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Getting worse now at work, one of our services wasn't producing data for six weeks and no client notices. They are indeed paying for this. Hard to really have an alert for when a process decides essentially, to just stare at its desk and pretend it's working.

I am not transgender, and I don't personally know well anyone who is (or if I do, they have not informed me). My interactions with people who have made it immediately known that they are transgender have been consistently unpleasant and unwelcome, but it's not exclusive to them, that's always the case with those who immediately make whatever their identity is known to everyone and anyone right off the bat, no matter what it may be: an identity is never adequate substitute for personality. I don't really even believe in assigning meaning to "he", "she", or "they" beyond it being a useful tool of language to make clear as to whom is being referred to in conversation, and I have said as much to others in real life conversation, to people both ardently pro-transgenderism and vehemently against it, where a not untypical retort from the latter group is to mockingly refer to me as she/her, but again, as I really don't care, it's always quickly dropped because of how little it actually impacts reality in any meaningful way beyond confusing others when someone uses the wrong ones. The former group will usually just be happy if you're willing to try to use the right ones, which I do, because again, it really doesn't matter to me, it's just arbitrary connotations of language, which itself is made-up, so why not try to respect others if you can, especially when it seems to matter a great deal to them even if it doesn't to you? But the option in these games to switch from one to the other is always the absolute barest lip service, with zero content or mechanics designed behind it, it's just a simple flag that is checked to say "the player picked a male/female character, swap any said pronouns to the opposite option that we've already designed to account for (or a neutral/third option that they've defined)". That's it, it probably took all of half an hour to an hour for one person to implement, maybe a little more to integrate it into the character creation UI. Wow, so woke...get a grip.

Yeah, never eat mushrooms. Eating mushrooms is smurf domicide.

Carnage can trigger multiple times, but if it does in a short time frame (for example when Swift Flurry/HBD procs) the game will tell you something like "similar effect already applied". So it doesn't really "stack" like it did in PoE1. Weapon effects which get triggered not only by weapon attacks but on spells etc., too (universal), should also proc on Carnage hits (or kills): Scordeo's Edge: Double Strike Sungrazer: Return Orbit Engoliero do Espirs: Cruel Blade and Blade Feast The Twin Eels: Breath of Life Azure Blade: Wrong Place, Wrong Time Sanguine Greatsword: Thirsty Blade and Parched Blade Oathbreaker's End: Found Guilty/Innocent Dire Talon: Tooth and Claw Aamiina Legacy: Slayer of Beasts The Spine of Thicket Green: Purge Decay Wicked Beast: Wild Heart Amaliorra: Ash and Dust Amaliorra: Innevitable Decay Whispers of Yenwood: Soul Cutter Xoti's Sickle: Soul Reaper List originally composed by @Constentin Lévine

Can't believe I didn't see the change to SC druid's wildstrike all this time. It just feels right this way. Corrode route seems to be really good at boss fights.

So many rules. I am trying to implement a new one: If you want to buy a new game, play one you own but haven't played yet first.

Not much of a scientific news, but finally worthy AI product

Stop over at Shanghai airport. Friend I am traveling with went for a smoke and missed boarding. Tried getting around Tokyo with two huge suitcases and both our carry on. People were quite amused. As one lady said: "You must have a lot of kids" probably thinking I was carrying presents for all of the little rascals. I knew passive smoking was bad.

I get what you mean, but I don't think it's just Diablo where this comes from.

Interesting take. Perhaps, as someone who never played Hacks&Slashes like Diablo, I was never conditioned properly enough for it to be a problem. I think the issue BG3 runs into, is that yes, while they decided to have very systemic containers, they use them mostly as a window dressing. There are a lot of rooms, with a lot of unnecessary contenairs and it begs a question: where there a best object to put in there? Larian seemed to use boxes, barrels and pots as generic decoration to make places areas look less busy. And while it makes narrative sense to have locations with a lot of boxes, even if they don't contain that much, a lot of rooms have a lot of boxes just cause.

