scrotiemcb

I don't agree. If you had said "anything below 80 Deflection is crap for tanking," then I'd agree. But the difference between 20 and 50 can be huge when it comes to turning crits into hits and hits into grazes. A little defense is the difference between a disengagement attack knocking your squishy out cold, or having them stay conscious with low health after disengaging. This is why a weapon switch to hatchet and large shield is so important, giving +21 to +33 to Deflection against disengagement before attempting it.

I don't think AncientToaster is right. He's assuming we wouldn't change our builds at all. Yes, a squishy who eats engagement is pretty much dead... now. Not necessarily if we stop building them so darn squishy. Which is a point specifically addressed by OP in regards to min/maxing. Here's how I would do it. 1. The enemy AI would be assumed to have access to the combat log. If a character has done zero damage to the enemy party, the enemy AI treats that character as dealing zero damage; if they've never attacked, as having zero accuracy. If they have done damage, the enemy AI has their base damage and accuracy. These values are used until that character deals damage with a different weapon or spell, resetting those values. 2. Enemies roleplay strategic thinking. An enemy has a base 30% chance to use the break-engagement algorithm, modified 3% per point of Intelligence. If they fail, they don't break and retry after next attack. Using Miasma of Dull-Mindedness will indeed dull their minds as far as breaking engagement is concerned. 3. If the algorith is not skipped, the AI simulates one attack from each player party member, randomly rolling 1-100 for accuracy for each. The engaging character(s) gets the bonuses for disengagement attacks for this calculation. The enemy then attempts to attack the party member with the highest simulated damage roll, breaking engagement if necessary. This means slow, powerful weapons draw more enemy attention than fast, weak weapons; a backrow character with a hunting bow isn't going to get blitzed nearly as often as a backrow with an arquebus, and a tank with an estoc (or who led with an arquebus shot which hit) is going to hold enemies far better than one with a hatchet and shield.

Can you give a research paper on this? Sorry, but I somehow doubt that there is any scientific evidence for this. Sounds like completely made-up. The reason why a game would go with either 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 has nothing to do with people's memory, but very simple practical reasons based on genre: Duo: typical co-op type games. Two is the most practical number for such games, as it's most likely scenario of having a friend coming over to your house. Having two friends come over to play games is much much rarer. Three: typical action-type games with AI companions. Those are usually there for filling the other two roles of the holy trinity setup. Four: this setup emerged from the restrictions of console game controllers, which mostly have buttons placed in groups of 4. Five: this setup comes from early MMO days and is derived from the statistical distribution of holy-trinity roles in most player communities: 20% play tank, 20% play healer, 60% play DPS classes. So this became the standard of intended group setups for allowing maximum community contribution. Six: this setup is a cRPG classic and most likely derived from a statistical analysis of the average player number in tabletop-game sessions. From all the setups above, it's probably the most arbitrary. Eight and Sixteen: these setups are the go-to setups in Squad-based tactical games. It's based on early days of computer-gaming where memory was limited and maximum numbers were mostly determined by integer sizes as base-2 for easier computing. On-topic: On BG2, I mostly played with a permanent group of 5. Not because of personal preference, but for effectivity reasons: it allowed for a temporary sixth member to complete NPC-specific quests to get more XP and items out of the game. Once I finished all the NPC-related quests with all 16 NPCs in the game, I usually didn't fill the last slot permanently as mostly the NPCs in question got outleveled already (So, the sixth slot almost always went to Sarevok or Imoen, which were the last two available companions by default). In PoE, I see no reason not to use 6 party members, as the companion quests yield no significant rewards and the required XP to cap the game can be reached early no matter the number of party members. I'd say this is a major balancing issue that should be adressed, but then again, we haven't seen any intel on possible expansion content anyway. The link to Wikipedia can take you to short-term memory studies. All I'm saying is that holding your party member's actions and status in memory makes for a better gaming experience than continuously pausing and reevaluating. It's still possible, but tedious. You seem focused on genre conventions. The way we've done this before isn't necessarily the best way to do them. Question the status quo, and look to research on how human brains actually work to help determine what provides the best gaming experiences. (Of the numbers you listed, only "five" seemed to have any real thought behind its design... although one might ask why tank and healer seem much less sexy to the general populace, and what could be done to achieve 25/25/50.) I highly recommend looking up Malcolm Gladwell on YouTube. It doesn't relate directly to the topic, but it's good for getting the right mindset.

