Blarghagh

Finally getting through Luke Cage but getting increasingly bored since Diamondback came in and replaced Cottonmouth. It's a pattern these Marvel shows are developing that only the first season of Daredevil avoided. Stories with emotional weight and interesting characters being built up, then replaced with more traditional Superhero stuff. Jessica Jones took a long boring break from Kilgrave to deal with Nuke, Daredevil season 2 has the awesome Punisher story building into a Kingpin story suddenly taking a backseat to The Hand and now Luke Cage drops a charismatic villain they were building up halfway through the season to replace him with a run of the mill psychopath. If you don't have enough material for ~15 episode season, make shorter seasons.

Story mode difficulty for the win, for me. It makes most trash negligable. It also makes the real fights negligable, but since I've never been someone to really get deep into the strategy of CRPGs and am mostly there for the story, it makes the sacrifice worth it. Ironically, the cloth wearing mages and warlocks are much tankier than my mail wearing Shaman. Enhancement Shaman has never been more fun. Anyway, don't expect much of Shattrath. You never get to go in.

I don't even mind the grind, I could grind for weeks if it meant I could accomplish specific goals. But now I'm grinding content where anything could give me unexpected improvement, but nothing will give me an expected improvement. It's rather aimless and that makes it much less rewarding to me.

Isn't Town of Salem Free to Play?

The cracks in this WoW expansion are starting to show for me. I feel like I've run out of character upgrades that I can target. It's always been pretty random, but at least you could target it in a way like "if kill this boss, it might give me the upgrade I want". Now I'm looking for items with increased levels of randomness. "If I kill this boss, it might give me an item that's less powerful than I have now, but it might roll on a higher item level randomly, give me the right stats and gem sockets randomly..." It makes targeting character upgrades feel really pointless. Now I have a lot of content that I CAN do to get potential character upgrades, but no content that I really want to do. Realistically I'm never going to run out of ways to randomly increase my character's power but other than occassionally getting a quest to go kill this or that boss, I don't really have much incentive to run that content other than the remote possibility that this will happen. Most of my dungeon runs are slowly becoming disappointments because "wow, this item would have been really cool for me... if this random trash item hadn't already rolled a higher ilvl making it a downgrade". For a game where the major driving factor is getting more powerful by getting gear, I'm not feeling particularely interested in or excited about any gear pieces I can find. I used to look at a boss's loot table and think "wow, I really want that item, I'll make sure to run this boss every week" and now I think "same ol' same ol', might get a good thing if I'm triple lucky". That's always been present in the game, but you used to run targetable things first and then if you had time left you might run some side stuff that could give you something good. Now the entire game is starting to feel like that side stuff. Unless something really cool gets announced at BlizzCon, I'm probably going to let my subscription run out and take a long break.

That sounds better.

That seems like a pattern. Lee Pace as Ronan the Accuser in Guardians of the Galaxy said most of his scenes were cut, and Christopher Eccleston said the same thing aboud Malekith the Accursed in Thor: The Dark World.

Its the crowd sourcing platform that a bunch of the successful kickstarter devs helped get off the ground, that combines crowdsourcing and investing. So you can do standard crowd sourcing with soliciting donations in exchange for rewards, or you can invest and get a share of the profits. I think at first there was a sizeable minimum investment if you wanted shares, but they are trying to set it up so smaller investors can buy shares as well. The projects are curated by Fig, with advisors from the various kickstarter successes, in order to minimize the likelyhood of projects not delivering the product. So far it looks like its been quite successful, raising some decent sized sums. Thanks! And I assume one of the "successful kickstarter devs" is Tim Shafer, then. Who is successful in the "getting large sums of money from crowdsourcing" way rather than the actually delivering on it. Having Tim Shafer in any way in control of those (or any) finances is a red flag for me.

Dr Strange was enjoyable. Solid entertainment but don't expect a smart film - it's Marvel's tried and true origin story formula just done very competently and with some interesting special effects. The villain was rather forgettable but serviceable, just random servant A of overarching evil force. I'd rate it somewhere lower than Guardians of the Galaxy, but higher than Ant-Man. It was surprisingly self-contained too, with only a few mentions of larger MCU happenings. Well... Post-credits very clearly shows it. Mid-credits is a larger MCU thing featuring an Avenger and the best pint I've ever seen.

I think Marvel has always been more interested in the heroes than the villains. Compare and contrast with the Burton & Schumacher Batman movies, which were solely interested in the villains.

What's fig?

