AmeenA

omg here it comes, this is going to be the greatest thing ever, I’m so glad it got delayed till after I finished classes!

Seems like a password or MAC addressing would essentially accomplish the same thing…I don’t really get it =/

Oh? This is available on Kindle? Sure, that might only cost a couple bucks, but then what! I’m not falling for it Flatley! (Great piece by the way!)

Alright, fair enough, but in the end this doesn’t have a real effect on the consumer. These carriers do much worse things than this, most bothersome to me being buying and then not utilizing spectrum blocks.

I’d rather know I’m paying $80 for Verizon’s "quality data" than to pay $85+ for data, voice & text subsidies, as you refer to it.

So you only care how they label it? Personally, I don’t care what they call it as long as I can use the services I want.

don’t lie to me & claim my 10,000 text messages a month should cost me any more than a $1

It’s not lying, it’s making one service cheaper by making another more expensive, they have to make profit from somewhere, and asking customers $30 a month for data and $15 a month for texting is an easier sell than asking $44 for data and $1 for texting.

It will force them to drop prices because people will have far cheaper options, like T-Mobile & Sprint (and lesser known carriers)

T-Mobile and Sprint use the same practices, and while they are both cheaper than AT&T and Verizon, they are also losing money fast; I highly doubt AT&T and Verizon feel compelled to follow their cheaper pricing.

Again, remember, this is a business, if you’re unhappy with a service provider, your best option (as you’ve done) is to change providers. If you truly believe that these companies are acting unfairly, perhaps a letter to the FCC could convince them to launch an investigation.

I’m not sure how much AT&T and Verizon are profiting, but you have to remember that this is a business for them. Data isn’t a right, and if they believed they could be more profitable, they would lower their prices. Just like Apple has tremendous profit margins that it uses to fund research for the future, the cellular carriers need to have the cash necessary to compete and expand their services. And while you might think that charging $15 a month for texting is a lot, you have to realize that these costs are essentially being used to subsidize the data plans; if texting was free, data would have to be more expensive so that they could continue profiting as much as they are now. Sprint and T-Mobile are in serious trouble right now, so it’s hard to argue that they are being greedy, and while AT&T/Verizon’s plans are more expensive, they are also expanding and advancing much faster than Sprint/Tmo.

All I’m trying to say is, it’s awesome that you’ve found an alternate solution to fill your needs and new pricing structures would certainly be welcome, but don’t accuse these companies of greedy scheming, they don’t have money to burn.

I also heard that you have to play in 3rd person; none of this makes any sense. Why they felt like they had to model it after current MMO’s I will never understand.

How well do you think it would run on my machine? HP Envy 14, core i5 2.4GHz, Radeon 5650, 6GB RAM. My screen is 1366×768, but I’d like to run it on my 1920×1080 monitor, not sure if it’s worth the lower settings though.

I believe they’re talking about Big Screen mode at this years E3, think Joystiq reported that.

I think, if Valve thinks they could tell a story better with a touchscreen, they would most likely release on the platforms that would allow them to share that story with as many of their fans as possible (meaning iOS/Android); but if Windows RT or WP7/8 had enough market share I’m sure they would develop for that also (Mac has about 10% of their users and they always do a simultaneous release). Although, I don’t think many Valve fans would only have a Windows RT computer, any Intel Windows tablet would be able to run their games fine anyway.

I have no idea what this is, but it is amaaaazing!

That’s honestly the best encouragement you could give Paul; he’ll never come back reading that XD

I can’t wait to see you defend a zerg rush!

If so, you have to bring the Director of Demons/Dark Souls on, ask him why he hates me so much.

I’m still bitter about what they did to Rare.

You say that, and yet the Wii won this generation in terms of pure sales. Nintendo always does something innovative with its hardware and it uses that to outsell the competition. While I’m not yet sold on the Wii U or the 3DS, I wasn’t sold on motion control at the time either, and that turned out particularly well for them.

Right, this is a fairly hard feature to implement the right way, I’m sure if you had suggestions as to how they could best implement it, they’d love to hear it.

Lots of great soundtracks listed so far! I’ll add Mass Effect, Little Big Planet, Kingdom Hearts, Portal 2.