quitthegame

A. That's irrelevant to my point. (That being that the comic is about someone who's about to retire not caring about long-term projects, but bot-busting is a long term type project) B. If you think the free game has been a shit heap for a long time, then why do you care enough about f2p high scores to make a poll about it? Normally shit heaps don't have high scores, at least not on any of the farms I've seen them at.

I'd say it's not working all that effectively or (time-effectively), and never was, something that they have admitted was true and repeatedly said that's why they needed to develop the bot nuke. I'm not a database expert but I believe the issue there is input/output speed and cpu limits, not storage limits. Pretty sure about that. No one I know ingame seems to care, these forums self-select interested parties to respond. Obviously they're releasing the faq so they're getting more flak than they anticipated. Enough to make them change their mind, not yet. Quy's thoughts on the matter were similar to mine, it's just that I feel like writing "It's a bunch of obvious spin" says the same thing and is much faster :P And I suppose, the difference is that I didn't expect any better of them. From a friend, one demands honesty. From a company, I'll settle for actions > words, and botnuke/dice ban outweigh this string of deceptions by a long shot for me. If you feel otherwise, go play LoL, I hear Riot is pretty cool. (I.e., they haven't been bought out yet, but they will be eventually, so don't get too attached there either)

Yes, but what is being spun? What is the real reason for the update, if the stated reason is just spin? That's what no one is talking about, therefore the spin worked. To lessen the shock of the game going to a pay-only model? Only one I can think of, honest. off the top of my head, reasons could be. 1. as stated, to remove bots from hiscores. 2. to save money, large databases get expensive and go up more than linearly with size, a problem worsened by the third party fansites that make large numbers of automated queries. 3. to encourage people to go p2p. 4. to lessen the shock of going pay-only in the future. 5. part of a market research test as they're deciding how the f2p/p2p divide will be handled in stellar dawn. or some combination of those 5. It's likely not a coincidence that bot busting/dice nuking/f2p hiscore bombing all happened within a month of each other. They could well have had them all planned, and then now are launching them all at once for a reason. What is that reason? (To put it another way--why did they wait to implement dice nuking and f2p hiscore nuking until after bot busting was finished?) You could interpret it another way, that the community response to bot busting was "ok, dicing next", and then the f2p highscores change is a money saving tactic. But at least consider the possibility that the three were grouped for a reason I agree that jagex announcements contain a TON of spin, and the amount of time people spend complaining about how illogical those annoucements are is, well, completely illogical, as they're obviously spin to begin with.

Yes, but what is being spun? What is the real reason for the update, if the stated reason is just spin? That's what no one is talking about, therefore the spin worked.

Change "fire r&d" to "stop free game" and it might make more sense. No, it still contradicts the bot busting software.

@sees_all1: If that were true, then why develop the bot busting software? You're not presenting a coherent narrative.

The question should have read: Are you, as a paying member, willing to continue subsidizing the cost not only of free servers but also extras like the server costs of f2p hiscore lookups and f2p forum access, as obviously the free players aren't paying for those themselves? Would you rather have membership fees increased to continue to pay for f2p, or just cut some services for f2p? I believe this to be a more accurate summation of the actual choices Jagex was considering, cut costs or raise membership prices, based on my use of common sense. A. Yes, I know there's no actual way to limit the poll here to only RS members, it's rhetorical. B. I know people are going to say "but the server cost of hiscores is small." Who here knows the exact cost? No one. Is this the only cost-cutting measure Jagex implemented recently? No. C. I'm don't really know much about databases, but I do know that 1. query times don't go up linearly with database size, but at a higher factor, depending on type of query. 2. The growing phenomenon of automatic trackers that make mass queries of Jagex system for contests and whatnot are obviously adding a ton of server load. So, what if the real choice here is either Jagex spends a bunch of mod time totally redesigning the highscores interface to break all those trackers, or they just remove all those who aren't currently members, both saving mod time and leaving those trackers working for now? Now what do people vote for? I'm just throwing some random scenarios out there, but I think it's pretty clear that people are voting based on ignorance. This isn't RSOF, at least take some time to consider the possible real motives behind actions before condemning them.

