All Give and No Take
Microsoft, I’m quite happy that you feel the need to shove lots of money at me every couple of weeks. Seriously, I have no problem with that. I’d just guess that when I want to give you back some of the money in the form of buying points on Xbox Live, you might want to take it. However, rejecting my credit card because of an authorization problem isn’t really helping that cause much. Steam will take it, Stardock will take it, so why not you?
Tomorrow I might go back to PAX, but likely I’ll spend most of my time playing in the open beta of Aion (this is, assuming, the servers can manage to stay up). I would think that NCSoft would have the beta process down pretty well by now so I have high hopes, but since the open beta only lasts for a week, I want to take advantage of the time I have to play it and start “learning” the game before I then have to play through all of the newbie zones again in another couple weeks. Fortunately I’ve seen just about everything there is at PAX aside from the panels going on tomorrow, so I don’t feel like I’d be missing out on much by taking the day off. You can totally put money on the fact that I’ll be there again next year, however.