QUOTE(tweak41 @ Jul 21 2008, 02:22 PM)

I give up. Apparently being passionate and excited about something new is a bad thing these days?
Eh, I'm stuck between agreeing with their having their own opinions and the feeling that I'd rather not have people who can't be bothered to gather details I grasped while reading OBsIV's blog entry on the XIM for the first time becoming members of the forum. Still, the impending neglect this subject is about to receive is somewhat bothersome.
http://obsiv.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!948789BF56FAF394!282.entry
It probably would have been best if the thread wasn't created, considering I don't have the time to hunt down and explain to every fool on the internet who finds information on items like the XFPS and XIM and then goes about proclaiming the death of competitive gaming on consoles due to this end-all "cheating device," to quote one such moron, that the XFPS and XIM still have to work within the boundaries of the game and are no more able at performing any task than the controller. I especially love when they try to hint at the nonexistent violations of the Xbox 360's Terms of Service that they never bothered reading (though it is a nice surprise to see that they know such things exist). Nothing like having kiddies who think the FPS genre was born from the Halo series act like they should be the one to decide what I have to use to play the game that I purchased to get the blood boiling.
Reading it again, that link to the pre-order thread is definitely a problem, though. I personally don't care to mislead people into buying something, so I will fashion the wall of text specific for the person and their questions with the reminder that they should know almost all there is about the product before they buy it, but more than that I don't want people crawling over the XIM without proper knowledge of it...
...And probably some experience with other adapters, so that they know where a lot of the original XIM users are coming from. Point being you shouldn't just show people with no knowledge of the XFPS or XIM where to purchase them. Oh, sure, you might be expediting the entire process of their finding a more merry gaming experience, but it runs the risk of their advancing to a level of disappointment that was entirely avoidable. So that second link was quite careless, at least without a complete description of the XFPS and XIM, along with the XIM2's development preceding it in the post.
As for profitability, the entire project still retains the feeling that it is little more than a personal project of OBsIV's and a hobby of Derek's, and they are the only two who will probably be making any money out of this besides the random seller. It's still obvious from OBsIV's blog that the XIM started entirely as a do-it-yourself project for anyone who wanted a better mouse experience than what is offered by the XFPS series. Everything produced by OBsIV was released freely and all materials were acquired through other companies. Of course some people couldn't or didn't want to construct an XIM for themselves, so naturally a small market of individuals who would pay for pre-built models formed, and a few individuals moved to supply such buyers with an XIM. Because the introduction of the XIM was handled in such a way, it is hard for me to see this purely as an attempt to advertise, (
Yay! Super-Fun Conspiracy Time!) as it would be at the behest of either Derek or OBsIV, and that would be an act that doesn't quite follow their behavior with the first XIM's production. Maybe Derek sounds a bit too enthusiastic about the XIM2 at times, but it doesn't seem suspicious considering how well the new unit actually does seem to work with Halo 3, one of the games that never quite liked to work with the XIM in the absence of excessive configuration tweaks. And OBsIV? Well, he almost never posts, past replying to the random question or "thank you," which definitely seems to back up the idea of how much trouble it was and still is to design, test, and organize the XIM2 for distribution (
Fun Time's over). Though I could go on about how some of the users are a bit on the fanatic side, they do not stand to make any profit from the XIM2, so that'd be ten sentences of wasted text past this block that I have lost complete control over. What was I writing about, again?