Tigranes

RIAA Sues Family For Piracy.... Except They Don't Own A Computer. No Amish will be safe from the far-reaching tendrils of the RIAA! (w00t)

A Wii in Every Home, For Every Member of the Family. Now I'll DEFINITELY get one.

Ramza : Obsidian's homegrown necrofan.

My 12 CHA will demolish you all with its devious averageness! Can someone PM me or something, I have OpenRPG and I can run it, I just don't know how to join the server, etc.

*shrug* I never cared about those +'s myself, half the time I put things into Luck! Sometimes things are just too blatant for you to *not* metagame, and sometimes you never notice them.

Fenghuang, first meeting had transcripts, it's in page 8 or something. I dont' know, I'd love to see what some of these acid spells can do to exposed... valuables.

That's cause they are the Chosen People.

Yeah, finished it.

For the blood: THE FLASK IS TEH MINE!

HH, seriously, you need reading comprehension. I have made this argument again, and again, and again, ever since you suggested they just hire more QAs. Argument: Bug Eradication requires both QA staff and Developer staff. Facts: QA's job is to FIND bugs. The QA does NOT fix the bugs. Devs' job is to MAKE the levels, wait for QA to FIND the bugs, then FIX the bugs. How does Bug Testing work? STEP ONE: Devs make a level. STEP TWO: QA tests this level. STEP THREE: QA finds bugs and refers the bugs to the Devs. STEP FOUR: The devs fix the bugs, then gives the level BACK to the QA. Repeat Step 2,3,4 again and again until the level is bugfree (hopefully). Why can't you just hire more QA? Because Step Four is essential to fixing bugs, and Step Four is done by DEVS, not QA. Imagine that you had 60 QA Staff and they all made bug reports to 10 Devs. 10 Devs cannot do Step Four, which can sometimes take a long time, as fast as 60 QAs do Step Two/Three. Therefore, sooner or later there will be paid QA Staff tiddling their thumbs while 10 Devs work to fix the multitudes of reported bugs. What about Bulock's quote? If Bulock was waiting for the QA, then this was because the QA was doing Step Two. What's your point? The nature of bugtesting is such that at SOME point, no matter how many or few people you have, someone is going to be waiting and someone is going to be on crunch time. You just have to minimise this 'waste'. Hiring 30 extra QAs won't help as much as you think, and it will be a serious resource drain.

S!

I do feel godlike in Oblivion after level 20, actually. At least, there's nothing to look forward to in terms of character development.

I think CRPGs levelling up faster is a necessity, just because the possibilities of what you can do with your character are much more limited (naturally) compared to pnp. Do you really want to be stuck on the same level for +5 hours in a CRPG, even putting aside the idea of progress? Nope. It is a smaller game and it is a more restricted experience, so you have to level up faster to compensate - at least, in the current model of Bio/BIS D&D CRPGs. I would prefer it to be slower than, say, BG2 / NWN though. KOTOR was *way* too fast.

We start in 21 hours and 15 minutes from the time of this post, I think.

The New Zealand Air Force consists of a single helicopter. And a rusty, 60-year old AA gun that has never been fired, if that counts.

Again you fail to realise how QA works. And all manifestations of that bug must be fixed. Listen, it's very simple - the more code, the more bugs. It's a rule every person that's ever dealt with even HTML/PHP knows. Maybe 40 hours doesnt mean double the bugs of 20 hous, but there are still a lot more. Nobody said this. The point is that Bugfixing requires the prolonged attention of both QA and developers, not just QAs. Are you suggesting OE, a young company with only one released game, hire 10 more QAs and 5 more designers for NWN2? And do you t hink this minor effect is enough to overcome the increased workload? No. It is fruthermore much harder for everyone involved to get the "big picture" in their minds and make everything consistent. The "advantage" you describe cannot cancel it all out. and devs. I've said this earlier in this post and in previous posts. Hello?? That isn't even correct english, what are you saying?

7pm = skip lecture. (w00t) The first one I do need to go into though, it's wednesday afternoon and I've only been into 1 lecture this week.

Well, 8pm Thu EDT = Noon Fri in NZ.. I should just be back from the lectures. I can make it 7pm if that would help, but that's a stretch.

Well, I replay BG series because I like the tactical combat as well as the game in general. +20 times, probably. But I'm someone that enjoys reading books again and again as well.

Alright, let's settle for Thursday. Arbitrary man! *poof* 8pm, Thursday. EST. Lemon Sausage Sandwich with Creme. *poof* And thanks to Arbitrary man we have a time. Stupendous. All those in support say aye, the others that support Hitler may jump in the lake with pixies.

Or maybe Ferret intended to quit a few months ago (when the rel. date was June), and when they brought in Sawyer (either partly because of htis, or for other reasons) they prepared him as a replacement. I find that much more likely than the "bolted suddenly" theory - which, of course, would suddenly gain weight if NWN2 flopped.

The thing is, the first playthrough has to be compelling enough to make you go through the motions again for the 'alternative ending'. It's something I definitely will not do with JE - partly because I did not like the game much and felt it was too railroaded for replay anyway, and partly because by then Bio's Good/Evil stuff was way too predictable. Hell, I actually guessed who the big baddie was as soon as he starts talking in the first 15 mins of the game - then after the 'important conversation' deduced that you would run around doing quests to shut down the evil guy, only to find HE's the evil guy, and then have an epic showdown. I think the only thing in the plot I didn't count on was the whole "dead world" thing. Whereas PS:T, I would replay, and I did. Others did not. It is a difficult game to replay even if you like it and want to see more things, just because it's so linear and a dialogue-based experience is usually not as circumstancial as combat or exploration or AI. But then again, I play TES mostly for sense of wanderer and discovery, and the rest of it can't hold me for a second playthrough.

How about this thursday, then? By that I mean in 2 days. I'm okay for anytime after 8pm Thursday (EST).

QA *finds* bugs. Then programmers / designers have to fix these bugs. Fixing these bugs make more problems. Each time you get a bug report you have to spend time fixing, retesting, fixing, retesting. This means that unless you hire more QA *and* more designers, which of course bloats up logistical nightmares and design inconsistencies, simply hiring cheap QA won't solve th eproblem. It helps, though - but OE is a young company and ain't made of cash. Oh, that post was a response to the discussion?? Listen, "losing attention" is something players do. If you are a QA it's your JOB to test things over and over again. You go to an area and find that the game crashes when an orc is on 16 health. You replicate the situation of 16 health over, and over, and over again, write down what happens, and try it differently, trying different combinations of attacks. Then a dev changes some things, and you have to try it AGAIN. That's how QA works. It's supposed to be monotonous, and sometimes you don't even test the entire game, you only test one section of it (as a single QA member). Come back when you know what actually goes on with QA.

Again, whether the length is appropriate depends on the story, gameplay style, and genre of the game, and the approach and dedication of the player.