Humanoid

the bane of most mmos is the single player aproach on the game design. the goal of most developers when they make an mmo is, mistakenly, to balance the game in a way that every single player can do everything by himself no matter his class or leveling-power up choices. Because the alternative approach assumes some sort of minimum population, at all times of day, at each level, in every zone in the game.

As mentioned, an Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 4 is an option, but at $80 a rather costly one. And the experience installing the Xtreme 7970 on my 7950 wasn't exactly smooth sailing, the thermal adhesive that came with it for the RAM were not very adhesive and the fans while very quiet, have proved somewhat unreliable. I'll consider it depending on what kind of improvement in the noise signature I can get from simply moving the card into my new system. I've had aftermarket coolers installed on most of my cards over the last decade, the 7950, the 5850 before it (though only towards the latter half of its lifespan), the 8800GT, and on the 7900GT (which died). The only exception in that bunch is the X1950XT I had, which I only had for a few months, that was a terrible buy and the HIS IceQ cooler it came with started making terrible noises within that time. The Skylake release has kind of crept up on me, I didn't realise the -K models were out within a couple of weeks, so I probably should start thinking about specific parts soon. Not sure which way I'm going with the RAM, I imagine most if not all launch boards will be for DDR4, but without meaningful performance improvements, keeping my DDR3 is definitely an attractive option. I'll port three of my SSDs over (the non-system ones) and probably try an M.2-SATA one for a new system drive. Tempting to just go ahead and buy a 1TB SSD though, something like a Crucial BX100 is around the $400 mark now, the same price I paid for a 120GB drive in 2010. I already have the Define R4 case, EVGA Supernova G2 PSU and Scythe Mugen 4 cooler waiting, so all I really need to get is the CPU, motherboard, one or two SSDs, potentially some RAM, and maybe a Blu-ray drive just because. Will try a Logitech MX Anywhere 2 mouse instore when it's released here, and also eyeing a set of Philips Fidelio X2 headphones. Since it's a clean install I also figure I may as well try Windows 10, as a free upgrade from the two installs I have left on my Windows 7 Family Pack, and if I don't like it it's not big problem to just start over.

The dungeons that came out after 5.2 were tuned down back to WotLK difficulty levels, but I'm pretty certain that if you could actually take The Stonecore heroic and somehow paste it into TBC it would come out squarely on top in terms of 5-man difficulty. Compared to that instances like the Shadow Labyrinth heroic seemed to be downright, uhm, reasonable. On reflection that's probably true overall. One thing I forget when comparing is that people tended to just pick and choose the few easiest dungeons and do them over and over again, while in subsequent expansions to get the 'full' reward required queuing up for a random one using the group finder (even when doing so with a fully pre-made group, as I do 90% of the time). Heroic Shattered Halls for example I may have only done a couple of times along the journey, while doing Mechanar and Slave Pens dozens of times. That said, my personal experience doesn't make for a fair comparison really because I went into BC as a "retired" raider, very close to quitting the game after getting a full time job and not having any access to raid gear, and tackled the heroic dungeons with that in mind. I had raided with an American guild in vanilla which disbanded shortly before the expansion launch, and I'd joined/co-founded a joke guild with a few friends, with the idea of "hey let's check out what's new in BC before we quit for good". It's by accident that the guild turned into a real raiding guild and we ended up with a creditable top-10 server progression by the end of the expansion despite giving away a half-year head start. By contrast then, every expansion since I've come into I've been able to outgear the dungeons extremely quickly and therefore don't really have a genuine gauge of their difficulty save for perhaps during the first couple of weeks. The other thing is that I tend to lump BC in with vanilla as "old WoW" and everything after that as "new WoW". I just don't really think of old WoW much when making comparisons because mechanically it was the dark ages where balance was never a concern, and developers had no problem having some specs do literally half the damage of others, enrage timers were not a thing, and you could stack as many tanks and healers as you liked.

...with lasers, spaceships, and power armor. How would you bite people through your power armour helmet?

That is why the STRIX cards are great, when it's idling the fans don't spin. Realistically though, any decent video card will be essentially inaudible at idle, it's load noise that's the concern. Yeah, undervolting is an option. Case is an Antec P182 configured for a somewhat lower heat dissipation, one intake one exhaust, middle drive bay removed and top exhaust mount is sealed with foam. That said, my Define R5 arrived with my video card, it's what I'll be using with my Skylake build so we'll see how much of a difference it makes with its padded panels. It's unfortunate that I don't like headphones ("condoms for the ears") because in theory they'd solve my problems instantly and for relatively cheap. (I've been eyeing a pair of Philips Fidelio X2s, my fourth attempt at finding headphones I like) I didn't really need the performance except in The Witcher 3 so I have no real need to extract maximum performance out of my system. God that game's cost me several hundred dollars now - $100 for the game and expansions, another $200 for the CE (Xbone version because reasons), $400 for a new video card, and $2 for AA batteries for my gamepad.

OSes, like kisses.