Seriously, grab a dictionary, look up gambling, then come back here. Even the stock market, no matter how well you study the ins and outs of it, is still gambling. Giving it a softer term like "investing" does not remove the risk aspect. Same goes when you "wager" on sporting events. Doesn't matter how well you know the stats of the teams. The most you do is mitigate the risk, not remove it. Yet, it's still called gambling all the same. If you can't understand a simple concept like gambling, it's best you remove yourself from the conversation. Under certain definitions, nearly everything in life is a gamble, building nukes, joining the marines, picking a career, driving a car, etc. "to take a chance on; venture; risk: I'm gambling that our new store will be a success. " Under another definition: "1. to play at any game of chance for money or other stakes. " "game of chance   noun a game in which the outcome is determined by chance rather than by the skill of its players, as roulette. " According to that definition, neither poker nor (most forms of) staking are gambling. Apparently it's time for you to remove yourself from the conversation.

If you want to find micro-transactions, just go look at every "Free" game that they compare F2P runescape to. It's a business, they're going to either add inducements to switch to P2P, or add in pay2win micros. One or the other. (Or both, in the worst case scenario) If they stuck with their business model from 2004, they'd be bought out by a competitor who modernized and then that competitor would institute the pay2win instead.

"F2P is both an early showcase for the game and under-served. " That's not a contradiction. The contradiction was the things I quoted last post. " If the early showcase for the game is so boring that there's nothing better to do than cheat, then there's the problem. " That simply doesn't make sense to me, boring games are for not playing, not for cheating at. There are a lot of other "free" mmos coming out that are technically free, but have pay2win features. Is that what you've been hinting at with your Reznor links, that Jagex should improve F2P and fund it with XP potions and 20 dollar armor sets? So many RS players are against pay2win, but then you see people compare RS to a "free" pay2win game like LoL, etc. But if you're not for pay2win freemium models, then what were you getting at before? If you're going to glorify Reznor's attempt to monetize in a new way, you've got to be for some kind of new monetization of RS, right? I guess I'm not getting what you're saying with respect to the early game being 'uninteresting' either. The early game isn't grindy compared to the late game. I spent virtually all of the double weekend in one place, doing waterfiends in the chaos tunnels. That's much more grindy than anything I did in my first few weeks in the game. It seems to me that even if Jagex took your advice and revamped gameplay, they'd be better served to start with end-game members content for skillers, satisfied customers are the best recruitment tool for new customers in the MMO market. Edit: Today's removal of f2p highscores is exactly the kind of thing I was predicting in my earlier post--Jagex is going to keep trying things to convert F2P to P2P, first double xp weekend only for members, now this, who knows what will be next? They have obviously decided F2P is no longer worth supporting as it once was, so I'm afraid your points are falling on deaf ears atm.

Right, and in that article it says "Late last year, he also experimented with offering free downloads for an album he produced with Saul Williams. While he admitted he was a bit "disheartened" that not that many people paid for the album,..." Thus, while it's an interesting example you give, it certainly doesn't show that the "fear" that no one will purchase the more expensive option is an unreasonable fear. He's still experimenting with different methods, just like Jagex is experimenting with different allocations of content for their free demo, and their full version. Since Jagex has been offering free content for much longer than Trent Reznor, I do have to question your point in mentioning him. He's just doing what Jagex did first, after all. In a world where people in my neighborhood pay large amounts of cash for bottled water, despite the fact the the tap water where I live is has been shown by scientific studies to be superior to most bottled water (all water comes from somewhere, a fancy price tag doesn't make bottled water better than where it's sourced, and our tap water is sourced from a pristine mountain glacier outflow), it's pretty apparent that getting people to pay for premium products isn't so simple as just measuring the quality of your premium product, or even comparing it to the quality of the free product you're competing with. Ok, your main point is that F2P is an early showcase for the game. But, your article said things like this: "F2P is an under-served fanbase. There hasn't been much new content for them in quite a while, and what they do have isn't exactly entertaining....It isn't a cheap solution: start investing into the free version of the game. Offering updates that help balance gameplay in F2P, or alternative ways of training skills, could entice more players to stick around, allowing them to enjoy the game they're playing." This is asking for more content for long-term F2P players, and has little to do with your paragraph above about early showcasing, except that it contradicts it.

