TimTheEnchanter

Emotions also typically fuel any person's desire to point out to others that they're wrong

That's nice. It's hindering our society more than helping it now and should be removed. Or the 'natural order' will probably do it for us and throw out the baby with the bathwater.

And poverty, the problem with "bare minimum" is you're not really in a stable environment. It's only stable if luck ignores everyone else and never deals Murphy's Law to you. Just because you're doing fine one month, doesn't mean a thing come the next one. When all it takes is a single breakdown of a car, or a colder than normal winter to put you in the red, that's not stable.

Inventions... we could actually be way more backward than we are now if the systems of greed existed before we started using tools. Just imagine if the patent system had been around at the dawn of civilization. We'd hardly be anywhere because nobody could afford to pay to use fire, and every simple machine. Things that are the basis for practically every piece of technology we have. Imagine if licensing had been around and every time you used a hammer on a new job, you had to pay for an additional license for the hammer.

I agree that the government needs to do something, even if nobody knows exactly what it is they need to do. What I see as the most basic problem with the whole thing is, I find it ridiculous that the thriftiest person in the world, with a minimum wage job, will not be able to afford the basic necessities. NO job should be incapable of supporting a worker (provided the worker isn't being a shopaholic) above the poverty level. That the only houses being built anymore are mansions doesn't help things any either. You certainly hit on something that has always irked me about happiness though. In our society, nobody really has a right to pursue happiness. That's only a privilege. So while the classic phrase, "Money can't buy happiness", while accurate, only shows half the picture. Nobody is happy if they have to constantly worry about losing their home, electric, heat, etc. Yes, money can't buy happiness. But what it can buy, is the freedom to pursue it. The pursuit of happiness isn't free. You need a license, and the fee is pretty hefty for many.

What does or doesn't need feeding is irrelevant to the validity of the metaphor. You seriously can't see how it applies?

I must have cursed it. The one time I actually had a costume ready to go BEFORE the party.

I suppose that boils down to actually getting power to these other places. More often than not, whenever 'more advanced' nations try to help the less fortunate ones, the poodoo always finds a way to hit the fan. And then there are groups people who are perfectly happy without electricity, even though it is well within their means to acquire it if they wished.

If I was going to try and define greed mathematically, my first thought would be to use scalable percentage relative to whatever the accepted poverty line is.

I've been at that line before, and internet/gaming was the only pleasantry I partook in during that time. But that resulted in me being unable to accumulate money. It was always 'just enough to get by' at best. My ideal living conditions? All I really wanted to be different, is to not be afraid of breaking a leg and being unable to get it fixed, or worrying whether or not the heater was going to fail. If I were rich, there's very little I would want to change, except for maybe a vacation. The rest of that money would either be given back, or maybe into entertainment for the masses (preferably the ones who are currently being ignored). I have little need for material things.

On the other end of the spectrum, like what you were saying about millionaires not thinking they're rich, you have people who were made an example of during the election. Those who were fighting against a higher tax for the rich, and citing things like only having a few 100k leftover per year after dealing with all the necessities. And they treat it like it's hard living. That's pretty extreme. To me, the boundary between rich and not isn't whether you have a shiny car in your driveway or can go to Tahiti for a month every year. It's whether or not you have to be afraid of what tomorrow brings, and whether or not it's actually catastrophic. If you don't have to worry about what happens if your car gets wrecked, or you get sick, etc, you don't tense up when the utility bills come in the mail, that's wealthy.

But that kind of greed is at least easier to grasp. People who eat caviar when there are kids who can't afford rice, have a much bigger buffer between their actions and the suffering. That is a lot easier to believe than when someone fires a whole town, pays farms to not grow food for the purpose of driving up prices (and causing famine in the process), lobbies for regulations to make it impossible for small businesses (and potential new competitors) to survive, etc. We're getting off on a pretty stray tangent now though. The kind of trouble I was discussing before, isn't about just hurting one group of people or another. It's something that will come back to bite EVERYONE in the **** eventually, the super-rich included. I'm sure it's possible to enjoy oneself while still achieving some sort of equilibrium with what nature can provide. Or at the very least, extend our livability on Earth past the point where we can expand outward into the galaxy. But that's probably me being overly optimistic. The sad truth may be that faster-than-light travel is not possible, and Earth is all we will ever have. If we are indeed trapped here by the laws of physics, we will drastically need to alter our perceptions or one of two things will happen. We will either be catapulted back to the stone-age, or will face mass extinction.

