Humanoid

I'm playing the included month from the key I got from a Squeenix surprise box, but subscribing doesn't give additional XP so it's not a factor. The only difference is that F2P is limited to level 35 (and is locked out from all convenience features and even basic things like chat). So yeah, the XP issue is strange, but from doing a bit of reading it seems it's the common experience for people like me who are used to just questing for levels from other games. Instead, there is an absolutely massive dump of XP you get if you do a daily random dungeon, and apparently that's the "intended" method of levelling to avoid the problem. Indeed, the fact that I got to mid-40s just fine without needing to do the random dungeons is because the main quest XP was doubled some time back when one of the expansions launched: it used to be even worse, far worse. There's an especially notorious gap between levels 47-48 where there are no story quests at all, from what I see it's common knowledge to the game's community. Apparently the first expansion also has a bit of a quest shortfall, but it's compensated somewhat by people overlevelling in the base game due to a deluge of level 50 quests being suddenly available - quests that are part of vanilla but were added post-release to introduce new features and whatnot. Beyond that, the second expansion apparently has corrected the quest issue altogether, as well as having significantly higher production values in general. It's important to note that the main story quests are 100% mandatory, which includes doing several dungeons. You cannot skip ahead, and even if you buy an expansion, you cannot start it's storyline without having completed all prior story quests. A friend of mine started playing the game at the same time as a healer and unlike me, did the daily dungeons (as a healer her instant queues helped a lot there). She's just about to start the actual content for the first expansion, which covers levels 50-60, and she's doing so at level 54 from being forced to keep doing older content. From what I hear, the base game was made on a fairly small budget after the failure of the initial launch, so there are a fair few oddities that result - things like only 5% of cutscenes being voice acted, even key story ones. It's a very weird experience coming from the moneybags competitors. Frankly what it sounds like to me is that the game needs an equivalent to WoW's Cataclysm to wipe out and fix the weird legacy stuff.

It's not like it's a choice to not be bought out, which is what "changing their approach" seems to imply in this context given the references to Liverpool. Until such an event happens, other teams genuinely do have more money to splurge, and that still would be true even without the expenditure of the new stadium. While the club is owned by a billionaire in Joe Lewis, the club is run at arms' length as a pure business, so everything is funded from operational income. And while that still makes Spurs somewhere around the 10th-15th wealthiest club in Europe, they're also still but a clear 6th wealthiest in their own league, with a big gap to 5th. Sure, Arsenal and Utd spend within their means too, but they have the advantage of historically bigger fanbases, paid-up stadiums and all the other nice things that come with a history of greater success. Now that's no justification for spending nothing of course, but neither is the relative parsimony a surprise to anyone. Sure, TV income is much bigger now than what it was when Arsenal built Ashburton Grove, but the cost of building the stadium itself has been inflated more-or-less proportionally as well. Arsenal did well in the following years to keep their CL spot despite the massively curtailed spending, so I would argue the fair expectation of Spurs would be fairly similar, even if the achievement has become more difficult because of the greater number of clubs competing for the same number of spots. A simplistic but not terribly unreasonable expectation would be to spend the 6th largest amount of money in the league, but with sugar daddies in control of some of the clubs directly below - notably Everton, Wolves and now most of all Newcastle, even that expectation will likely not match reality. The *other* alternative I suppose would be to do a Leeds.

I've found out, much to my displeasure, that FF14 does not actually have enough quests for you to level up to the base game level cap of 50. Unless you're on a "preferred" server (which doubles all XP gain in old content), you are expected to grind repeatable content to make up the shortfall. Utterly ridiculous.

Larian can outsource the expansion to them next year.

I want it to be to BG2 what New Vegas was to Fallout 2.

So that's the way it goes. Obviously disappointed, but can't say I'm sad or angry or whatever - mostly because it was the wholly expected result and I can be proud of the team for their campaign regardless. Credit to Liverpool who showed why they finished streets above us in the league, for a brief period a few years ago we were basically in the same position, but they showed what shrewd signings can do to transform a team. Didn't watch the match - kick-off was at 5am my time - but that was probably a blessing as I'm not the type to enjoy high-stakes matches that I'm invested in, it usually ends up a torturous experience. I hope to see us do one better sometime during my lifetime, as long a shot that might be, but if we never even reach this stage again I wouldn't be too surprised either. That might sound a little defeatist, but when I started supporting the team back in the aftermath of the 1998 World Cup, this scenario was already unimaginable. I just hope this summer transfer window is a bit more fruitful than the last one, because as the end of this league season proved, there's only a hair's breadth between maintaining our current status and sinking back into the obscurity of Europa. Bigger clubs like Arsenal and Man Utd can take the hit, we decidedly can't. Both in terms of maintaining profile, and for simple financial reasons, deep CL runs are required to simply keep in touch with the big boys. P.S. Going to buy myself a decent Ryzen system from the proceeds as consolation once Navi comes out.

