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On August 03 2012 06:08 peacenl wrote:Blizzard is a business, the only reason they are pushing e-sports is to further their income. Spending the amount of time and effort they are into perfecting a product and keeping up servers for a game you only pay once for, is pretty unique in itself. Sure it helps their future sales, side events, products and their brandname. Spoiler for reality check, only read if you can deal with it  . + Show Spoiler +I won't say you're all spoiled, but you might want to rethink what's realy going on here and get used to the real world: where businesses are doing things for profit, not for planet or people. Bottom line: You've paid 50$ for a game, which gets updated, bugs get fixed and the whole game is balanced to perfection, sure they can mess up, but aren't we all being a tad unrealistic asking that a business with share holders needs to spend even more money on a game (meaning that it probably will never happen). I wouldn't waste my time on this, they will do as they please (or as long as their shareholders are pleased).
since they force us to use bnet 0.2 i think its legitimate to complain... giving no lan is a good reason too, they force us to play online on their plateform and they fail hard with it...
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On August 03 2012 06:15 sAsImre wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2012 06:08 peacenl wrote:Blizzard is a business, the only reason they are pushing e-sports is to further their income. Spending the amount of time and effort they are into perfecting a product and keeping up servers for a game you only pay once for, is pretty unique in itself. Sure it helps their future sales, side events, products and their brandname. Spoiler for reality check, only read if you can deal with it . + Show Spoiler +I won't say you're all spoiled, but you might want to rethink what's realy going on here and get used to the real world: where businesses are doing things for profit, not for planet or people. Bottom line: You've paid 50$ for a game, which gets updated, bugs get fixed and the whole game is balanced to perfection, sure they can mess up, but aren't we all being a tad unrealistic asking that a business with share holders needs to spend even more money on a game (meaning that it probably will never happen). I wouldn't waste my time on this, they will do as they please (or as long as their shareholders are pleased). since they force us to use bnet 0.2 i think its legitimate to complain... giving no lan is a good reason too, they force us to play online on their plateform and they fail hard with it...
i can't recall saying anything about legitimate things to complaining about, I'm not sure what you are on about here. I'm merely implying that odds are pretty high that you are wasting your time by persuing this approach. If you would stop buying the game because of this, or you could build a situation where Blizzard feels they never should do this again to continue their revenue, then yes you have a case. But complaining on a forum, not realy that effective is it? I wouldn't go so far to call you true activists until you created a Facebook page, sent in a community backed complaint letter or something, that will slightly hurt their reputation for making bug free games.
I, for starters, am all for such a thing. Because revenue is the only thing Blizzard listens to, as was said earlier, the only way to vote is with your wallet.
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On August 03 2012 06:11 TrippSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2012 04:54 Chef wrote:
Please inform yourself before you say things that make you look like an idiot. It is not my responsibility to catch you up on current events and the events of the past three years when you enter an argument in pure ignorance. I've kept up on things pretty well and nothing at all comes to mind. Quite frankly, I can't fathom anything that would make me think "awful human being" would be justified. IMO you look like an idiot for saying someone is an "awful human being" because he made a game you didn't like and said something you didn't like. Hardly seems like a compelling reason to hate someone on a personal level. That's a pretty fucked up outlook on life.
There's nothing wrong with making a terrible game. Selling it for $60 while fully aware that it's broken does make one an awful human being for doing business in a disgusting and despicable way.
That's why Kotick is an awful human being and Morhaime is one of his collaborators in running the business like dicks, with no consideration for the consumer.
It's true that a CEO's job is to please the investors, but when he's willing to treat his consumers like shit to increase his profit margin, yeah, he's a POS.
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Then don't buy anything from that POS.
Simple.
Then his investors won't be pleased, and he might start treating his consumers less like shit.
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As much as I agree with peacenl's sentiments, you have to realize that Blizzard is working in a different, privileged environment than most other publicly trading companies in their position. With Starcraft II they have a large captive audience of RTS players and RTS esports fans who have no-one else to turn to. Blizzard are the only major publisher to produce and support a traditional, Dune II style RTS out there and are not likely to have any competition in the near future or even beyond.
This means that they don't have to treat their customers as well as they normally would have to as they are offering a game in a vacuum. Blizzard are not looking over their shoulder thinking "Oh man we have X RTS to beat, they are offering feature A B C, that we don't have, we gotta step our game up!". Even with the advent of LoL, a pseudo MMO, which has stolen WoW's title of most played online game, Blizzard don't have a direct competitor to SC2 to worry about.