Done with the game. The game has two rather big problems, only one of which is Bioware's fault. Marketing. Well, what's in a name anyway? The first is EA marketing as RPG, while in reality it is Thedas: Fallen Dragon. It is hard to stress this enough. The Veilguard is not an RPG, it is a 3D action adventure that plays mostly like the Jedi series, with a different abilities tacked on to make the combat more flashy than it was in Fallen Order (I have not played Survivor, so I cannot commet on any advancements over Fallen Order). The combat has about the same substance as the one in Fallen Order, but it certainly looks, feels and plays a lot better. The other problem with calling this an RPG is that there are barely any decisions to make, and only two of those have consequences - and there never is an alterantive way to handle quests. Bioware really dropped even the pretense of having morally questionable options for the player to follow through. Even Mass Effect's paragon and renegade system looks inspired in comparison. Which, again, is fine for an action adventure. The ability/skill tree is a bit bigger than the one in Fallen Order too, with more variety and different playstyles. The exploration of Veilguard is also similar, with companion abilities substituted for the upgradeable driod in Fallen Order. The problem is that it still isn't that much fun, or challenging. It only very seldomly goes beyond PRESS X FOR AWESOME, and the exploration element is generally fun with a capital c Caveat, which neatly leads to the second really large problem of the game: pacing. We're on a record pace to... boredom, I guess. Sigh. The pacing is downright dreadful. The game opens with roughly four hours of not very impressive content. The abilities one can use are very limited, the combat thus highly repetitive and the areas are rather constricted hallways designed to funnel you from one main quest to the next. It is only after recruiting the first companion and finishing another part of the main quest that the game itself opens up, at which point your character has a few levels under their belt and has unlocked a few more abilities and passives that transform the combat gameplay from boring to good enough. It is precisely at that time, before the game opens up or starts playing well, where you're introduced to token minority elves, one of which is a companion that joins you. It is a sad testament to the times we're living in that the minority representation in the game (which was almost always a part of Bioware games anyway) had such a terrible reception, but there's no second chances for a first impression, as the saying goes. You're already not having fun at this point in the game, and then you see that Bioware wasted development resources on brown and east-asian looking elves. In an ideal world players would realize that for a project this size, no part of gameplay, quest design or writing (outside of Taash, who we will talk about later) has suffered a lack of resources because someone was tasked to make brown textures for characters, but the polarization is what it is. The game sucks because it is woke - but that just is not the case. The game (almost inarguably) sucks at this point because it is not fun to play, and that is not the fault of Strife the Brown Elf. It then proceeds to go on for too long, especially the exploration and parcouring part of the game. Fallen Order had the same issue - and neither game is very good at telling the player that certain parts of the maps are cut off until quest progress or the abilities of a newly recruited companion opens that part of the map. I probably spent a good five hours of my playtime (roughly 75 hours, which was enough time to experience all of the content) trying my damndest to figure out riddles and/or ways to reach areas and loot that just were inaccessible at that point. The other part that is badly paced are companion interactions. This is arguably the worst part, because at the end of the day, it is still a game (ostensibly) made by Bioware. For the first twenty hours I have played the game, the companions all seemed shallow and flat. Friends that played the game also agreed. The problem here is, again, the pacing of the game, as companion interactions and dialogues are interwoven with side and main quests, and often are contingent on reloading the Lighthouse (your base of operation) map, i.e. you need to go into the game world and come back for a new set of interactions to be loaded once they're ready to be presented. So if, for some reason, you have unlocked three interactions with a companion, you can do one, then you have to go back into the world and come back the Lighthouse for the next. This is such a dumb decision that whoever came up with the idea needs to be fired, because it means you're best off with going back to the Lighthouse whenever you have finished a quest, instead of just questing naturally in the game world. Gating was always there in companion interactions in Bioware games, of course, but they were usually also frontloaded with an enormous amount dialogue to be explored with them right from the