That's a strange example, I literally don't know a single person IRL who still buys CDs, and every CD store I used to frequent when I was but a lad has closed down. If that's your counterexample, I don't think you'll win many people over. Your second paragraph sounds exactly like the current situation with Runescape, so while I can't disagree with it, it doesn't really go anywhere. Here's the central issue. It's Jagex's game, they're trying to give the proper amount of attention to F2P to maximize their profits over time. If they were considering changing it, which should they give more attention to--the small % of RS players who are devoted enough to RS to write long forum posts or editorials, but not devoted enough to spend 5 quid a month; or scientifically conducted market research? And if they were conducting said market research, would they conduct tests like adding in special weekends only for members to see how many F2P players converted for it? Hmm...unless you have another theory for the double weekend we just had, than that they're taking advantage of the low numbers of bots to conduct market research with fewer confounds.

Broadly speaking, you have four options: A. Baldly state that it's undesirable to have such a level of rhetoric in an article, which statement, lacking any accompanying evidence or argument, becomes rhetoric itself--which is pretty much what I called you on here. Even phrasing it mildly, such as "It's a good article, but for my own personal standards, I prefer less rhetoric"--still ends up being a self-contradictory rhetorical statement. B. State that it contains a given amount of rhetoric, without making any positive or negative associations based upon that whatsoever. Of course, this lacks a certain amount of impact, but that's the entire point of the division between rhetoric and logic...rhetoric is the art of achieving impact briefly, which is pretty much antithetical to logical methods. C. Respond to every instance of rhetoric with a 3 page essay on why logic is superior. I suppose you could provide that in a link form, which is still a bit crank-ish but at least more compact. D. Refrain from pointing out that essays that contain rhetoric do in fact contain rhetoric, applying the common sense rule that anyone who would object to rhetoric in the essay might reasonably be expected to be perfectly able to discern it for themselves. Since you asked--personally in an informal forum such as this one, I'd go with option D. If you go with options B or C for everyone who uses rhetoric for a non-deceitful emotional effect or merely as a shortcut, then you run into the 'boy-who-cried-wolf' problem when it's finally most appropriately used against a real troll. Of course in a more formal setting, option A becomes usable if the rules of the setting preclude rhetoric. I would argue that many formal settings actually do not preclude it, although obviously many others do. Not only is it possible to argue such, but I've seen that argument thousands of times on the official forums. Moreover, I've seen J-Mods make that exact argument many times there as well, usually in reply to someone saying some subset of what was contained in Friday's article. More germanely perhaps; "Or worse - the same community that gave Jagex widespread success will turn their back, and find more compelling games to play." Did that already occur? I haven't been f2p for a long time, but based on those foggy recollections, I'd say yes. Can't say it seems like Jagex cares, either.

Amusingly, not only is referring to a quote containing one rhetorical device as "loaded with rhetoric" itself an example of hyperbolic rhetoric, but you're also arguing rhetorically by saying you don't like the quote due it containing a rhetorical device. That equates to a rhetorical slur on both the quote and a slur on rhetoric itself, so that your short quote contains 3 instances of rhetoric even as it denounces it. A disparity that I'm sure all those on this forum with a truly skeptical bent will keep in mind. I was meaning to say that the article was loaded with rhetoric, rather than the small quote - I should've taken that into account when pasting the quote. Then again, 'exaggeration/hyperbole' is open for debate in this context. I don't quite see your second point though, care to enlighten me? Well I don't want to simply repeat myself. Let's try to strip the rhetoric from your first clause, and leave only the relevant arguments. "I don't like this quote either, it's loaded with rhetoric" First we change it to "I don't like this quote either, it contains one rhetorical device." to remove the part you agree with above. Then, to strip the slurs out, we simply remove your unsupported slur of rhetoric, leaving us with "It contains one rhetorical device." (Technically it's unclear which is the primary and which is the secondary assertion here, but you've clearly rhetorically slurred both the quote and the idea of rhetoric itself. Compare to "I don't like Steve, he's a runescape player. I've clearly slurred both Steve and players of runescape with that rhetorical statement.) Now the clause is redundant, as your clause following the quote doesn't just tell us it contains one rhetorical device, but also names it specifically. So we can shrink your clause down to " ". That is to say, stripped of rhetoric its informational content becomes zero bits of information. So we see that your statement condemning rhetoric was itself purely rhetoric. Are you sufficiently enlightened yet?

