Wackydavo

It sounds to me that you haven’t made it far enough in the game. I just finished normal mode last night. I’ll admit it was pretty easy. I’ve been reading the Diablo reddit and it gets harder, believe me, it gets harder. Those guys are hardcore and they’re getting owned in the higher difficulty levels. There will be champion packs so hard they will make you pee your pants and go through more than the 5 point check list. The min/maxing you can do with gems later in the game more than compensates for the loss of attribute points in leveling up.

Also, most deisgners agree that the infinitely spammable potions and town-portal escapes were broken mechanics that allowed content to be trivialized. I personally hated potion spamming. To each his own, I guess.

I can understand you want bigger worlds to explore. To me, it’s never been about that. I mean, in d2 the maps were randomly generated tiles. I didn’t care to explore the same repeaeted tile set.

Your comment illustrates my point that your own expectations are different from what the game was designed to be. Every one of your criticism can be directed at Diablo 2. I just finished playing through d2. Gold/item farming sim? check. Same monsters on replay? check.

In fact, some d2 fans were mad that d3 lets you respec at all because they preferred to re-roll new characters entirely. To me that’s insantiy, but indicates the type of repetition that the d2 fan-base would tolerate. D2 fans didn’t love it for the in-depth story it offered (although they liked the story and lore), they would do THOUSANDS of Baal runs to farm items. D2 wouldn’t fit the replay-a-longer-game-50-times mold you are asking for.

The game was never intended to tell a story in the same ways that Dragon Age and Skyrim did. It was never meant to have that sort of depth. It does have an insane amount of character-building depth, however. Much more so than DA or Skyrim. That you expected different is your problem, not one of the game.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re not trolling at this point, even though your frequent comments seem to indicate otherwise. To me it sounds like you were expecting something other than an Action RPG from Diablo 3—perhaps something like a more traditional RPG. When you consider that D3 only ever hoped to be a fun Action RPG (top-down perspective, lots of left clicking, lots of loot whoring, mowing down swaths of monsters, etc.), the game is exceptionally thoughtful and well-crafted. It doesn’t genre bend because it wasn’t intended to. But within the Action RPG genre, it sticks to the core design, but advances and iterates on the design in what I think are brilliant ways. So, while the genre may not be that attractive to you, or your expectations may have been different. Blizzard wasn’t designing the game you expected. But the design decisions they used to achieve their goals were excellent in my opinion.

And no, Skyrim is not an action RPG. It’s a pure RPG.

I think you’re missing the point, at least with your criticism of the voice acting and side quests. I think you’re comparing the game to an “RPG” like Skyrim, Dragon Age, and their ilk. D2 is an action RPG, which is a very specific sub-genre and includes titles like D1, D2, Titan Quest, Sacred 2, and now D3 (there are others). The voice acting or story aren’t important because the game is about infinite replayability. You’re going to skip the story for the most part after the first play-through.

I hope everyone out there realizes this is pure trolling. Disregard and move on everybody.

Dear Mr. Wolf (if that is your real name):

Regardless of whether Mr. Schilling was a predominant hitter or not, or was in the AL or not, it was a baseball-related pun. A joke, if you will. In case you haven’t learned about jokes, they are inherently not literal and are not to be taken too seriously. Had lancelott been intending to make a serious comment relating to baseball and KOA:R, your powers of both observing and articulating the obvious would have been well suited to cut down lancelott’s comment with all the righteous fury that your “So, really, just no” insight so eloquently exhibited. Next time, please focus those observational and articulation powers on context and reason and you won’t have such a bad time in the comments section of a video game blog.

Also, you need to change your avatar to a picture of yourself in Wolf form. The current does not do your true nature justice because, Mr. Wolf a human? Really, just no.

Sincerely,

Wackydavo

If there’s anything worse than general douche-baggery, it’s legally wrangled douche-baggery. Hi, my name is Activision. I’ll just withhold enormous sums of money from the developers responsible for making me even more enormous sums of money. Also, I’ll have my lawyers advance a bunch of lies and half-truths when said developers sue me for the money owing. By the way, I’ll force the developers to drag the money out of me kicking and screaming through litigation during which time the developers will incur astronomical attorney’s fees. Then I’ll try and look like a good guy by paying the developers a fraction of what they are owed.

Why am I doing this? It’s because the developers were making me money like a golden goose, I abused them, and then they no longer are willing to produce golden eggs for me.

Activision is like Donald Sterling on steroids. I hope the trial results in an obscenely fair damages award against Activision.

