>replace Zynga with Epic and Tiny Tower and Dream Heights with Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament.
Bad example. UT and Q3A were released withing 10 days of each other. The development time for an FPS such as Q3 doesn't leave much time for it to copy UT. On the other hand, Tiny Tower has been around for about half a year, plenty of time for Zynga to imitate as it pleases.
I voiced some of my concerns in the other HN submission which I will repeat here:
The old system had flaws but it worked. Firstly, I'm not against G+ integration if it meant both products were improved. However, this change looks to me like forcing a whole lot of Reader users to begrudgingly use G+. Reader's social features were not improved; only removed other than a "share to G+".
Not replacing the following system with an interface into G+ so that you can view and comment on friends' submissions from Reader is annoying. Reader was my social network. Why are they forcing me to go open G+ in a new tab everyday to see if my friends had shared anything? That's the _very_ reason I use a feed aggregator. Google doesn't provide any way to view streams in Reader (to my knowledge. I would really love to be wrong here); the only way is probably to use a third party method with no guarantee to not break every time Google touches the G+ code.
Edit: additionally, when viewing shared items on Reader, Reader tries to get the article or picture in. Now, not only do you have to go to G+, it only gives you a link rather than try to fit the article or picture onto the post. Irritating.
While being able to share to particular groups is nice, this just adds a new site that I need to check everyday (ie. G+) which goes against everything a feed aggregator should be.
It would be nice if there was an interface to G+ from reader where you can share, view and comment from inside Reader.
Because it is a very good aggregation of almost everything on the internet I care about. I can have feeds for tumblr accounts, youtube accounts, twitter accounts and whole subreddits and without actually having an account in any one of them or actually having to go to them everyday.
This ties in with my complaint with Reader removing social features. I don't want to go to G+ everyday to see my friends' shares when previously I could stay in the only ``social'' network I care about.
They sacrificed usability to make a lot of GReader users use G+ begrudgingly. Now, instead of being able to see a nice feed counter for friends' shares, I would have to go to G+ in another tab to do what I was previously able to in the very same tab.
Reader integrating into G+? Why is this relationship not mutual?
Edit: And the concept of "+1" being to "give it your stamp of approval" does not exactly suit the majority of my shares...
For one, I shared a particular article called "New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing".
For example, I have Hacker News in my rss feeds. I certainly never read everything or even close to that. As a fellow HN user, surely you are not interested in every article here?
The software actually provides access to competitive leagues and various other resources for various games.
I think this is a good summary of the backstory:
http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1hn6n5/esea_north_ameri...