[Fyron]

1. The hostility to those of us who are not thrilled with Se5 is real. I have almost stopped posting here because of it.

Again, I don't really see it... Who is being hostile? Where?

Jeku said:
Ads have been showing up in games for *years*.

So? It was despicable then, it is despicable now. Luckily, I have never had the misfortune of buying a game with ads in it... Don't even want to think about how hard it would be to return such tripe. :-\

It's not like you have to sit through a commercial-- it's non-obtrusive. You pay for your cable TV every month but you still have commercials--- what do you do about that?

I don't watch TV. If I did, I would set up a DVR that let me skip ads (probably have to be a HTPC). But that's not the same thing anyways; you don't pay for each show, just a general connection service. Channels that you actually pay for have no ads (eg: HBO, Cinemax), other than the short spot between shows/movies telling you what else is on the channel. Paid download for episodes of shows don't include ads either (at least, the ones I've read about).

Broadcast TV is free, so being ad-supported is one thing. But a video game is most certainly not free... Even the ability to connect to multi-player servers is not free, because you have to buy the game (and expansions in some cases) to be able to do so. If they want to provide the _entire_ thing for free (like broadcast TV), then maybe, just maybe, they can make it ad-supported. Charge for the service, AND put in ads? Despicable. It's reminiscent of AOHell...