Check out RealmsBeyond for a community based around variant play that focuses on self-imposed challenges. http://www.garath.net/Sullla is another website full of AARs where the player solos Final Fantasy V, for instance, or runs a sub-optimal Diablo 2 build for added challenge.

You seem to see the player-game relationship as an adversarial one; I see games as a way to facilitate some fun rather than a challenge to be vanquished.

I’m okay with most of what Valve has been doing with this patch. The only thin that will worry me is the incessant in-game chat spam that looks like it may almost reach the levels of Diablo 2.

Just how ignorant can you choose to be? Do you have any concept of just how much good religious organisations do for this world? How much self sacrifice they make to help others? While their out in the third world countries helping countless people, providing shelter and food in supposedly civilised western countries, your sitting there in your smug arrogant ignorance, typing tripe about something you know nothing of.