Celebration that a third Fallout was happening at all was in incredibly short supply.

Maybe because it wasn’t, and maybe because now it never will?

Instead of that we got a mediocre game with flashes of both retardation and gaming quite goodness. After years of incredibly disheartening information given to the press the angry people were expecting simply a horrible game, so their expectations were ultimately exceded upon release, thus reducing the hate.

It’s still postapoc Oblivion TC with guns, hamfisted fallout references (seriously, they’re so forced and out of place that the game would’ve been better without them), some skillchecks and enough mutilated bodies to call it goreporn though, so extreme lowering of expectations was pretty much the only way for it to not dissapoint.

And here’s a question: I tried it out, and found it didn’t do anything for me, so I deleted it. Do you think that makes me a good guy? Or should I repent by purchasing this thing I don’t want?

As I said at the time, the distasteful thing about the argument was how hard people were debating over what was effectively whether there were five pints of blood by the corpse, or only four and a half. Hell – maybe there is only half a pint. Blood spreads around a lot, you know…

At the risk of being branded an AIM, what I found worth debating there was not whether it was 4.5 or 5 pints, but simply “do we *know* how many pints it is? Can we find out?”
The question wasn’t +-0.5 pints, it was pretty much +- infinity. The numbers *could* be wrong by any margin, because they failed to take into account some pretty obvious factors. There could have been a total of 0.001 pint, or there could even have been 20 pints. No one knew, because they hadn’t measured it (yet). All we had was a guess based on incomplete data. And I fail to see why it is then wrong to point out this missing data and say that it invalidates your conclusions. It does. You can’t conclude anything if you don’t have data to back it up.

The argument was simply “Is it ok to claim that there were five pints of blood by the corpse when we haven’t actually looked at the blood by the corpse?”.

And I think it’s a bit sad to see that anyone who questioned the initial 90% figure are now being branded as “a member of the piracy-is-a-victimless-crime brigade”.

It was never a question of 90% vs 82%. It was a question of “a basically random guess” vs 82%. I think the former is useless, while the latter is very interesting, and actually sheds some light on just how bad piracy is on PC.
I don’t like piracy any more than you do, which is why I thought it was worthwhile to try to uncover the *real* number.

Don’t you think a 82% piracy rate based on real data is a lot scarier than a 90% rate based on made up guesswork? I do. In the same way that knowing that it’s a bit more helpful to perform the forensic analysis and find out that the guy actually died from blood loss, rather than merely seeing that “there’s something red nearby”, and then concluding that “he must have been stabbed through the heart with a kitchen knife at least 6 inches long by a tall dark person with sunglasses who smoked a cheap brand of cigarettes and lisped.

And it’s a sad day when this can get someone branded as “a member of the piracy-is-a-victimless-crime brigade”. Does that make me an AIM?

I’ll take Zoey.