NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scars Unseen" data-source="post: 8492656" data-attributes="member: 10196">Not really sliding past; it's part and parcel to why I prefer products over services.  If I'm going to be dependent on something, I prefer to have a say over when that dependency ends.I've had my entire collection stolen from me before due to a storage unit break in when I was between apartments  Yes, it was massively inconvenient.  I don't really feel that burglary or theft is a great analog to having an really great online tool shut down, but in a way, it's kind of worse.  On the one hand, it's worse because the company is offering this tool, already knowing that they'll take it away one day.  On the other hand, it would make it worse for me to use such a service, because at least with that storage unit, I wasn't going into the deal expecting to have everything taken away from me.Fact is, pretty much anything being offered as an online service could function as a product instead.  They used to.  Even online games that use central servers used to offer the software to run those servers privately.  Other than the convenience of not having to do any initial setup (the existence of which would not preclude having an offline or privately hosted option anyway), everything integral to online tools' design is to serve the control and profit of the company that owns it, not the benefit of the user.  And I don't see why I should buy into that, knowing it's going to bite me later on when they don't see the profit in it anymore.</blockquote>

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