Still a "turbulent" mediator. Accurate with other Meyers-Briggs tests I've taken. EDIT: Funny how many people in the other thread called bollocks because they get different results when they retake. I get INFP every single time, in every Meyers-Briggs test I've taken, and the text is disturbingly accurate for my personality. I guess I'm a more extreme variant of the type compared to other people?

Latest post in 10 days:

This thread is far over the cap already so I'll start a new one for you.

Not weird per se, tell reviewers to talk positively about your game unless they won't receive it and many will make that behavior into a story. Tell so-called "Influencers" "Oh hey, do you want exclusive Youtube/Twitch views on this cool new game? Well promise us you'll praise it in your content in this agreement here and you can have it!" Not saying Betheda's doing this, but it feels fishy that only some select people receive a copy. There's games by Bethesda and then there's games published by Bethesda. Anything created by Bethesda is invariably buggy piece of crap on release. Anything published by Bethesda, on the other hand, is well polished, optimized and functions extremely well (perhaps with the exception of Evil Within, altho I think that was fine too?)You have your Dishonored, Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Old Blood, 2016 version of DOOM. That makes their decision even more puzzling to me, it seems that their QA department actually does really good job for games they publish (and completely ignores those they develop for whatever reason.)

Thread capped (like 10 pages ago). New version coming up.

To be fair, so has Tim Miller. He was slated to make a CG cartoon long before Fox pushed him up towards the big boy version. But I agree with kirottu, creative use of a low(ish) budget is a huge part of why the movie felt so fresh. Can't blame Tim Miller for being more ambitious, but you can't lose sight of that. Plus, not being on Deadpool 2 means he's got a free schedule to get back to his adaptation of The Goon with David Fincher, and I bet he's finally got the clout to make that happen. After, who better to direct the CG industry away from PG-13 than the guy who made that work for superheroes?

Yeah, I agree about being responsible for your own burnout. I've read a lot of complaints about there being too much to do and how people can't be expected to max out farming artifact power, doing world quests, running mythic+ dungeons, raiding so many nights bla bla bla etc. etc. every week and how that's Blizzard's fault. But I feel like the point is you CAN'T be expected to do those things so you have to chose the activities you find more worthwhile. I've never seen a game community so salty over having too much content. We'll see how set bonuses work out. The one's that were datamined to be coming with the Nighthold in a couple months were all fairly minor - great if you have it, but not worth taking the ilvl hit over it. Secondary stats that come with ilvl are way too powerful right now.

Hm, I hadn't considered it that way. We did clear through the entire Emerald Nightmare on Normal in a week as a guild that goes in blind (nobody is allowed to look at videos or guides for tactics, we want to figure them out together) and ever since we've been running it once every week in an hour and a half or so for the people who still need gearing up, so I'm guessing we might as well have skipped it. In truth though, most guilds I know run through the different difficulties in sequence, so how it's intended might not be how it ended up working, which happens to Blizzard a lot (i.e. the current Legendaries not causing "wow, an unexpected Legendary dropped I'm so excited" as it was intended but "aw goddammit I still don't have my expected legendary yet/aw it's not the right one I'm so disappointed").

Eh Steam streaming is kinda bad in my experience, but yeah, HDMI cables for the win.

