. Never was there a bigger reminder of how much we're still like the other animals on this planet on this board than that stupid rep system. For me at least! I rejoiced when it was removed.

Not that removing it did anything to stop the little personality cults all around this board. In another thread, someone said something to the effect that we kind of blinded ourselves to the reality that our game was slowly dying, and a shutdown was inevitable. A year ago, if anyone had tried to make a post warning that the game would go offline by this time would have quite likely been shouted down, being forced to drown in a sea of trite little memes and trollfaces. So maybe in a way, we all deserve this cold splash of reality on our faces. Our playground is going away, and none of those silly little things we did to hurt each other will help us to get it back now.

I never felt any true sense of camaraderie among any of my fellow players, particularly on this board. While playing the game, I would sometimes get private messages from other players who lurked here, as they quietly agreed with me about how crazy a lot of the posters here seemed to be. I might have been just as crazy in trying to point out such things here. I just liked to try my best to put the truth where I thought it should be, especially when others were doing their best to short circuit rational thought with such inane memetics that I thought I'd escaped once I left high school. Most of you are older than that; I'd have figured you'd have known better by now!

So maybe that's my biggest secret of all. The collective antics of this bulletin board over the past eight years have been a contributing factor in my becoming ever more of a misanthrope. And yet despite that I continued coming here, making occasional attempts to gently point out when I thought someone was being inordinately cruel or inane, or usually both at once. My conscience would bother me if I didn't at least make an attempt.

I don't really know what that makes me. So there you go!

There's about seven billion people on this planet. The odds are that at least some of them actually liked Howard The Duck. If that's even just 1%, that would be 70,000,000 people.

70,000,000 fans of a bad movie.

Do you stop to read all of the agreements you have to click "yes" on just to get your computer operating the way you want it, let alone videogames? Not just read them, but understand them. And what if some part of it confuses you and you have questions? Who do you call, customer service? I doubt you'd get a satisfactory answer. I'm pretty sure if you tried to read all of that legal felgercarb, that would be the only thing you could do for quite a while.

That's an awesomely cool idea. The Paragon City we're now familiar with would be the base, as the game comes out-of-the-box. And you could add to it. Your own missions, your own contacts, your own NPC groups, your own zones. Or you could change other things you didn't like in the default game, or remove them altogether.

Well, I tried looking up what legal precedents might exist in this regard, but my quick and cursory Google search came up with only one article on a UK website that essentially demonstrates that companies are doing what I already figured they were doing; legally redefining words and phrases so they can continue using them in their ads to make them sound better. Such as "forever" and "unlimited". And they actually act surprised when customers call them on it.

If you don't mean "forever", then don't say "forever". Why is that so hard to understand?

Perhaps a class action lawsuit would be a good idea. When we win, we'll all get $5 vouchers good for any currently running NCSoft game. Success!

So you're saying it's OK for a company to make exaggerated claims about a product they're advertising. And here I thought that was bordering on fraud. Silly me!

There are some products out there that are "guaranteed forever", and the manufacturer actually means it and they've been good on their word about it. You try using a slogan like, "Play Free Forever" and then discontinue your product a year later, and see how much your customers trust you afterwards.

Unfortunately, that's exactly how it works. It's the Golden Rule: "The one with all the gold makes the rules". Corporations do this sort of thing all the time. Just look at how much the copyright laws of the U.S. have been changed just to keep Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain.

Our problem is that even collectively, we just don't have enough gold to make anyone take us seriously.

Well I guess I could have called it "fluff". But in this instance, I think George Carlin put it so much more eloquently! I say that his general philosophy about life and people really applies to something like that so-called "mission statement".

In other words, it's BS.

So NCSoft is a literal genie?

Thank you, Forbin.

Frye?

Frye?

Frye?

Indeed, those people are dead wrong. If a company didn't want my vociferous ire after making a change I didn't like, then they should have never solicited my interest in the first place.

Welcome to the Internet!

Oh gods. Yet another reason for my contempt toward this board's mods. Such abusive behavior by them is one of the reasons why I never tattled on another poster for saying things I didn't like, or for drifting toward forbidden topics (gasp!).

If you say "no" to something, doesn't that mean you disagree with it?