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Showing content with the highest reputation on 08/07/24 in all areas
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This is far better than my wildest dreams. To quote Steve: "It's the Skylake stagnation all over again." Well, and the memory stability problems of early AM5 are back with a vengeance. Steve found two positive things in his review: 1. It is really efficient 2. It is not from Intel Love the (admittedly few, but existing) benchmarks where the 9700X is behind the 7700X. Edit: Guess I was wrong, ey?2 points
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Do you think the likes of Mali and Niger matter when it comes to whatever the Global South thinks? There is no such thing as a united Global South, thats basically a BRICS term that gets selectively used depending on the topic and geopolitical development What really matters is regional seats of power that are functional and efficient and as far as Africa is concerned that is suppose to be the African Union which is intended to speak on behalf of a united Africa like the EU but the AU is not united on a myriad of issues both on the continent and internationally and countries like Mali, Niger and Burkina Fuso have been suspended from the AU because the AU doesnt accept military coups as a type of leadership change and never will So these 3 countries now represent there own regional group united by military Juntas but they dont speak on behalf of the AU or whatever the " Global South " is suppose to mean2 points
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I believe, somewhere in our hearts, we are what we play. We don’t become angry half orcs slaughtering villagers or bold knights fighting for justice, but those ideas become part of our person. They swirl around in our heads like swarms of butterflies. I have been formed as much by games as I have by the events in my life. I played games as a child. Recess had tag, dodge ball, and kickball. At home, we would play the occasional board game. It wasn’t until my mom received the original grey Dungeons and Dragons boxed set as a gift in 1978 that games became a peculiar focus in my life. I was only nine years old at the time. I didn’t understand every word, but I understood enough to know I wanted to play. Wanting and doing are two different things and my nine-year-old self could not grasp every concept. That didn’t stop me from valiantly trying to construct modules. No one else had much interest and so I would fashion what, to my mind, were elaborate maps and imagined encounters for players who did not exist. Sometimes the idea of the game is as entertaining as the game itself. Sometimes, I think, the idea of the game *is* the game. In 1981, after I returned from Guam, my eldest brother brought over an Atari 800. Magic! Two-word text adventures were simply brilliant! Unlike my experiences living on a tropical island, there were plenty of kids in California who wanted to play games like Dungeons and Dragons and some of my friends would also come over to my house to play computer games. If solitary play fueled my imagination, including other players forced me to put that imagination to practical use in a game setting. Sharing a computer meant one person could be at the keyboard while the other one or two would be forced to stand in back yelling comments or barking orders. As I grew into my teens, Dungeons and Dragons became central to my life. I would hunt out modules to play with friends or, more often, simply read and imagine playing. There wasn’t enough time to play everything. One of my best friends liked to play, but his mother, a staunch evangelical Christian, was convinced that Dungeons and Dragons was Satanic, so we played Gamma World. However, soon after, her pastor proclaimed all RPGs were Satanic and it was difficult for him to play. I loved his mom, and she was very kind to me, but she gently explained that I should enjoy my life on earth because, as a Catholic, I was bound for hell. …And she was certain RPGs corrupted young minds! Lol Alas, I’d started drinking and smoking at 12 years old and much of my time was spent in callow and self-destructive behavior. If only the pull of games had been stronger, it may be that I would have been a much more useful member of society earlier in my life, but I was not. Turns out games hadn’t corrupted me, but I was still corrupted. The fault, as always, was my own. I was 17 when I graduated from high school and immediately joined the United States Navy. Far from being rare, it turned out a lot of my fellow sailors were gamers. I often wonder if I would have had even more chance to game if I’d been stationed on a ship. Not a lot of chance for other things shipboard. I was always land based, however, and mostly overseas. We did have some great computer games. One of my fellows overseas, an army grunt if I remember correctly, would use such creative names as Prelf for his elven priest and Dwight for his dwarven fighter. : Eldar’s shaking his head with a bemused smile icon : As it seems, some of us didn’t have our imaginations