LOL I was wondering at what point someone was going to need to cite Dr. McCoy vs. Spock as Exhibit A.

Maybe that's more of my problem. I don't know enough of the neurology to be sure about this, but I'm guessing empathy happens in the right brain and logic in the left? Doctors discovered I have he ability to use both sides at once - it's a known disorder, but I can't for the life of me remember what it's called now. What it means is I don't have a truly dominant brain hemisphere. But that doesn't mean they're perfect harmony with each other. Quite the opposite. It causes them to 'battle' each other, which meant I had to fight much harder to concentrate than normal people.

<< warning: I'm not posting these for debate, but if you feel you must debate them, keep the politicians out of it >>

But keep in mind my gripes about the CoH shutdown, stem from my hatred of much larger issues that are caused by the same kind of business thinking. Humanity as a species is so obviously headed on a collision course for disaster, we might as well be crash dummies in a test vehicle (and I'm not even talking about global warming). For just one example, "perpetual growth". Impossible to sustain. But it is the holy grail of business and seen as a necessity to keep from getting slaughtered by angry investors. But how can ANYONE think it is possible? Even the most perfect business in the world, will eventually fail due to a lack of resources. How can we expect perpetual growth to sustain us when Earth has a specific limit of natural resources? One way or another, that business is going to be unable to keep producing more than they did the previous year.

Social Security is flawed in the same way. It relies on every generation having more humans than the previous one. Once again. Earth is limited. It only has so much surface area that we can live on and even less of that is arable. Yet even as overpopulation becomes a real threat reproduction is pushed just as much now as when "Be fruitful and multiply" was penned into the Bible. People are even called selfish if they choose not to make babies.

Despite these realities, logic is taking us down a path to disaster, and somehow even many logical people do not regularly see these things, or they just don't care, because they're logical instead of empathic. Whether that would technically be Empathy for the planet, or "Gaia" or whatever, or a lack of Empathy for humanity as a whole, I'm not really sure.

"Wall-E" had it right. While the imagery of a trash city was mostly done for dramatic effect, the mindset behind how Earth reached that point is entirely real. A disaster of that caliber can and most likely will happen, and greed disguised as logic, will lead us to it. And that brings me to a point that most will hate to agree with. Greed is NOT logical. Therefore logic shouldn't even be used to justify it.

I think they actually did win that. Though with the way some trials go it isn't completely unsurprising. There are some equally ridiculous things that have gone in favor of the big dog, like the suit against Disney for stealing Finding Nemo from a pre-existing children's book. They brought a huge list of similarities as evidence, and the judge threw the case out on the grounds that Nemo was a different shade of orange.

But as for the Boston Legal case, the couple didn't want financial compensation. They just wanted the station to diversify.

Well if that was the case, then sorry, I was mistaken. But everything I heard about Tabula at the end was that it was very much in the red.

However, the scary thing about profiting games still shuttering is, if you can at least assume that the game will continue while it's profiting, then you can contribute to keeping that game alive. If there's some unknown profit percentage for each company that may suddenly get more greedy for a number we can only guess at, then we lose the feeling that we are 'supporting the game', and that isn't good for the morale of a community.

Oh yeah, I'm fully aware of what's going on in the political ivory towers. Even there, we've seen a bit of a shocker in the past week though. The unthinkable happened. The 'businessman' wasn't given the king's seat despite the financial noose that has been slowly being tightened around everyone's necks. Whether or not that is the main reason is open to tons of debate, which we definitely shouldn't go onto a tangent about, but between that and the Occupy rant fest, it MIGHT be a sign that people are finally getting fed up with it.

This empathy for other games is more of the change I was referring to originally. Not a change across the entire business landscape. I don't know exactly what it is, but something about this shutdown has made an unusual impact. I wouldn't say it rocked the internet, but it was at least a ripple that everyone felt, and that's more than what usually happens. It's not a great change, but it's a first step. The eyes of the gaming world have been opened, at least a little.