This all boils down to them being able to push an incomplete online environment, have questionable design decisions, kill off BW prematurely and treat their playerbase as a free, abusable QA team. I know that game take time to code, update and roll out features for but the glacial pace at which SC2 has developed in comparasion to its indirect competition in LoL and DoTA2 is a big indictment of whatever systems and process they have in place for delivering content. As great as the figureheads behind SC2, Browder, Kim and Morhaime appear to be in public, I have serious concerns with their steering of the Starcraft ship.
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I think sabatoging and then strong arming an entire functioning industry to adopt a much weaker and failing (in Korea TV) product, putting countless jobs of those working in that industry in jeopardy (from the basic functioning of the system to the players who may not transition well to the change) all for the sake of a few extra dollars now is pretty unethical.
I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level.
Blizzard are not looking over their shoulder thinking "Oh man we have X RTS to beat, they are offering feature A B C, that we don't have, we gotta step our game up!".
Except they were. Only it was their own game that they couldn't make as much money off of anymore. They couldn't have their new game living in its shadow, so they destroyed it. If it were another company's game and they somehow had the ability to destroy it still, they would do exactly the same. It is destructive rather than constructive business practice. You seek not to build something more amazing and more functional, but only to eliminate the competition. They took the people who built ESPORTS and their game from the ground up into something legitimate and basically said "LOL fuck you dopes, thanks," sued them, cannibalised what they worked on, and made a massive mess of everything. Some people justify this saying it's business, but those people are idiots. When you owe someone a decade of hard work and you return the favour by bossing them around and fucking up their lives, you're an awful person. A business is a collection of people making decisions, none of them feeling totally responsible because hey, a tonne of other people were involved too. But that doesn't make what these people do not awful.
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On August 03 2012 06:08 peacenl wrote:Blizzard is a business, the only reason they are pushing e-sports is to further their income. Spending the amount of time and effort they are into perfecting a product and keeping up servers for a game you only pay once for, is pretty unique in itself. Sure it helps their future sales, side events, products and their brandname. Spoiler for reality check, only read if you can deal with it . + Show Spoiler +I won't say you're all spoiled, but you might want to rethink what's realy going on here and get used to the real world: where businesses are doing things for profit, not for planet or people. Bottom line: You've paid 50$ for a game, which gets updated, bugs get fixed and the whole game is balanced to perfection, sure they can mess up, but aren't we all being a tad unrealistic asking that a business with share holders needs to spend even more money on a game (meaning that it probably will never happen). I wouldn't waste my time on this, they will do as they please (or as long as their shareholders are pleased).
I think we all know that we are spoiled; blizzard is doing a great job being present and updating their game. The issue is that they seem to have gotten worse at it. It feels as if we are dealing with a downgraded version of a company we love so much.
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On August 03 2012 07:11 Chef wrote:I think sabatoging and then strong arming an entire functioning industry to adopt a much weaker and failing (in Korea TV) product, putting countless jobs of those working in that industry in jeopardy (from the basic functioning of the system to the players who may not transition well to the change) all for the sake of a few extra dollars now is pretty unethical. I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level. Show nested quote +Blizzard are not looking over their shoulder thinking "Oh man we have X RTS to beat, they are offering feature A B C, that we don't have, we gotta step our game up!". Except they were. Only it was their own game that they couldn't make as much money off of anymore. They couldn't have their new game living in its shadow, so they destroyed it. If it were another company's game and they somehow had the ability to destroy it still, they would do exactly the same. It is destructive rather than constructive business practice. You seek not to build something more amazing and more functional, but only to eliminate the competition.
Just to clarify, I completely agree with you, Blizzard are an utterly horrible company in their handling of BW in Korea. I stiill follow SC2 esports because of the people involved.
Blizzard had the biggest opportunity, the biggest fucking opportunity imaginable, to work with KeSPA and the teams and the players to create an amazing new esport game to continue the incredible legacy of BW. They could have interfaced with the finest RTS minds on the planet (coaches as well) who truly understood the game at a deep level. They could have talked it out with KeSPA, an organisation, for all its flaws, managed to sustain the most spectacular scene in the world at a financial level. I'm sure by in meeting with the companies backing KeSPA, big corporations, clearly invested in BW, SC2 could have been built from the ground up to provide some sort of win-win for both sides (imagine integrating the teams directly inside of the client, you could have STX themed Zerg, T1 themed Terran, tutorials from the coaches and players, ads for the companies arrghhhh so much more possible).