Amusingly, not only is referring to a quote containing one rhetorical device as "loaded with rhetoric" itself an example of hyperbolic rhetoric, but you're also arguing rhetorically by saying you don't like the quote due it containing a rhetorical device. That equates to a rhetorical slur on both the quote and a slur on rhetoric itself, so that your short quote contains 3 instances of rhetoric even as it denounces it. A disparity that I'm sure all those on this forum with a truly skeptical bent will keep in mind.

The 'resources' article described a hypothetical world that was pretty much the way WoW has been for the past 4 years. So yes, there's obviously a market for it, not really the same market that RS is currently aimed at perhaps, and it would be taking RS from its own niche into a more competitive niche. Sounds like a bad idea to me.

"So I can derive from this post that you've all but missed my point, right?" No. " Let me help you along a bit - I "retired" back in June." But you're still posting about how to change RuneScape, and keeping up with every update so that you can post intellegibly on the current state of the game, and make threads of this length about it? 1. You haven't really 'retired' in the full sense of the word. 2. That kind of devotion to the game proves that RS is a much better game,to you, than you claim it is. Your actions speak soooo much louder than your words. Heck, I've quit RS 3-4x. When I quit, do I make any posts whatsoever about RS here? No. "With this in mind, go back and re-read the main post. Think about the points I've raised. When you're ready to respond, I'm ready to listen. :) " It's customary to settle terms of payment before placing an order like this. I charge 200$ an hour for that kind of work. PM me if you'd still like to hire me at that price, and we'll work out some method of payment. It goes without saying that a gentleman would never callously order someone around like that without them being your ward or in your employ already, so I'll just assume if I don't hear from you that my rates are too high, and not that you didn't intend to hire me to perform those tasks.

Ok, the game takes too long, and you don't enjoy the game, that's cool, enjoy finding a new game that's more suited for you. I wish you well. Buuuut: The irony here is that you take soooo many paragraphs to explain how Runescape takes too long to play. Perhaps this explains why you started playing such a grindy game in the first place, these hidden tendencies that incline you in that direction seemingly against your better judgement. You feel like you want to play a game that gets right to the complicated endgame,( of which there are a plethora,) but something impels you to stick with this grindfest; but to change it from the inside, as if by changing RS you might change yourself. It's a chimaera, my friend. As the Dalai Lama says, if you want to change Gielenor, change yourself first.

Those are all goods people had sitting around in their bank from MTK, which they dumped into the GE when it came out. The potions doubtlessly affected the herbs as well, although tarromin might actually have gone up due to ashes become easily available if it weren't for the massive supply in people's banks. Mm, well the question to ask is why the price had dropped in the months before? I'm guessing that botters were hitting that hard, so perhaps the RWT discouraging updates deserve most of the credit here.

Incorrect, yew longs are hard-capped at a minimum price of 704, which is 11/12 of their high alch value. Most items have a hard cap price floor of either 11/12 their high alch value, or their (high alch value - price of nature rune), whichever is higher. Apparently Jagex hates mass alching.

But bubbles keep appearing regardless of how many recommendations of the efficient-market theorists we follow, so perhaps it's time to ditch their theories altogether? So you assume no bubble market, and you assume the price of phats will rise constantly, (via assuming the demand will continue to rise constantly), now that you've assumed everything that's been under discussion, what is there left to discuss? You've assumed yourself into a small and barren corner. Now you're assuming everyone to be rational, before discussing a paper about irrationality. Now you can have nothing useful to say about the paper...seriously, do you ever discuss a topic without assuming everything you're going to discuss on beforehand? Again, my definition would even fit your cited paper. Those traders who assume some random percentage of others are acting irrationally are not rational themselves because they act on completely unknown values. Speculators, as I defined in somewhat casual terms, value an object at time t based on the demand of the object at time t-1. With a bit more mathematical magic, this will increase the value each tick until the demand goes lower due to fluctuations in the normal variance of the price (from actual rational non-speculative traders), sparking a re-valuation of the item for all speculative traders and driving the price down. Your irrational irrationality-sniffer traders believe the object is undervalued by other too cautious traders, so I see a parallel here. I don't see how your response about the paper addresses my more general philosophical arguments that you quoted. As to your actual response, basically what you're saying is an analysis that there won't be a bubble, but the paper is about how those preconditions "did" cause a bubble, I don't see what the use is of giving an interpretation that doesn't fit the data. I believe that Jagex has made most of their decisions about the GE with the goal of reducing server load. Data over long periods of time = less server load= what I would expect from Jagex.