Heh, this reminds me of an episode of Boston Legal that really intrigued me. An old couple sued a television station because all the shows targeted the teens demographic and there was no entertainment for them.

It sounds petty, but seriously think about it. What ever happened to niche marketing? It used to be a good thing, and now it magically isn't. In the most obvious example, nobody can make a low-pop MMO now even though what is now a low-pop MMO was top dog 10 years ago and highly profitable. This is bad, bad, BAD, for anyone but who always becomes the target demographic: the gullible young crowd. Why should everyone else have to be told, "you get nothing but what is crap to you because all we care about is the demographic that is easiest to string along"? This is how smart sci-fi has almost become extinct and now can usually just be described as soap operas in the future/space. Entertainment is telling you, "You're not in the largest demographic, so you don't like poop? Too bad. You either eat the poop, or starve, because the only people who matter to us are the poop eaters."

That's starting to change too actually. Amazingly we've been getting support from other games. And I think we're going to see more of it, if these kinds of things keep happening. The frontier of the internet is so young though that there's scarcely been any time to define its value beyond a literal sense. But philosophy can't help but become more of a factor as time goes on. And people will start asking the deep questions that will make the whole thing sound like a dialogue from the Matrix or Tron. "What is real?" "You don't have the right to cut the users off."

But comparing CoH to NCsoft's previous slayings is moot. All of those games were in FAR worse shape than CoH was when given the termination order. And whether it was a weak profit or a strong one, it was still a profit. And MMO's being shut down while they're still generating revenue is uncharted territory, and paints a pretty scary picture for the future of the genre.

By the way, the fact that you said NC doesn't care whether we keep buying their products or not, is EXACTLY why I have felt that "voting with your wallet" is a meaningless gesture and does NOT create the balance of power between company and consumer that most pro-capitalists (probably the wrong word to use, because I don't disagree with capitalism, only that it has become more corrupt and 'scroogey' as time has progressed) love to use as a reason why everything is as it should be.

Without us, their stuff does not exist.

Symbiosis.

Tell that to SOE.

So now not only should we not expect morality, we should expect that businesses get looked down upon for being moral?

Dehumanization perhaps? Which coincidentally (or maybe not so much) is a lot of what many people also dislike about a "profit first/everything else second" philosophy. Having no emotion also tends to go hand-in-hand with having no moral conscience.

Not saying you CAN'T be emotionless and still be moral or empathic, but it's certainly a lot easier to just ignore those things. Just like drinking and driving, there's probably some folks out there who can and do partake in it without ever having an accident, but the odds are still in favor of you getting yourself or someone else pulverized.

Didn't that sort of happen anyway with the shutdown announcement? Granted a lot of the protesting would have been the same and the Unity Rally kept a big mass of players around, but aside from that, would the rate of population-thinning be any different?

Instead all development on I24 is just wasted resources now.

That's a pretty good argument. I feel like it only applies if NC doesn't pull out of the Western market though. In Korean games, PvP is everything, and it makes U.S. PvP look like toddlers on a playground. It is incredibly cutthroat, and leveling usually demands hardcore grinding. There is nothing casual about it, and much of what made CoH special is that it was accessible to casual gamers. One didn't even need to play the game (in terms of doing hack & slash every day) in order to enjoy it. It just doesn't fit the Korean gaming model, which is exactly why I thought NC didn't want to do anything with it anymore.

But heck, if they want to hold onto the IP in that way, there's no reason they couldn't do when "selling" it. In fact, I thought it would be better that they retain ownership and just collect royalties on whatever a new developer did with the game. And if NC wanted to do their own spinoffs, or recycle assets, they'd still have that option.

And that is: BAD.

No entity should be permitted to operate without a moral conscience. That includes individuals, business, government, and whatever else you can imagine.

And people wonder why there's so much regulation on business now. Well there's only 2 ways for it to go. Either the businesses regulate themselves, or the government does it. And business with it's severe lack of morality certainly isn't going to regulate itself.

And I said that it's the same kind of business process that leads to more destructive forces IRL. I did NOT say, that destroying CoH is of the same the same caliber as destroying a real town. Only that the thinking behind both acts is essentially the same, and equally without a conscience.