enriched by gaming, but what some lacked in imagination they returned back with practicality. Same manual, different lesson. When I returned home, basically bummed out and aimless, I wandered around a lot. I’ve had a variety of jobs ranging, in no particular order, from cashier to human resources for Longs Drugs, meter reader for the gas company, teacher at a parochial school, wedding photography salesman on the Las Vegas Strip, quality assurance for a video game, security guard, and registered nurse with a couple of others I’m probably forgetting. I’m currently a nurse practitioner. I’m done floating around in the ether, so this one is going to be my last. As you can tell, gaming has been more consistent than employment for me. Like a lot of gamers my age, there are particular computer games that were fundamental in my developing tastes. Zork would probably be the first and foremost. Fallout and Baldur’s Gate, of course. It’s now that I invoke Planescape Torment. What words exist that have not been said of PST, good, bad, or somewhere between? I won’t add to them here. It is for me what it is. I love the game. As an aside, my wife loved this T.V. show during the 1990s called The Pretender. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but just this year my wife found it again on some streaming service and we discovered the main character did the voice work for The Nameless One. During all this time, talking about games has been as important as playing them. I’ve spent considerably more time discussing PST than playing it. Same for all of my favorite games. I became part of the online community at Black Isle Studios and eventually, a bit before the place folded, I was a moderator. Sadly, I can’t remember the names of all the people there. One of the moderators at that time left a message on my answering machine, playing his guitar and singing a song. I don’t remember who it was, but I remember the song. That was some point after I’d dropped off the face of the earth for months. Being someone with a number of character flaws, I’m a bit of a wanderer by nature. As they say, I’m constantly pushing people away with one hand and pulling them closer with the other. Eventually, since everything was quickly going to a fire sale at Interplay, I signed up as a community member at Obsidian. I want to address particular Obsidian games since this is the Obsidian board and I’ve loved a number of Obsidian titles. I’m currently hundreds of hours into Grounded, for instance. I’ve spent thousands of hours enjoying Obsidian games, but I can’t go on without owning to a past of which I am ashamed. I don’t know who all is at Obsidian at this time. I sent word asking someone there to help me find work and he arranged to have me do quality assurance on Mask of the Betrayer. I tried my best to do a good job, but I was an utter failure. My personality defects were simply too great to put in quality work. I refuse to submit anything here without giving a nakedly truthful account. Ironically, Mask of the Betrayer was an excellent title. The story, the unfolding of every element, was so well done I always believed it should have been a stand-alone title outside of NWN2. After I worked on Mask of the Betrayer, I was bereft of hope. Not because of my work on MotB, but because it threw into stark relief how lacking in distinction I was as a human. I realized, with my degrees in history and classical studies, with my wife and varied job experiences, that I had done nothing to justify my existence, let alone distinguish it. I fell into abject despair and rarely left my house. I gained weight and eventually weighed over 400lbs. Even so, in all this, I gamed. Games were the last frayed strand of a rope to which I clung, and my grasp was starting to fail. The point of this isn’t my sad state. I have a private blog that serves perfectly well in order to flog myself. My point is that, in a pinch, I had games. Maybe you’ve all heard the story of the man who is falling from a cliff, clenching the roots of a tree. Looming on the cliff above, there is a ferocious tiger. Below him lie jagged rocks in the distance. The man, desperate and despairing, sees a berry on a bush growing from the side of the cliff. He takes the berry and eats it. Savoring the flavor, he thinks to himself, “I have tasted no berry sweeter than this.” Games. I’m clearly in a much better place now. I’m a professional and I help people in my practice. …But games. New Vegas. Pillars of Eternity 2. Mask of the Betrayer. Masterpieces. I have tasted no berries sweeter than these.1 point
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The newest blog by @MedicineDan is now live. Get a cup of coffee or something cold on this summer day and take some time to explore "We are What We Play" ...1 point