That was probably true during "vanilla" or for some raids in TBC, though I doubt it was true for, say, Karazahn and certainly not for any of the Wrath of the Lich King raids (which were still pre-raid finder). At least on our realm PUGs used to clear the previous "generation" of raids during WotLK (eg. we ran PUGs for Naxxramas/Eye of Eternity(Malygos)/Sartharion with alts while clearing Ulduar and started PUGging the first few bosses in Ulduar while working on heroic Ulduar). That, imho, was fine: hardcore raiders got to see the new content, and got it first, the rest just got to it later. It was already better than in TBC where most people indeed never got to see the inside of Black Temple. After Ulduar Blizzard imho just got lazy, instead of designing different fights for hard mode they just upped damage/hp on bosses and called it "heroic mode", moreover most raiders went through what is basically the same fight three times (raid finder -> normal -> heroic). Whether these were hard or not isn't even the point, it just got boring doing the same fights over and over (much more so than ever before) and you didn't even get any awesome loot to show off for it (a recolouring of the same items everyone else got hardly counts). If they'd continued on the Ulduar path then I'm sure hardcore raiding in WoW wouldn't be dead (exactly none of the raid guilds on my realm survived the introduction of the raid finder for long). If I just want to quest and wander around I just resub to EverQuest 2 tbh, that game is far superior in the actual RPG department to WoW. Our pseudo-hardcore guild just steamrolled Naxxramas in two raid evenings or so (we even nearly killed the first boss with only 10 as our raid leader hadn't figured out the switch between 10 and 25man modes...note that our guild was "special" in the sense that nobody was allowed to look at videos of fights before the guild had cleared it for the first time, in stark contrast to how most guilds operated), that said, some of the heroic modes were real fun in early WotLK (until after Ulduar, see above), I greatly enjoyed Sarth3D on 25man. You're right, the less than As for just upping the hp and damage on bosses, right now in Legion I enjoy that the fight mechanics are progressive over difficulties. Mythic has more mechanics than heroic which has more than normal and so forth. Still a problem with having to run the same fight over multiple difficulties, but it's more interesting than just upping the damage. LFR is mostly redundant - daily world quests offer the same gear level and there are no long quest chains you can complete on that difficulty so it's become the tourist mode it was meant to be, and normal isn't that hard so most casual guilds can easily clear it. I just feel like they could tune up heroic and get rid of mythic, by the time most guilds get to mythic they're sick of the instance and the next tier is about to come out. Plus my guild has trouble filling slots for heroic now because most of us are having much more fun in Greater Rif- I mean Mythic Keystone Dungeons. EDIT: Personally I think Wrath had the right idea, but feel fairly safe in saying that up until now Legion's been the best expansion since Wrath. I skipped Pandaland though and apparently that was better than Cata and WoD for people who weren't alienated by the Pandaland theme before it started, so I'm not 100% sure. The only problem I have with Legion is that they screwed the gear system a little by adding too many randomness layers on it, but the actual content you do for that vendor trash gear is pretty fun.

Yeah but it had a bot mode. I don't know any numbers about Battlefield but I remember reading that Unreal Tournament's bot mode was played more than the online game too, and that game was even more online focused. Since Battlefield added single player, I assume the number has skewed. Why else add single player at all if you're doing fine with just the multiplayer? Why don't more multiplayer only games become succesful? Other than Overwatch, I believe every multiplayer only game that wasn't free to play in the last couple of years was a bust, right? I can't remember any real successes (I firmly believe the disappearance of bots has a lot to do with this). Nobody played Evolve until it went Free to Play and that game was hyped as hell. To answer your WoW question: It depends on the route you take. The game encourages questing and for a new player with no heirlooms or tricks that's probably going to take you days rather than hours - I'd estimate 4 to 7 full 24 hour days worth of playtime. I leveled a toon from level 1 to level 100 right before Legion launched in about 12 hours chainrunning dungeons in full heirlooms. My quickest max level character was the free level 100 boost that came with my Legion pre-order (I normally don't pre-order but I was going to play this whether it was good or not, help me I'm addicted), the existence of which has probably helped with the massive level grind for a lot of people. Of course making a new player level 100 right away and throwing all these abilities at them when they never explain how to even play game is a bad idea, but really this game has enormous problems in its new player experience anyway so fair enough.

I know what you mean. We cleared the new Emerald Nightmare raid in one week and my guild goes in blind (i.e. nobody knows tactics). At least they have Mythic mode these days, which gives a serious challenge, but only But even with how easy it is now, an estimated 8% of the playerbase cleared Blackhand during WoD on any raid difficulty including LFR - which you can win by pressing a queue and going afk - according to some numbers MMO-Champion published last year. Comparatively, about 60% killed the first boss of that instance - the majority of WoW players cared so little about raiding that they can't be bothered to afk until the end of a raid instance - and this was in an expansion where there was little else to do than raid (I'm convinced at this point that the emphasis on raiding in WoD was why the subscriber numbers dropped as quickly as they did, because that expansion was even worse for casual players than it was for the hardcore). Raiding is not and will never be the primary action people do in WoW. Most subscribers just quest by themselves. It's surprising but true. Which is my point - of any game, assume that less than 10% play it the way its meant to be played or how gamers think it should be played. When I still worked in game dev you don't want to know how many people would complain that the easy modes of our casual mobile games were too hard. Similarily, when I was young I didn't know anybody who played StarCraft online which everyone says was "StarCraft's strength", but I knew plenty of people who used cheatcodes to beat the campaign. Go figure.

Pay close attention to the first part of that - it's a question everyone hates to hear: Is it REALLY what you want to do? I don't want to put you off, but that's my story. I studied to become and briefly was a game animator because I thought that was what I really wanted. I ended up hating it.