start. With a few exceptions (most notably the Antivan Crow companion, who remains boring and flat throughout the game), the companions in The Veilguard aren't (much) less developed than those in other games. They're just not front-loaded in the usual Bioware manner, and that is much to their detriment. To recap, we're now a couple of hours into the game, it does not play well, it is not fun, there's no real sense of exploration, the main quest is on rails going through several limited hallways (of which most are out in the open, to make the contrast even worse), you had an annoying "nervous and talky scientist type" Korean looking elf lady foisted on you for a companion whom you could have exactly one really short conversation with and you have just reached Treviso, a city in an "RPG" that is basically also just a colletion of hallways (which kind of makes sense, as Thedas' version of Venice) where any and all exploration options are seemingly unreachable. To make matters worse everyone talks in a weird Italian style accent that the voice actors were clearly uncomfortable with and no one sounds in any way natural. Sprinkle your own character's somewhat dumb dialogue in this part of the game on top, and you have one recipe for a disaster. Where it doesn't matter at all that all of that gets better the more you play. I mean, who's still playing at this point? By now you're angrily shouting about how bad the game is on social media. Depending on your political and social leanings one might as well blame wokeness and DEI for everything that is bad in this game, ignoring that Bioware games were pretty "woke" all along. Taash And then there's Taash (Taash was born a girl, for the record, for anyone who has no intention of playing the game). Taash is Bioware's attempt at making a non-binary character, and while they had a wonderful setup for them, they never followed up on it. Taash is Qunari, but their mother fled to Rivia when Taash was little. So as Taash grew up, they were neither really Qunari nor Rivaini. There's also conflict with her mother, neatly established during the first companion quest, which is actually pretty good. Her mother complains that Taash dresses and behaves more like a man (for those reading this who are not familiar with the Qunari, they're basically fantasy muslims with a caste system) than a woman, which frustrates Taash. Taash is an accomplished warrior and dragon hunter - job reserved for men under the Qun. Can you already see how this might make for a decent metaphor for not feeling particularily like either male of female? Taash doesn't feel like adhering to the Qun, nor do they feel like being fully Rivaini. Naturally this looks like a decent way to bring a non-binary companion into a fantasy setting without it being immersion-breaking, right? As the player character, you can probably gently guide Taash towards understanding their place in between these two cultures. Right, except then it just stops, and the game and all other characters start using the term "non-binary" as if we were in a contemporary setting, crashing you hard out of any immersion. It eventually culminates in a really weird scene with Taash and her mother where Taash has a "coming out" as "non-binary" ("Hey mom, I'm non-binary!") that is so awkward that it leaves players facepalming hard. This is all handled about as well as Adira was in Star Trek: Discovery. Like, not at all. The setup falls of a cliff so hard it becomes a disservice. It's not just a case of bad representation, it is actively hurting the cause by introducing an element that strains the already tenous enjoyment of the game. What was that saying with the road to hell and good intentions? You know what's the worst part? Taash is a genuinely fun companion with lots of funny interactions. She also has the best apology line in any Bioware game when she's having a minor fight with Emmrich, the necromancer companion. "I'm sorry I called you a skull-f... liker. Skull-liker." Conclusion So, what's the conclusion? I liked The Veilguard, in spite of all the problems. Partially that is because I have an OCD-ish tendency to finish games I have begun playing, so I kept playing, and eventually found myself immersed in the game, started to like the companions and genuinely enjoyed the flashy combat and exploration. It takes a good eight to fifteen hours of playing the game to reach that point, and I don't blame anyone who quits well before that. If, for some reason, you still want to play the game, then make sure to rush through the main quests until you have gathered all your companions. Then you can explore, and make sure to return to the Lighthouse as often as you can, to check for companion interactions. That means those marked on the map as well as where you can see two or more companions standing next to each other. That means you should go there and listen to them talking. The game will be better for it, really. Oh, and I hope you're like me and don't care for exploring city-settings in RPGs. While the game does have two cities, they're not what you'd expect from one in an RPG. I don't mind, but others might.