What I probably should do is find a reference level of noise that I'm comfortable with and then compare that with the figures measured in various reviews. The Windforce cooler, along with the Sapphire Tri-X gets nothing but praise in reviews for being just about the quietest factory solutions available, quieter than even the best blower by far. So the "problem" is likely simply that I'm a lot more sensitive to noise than most people are, and always have been - I remembering going out to some lengths to find the famous Japanese Panaflo case fans more than a decade ago, back when video cards barely had a cooler worth mentioning. AMD's reference blower is probably the worst cooler out there since the notorious nVidia FX5800. It's just that they've stopped shipping cards with it now: the Fury air coolers are exclusively custom vendor ones so the blower's last hurrah was with the 290 series release back in 2013. For what it's worth, nVidia's blowers are as good as blowers can get, probably, but with the 980Ti/Titan X it's really starting to show its limits: they do run noticably hotter and louder than factory custom coolers. However blowers will always have that niche of being the better solution for multi-GPU setups, because of the aforementioned exhaust effect. Recirculating air internally from one GPU is fine, the case fans can handle that more efficiently and silently than a blower. Ultimately the problem lies with the ATX specification, which is an anachronism in this day and age but which persists due to inertia. CPUs sip less than 100W of power these days, but we have massive clearance for massive coolers and good airflow around them. Meanwhile video cards suck down two to three times as much power, but are placed in a cramped position with minimal airflow, and with the heatsinks upside-down. Hopeless these days but understandable in the context that when the ATX design was finalised, cards didn't even have a heatsink at all. I recall the original nVidia TNT was the first card I saw with a heatsink, and the TNT2 was the first I saw with a fan. Not sure when 3dfx started putting heatsinks on theirs, pretty sure the original Voodoo was just a bare chip.

In: Gigabyte R9 290X (bottom) Out: MSI R7950 (top) Unfortunately it's a bit louder than I'd hoped, but that's to be expected. Every time a new generation of video cards comes out, reviews love to claim that it's the new-best-cooler, and while that's likely technically true, they still fall a ways short of the third-party coolers, such as the Arctic Cooling model above, which was effectively inaudible over the rest of the system. Unfortunately the leftmost fan on it died early, and while the remaining two fans have held up just fine in effectiveness over the past couple years, I suspect another is starting to fail, it makes a loud grinding noise for about 15 minutes after booting up, though it goes back to silent after. The dimensions of the coolers may look similar on the photo, but the AC one is a fair bit chunkier in person, overhanging a third slot while the Windforce settles in two (though just barely). The Gigabyte Windforce is better than the MSI Twin Frozr that came stock on the 7950, even with the 290X pulling upwards of 50W more power, but it's still not great to live with. Up to 40% fan speed it's great, but the noise ramps up pretty fast after that point and at 60% which it will hit sooner rather than later, the noise dominates everything. I'll give it a week or two to see if I can get used to it, because $75 for an Accelero Xtreme 4 is a fair chunk of change.

Googled a random Saffer hardware shop to look at prices. (Wootware, no idea how reputable they are) GTX 970 = R5000 = $400 GTX 960 2GB = R3000 = $240 R9 280X = R3300 = $264 R9 290 = R4200 = $338 R9 390 = R4800 = $386 All of those are reasonably priced, by which I mean largely in-line with European and Australian prices that we've been discussing. Though just to illustrate how much VRAM doesn't really matter, the R9 390 is pretty much just an R9 290 with 8GB of VRAM. It's not going to run Witcher 3 or GTA5 any faster than the 290, and is slower than the 4GB* GTX970. So if you can trade up when you go to the store, try to get a 970 or 290 (discontinued) instead.

Of all the dot points to talk about, it's the least interesting to me. I'm more concerned about the "tactical-but-Souls" combat claimed: how does that even work? I'd have thought those are fundamentally opposite things. Either I'm in there swinging my sword around, or I'm at arms length directing the (two?) characters independently. In line with my preference for only controlling the one character in any given RPG, I would certainly hope the companion character can be set fully autonomous - and I'm kind of expecting it to be like any recent Bioware game, in that "hey you can give your party members orders if want, I guess" indifferent sort of way. I wouldn't call that tactical, but I don't want tactical, so hey. Totally fine with the predefined characters. Also fine with fully customised characters. I only really complain about games that try to compromise and do semi-custom, as you lose the strengths of both approaches.

Unfortunately it's a common marketing trick for the board vendors to add more VRAM to a GPU that can't really take advantage of it, to try to fool people into thinking more is better. The 5800-series came with 1GB VRAM standard and that was all they really needed, the 2GB version was largely pointless. Likewise the GTX960 comes with 2GB as standard, and excepting edge cases, the 2GB version will be as fast as the 4GB version. You're paying more because it's a non-standard version of the card, how much is the 2GB version?