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I do like that they've reined in the power consumption of the X CPUs to be more in line with the non-X Zen 4 CPUs, even if it makes the raw performance improvement over Zen 4 look poor. A simple 8C/16T CPU at ~135W was not the direction I liked AMD going in, so I'm glad they've not done an Intel and kept pushing up the power limits. That's not the full story of course. 7700X to 9700X, 5% improvement for around 40% less power? Great, I wouldn't complain if that was what we got compared to the previous best. The problem though is that the 7700 exists, and suddenly the 9700X is more like 8% faster for zero improvement in wattage, significantly less impressive. And also probably a sign that there won't be a cut-price 9700 in our future. Ah well.1 point
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Botswana ratified the peace summint memorandum a day after “Mali diplomatic incident” . Seems like it affects the “Global South” as much as bombing children hospitals afects Nestle doing business in Russia and the Kursk, well, this is becoming very juicy. Russian milbloggers have confirmed operational encirclement of Sudzha, which means approx 15 kms in a day, or in other numbers, 2 months and 20k of casualties of Russian Advance in Pokrovsk Direction, after the fall of Avdiivka1 point
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Because gamers are discerning and intelligent people.1 point
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Started again with Rogue Trader. Tried to see if there is an optimal way of doing the first chapter. In Dragon Age Origins, the optimal play was to not finish areas, but to hop back and forth to unlock always just enough to get a better outcome somewhere else. (Mainly to help the possessed child) Rogue Trader it turns out locks in where you have gone first on arrival. Land, take off, go somewhere else and do that first will still act as if you spent time in the first option. At the same time, minor flavour items will react to the actual order you did things, referencing that npcs are dead even though in the grand scheme the game state of the location thinks you haven't been to where you'd kill those NPCs.1 point
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Skyrim. It appears that you can get pets now. Well so my mage did find one. Looks like a something born out of love between a spider and a mantis, sounds like a tank when walking. Which is kind of grating especially when you try to sneak, but as soon as I found out it messes with enemy pathfinding I'm more than happy to tolerate it in exchange for draugrs doing nothing but very intense eye contact while I pelt them from behind of my spider-mantis mini tank. Elsewhere in Skyrim, I went werewolf. They have their own skill tree and everything now. So I went on some official Companion Guild quest, turned the wolf on, cleared the dungeon, gained a few perks, cool, but it would be pity to let the wolf timer expire without doing some more maulin', I thought. Could come back for loot later, I thought. ...probably half a map later I'm still a wolf. See, wolf timer gets prolonged every time you eat someone and I've forgotten just how many bandits and necromancers are there everywhere in Skyrim. Eventually it should expire some day because I avoid towns and undead are inedible, but I'm keeping the wolf on out of sporting interest now - I want to see that trail of destruction on the map. When I'm allowed to use it again, because werewolves cannot read maps. I do hope my companion is okay, I lost him, like, 30 dungeons ago.1 point
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Conan Exiles does not require online access. They set it up so you can play it single-player/LAN.1 point
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Given the fiasco with John Deere, a precedent's not needed. I guess in a certain way we've been here before, with Apple and maybe IBM going further back ? Largely will be a lot of independent scuffles in given industries, I feel. But I don't think either way gaming will die, it'll just be more an intolerable pain in the ass, which it has been for me for 15 years or so at this point, heh.1 point
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adding onto this - on paper do1000c can do crazy things, but when i actually ran a party with a SC cipher that did this (i think ydwin) it was extremely underwhelming. on most enemies and in most fights, it's completely overkill - a disintegrate is cheaper and will do basically the same thing. i would rather disintegrate more enemies than try to set up a single do1000c + antipathetic field on one target (that's almost enough for a second disintegrate). (edit: i guess with an ascendant you could do a lot more dumping of do1000c on enemy mobs, but you could also do other insane stuff with an ascendant and i'm not sure do1000c spamming is the best use of it) on most bosses, it's close to overkill as well - a disintegrate is cheaper and requires less setup. it's really, really painful to miss or even graze do1000c, and then you actually need some enemy to help trigger a shred combo - or you need to somehow be generating tons of focus and consistently landing a different shred spell... it's kind of a waste of a cipher's action economy honestly. in the end it was mostly just useful as a secondary disintegrate for after when i'd already hit disintegrate and other debuffs on the boss. also it's lame that the tier 3 beam spell is tagged as echo and not shred1 point