I did not know that one of the original DOTA guys was working on Valve’s game. That sort of lessens the sting because the game-type and any associated naming conventions should go to the creator. The law may not dictate that result, but fairness seems to.

I have not played a DOTA game ever, so experts may correct me, but it seems like Blizzard got the short end of the stick. It was a Blizzard game that got the original term, then the term became kind of generic, describing a genre (hehe, generic and genre have the same latin root) not a specific game. Then there are these DOTA stand-alone games and then Valve applies for a trademark for DOTA. To my knowledge, calling a game “DOTA 2” is like calling a first-person shooter “FPS 3.” I wish someone would still oppose Valve’s application filing. Seriously Valve? The best you could come up with was DOTA 2?

I can understand the argument that hitting “like” isn’t exactly like the examples I posted. So in that respect, by the most narrow interpretation of the facts of the case, the case may be without precedent (using that term in the legal, not colloquial sense). But I think those cases and general first amendment jurisprudence make it clear that non-speaking conduct that amounts to a statement is “speech” for purposes of the 1st A. And I think this rule of law is sufficiently well-settled that a district court judge in any state or any circuit does not have the interpretive discretion to rule that hitting “like” of a political candidate does not amount to speech—even though there is no 1st amendment case that deals with the specific issue of clicking like on facebook. The analogous cases are so legion and so clear that I think the judge was ignoring precedent by ruling otherwise.

If the connection between liking something on facebook and other forms of 1st A expression is not clear, the English language has no ability to categorize similar concepts.

To give an example, let’s say there is a law prohibiting killing by use of “projectiles” and that court’s have interpreted the word “projectile” to include bullets. I think we would all agree that in a case where a defendant is being charged with killing with a bow and arrow, the judge doesn’t have discretion to say that the arrow was not a projectile. The judge is simply following precedent by ruling that the arrow is a projectile, not creating precedent. In the first amendment case, the term “speech” is the word projectile and liking a political candidate is the arrow. Not exactly the same, but obvious enough to fall within the category.

Now look at me. Quibbling over technicalities even though we agree on the ultimate principle. Let’s just be friends and kill monsters in Diablo 3 on May 15, shall we?

He didn’t set a precedent. He ignored years of it. (see links below). It’s his job to make hard decisions, but it’s also his job to follow binding precedent. The day that mandatory precedent is viewed as non-binding on lower judges is the day that the rule of law gets tossed out the window.

Agreed. Poor lawyering on the part of the fired employee if this was not emphasized. If this point was argued, the judge intentionally made an erroneous ruling.

Regardless, I think the judge is wrong and I don’t even really think it’s a close call. There is no question that liking something on facebook is speech. For the logically challenged, here’s the message: “I support the page that I liked.” In the context of a democratic political campaign, the speech is even more explicit and explicitly political: “I support x political candidate.” So, not only is it speech, it’s (one of) the most important types of speech the constitution protects.

If the fired employee wore a shirt with a picture of the political candidate with a thumbs up (or some other symbol of support on the shirt), this wouldn’t even be an issue in the case.

This sounds to me like a case of bad lawyering on the employee side or the judge just going out of his way to decide in favor of the government.

What about this one “Arthur your living your dream”? It should be "you’re living your dream. I kid. I kid.

I’ve thought Bissell’s other reviews were passable and even enjoyable. But I thought this one was indefensible. He admits he only played 6 hours of the game. I’m okay if you only play 6 hours and it is clear that the game is complete shovelware, but we all know Witcher 2 is not shovelware.

Bissel has some odd viewpoints on games. Reading this review, I got the distinct impression that he’s a very atypical gamer. His criticisms were more directed at the genre than the game itself, but he failed to realize this. I got news for you Tom. Elves aren’t going anywhere soon.

It’s not too close for comfort and Bethsda doesn’t have to defend their trademark against another non-infringing mark when there was no real risk of dilution in the first place. Stop spreading misinformation. The only time a trademark owner needs to step in and defend or lose the trademark is when it becomes too generic or when there is actual infringement. Mojang’s Scrolls wouldn’t genericize Elder Scrolls. Also, Elder Scrolls is already very generic. If your trademark is very generic already, it merits less protection. I’m not saying this because I believe it, it’s actually the law. Look it up).

The argument “I’m only suing because I have to defend my trademark” is ludicrous against other non-infringing marks. Essentially the argument is: “I know I don’t have a really good case, but I’m going to sue you anyways .” This argument improperly expands the scope of the protected trademark through illogical bootstrapping.

Look at me, now I’m getting all butt hurt about trademark law. :)