No Blizzard essentially harbored an enormous grudge against KeSPA and the PC Bangs, possibly the only two things keeping their fucking game alive so long and proceeded to fuck them both over. Ridiculous requirements for new accounts and Battle.net 0.2 meant SC2 was dead on arrival in PC Bangs. As soon as they got any sort of leverage over KeSPA and suddenly realized that no-one in Korea really cared about SC2 they murdered BW in cold blood, forced KeSPA to implement the hideous Dual game Starleague and had the arrogance to say that SC2 was the only game built from the ground up to be an esport. Now LoL, a game that I have a hard time respecting, despite its clear appeal and success, is the new BW and it is pretty much Blizzards fault.
They wasted SC2 in Korea. Fuck them.
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On August 03 2012 07:27 Klonere wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2012 07:11 Chef wrote:I think sabatoging and then strong arming an entire functioning industry to adopt a much weaker and failing (in Korea TV) product, putting countless jobs of those working in that industry in jeopardy (from the basic functioning of the system to the players who may not transition well to the change) all for the sake of a few extra dollars now is pretty unethical. I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level. Blizzard are not looking over their shoulder thinking "Oh man we have X RTS to beat, they are offering feature A B C, that we don't have, we gotta step our game up!". Except they were. Only it was their own game that they couldn't make as much money off of anymore. They couldn't have their new game living in its shadow, so they destroyed it. If it were another company's game and they somehow had the ability to destroy it still, they would do exactly the same. It is destructive rather than constructive business practice. You seek not to build something more amazing and more functional, but only to eliminate the competition. Just to clarify, I completely agree with you, Blizzard are an utterly horrible company in their handling of BW in Korea. I stiill follow SC2 esports because of the people involved. Blizzard had the biggest opportunity, the biggest fucking opportunity imaginable, to work with KeSPA and the teams and the players to create an amazing new esport game to continue the incredible legacy of BW. They could have interfaced with the finest RTS minds on the planet (coaches as well) who truly understood the game at a deep level. They could have talked it out with KeSPA, an organisation, for all its flaws, managed to sustain the most spectacular scene in the world at a financial level. I'm sure by in meeting with the companies backing KeSPA, big corporations, clearly invested in BW, SC2 could have been built from the ground up to provide some sort of win-win for both sides (imagine integrating the teams directly inside of the client, you could have STX themed Zerg, T1 themed Terran, tutorials from the coaches and players, ads for the companies arrghhhh so much more possible). No Blizzard essentially harbored an enormous grudge against KeSPA and the PC Bangs, possibly the only two things keeping their fucking game alive so long and proceeded to fuck them both over. Ridiculous requirements for new accounts and Battle.net 0.2 meant SC2 was dead on arrival in PC Bangs. As soon as they got any sort of leverage over KeSPA and suddenly realized that no-one in Korea really cared about SC2 they murdered BW in cold blood, forced KeSPA to implement the hideous Dual game Starleague and had the arrogance to say that SC2 was the only game built from the ground up to be an esport. Now LoL, a game that I have a hard time respecting, despite its clear appeal and success, is the new BW and it is pretty much Blizzards fault. They wasted SC2 in Korea. Fuck them.
SC2 in a nutshell essentially. SO much wasted potential.
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On August 03 2012 01:16 Chef wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2012 00:53 Djzapz wrote:
Blizzard patches are actually buckshots. Patches are then applied (excruciatingly slowly) to correct the mess, while the players suffer. Blizzard's in a very cozy position as far as business goes, with a very strong playerbase of people who will buy HotS and LotV no matter what.
I'm usually driven by my principles, but I don't think I'll be able to keep myself from buying HotS even though now I loathe Blizzard for SC2 (which I can't get myself to like) and for D3, which is just a bad game. This patch just piles on.
