Making some changes to improve formatting and brevity. :)

True Blood 04x07

* A pretty good episode, I actually enjoyed it more than most of the season even with all of the new supernatural ghost stuff.
* I skip past all of the adult oriented scenes, so I hope I didn't miss any important dialogue that advanced the story.. I probably didn't though.
* Spoilers for Jessica, if you wanted to know if she survives or not. She was left out of the Episode 8 promo on purpose but she's scheduled to appear in the next 5 episodes leading up to the finale, so yeah - she lives. I'm none too fond of True Blood's cliff hangers that they insist on putting into every episode.. "oh man, Pam is going to kill Tara!"
* In the next episode, Jason will probably run towards the door and throw himself onto her, thereby pushing her back into the house. Of course, Jessica will be too strong for him and vampires can't be knocked unconscious so the only way to stop her is if the spell suddenly stops. Unless the writers get stupid. Anyways, Jason will save her life and Bill will forever be grateful to him.

Falling Skies 01x09

* A filler episode where they suddenly find the aliens weakness (as expected) right before the final episode.
* I was hoping that they would delay this discovery until next season when they'll finally take down a tower or find out what it's really for.
* The first entire season should have been more about survival and hiding, rather than all of the internal domestic matters.
* There was also the sudden introduction of a "stereotypical solder who only follows blind orders" storyline.

Falling Skies 01x10

* The season finale was very disappointing.
* Rick was clinging to the walls like Spiderman, but they did something a little smart in this scene. They made sure that the ceiling was cement tiled to show that it was a solid surface. If for example, he had been clinging from a suspended ceiling.. it would have been quite an amazing feat.

One thing they missed though. The ceiling in the room was actually drywall, but they changed it to cement tiling for the Spiderman scene. Oops. :)


* To further exacerbate Rick's "clingy" nature, he suddenly breaks down into fake tears and bad acting when he's rejected by the aliens. Now he suddenly misses his father? They really need to get rid of Rick, he can't possibly make it more obvious he'll betray everyone again.
* I was disappointed to learn that the harness is actually mutating the humans. I was hoping they wouldn't make it into a cliche, but they did. Maybe some improvement to the human form, mostly internal.. but they're taking it too far like every other scifi story. The reason the harness is used on the younger generation is because their minds are more malleable at a younger age. Older harnessed humans require more direct mental control and concentration (which is where those new aliens come into play.)
* There was more and more preaching about past history from the professor, and more stories about successful tactics from history. This was after the same writers also explained that the aliens were different and not anything like humans, so normal human tactics would not work.
* The drug abusing Captain Weaver goes off on a suicide mission, everyone follows along for some reason knowing that it's a trap and heavily fortified and knowing their outmatched, and they let all of the soldiers get killed so that there's no one left protecting the civilians. Not a very effective strategy.
* The reason for this? They couldn't live with themselves if they didn't try. Come. On.
* They also found a silly way to defeat their enemies... radio signals. They had a scene straight out of "Mars Attacks!". It was difficult to watch.
* The final ending was even more ridiculous and a very bad cliffhanger. It demonstrated to me that the writers have no direction whatsoever and that really concerns me for next season. It's like every episode was written on the seat of their pants.
* The aliens apparently have no concept of resistance or don't understand why the humans are resisting. If that was the case, why did they attack, destroy key cities, strategically target certain locations and groups, and use standard war tactics? For heavens sake, all of their strategies were used in the anticipation of heavy resistance!
* Tom just walks off with the evil enemy for no good reason.
* They revealed way too much too soon and it was just shoddy and lazy writing.

Here's an awesome tip for single-players who are interested in cashing in and leveling quickly.

* Diablo 3 is a one-time cost and there are no monthly fees.
* There is a party limit of 4, and the game is designed for the more difficult encounters to be handled by 4 people.
* Each player has their own drop modifiers for personal drops and magic finds. There will be group drops and personal drops for each player in the group.
* When playing in co-op, you kill faster and there's much better loot available.

The tip? MULTI-BOXING!

And you only need to buy a maximum of 4 copies!

With your own party of 4 and in your own game instances, you can level faster and get better loot than most of the competition. All of your characters can stack on top of each other too and they don't all require varying locations in combat. :)

Blizzard has no problem with this, it's not against the rules and is widely used in World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs.

With a powerful enough PC, you should be able to get away with this on a single PC. Each Diablo window, though, might require lower graphics settings. It will take a while for the Diablo 3 retail price to drop too, so this is something you need to decide whether to do right in the beginning or not.

There's still 4-5 months to go, so take this time to research and prepare. :)

Some links to get you started; What is Multiboxing, Dual-boxing.com Forums, MMOWNED Forums

If you guys know of any other good starter sites, let me know. I'll write more about this in the future too as this is probably what I'll be doing.

This is a continuation of the RMT discussion, but on the subject of botting.

Remember that the decision to implement RMT into Diablo 3 was not an easy one. Blizzard, not Activision, makes these decisions and they're not made lightly. They're thoroughly researched, well thought out, considered, and all angles investigated.

EVP Rob Pardo said that they were "thinking about the trading game for a while" and one of the reasons for doing this was because of the changing landscape of games, the different business models, and it "benefits the players, provides more entertainment, is more fun".