If everyone believes that rares will always go up in the long term, then that unity of opinion is a warning flag that rares may be in a bubble market. Mathematically, if EVERYONE believes that rares will always go up in the long term, than they should buy them at any price, which will further raise their price in an infinite cycle. Obviously, since the supply of money is finite, there is a price above which they will not rise, which is a contradiction. But, a warning flag is merely that, a warning flag, not a sure thing, and I agree with you that the mere existence of the claim does not imply that they are bound to become a price bubble at some future time, and I agree with your first claim unreservedly. Well real estate is in limited supply. But anyway, I believe my reply to your next paragraph explains why the other examples are comparable in only a limited respect. Yes, it is hard to exactly define a price bubble, because of its nonanalytic mathematical nature, which is why its definitions are more subjective. Let's attempt to divorce the issue of rares always going up in the long term, from the existence of short-term bubbles, it is easy to lump them together because there exist two-way causative influences from each to each, but it's clear to me that they are still two separate issues. I agree that the overlinkage of the two was the source of our greatest misunderstandings. It's relevant to short-term bubbles, but not useful for the second question of the long-term value of rares, I agree there. I'm going to think on the long-term question, separating it from bubbles entirely, and post again when I have more time.

Ahh that's not what I meant :( , I'm sorry that I couldn't communicate my point more clearly before. But, that large of a misunderstanding gives me new hope for our discussion. When I said "evaluation", I didn't mean "evaluation of the model's mathematical consistency", I meant your evaluation of how often the model doesn't match reality... a probability that is important to consider, yes? Prima facie, since the model is simpler than the real world, that probability is nonzero. Your model is well-constructed within its framework, and the assumptions and simplifications are not wrong, but they are still just that, simplifications. If you are asking specifically what in your simplifications makes them different than reality, the differences are those of any standard analytic economic model: it takes the real world economy, which would be expressed as a tremendously complicated nonlinear differential equation, looks at the constant, polynomial, or periodic behavior, which can be modeled by a linear differential equation, and then decides which behavior seems significant, by a subjective interpretation, and comes up with LDE's for that behavior. Since a bubble is the kind of divergent, nonlinear behavior that this process specifically excludes, it is impossible for the model to predict or model such a bubble. If you have been thinking that I have been criticizing your model for not predicting such behavior, then there has been an error in communication, since I would never criticize your model for not doing the impossible. Since this behavior is nonlinear, and nonlinear DE's are not practically analytically solvable, the only way to study such behavior mathematically is via simulation, or a subjective process of classification. My only point has always been, that it's important when constructing such models to understand how well they actually model the real world, which, assuming the model is well constructed, doesn't consist of criticizing the model, but instead looking at history to figure out how often the real world has exhibited the nonlinear behavior that the model excludes. Ergo, I've been bringing up historical examples, instead of criticizing your model, because I think your model is great for what it is, but don't agree that modeling the linear behavior of a system helps to predict frequency of extreme nonlinear behavior. What does help to predict the frequency of such behavior? Well, that's a conversation I'd hoped to have, once I convinced you that such behavior was possible. I'm hoping that our disagreement was caused by a misunderstanding, and that this post has remedied it. Scientifically speaking, everyone is assumed to possibly be right about any ridiculous statements they make, if their statements are not testable, then they are not science, if they are testable, then the tests will show whether they were right or not. Realistically, not every crackpot claim is actually tested, because time is finite, but most such claims contradict tests that have already been repeatedly conducted. It is indeed true that the class of statements that are simple enough to be reliably and repeatedly testable, and therefore possibly scientific, is vanishingly small in the universe of all possible statements, but I don't see how that is extreme consequences. I'm not sure I'm addressing your point here, since I'm not sure if you were making a scientific or philosophic point, but perhaps I guessed right. I quote this to double-check that this is the model you refer to. As you can see, it matches the common procedure for creating a standard analytic model using LDE's, it looks at the emergent properties of a complex nonlinear system, and takes the significant linear properties for its assumptions. You haven't gone so far as to write out the LDE's yet, but the data is lacking in several areas so that would be a sketchy endeavor anyways. Again, it would be mathematically impossible, with this technique, to construct a model that exhibited bubble-type behavior. Just for fun, let's analyze a recent bubble, to provide some perspective, and a starting point for a new discussion, not on whether bubbles are possible, but on how they form. Let's choose the dot-com bubble of the late 90's. first, how does it look in your model-form: - increasing companies and infrastructure, with the expansion accelerating with time -relatively stable environment, short on wars or major disasters, favorable economic situation in other sectors. -steady population growth -steady money supply and low inflation Clearly, if you do the LDE's for this situation, the prices of companies and infrastructure would change fairly steadily, first holding stable, then beginning to drop away as the amount of companies and infrastructure outpaced population growth. We know what actually happened is that the prices went on a long upward surge, lasting for many years, until the bubble reached a peak with countless unprofitable but cool-sounding companies and a vast overcapacity in laid fiber. People seemed to reason that since everyone was using the internet, just like everyone had adopted the personal computer the decade before, that the internet companies would make money like the personal computer hardware and software companies had the decade before. But, a metaphor does not a business model make, the bubble crashed, the useless companies went under, and the fiber went dark. Was a bad time, as I lived in San Jose at the time at one of those unprofitable companies :P . According to the efficient-markets theorists so popular in the 70's, bubbles were a product of ill-regulated and slow markets, and wouldn't happen in today's regulated and computerized markets, a theory which took a hit in the '87 crash and another more fatal one in this dotcom crash. The irrationality theorists more recently postulate that the conception of the economic base unit as a rational actor is not accurate, that actual humans make irrational economic decisions constantly, and that this can explain bubble behavior. I believe that they are right in that humans make irrational economic decisions constantly ( the irrational ignorance of flawed business models above is only one example,), but I don't believe that this fully explains bubbles. If one looks at the economic unit in a sustained bull market, there is the short term knowledge that the commodity is extremely likely to rise again tomorrow, and the knowledge that in the long term, the commodity may crash, or it may reach a new plateau and settle down. I think that in the interaction between the weightings of each individual between the short and long term expectations for the commodity, the market may produce nonlinear behavior, which even under the assumption that each actor acts rationally, can produce a bubble. In fact, I'm not aware that economic theory considers the different weightings of short and long term expectation in its definition of a rational actor, I should go research that (I think conventionally future events are supposed to be weighted based upon the current value, derived using interest rates, but whether the bull market crashes or not would change the correct interest rate to use, which is just the kind of nonlinear self-referencing behavior I'm talking about). I should probably try to research what simulations have been done similar to my hypothesis, as well. Anyway, I hope this example helps you understand where I'm coming from.