I wouldn't care if it were any other company. I've never been a fan of anyone else. The suck is just more striking when it comes from a company which once was so great. o.o I want you to picture Mike Morhaime. Now I want you to picture giving him 70 bucks. Now I want you picture him spending it on something incredibly dumb, such as a latte. If you buy HotS you have just bought Mike Morhaime a 70 dollar latte. Please don't buy a game you don't even like so that you can support awful human beings....
Calling him an awful human being is a bit sensationalist.
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Sorry, i have t been playing sc2 for the past week cuz I'm moving around, do you mean 1.5 actually went live today?
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On August 03 2012 07:57 Brett wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2012 01:16 Chef wrote:On August 03 2012 00:53 Djzapz wrote:
Blizzard patches are actually buckshots. Patches are then applied (excruciatingly slowly) to correct the mess, while the players suffer. Blizzard's in a very cozy position as far as business goes, with a very strong playerbase of people who will buy HotS and LotV no matter what.
I'm usually driven by my principles, but I don't think I'll be able to keep myself from buying HotS even though now I loathe Blizzard for SC2 (which I can't get myself to like) and for D3, which is just a bad game. This patch just piles on.
I wouldn't care if it were any other company. I've never been a fan of anyone else. The suck is just more striking when it comes from a company which once was so great. o.o I want you to picture Mike Morhaime. Now I want you to picture giving him 70 bucks. Now I want you picture him spending it on something incredibly dumb, such as a latte. If you buy HotS you have just bought Mike Morhaime a 70 dollar latte. Please don't buy a game you don't even like so that you can support awful human beings.... Calling him an awful human being is a bit sensationalist.
DB: "Oh yeah BW is a good game and there is a scene about it. If you want BW, go play it."
and then Mike M came up and said: "Oh wait, but we killed it! Time to move one bitches!"
Awesome, awesome PR from Blizzard that makes everyone want to just puke all over the place.
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i think the solution is to end the monopoly blizzard has on the rts genre =\
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On August 03 2012 07:11 Chef wrote:
I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level.
100% true. Even without getting into the moral level, I don't understand why people say "well it's a business, what do you expect". Yes I know businesses want to maximize profit, do I give a fuck? As a consumer I want to maximize my utility. I have every right to complain if the business delivers a shitty product for my money.
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On August 03 2012 10:07 writer22816 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2012 07:11 Chef wrote:
I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level.
100% true. Even without getting into the moral level, I don't understand why people say "well it's a business, what do you expect". Yes I know businesses want to maximize profit, do I give a fuck? As a consumer I want to maximize my utility. I have every right to complain if the business delivers a shitty product for my money.
Agreed. Bottom line for all us Blizzard haters (now) is that, we all know that they made great games, they had much more resources, time, and whatever was needed to do something close to that, instead they produced something that was not what the loyal customers have come to expect of the company which is why we the customers feel cheated out. I for one have stopped buying Blizzard games automatically and hope that many who also feel cheated to do the same (though I imagine many have already taken this path)
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Shoutout to all the haters these days, getting really tired of these flamefests on TL:
There are two central things that you're afraid to admit because it reveals a weakness in your character, but you lack the authority to speak your opinions with the ferocity that you do because of the weakness of your argument AND you lack the integrity to put anything on the line because you deal your arguments out in anonymity.
It really is that simple.
You're trying to convince the rest of the forum that you have something valuable to say by flaming Blizzard about decisions that they make/made when you have no details of what actually took place. Furthermore, you're able to continue to whine and complain and make half truths seem substantive because no one is able to call you out and create any consequences for your behavior. You have no choice in the matter if you want to participate in an online forum, but you have a choice in how you behave given the fact that no one will put any serious limits on your behavior. Self-moderation and self-responsibility used to mean something around here - maybe I'm just older and more cynical but fucking christ you guys are annoying.
Newsflash - unless your posts have something of value to add to a discussion in a factual sense, agreeing with the 20 previous posters who piled on venomous comment after comment is a waste of time for yourself and everyone else in the world who has to wade through that filth.
I realize nothing I say here will make any impression on you, but if one of you people stops to think about what you're doing before you type then maybe I haven't wasted the last 5 minutes of my time.
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Canada11607 Posts
On August 03 2012 00:59 IntoTheWow wrote:
You know why this didn't affect other games in the past? because if a patch was buggy, people could just not patch in tournaments and use LAN.
lol.