As for spreading lies... well with a lack of proof to the contrary, it's all pointless to argue whether they're lies or not. But I guess you'll just have to be a realist and accept that people have a right to speculate... unless you want to defend the rights of the game industry and stomp on the rights of news industry in the same breath

Yes, I would rather hear that. Though I'd say my eyebrows are raised more at the "exhausted all options" comment rather than the original shutdown notice at this point. We don't live in an age where you can just drop a bombshell out of nowhere, and then say "negotiations have failed" when you can't even provide proof that they happened at all, and expect everyone to just believe it. The limited info we've gotten from news sources about what may or may not have happened behind closed doors, doesn't paint a pretty picture. That's the trouble with a severe lack of transparency. If there's anything sneaky going on, NCsoft has everything to gain by not only fooling us, but also fooling investors. But the more silent you are, especially to a demographic who feels like they've been wronged, the more you vulnerable you make yourself to speculation. And if that ISN'T the case, and they really did try to save it, we could feel like we were at least worth the detailed explanation.

Because the same BS that went into this business decision is exactly the same BS that goes into driving all sorts of greater destructive forces. The very use of the word business is wielded all the time as a way of minimizing the implications of whatever party A did to party B. It tells business folks that they don't have to think about anything but profit, and that scenario is BAD, whether you're a realist or not. And there's a lot of anger brewing all over the place over things like this. Disregard for humanity in favor of the blind pursuit of profit drives everything from a simple MMO shutdown, to the fall of the housing market that now has the whole world balancing itself on the head of a pin.

NCsoft has nobody to blame but themselves for the misinformation, lies, half-truths, etc, with the pathetically minimal amount of information that has been handed out. And what's the alternative? Just accept it? Next time someone shoves my face in the mud, yeah, I'll just sit there and take it, because that will get me way more respect than fighting back against something that every cell of my being knows is wrong.

In case you haven't noticed, money usually trumps (no pun intended) God.

So you're saying what... that Southern industrial engine would have collapsed on its own because of... an eventual uprising from within? Whips and chains seemed to be working pretty well for them.

Say what you want about the North having an equivalent workforce, but don't try saying that they actually had it WORSE.

You seem to fail to realize that most wars are ultimately business decisions. Citing human rights or the spread of democracy is just the convenient sugar-coating that gets used to keep the civilians quiet about it. Take the American Civil War. Was slavery a factor? Yes. Was slavery wrong? Yes. But behind all that you had the fact that the South had a free labor class which would make them automatically capable of underselling the North no matter what. Business. Not morality. These days it's usually about natural resources though. Or even just having a hand in reconstruction, so you can send your warriors in to level a city on taxpayer money and then profit from the rebuilding of it in the private sector.

Not even going to try to read all of that.

Also a couple of things to consider.

#1. Just having an MMO as old and legendary as CoH that you can say is still profiting, is something you can flaunt to the world to tell them you're a good game maker. It's a well-known title and it was still alive. To say that you're not just keeping it around as a favor to the gamers, but are actually still making money off it, is pretty darned good publicity. It may not be a flagship MMO, but it's still some nice icing on the cake. They also had PS, which among MMO's, had a better relationship with its player base than practically any other developer but Blizzard. Again, that's not a trophy you just want to toss out.

#2. If we had any inkling that PS was in danger of shutting down, I can't even imagine what would be happening right now. Take a look at what the players have done in an effort to save the game. If NCsoft didn't want to pay to advertise CoH, it probably wouldn't have even mattered. I've seen what this community has been able to do, and I dare say that practically ANYTHING that was needed to keep the game going, would have been accomplished. But then there's also the problem. Nobody was in danger. The game was still profiting, PS never saw it coming, and everyone expected to see new products. It's not just that NCsoft canned the whole thing. They never even gave PS a chance to rebirth CoH with a sequel, or finish the 'super-secret project'.

#3. Sell the frigging IP. That NCsoft decided to abandon the sequel should be enough of an indication that they have no interest in its future. BUT they still want to squat on it, for whatever self-conscious reason. If another company fare better than NC did with it is reason enough to bury it, then the opposite scenario should be no worse of an option.

Option A: Sell CoH, and risk losing face when company X turns it into a gold mine.
Option B: Bury CoH, and risk losing face for being a big meanie.

Either way, you're inviting trouble. At least with the first option, you can make some extra money.