This isn't relevant to what I said. My question was simple, whether you thought there was any uncertainty in your evaluation, and though you skated around the question by continuously talking about the situation in the third person when I clearly asked you only that one simple question, I think I've finally pinned you down to a yes. But when you go around claiming that you are 100% correct, and then reinterpret events after the fact so that you are still 100% correct, that's not science, that's religion. Not much point in continuing the discussion under those parameters. All that simplification says to me that you admittedly don't know how the markets work either ~_~. Which is fine, except you're the one claiming 100% certainty. No, I was telling Agamemnus that just because I maintain that a certain thing is nonzero probability doesn't mean that I want to debate over the specific probability of the event...something that would have been clear if you'd quoted that instead of badly paraphrasing it. That's a low blow. Why do I have to prove my position, but you only have to defend yours? That's ridiculously unfair. I provided a link to a scientific paper that came up with bubbles in conditions seemingly even less likely to produce bubbles than this one. Seems to me that's great evidence that it's possible that there could be a bubble in the prices of rares under the conditions above. Well, it's a shame that it took me this long to get you to admit that you don't think there's any uncertainty in your analysis of the RS economy, despite it being done on a simplified model which should obviously introduce uncertainty, but at least we finally found what it is we disagree on. There's really no point in continuing to argue with someone who is that certain of being correct, and I can't even wait for the bubble to collapse to declare victory because you'll just find some "reason" why it collapsed that means you're still 100% right, so I'm just going to have to declare victory now by virtue of your hypothesis being non-falsifiable and therefore non-scientific--somewhat of an anti-climactic end but it is what it is.

Sly, I thought you offered not to debate me anymore... was that a joke? You've been slinging that ad hominem phrase a lot lately, but I suspect you don't know what it means. So, while I'd still prefer that you just stop responding to my posts, if you're going to continue, how about you give an example of an ad hominem response that I've used against one of your arguments. Just one.