On August 02 2012 19:17 MasterOfChaos wrote:
Blizzard's patch record is pretty bad. Remember patch 1.16? Many simply stayed on 1.15.3, and everybody else hacked their game so it didn't suck that much. Or the ladder features around 1.14? Delayed forever, then released broken, poor WGT. Solution: Custom server + old version, then it doesn't matter how much blizzard fucks up their patches.
Therein lies the problem and why it's not surpising that people get quite upset about this sort of thing. Blizzard chose to shoulder the burden themselves when they didn't need to. With Battlenet 0.2, they have more control, which means the customer is even more reliant upon the company to be our nanny and fix stuff. We need to beg and plead to fix maps, change maps on the ladder and now we have to sit on our hands and wait for them to fix the errors in patches.
Blizzard should be held to a higher standard then the past because they took away many things the community used to do on the claim that they could do it better. When it isn't better, they should know because there used to be ways to get around these things when gamers had more control.
I still have on my computer that program that allows you to change to any patch version of bw you wanted.
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On August 03 2012 11:29 Fzero wrote:
Shoutout to all the haters these days, getting really tired of these flamefests on TL:
There are two central things that you're afraid to admit because it reveals a weakness in your character, but you lack the authority to speak your opinions with the ferocity that you do because of the weakness of your argument AND you lack the integrity to put anything on the line because you deal your arguments out in anonymity.
It really is that simple.
You're trying to convince the rest of the forum that you have something valuable to say by flaming Blizzard about decisions that they make/made when you have no details of what actually took place. Furthermore, you're able to continue to whine and complain and make half truths seem substantive because no one is able to call you out and create any consequences for your behavior. You have no choice in the matter if you want to participate in an online forum, but you have a choice in how you behave given the fact that no one will put any serious limits on your behavior. Self-moderation and self-responsibility used to mean something around here - maybe I'm just older and more cynical but fucking christ you guys are annoying.
Newsflash - unless your posts have something of value to add to a discussion in a factual sense, agreeing with the 20 previous posters who piled on venomous comment after comment is a waste of time for yourself and everyone else in the world who has to wade through that filth.
I realize nothing I say here will make any impression on you, but if one of you people stops to think about what you're doing before you type then maybe I haven't wasted the last 5 minutes of my time.
That's funny though. You consider us haters because we and many other people feel like Blizzard's behavior has been bad, and their games have been underwhelming. Plenty of good arguments have been brought forward and you choose to ignore them.
I'm not a douchebag and you're more than welcome to like Blizzard and their games, but don't be condescending to those of us that disagree with you. You call us haters, and by essentially denying us the right to complain, I think it's fair to say that you're a mindless fanboy. If anything in this forum is "filth" as you call it, it's people like you who use ridiculous language like "fucking christ you guys are annoying" and "newsflash" and "factual sense" (lol what).
The internet has gotten to the point where you can't even bring up legitimate criticisms of anything or some guy with no conception of ambiguity will barge in and pretend that everything is fine and we should just appreciate everything or shut up.
Women have rights today because they stood up even though other people disagreed. And I bet they were really annoying to simpletons too.
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Yeah, except the people in my business (software development) don't listen to shit like this because you have no idea what it takes to make these patches happen. You have no idea what it takes to test video games, you have no idea what it takes to edit code that has been worked on by hundreds of different people. You don't know that when your tester finds a bug it doesn't mean it gets fixed. You don't know that when your lead designer decides it isn't worth your time to fix something, it doesn't make the cut for the patch. You don't realize that your biggest complaints have no weight with the people who make decisions because they don't have the same goals as you.
If you want to make a difference you need to make an argument that has value to the organization because you're appealing to their goals as a company, their department, their personal interests. If you're doing anything else, you're speaking nonsense to a group of eager participants.
All I'm saying is that you guys are out to get the big bad blizzard when the people writing the code to fix the issues that you're complaining about probably did nothing wrong. The testers who let the bug slip through probably caught it a day too late to make the cut. The producer probably had to decide that the one fix you most cared about needed 3 more days to fine tune.
Shit goes wrong guys, we just don't need the endless 'blog' posts about KESPA and how they failed in Korea and all this other stuff that has nothing to do with anything anytime someone breaks a line of code. It's filth and you know it.
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Well this whole conversation also slipped into "all things blizzard do that we don't like". I think D3 is pretty representative of some of the bad things that have happened.
Anyway I have to get going. Cheers.
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EPT
