Samuel_Tow

What conspiracy theory is any different? That's the stupid thing about it. If I wanted to, I could invent a conspiracy theory for how pasteurised milk is designed to make me buy more socks. You can ascribe nefarious hidden motives to anything and then just use "That's what they WANT you to think!" as a circular logic justification and appear to make sense.

Also, have you guys noticed that the Eye of Horus on your dollar bill is the seal of the New World Order?

Let me put it this way. Say you have a grace period of 7 days. You buy a set, play it for five days, then return it. Character becomes locked. You go on vacation over the weekend, then come back and buy it again. Character unlocks. You play it for another five days, then return it again and take a break on the weekend. Come next week you buy the set again and then return it again at the end of the week.

That's not buying a set. That's renting a set. For free, might I add.

I hope they're doing it intentionally. It means more money from them, and less of it from me.

And that's bad because? That's just smart business. What, do you honestly expect any for-profit business to hand you your free money and then go "And also, here's some new content you can buy with that money!" Of course not. That's not evil, that's just logical. No-one is forcing people to buy anything. If people lack the self control to not be wasteful, then that's their problem.

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Is that what Freedom will be like? A new Icedrone every day? Because it'll make the forums a lot less interesting.

I'd like the option for it, yes. It's appropriate to the occasion. Such an option is appropriate for rather a few occasions. Is there something wrong with suggesting this?

To be fair, I still believe that all powers should have graphics of some sort, but that we should have an option to disable them where graphics represent inherently non-visual aspects like speed, toughness and strength.

How are you calculating that? Are you saying that three months from now, you will expect to have 1200 points but will instead have 800, but three months and five days from now you'll have 1200, and that's "not as much money" as opposed to "just as much money a few days later?"

As for impulse purchases... If I toss a hundred off a bridge and a beggar leaps after it to his death, am I responsible?

Generally if you go to return an item, the store will want said item unused. If you buy a set, get to 50 in a day with it then declare you don't like it, you've already used the hell out of it. Paragon Studios aren't selling you virtual goods that you can give back. They're selling you licenses. You can't "give back" the time spent using said license. What's being asked is, effectively, the ability to rent a set.

So you're saying that next month, they'll delay by another 10 days? Or are you saying that because it's on the 10th next month, that's "evil?"

So you're saying that the point was to gather all people's Stipends on the same day so that they can release new shop items ten days earlier? And they needed "nefarious schemes" to achieve this instead of simply appointing a game-wide stipend date because? Seriously, if Paragon Studios had said "Everyone will receive his or her monthly stipend on the 15th of every month." would that have been "evil," too? Because - surprise of surprised - that's precisely how my employer pays me my salary. That's exactly how my cable company requests I pay my bills.

In fact, here's an anecdote - when I swapped cable companies, I got my cable installed around the 10th of that month, and I paid for that month. Thing is, "that month" ends on the 25th, which is when I'm expected to pay my bill, so for the first month of my subscription, I got 15 days of cable TV. Every month thereafter, I'd pay my bill on the 25th and have my cable paid up until the 25th next month. I guess my cable company is "evil?"

Or maybe that's an incredibly stupid thing to say. Or maybe Paragon Studios is run by aliens who have implanted a chip in my brain so that I would accept their every decision. Or maybe I'm not real. The possibilities are endless.

That's more or less how I see it. If people stop buying something, whether because all the enthusiasts already have it or because it didn't prove popular enough to justify the price, it will become cheaper. If I want it bad enough and want to accept the price, I'll buy it right away. If I don't like the price, I'll wait for a discount or a price drop.

Now more than ever, we get to vote with our money. The question is how strongly we feel about our vote and whether we can stick to it. Buying something and then complaining it was too expensive is a day late and a dollar short. I paid for it, I supported it and I voted with my money, saying "I was willing to pay for this." Even if I say I didn't want to pay for it, I proved that I was willing to.

As soon as you realise that you really can't have "everything" unless you drop hundreds of dollars, it becomes a question of what you can accept not having, and that really is more or less how the store is supposed to work.

Why is it more important to you that it happens on your bill date than that it happens a month after it previously happened? Honest question.

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Is this enough?

My point is that there really doesn't seem to be room for a carnival in Praetoria. In the civilised areas, Emperor Mary Sue has everything under tight control, so a carnival he doesn't control would be hounded like criminals, and in First Ward, the people just don't seem to have any time or inclination for entertainment. To be honest, I could kind of buy the Carnival of Light as entertainers... If they ever acted like such. Instead, they serve as the militant protectors of the Gumbo and take on the role of catch-all wizards and witches and no mention is made of them ever being entertaining. Oh, sure, Jester and that dude in the brig act funny-weird, all of the actual Carnival leaders are just serious mages.

See, the thing with the Primal Earth Carnival of Light is that they look and act like circus freaks. They wear actual stage clothes, they hold shows in circus tents and they always seem like they're just out for a spot of fun even when they're engaged in mortal kombat. There are a select few Carnival characters that sometimes do this, but for the most part the Carnival is as dark and angsty as the rest of Praetoria, and it just seems odd for it to BE a carnival to begin with. Maybe if we got more backstory then THAT would help, but the thing is... That kind of sort of should have been what the First Ward opens with, not something to leave for well after the end in another expansion.

Frankly, I'm not against refunds as a concept. I'm against the entitlement that comes with them. "I bought your game and it sucks! Give me my money back or I will sue you!" If Paragon Studios institute a system for refunds (and I can bet real money they never will), then it won't be because they were legally or ethically obligated to institute one, but rather because they decided it was a smart business move.

See, this I agree with. I hold the vendor responsible for keeping promises made in advertising and during the purchasing process. If you bought something and it's not what you were promised, then you were swindled out of your money because the vendor either lied or screwed up. This is when a customer rightly deserves a refund because what he got isn't what he ordered.

I draw the line, however, on refunds for perfectly functional, advertisement-accurate items delivered undamaged. If the customer got what he ordered, then the vendor has lived up to his responsibility. If the person changes his mind, then that's no longer the vendor's fault and, as such, no longer the vendor's direct responsibility to deal with.

Soon as you pull out the "fanboy" card, you lose all credibility and sympathy. I don't care if you've spent $200K in the store, with that kind of attitude you deserve what you get.

I mean in a philosophical sense. I simply don't believe that a customer buying a product based on TRUE information then should ever have the right to return it because "I don't like it." Sure, if some companies allow that, more power to that, but that's not a case of "right" so much as specific business practice.

A vendor cannot read a customer's mind and know exactly what a customer really actually wants. The best a vendor can do is inform the customer of a product's specifics to whatever extent the vendor feels is prudent and then let the customer make an educated choice. If a customer is put in a position to make an uneducated choice and guess at a product's quality, then it is that customer's responsibility to decide whether he wants to take a risk or whether he wants to walk away and potentially look for additional information.

Let me put it this way - Steam is constantly trying to sell me games, and most of the time the info on the game listed in the Steam store is garbage. It's just a small text blurb that's rarely informative and is usually empty praise and one or two trailers which are often SGI and don't show much of the actual game. Before I buy a game off them, I check GameTrailers for better videos and possibly reviews, I check for owner commends, I check for non-professional reviews, I check YouTube for in-game videos, I ask people I know who've played it and so on. Steam DOE SNOT offer refunds for anything that I'm aware of, and as long as I'm going to be putting down real money for a game, I want to know that it's not garbage. Because if I DO buy a game just based on five screenshots and a 100-word text blurb and I hate it... Well, whose fault was it that I was an idiot and bought Crevures, then?