Along with Cazorla, one of the few likeable (ex-)Arsenal players. Ian Wright's a good 'un too.

At this point that'd be the only way to sell it to me really. The wave of party-based RPGs in the last few years have now convinced me that I'm well and truly over them. As much as I loved the genre two decades ago, a faithful sequel would simply hold no enjoyment for me anymore. From a purely selfish perspective, it'd feel like a waste, a developer I like making a type of game I cannot like. It hits close to home because that in essence has been Obsidian for me for nearly a decade now.

WoW is a complete wasteland now pending the next major patch release, so I registered the FF14 key I got way back in the Christmas 2015 Squeenix surprise box and gave it a go. Less than a week in but some first impressions: It has some good points, - No looting! Everything is done automatically so you can move on as soon as you kill anything and get whatever relevant items were on it. And I emphasis *relevant*, there are no worthless vendor trash items here, they simply don't exist. As inventory management is my number one pet hate in any game, this is a godsend. - Very clear ground effects during combat, making it damn clear whether you're standing in that fireball blast radius or wild axe swing or not. - Multiclassing! Sort of. You can only enjoy the benefits of one class at a time, but you can learn to be all of the classes on a single characters. - Surnames! No longer are you locked out of choosing sensible names for your characters, as the existence of surnames means that it's far easier to find a unique but sensible combination. - Individual quests are fairly short and to-the-point. While it's still standard MMO fare of "collect bear butts", you're typically asked for just a few of them, with a 100% drop rate, compared to WoW's often absurd kill requirements. - Bust size slider. Done with being weighed down by my absurdly sized sweater puppies in WoW. Some bad points, - The world is extremely confined, being broken up into dozens of separate, fairly-small areas separated by loading screens. It simply does not feel like a living, breathing coherent world and it also makes maps a nightmare to read. - While multiclassing itself is fine, what happens is that there are really only enough regular quests around the world to level one class properly, maybe two at a stretch. Beyond that, you're relying on grindy, repeatable content for your XP. - The game loves its cutscenes, but it doesn't really have the chops to pull them off. Too often you end up watching tiresome generic cutscenes consisting of unvoiced dialogue, perfunctory emoting, discussing some irrelevant or inscrutable plot point. At the moment I'm finding maybe 5% of cutscenes are voiced, which makes it really jarring when it does happen. - Speaking of voice acting, the player character, despite you being made to choose a voice during character creation, is completely silent outside combat grunts. I don't expect full voice acting (though I think SWTOR did it well enough), but not even having so much as generic acknowledgements, even a simple "yes", gets pretty awkward. - There are a *lot* of FedEx/fetch quests. Hell, the game is pretty much set up such that your first 3-4 levels are all in this vein, with no combat until then. - When the combat does arrive, it's extremely simple at low levels. My skill rotation is simply 1-2-1-2-1-2-etc. I'm sure this will change later on, but I'm level 20 already and I'd say that makes it too gentle of a learning curve. But it all works out, sometimes I'm a little freaked out. - Some of the non-human races end up being really uncanny valley. Might get used to it over time, might not. - I'm still not sure what the setting is. One moment I'm in a bird-drawn carriage, the next a Batmobile zooms past. Just, what? - Fashions are all over the place. One minute I'm in a frilly dress, the next in a green diaper, the next in a puffy jumpsuit.

Eh, even disregarding form and fatigue (the few weeks rest is a godsend to Spurs' thin squad), I feel Liverpool's experience in finals should probably carry them through. Their squad is what, 80% carried over from last year's final? That experience is invaluable. Not going to die wondering though. Will throw a grand or so at Liverpool and if they win, then at least I'll have a new video card or something like that. Fully expecting Arsenal to lift the Europa cup too against a Chelsea team in disarray, earning themselves a cool 60 million or so from CL qualification. That would be a shame. Probably Villa to get promoted too to complete the trilogy of ...sub-optimal results. By that point I'm just being petty though.

