But that doesn't justify it in the slightest, if anything it makes it worse

it's fair game if you can pull it off and make money off it. it's not about ethics, it's about money and the fact is that people want to play this game so much, they'll be willing to spend an extra whatever $ to do so.

btw, i wasn't trying to single you out, Bal. your comment just provided a stating point.

i mean, i get it. i understand the sentiment behind it. but if a person is willing to pay, than it's not bad business because the net profit is positive. if this pissed people off enough to not buy it such that those net profits are negative, well... 

my point isn't that people are stupid to pay extra money, but that their willingness to pay means that the game is worth the extra money to play.

something's worth is determined by how much people want to sacrifice for it. if the subscription fee goes through and people agree to pay, it just means your take on how much the game is worth doesn't coincide with everyone else.

i personally don't think the game is worth the extra money, but i don't think the game is worth 50-60$ (or whatever it's price will be) either, so i will not be purchasing it. :) 

To be honest, I don't feel like I'm paying extra money... yet.
The LAN thing isn't an issue for me, I don't play LAN, or when I do it's at work and we are all connected anyways. The three games issue will become one if the 2 next games aren't priced as expansions, and if they aren't nothing is forcing me to buy them. I played the hell out of Warcraft3, but never bought the expansion for instance.

There has been NO talk of subscription for Battlenet (for SC2 anyways) at the moment, I seriously doubt they will go that route. 

... is so 2003, seriously. You are buying a maintained and constantly developed and evolving service, not a static game. 

nyah!

My productivity has just gone up 50% =) 

50%? 

Now get Vondur to delete it! 

You are buying a maintained and constantly developed and evolving service, not a static game

And if we were actually discussing an MMO game that might almost be approaching a valid point... 

But EVE Online has some of the best stories I think I've ever seen in an MMO.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/100/1002527p1.html 

i always felt that eve had hit on something quite good. while it doesn't appeal to as many people as wow, having never played eve, it seems to me as if the developers can take a much more 'hands off' approach. blizzard is constantly working with the next expansion in the pipeline because WoW is content driven whereas eve gives the player more of a framework to work with and pits players against each other.

a game that could apply eve's model but also break into the casual market like wow could be amazing.
the important thing here would be to make sure people know that it's the players who write the story, not the devs. 

http://armorgames.com/play/4137/giraffe-attack 

Doesn't feel suitably giraffe and I can't dodge fast enough.

0.4/pi 

Giraffe-y even.

You know, that guy in charge of Libya 

So anyone played this?
It's really good, very fun gameplay, single player and coop.

Playing alone is a great platformer, mastering the characters is lots of fun.
Playing coop with 2 other people (on the same machine, no online coop =( ) turns it into more of a Little Big Planet experience, with lots of silly physics.

The game is really pretty too (just the 2D character art is a bit average). 

which includes sonic3, sonic and knuckles, and sonic3 & knuckles are the only other games i really play besides quake

...just moving a certain thread down a certain page 

http://www.shatteredhorizon.com/teaser/1/teaser.html

Looks interesting :) 

could be good aye, but this lame ass trailer shows nothing. oh wait... multiplayer only, and no gravity. damn. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP0FuiScbh4&NR=1

This is the game I am dumping WOW for, I am in the closed beta and the game is ace. 

teasers/trailers 

http://www.casualcollective.com/#games/TSG_Missions 

needs to be set aside to play through HL2 and Ep1? 

Don't want to set aside an allotment of time to play them, trust me. You're going to waste lots of time playing with the physics, experimenting with different ways to kill enemies, looking at pretty stuff and driving like a prick.

Make sure to play ep2 as well. 

dont have ep2 yet, have had hl2 and ep1 sitting around for ages since sleepwalker kindly gifted them to me.

unfortunately, I thought that might be the case (wasting lots of time doing various stuff) from what I had read, but I just dont have that time right now. maybe I'll put it off till the end of the year when i get some time off and am not overseas. 

is pretty short. i think maybe 8-9 hours? 

So after which level exactly does it stop feeling mediocre and boring?