Cataclysm was actually the peak of WoW dungeon difficulty, and MoP actually went to the other extreme as a result, dungeons were the easiest they'd ever been. WoD dungeon difficulty is somewhere in between, but they've messed it up in a completely different way - there's no longer any incentive to do them because the loot is hopelessly outdated and you can get better stuff easily from solo outdoor content. This was once again an overadjustment, previous expansions had the opposite problem where people felt obliged to run old dungeons that had long been trivial for them to acquire special currencies. You're conflating two separate things with the cross-server thing though. Cross-realm groups in themselves I consider a boon, I can get friends from off-server together to do stuff, that's nothing but positive. The group finder functionality, on the other hand, achieves the opposite of that: everyone you find with it is essentially anonymous, someone you will never meet again, and it kills the social aspect of the game. That said, I'm probably not the best judge of what impact it's had in general because I've been part of the same guild since 2007, a guild I effectively co-founded with people I've played with since 2005, so there's no real need or want to use the tool. A large part of the problem is that WoW just has too many servers relative to its subscriber base, a relic of its heyday when it had close to double its current population. A significant number of people are stranded on these servers, not wanting to pay the fee to transfer to somewhere more populated, and therefore have no option but to use these tools to be able to do any sort of multiplayer content. There's been a sort of band-aid fix applied where realms are "connected", that is, having groups of two or three servers linked so the outdoor zones are shared between them. I suspect they went this route largely for PR reasons, the headlines would look really, really bad if they merged and/or shut down servers like SWTOR did: headlines like "Blizzard closes down HALF of all servers!" would get the suits a bit antsy.

Sounds about right really, just put in more fetch quests and unskippable cutscenes.

Would be interesting to price it at Newegg, say, to get an idea of how much a typical US customer pays, not the expert bargain hunters.

In Australia, MSY is famous for: a) having the best prices; and, b) having the worst website ever created. For normal folk, PC Case Gear is probably the benchmark and are competitive pricewise while maintaining a usable website and decent customer service, but are an online-only business. Scorptec is probably the place to go for a full service store, but charge at the higher end of the spectrum.

Yeah a good 980Ti is now $1100AUD here. Though to be fair a large part of it is due to the Aussie dollar which is in freefall, if you take the US price of $650, add 10% tax, and convert to AUD, it's $970 for the reference version, so it's unfortunately a "fair" price. Similarly with your example, the Amazon price + VAT would be 800+ EUR so it's the Brits who are getting ripped off the most. (It's worth noting that unlike most of the world, US prices as listed are almost always excluding tax, because they have different tax rates for every state) Speaking of which, concern about the exchange rate means I'm moving ahead faster than I had planned to with my own upgrades. I really wanted the R9 Fury (non-X) and I thought that the US price, which will probably drop soon, was in my range. But realistically that's no longer the case, it'll be about $900 here which is unpalatable. So I think I'm picking up a clearance custom R9 290X for $405AUD which looks like my best option now. For comparison, all AUD and all reputable custom-cooled models: R9 290 $359 R9 290X $405 GTX 970 $460 R9 390 $470 R9 390X $600 GTX 980 $710 I like to think I made the right choice - or at least, the equal best one. I'll get a Fractal Design R5 case and EVGA Supernova G2 850W as well since they're things not subject to change before I build a Skylake system later this year. Alas the rest of it I'll have to wait before buying and cop the price rises as the economy continues to falter.

It's the VESA mount mentioned in the specs. Another handy use for it is to mount a NUC to the screen, as a sort of DIY all-in-one PC.

Hidden object puzzle games are probably the most mature genre of video games, their target audience is 50+ year old women.

I vaguely remember getting a pink tint on my display some years ago on updating the graphics drivers, can't even remember what card I had at the time but I think restoring default settings in the control centre fixed it.

Yeah, well hopefully "hearts of stone" doesn't refer to her feelings about Geralt.

Look who's back. Not a particularly well kept secret, but hey, confirmation by way of the Steam listing

Wonder if it's just a toggle that turns off Geralt's momentum. Think Skyrim movement.

Well in retail, or anything sold under the wholesale model in general, the individual vendors still have control over their own policies. A customer might feel entitled to more than the law allows, but it's up to the discretion of the vendor whether to allow that extra leeway. The is more of a problem under the agency model of sales such as Steam, where you're bound by whatever policies they can unilaterally apply. I'm a little torn about it since it seems they've decided the policy applies retrospectively, which is a fraught issue with any agreement. But then again it's an economic decision for the publisher/developer whether the extra income from being able to sell on Steam outweighs the loss in having to agree to their possibly overgenerous return policy. I'd assume in pretty much every case it absolutely would. Personally I think the only legitimate grievance with the move may be if Steam takes money back from partners when they issue refunds for games bought before the current refund policy was in place - I'm not sure what exactly happens when that kind of refund happens.

Seems to be the obvious thing, yes. But I don't think that alone accounts for a 10% hit necessarily, so some other sneaky but less obvious 'optimisations' may be happening alongside.

Sellers need to have a return policy that at minimum complies with the law on consumer rights. Sometimes these policies exceed the minimum legislated rights, such as the policy Steam have set in place. This is not done out of the kindness of their hearts, it is because it is more economical to have a broader net that sometimes gives an unjustified refund where it's not warranted, compared to the cost of scrutinising every single return carefully. The cost of the occasional unscrupulous customer gaming the system is dwarfed by the cost of implementing a system to prevent that. So don't cry for Steam or Wal-mart or whatever, they're simply implementing the policy most cost-effective to themselves.