GMG were having it both ways, they were authorised partners for some publishers (like Humble), and for publishers they did not have deals with, they sometimes resold keys (like CDkeys). Can't say I have a problem with that. It happens less so now but I used to regularly buy keys from smaller resellers who in actuality were just stores in Europe that sold physical copies of games, and simply opened those copies and scanned the CD keys themselves for overseas customers. And like regular brick-and-mortar stores, it's simply the age-old retail model in action: store buys goods from a certain price from their suppliers, and sell it at whatever price they like to end-users. There are some laws around predatory pricing of course but that really only applies to the market leader in general. The advent of Steam means the agency model where the supplier has exclusive control of pricing is now ascendant, and while I live with it, I'm not a fan of it on general principles. The likes of Miele and Apple do the same thing with their retailer partners, and I prefer not to deal with that. It annoys me when a department store for example says "20% off everything!*" with an exclusion list a mile long.

Thank god the appliance industry didn't follow Miele's crappy agency retail model.

Haven't visited their store yet, but I like Epic more now.

It's best to do it during a double XP event though so you can ignore the generic sidequests (which are identical for all characters) and just do the story stuff.

Given that we (Spurs) been in relegation form for the past few months, it would be an understatement to say my flabber has been gasted. If you offered me this outcome at the start of the season - or hell, during any point of it - I'd have swallowed you whole. Being CL finallists is something I genuinely thought I'd never see in my lifetime. And while I'm obviously happy with the situation, I'd hope the team have higher ambitions than I do. Oh well, we'll see in a few weeks, and I'm genuinely considering a huge hedge bet to take the edge off. As for the PL, shame about not taking the 3rd place spot that was all but shoved in our faces on the last day, but as all four CL spots (or indeed five it it ends up that way) go straight into the group stage, it makes no difference other than "only" a few million quid in prizemoney. But if this summer window goes the same way as the last one, I'd expect another wave of London riots.

Image retention is often conflated with burn-in. One is temporary, the other is permanent. To be sure, both can still happen on both (later) plasmas and OLEDs, but it takes some serious abuse to make it permanent. Using the brightest possible "torch" settings intended for shop displays can exacerbate the issue.

I want another counter next to the reputation and post counter, showing how many times in total the user has edited any post.

@Phenomenum @LadyCrimson @Gfted1 Yeah, on other Invision boards, the cover photo is directly to the right of the Edit Profile button - the one in the light-coloured area. So it looks like it's not enabled for us plebs. (The Cover Photo is the beige image behind the button, so only something people see if they look at your profile) If enabled it should looks something like this:

A tricky subject I guess since technically people explicitly paid for them so hiding them needs to be an optional feature rather than a global change. That said, it's one of the easier things to address since you can just block them with an adblocker.

Cookies seem to last for like, 2 hours.

You can copy a quote block that's inside the editor box by using the right-click menu of the quote block header, that is, the bit that says "X minutes ago, Y said:" If the quote is the only thing in the textbox, good ol' Ctrl-A Ctrl-C works too. EDIT:

Hit Shift-return instead.

The announcements section seems to be pulling some very old ones instead of what we used to get in the sidebar (not that those weren't also old).

Figures that happens after I buy and play the original version for all of half-an-hour. Didn't have time to form an opinion on it, but it's been several months since - indeed it's been several months since I powered on the PS4P at all. Given that I've used the console for maybe a collective dozen hours over the course of ten months, not one of my smarter purchases so far.

Back to For The King again for the first time this year - in co-op of course. Looks like there have been some nerfs to the difficulty which sits just fine with me. Previously it felt like even the easiest difficulty was balanced around earning unlocks by failing campaigns until you get some decent locations and special gear unlocked. There's also a House Rules setting which allows you to set a custom difficulty, essentially, from easier than the easiest setting, to literally impossible. The other good thing of course is that additional content continues to be added for free. The "new" sea campaign was released last year, but, well, it's new to me. Not convinced by sea combat mechanics just yet though there've been limited realistic opportunities to try. P.S. The swamp terrain continues to suck the joy out of playing that particular section of the game though. I get that severe movement penalties over swamps is a staple of strategy games, but it really needs to bugger off for good for the sake of fun gameplay. P.P.S. Very close to stopping my WoW sub once again. I'm very on-and-off with it anyway these days but I think I've pretty much seen all I can for now. Good thing with tokens though is that it's trivial to stop and then start again when new stuff is added. I haven't paid a cent for the game via any channel since the upfront purchase price for Legion which was what, three years ago?