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A little bit more into the Shrine of Amana again. I am spending now a little bit less time, as I would like to, but having a shoulder injury makes it very painful, whenever I sit and play behind my PS for more than 1 and half hour. Anyway, Looking Glass Knight has been defeated. Not much trouble, as I have called two summons just for the laugh I did not wanted to spent to much time with the fight, knowing, what awaits me next… Shrine of Amana… As I have mentioned before, to my surprise, the areas up to the second bonfire have been “blessed” by much better mob placing, than in Vanilla, so it was not as painful, as I have expected. Of course, I’ve made few stupid moves, so my Deathcounter has increased again, but it was much, much better experience this time around. The issue for me was the third part, before Demon of Song, I have destroyed my equipment few times in the mist from the giant “Sponge Bob”, and then I have spent few times clearing the area, out of the cave, as I forgot, that there is a red phantom invader, and I wanted my Awestone a lot, so I had to change the covenant just for this fight. Of course, I have died in this area as well, so I had to repeat it again and slowly with a crossbow. I have not found a 100% safe way to clear the mobs with melee, like the previous area, so it took a lot of time to get to Demon of Song. I went back to call phantom for the fight, and went through the fog. Took me three tries, as a felt to tired from my pain, but I wanted to get the giant toad at all costs. Of course two more tries meant two more clearings of the pond mobs, so it took me a lot of time to start a new fight. But my goal was fulfilled. With deathcounter stopping at 109 wipes.1 point
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Why is it highly likely that they took it from gaming? Seems just how would go as the opportunity is there, so if gaming's "saved", they'll still lock in, or try to lock in people with tractors, or toasters or whatever. So seems independent of a lot else, was just one of his selling points that didn't work with me I'd expect non-AAA gaming wouldn't have the means for these systems, and programming is more and more accessible these days. More of a worst case scenario, heh, well or if "saving" is the right term. I still don't think it's worth saving though1 point
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I am looking at The Golden Dragon build that I just found. Seems very fun and a great theme. So handsome too! I think I prefer this over a Firebrand build. another option would be something like this, TWS with HoF. I will experiment.1 point
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Yeah, Ross' campaign (Accursed Farms) didn't really need to be gaming-specific here, the right to be able to use the things that you've bought seems like it should be pretty obvious and inalienable.1 point
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balance is good especially early and mid game. i don't mind late game being slightly overpowered. a complete balance game in single player games are boring obsidian. imagine no one will be posting builds as nothing is good. this on the other hand is different if the game has multiplayer component. ideally, my hope is that player decision (whatever build and multiclass that player decides) should be equally good. but this don't seems to be the case. also i find that many subclasses are really meh. the penalty is far worst than the benefits it's getting. i do hope you can spend time in buffing some builds and not just nerfs whichever popular builds that was posted by community which is your best talent in doing so1 point
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I agree. Many times I plan a character thinking about how to make them powerful, just to mess the build with something I think is cool. That's the reason why the only big concern I have is about Martial Single Class Ressource Pool. They're currently so low that their High Tier abilities can't be used more than a couple of time. Their sustainability is abysmal compared to infinite ressource classes, single casters or multiclass martial. And that feels weak and kills the fun at the same time ^^ The one exception to this is probably single-class monk, which has very good PL 8 and 9 abilities that make the trade off worth it (that and the split resource pool). I agree that they should increase resource pool for single classes, but the better alternative would be to give all martial classes a variety of high level actives that are genuinely powerfu/attractive and not unreasonably high in cost. If investing in a single class character track means sacrificing that much power pool, there needs to be at least one ability that's the martial equivalent of missile salvo, symbol of eothas, etc..1 point
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Oh no, it's happening again... Intel falls off a cliff, and AMD immediately rests on its laurels.0 points