So, you can assume that Blizzard already knows the following;

* In black marketing trading, the two traders are known to each other. The trade is made knowingly, meaning that both accounts are susceptible to banning.
* The Cash Auction House is anonymous.
* If a player buys a new character on the CAH that was botted, they have plausible deniability. Meaning that the receiver of the botted character is free of disciplinary action.
* If a player buys an item gained through exploitation, the same. (Item duping, speed hacking, and teleporting will happen.)
* These are all immediate and final sales. The innocent receiver cannot be banned, only the guilty seller.

Under the old system, buyers and sellers alike work through blackmarket websites and there are systems in place to monitor shady dealings like transferring ownership of B.NET accounts.

Under the new system, there is only a monitoring system for catching the guilty seller. A cheater could sell 40 accounts before they get caught, but Blizzard can't just reclaim those accounts since most of them could have been in use for several months after purchase. The same is true for duped items or loot gained through exploitation.. several days or weeks after the sale, Blizzard can't just repossess them or rollback the account to weeks past. It wouldn't be fair.

Repossession or rollbacks of ill-gotten gains could only happen fairly if it happens within hours or a couple days at most. And that's after a full investigation is completed.

Blizzard would know all of this.. ie, that people will be "legitimately" playing botted-accounts or using items gained through exploitation.

So really, this is a method of almost legitimizing botting. :) Sales are immediate and final, and the buyer of the botted account or exploited gold can't be punished. It's a long process before the seller is caught, so the legit gold selling system and enforced anonymity permits this to happen and Blizzard should know this.

Not only that, but the new Auction House system makes botting much easier. In World of Warcraft, botters would need to travel back to cities to sell items or manually list on the Auction House. This is no longer the case. Players can now open the auction house interface from anywhere in the game to sell items. That is a huge advantage for botters.. I can't even begin to describe how amazingly great this is for botters and farmers. So far, things are getting much easier for botting and not more difficult.

On a side note, I've seen that a lot of people are defending the implementation of RMT by saying that "it's already happened." They forget, though, that it was a blackmarket and there's a ton of high risk involved from both the seller and Blizzard. Not only that, but it was only used by a small percentage of players. It's like going from 5% of subscribers on the blackmarket to 80% of subscribers in the new legit system. There's no comparison here, and you can't say "well, it's already been happening and players pay to win already.."

Personally speaking, I'm not for or against RMT officially, I'm just detailing what's happening and what will happen. I'll be playing the RMT system though for entertainment purposes.. I can see the negatives and positives, and I'll just personally weigh accordingly as I experiment with it.

Internet first! Well, it's not anything to really brag about since there aren't actually any real Diablo 3 gold guides out there yet (it's all just simple guesswork and guides on what might make money.. like "farm mobs"). :)

This however is a cool approach that not many people know about or even consider as a gold making technique but it works.

And, the strategy is sheer elegance in its simplicity; character name auctions!

* People will be playing this game for years to come, so it's vital to get a great name as soon as possible.
* The regional servers allow you to create 10 Hero names. I would recommend that you create one for yourself and 9 others for selling purposes. Don't waste your time playing the game right away, just try to reserve 9 of the best names you can.
* Even better if you have multiple accounts.
* Remember that these regional servers are not like WoW. In WoW, you're competing with 40-60,000 other players for names per realm and it's possible to have the same name on multiple realms. In Diablo 3, it's one server for potentially millions of players. Character names will be an extremely rare commodity.
* So far, Blizzard has not announced a new ID based naming convention. For example; Diablo3_Char_Name.AccountID. If this was the case, you'd probably see a half-million Legolas's running around.
* It's more likely you'll see a lot of xXxDestroy3rxXx naming conventions.

You could try and sell these names right away, but I would recommend holding onto them until the naming pool dries up and their value increases.

The new Cash Auction House is region wide, meaning that your Character Auction will be visible to millions of players. And the characters name will be important in their decision to purchase.

(On a side note; buying a bad character name encourages you to change it's name. So, it's in Blizzards best interest to not allow post-auction name changes and force users to use their paid services.)

Selecting character names ahead of time should be a pretty easy process for you. You'll want fantasy centric names, names similar to Diablo key-players, simple or short words, aggressive language, and real names. Short names are more valuable, and they must not contain special characters.

Remember that internal Diablo names will be reserved, so don't set your hopes too high for Deckard, Diablo, Tristram, Barbarian, Blizzard, etc. Blizzard, friends, and family will also have first pick of the litter before you. :)

Some names to get you started - Legolas, Aragorn, Frodo, Gandalf, Lich, Blood, Death, Killer, Jason, Timmy, Tim, Bob, Bruce, Glob, Ghost, Smite, Shock, Nope, Purple, Pink, Orange, Focus, Strength, Panda, Dyablo, Wicked, Nasty, Wild, Banker, Vendor, Frost, Awesome, Awesomesauce, etc.

Remember to make a list well ahead of time with all of your top choices and backups.

To get a good idea of popular names, search Google for "naming your wow character" or use WoW Armory to find out which names are used the most (and then compare to your own list to determine the most valuable ones).

tl;dr; Character names will be a highly valued commodity. Servers are regional/country based, whereas WoW had multiple realms per region, so you will be competing for awesome names against many more players.