This is what I was talking about in terms of short-term memory. Most people can micromanage 6, but a statistically significant portion of the population won't. Only a fraction of one percent of people have consistent issues micromanaging 5.

Varies from person to person, but is based on the player's short-term memory. Very few players have trouble handling a party size of 5 or less, almost no one feels right managing 10 or more. The average person could handle a party of 7, but if you went with this several below-average players would feel off while playing; you don't want to design only for the top 70%. 5 or 6 is probably best answer from a design standpoint; I would have gone 5.

Of course hardcore players are going to be more thorough in doing side content. Are you serious?He didn't say they'd be equally thorough. He implied they'd be equally interested. I agree with that implication. Also, consider this: to actively avoid side quests, you must be fairly hardcore (either research or rerolls), while a casual player is almost certain to do lots of side content out of shear uncertainty of direction. Extreme completionist or minimalist playplaythroughs do imply a hardcore mentality, but there is a lot of room between those two extremes... and the two extremes should to some extent cancel each other out in terms of overall statistics. Average % complete is probably about the same for both casual and hardcore demographics.

If I was Obsidian, I would have given every (or nearly every) class an ability which upsets chokepoint positioning, at level 1. Thus would include my idea earlier of being able to walk over prone enemies. This would ensure that pretty much any encounter the player has with kith isn't easily cheesed with positioning tactics.

Again, and for the millionth time - "don't use it" is not an appropriate response to the existence of an overpowered/dominant strategy. If chess had a rule where I could trade my pawns for queens on the first turn, I could surely decide to "not use it" to make the game more fun... but the game would still be poorly designed. Sure it is. This is a single player game. If someone doesn't like doing something, they shouldn't do it. In the IE games, if I had a full party, I would rarely, if ever, pre-buff, kite, attack outside of LOS, or any other powerful (OP?) tactic. I would just barrel right on into the fight and make the best of things. (Usually with as little active input as possible, and I really enjoyed making my own scripts for those games.) But... if I was playing a solo-ironman game, you bet I did everything I could to give myself an advantage (and I needed it). The exploits in the IE games allowed *me* the ability to really enjoy the game in a variety of ways, from ridiculously easy to ridiculously difficult, and everywhere inbetween. In single-player games, players have to accept some small modicum of responsibility for their own behavior in and enjoyment of a game. What You are describing here is, for many, a completely immersion-breaking experience. You are asking players to make a metagame choice to deliberately hinder their characters through suboptimal play. If you mentally separate the player from the character in such a way that the player's deliberate choice doesn't have an in-game parallel to character choice, then I imagine you have no problems. However, a lot of players, including me, have a problem doing this. I could play a tank character without the strategic sense to use the very powerful doorway strategy, but I'd need to explain it to myself in-game somehow - perhaps he's too narcissistic to really care about the rest of the party, perhaps he secretly hopes to betray them, perhaps he's a bit mad, most likely he's just plain old daft. While this can work for me, I wouldn't want to play that way every time. There is also immersion in terms of enemies. Any group which is so easily thwarted by such tactics simply doesn't seem smart. If I'm fighting animals or (most) wilders, no problem with immersion there, but when seasoned sellswords are befuddled by it, I see it as the game making mockery of their intelligence. Basically, you're telling players they are responsible for imagining how actions play out in Eora. I beg to differ; it is the game's responsibility to show us, in a manner which delivers on role-playing expectations. We as players are audience here, not storytellers... at least not primarily.

Balance isn't necessarily all about variety, but in this case that's certainly a good facet to focus on. Highly dominant/OP strategies reduce variety and player choice, making the game boring in no time. Precisely. A large variety of options, where one option is clearly superior to all others, is the illusion of choice, and in practice no variety at all.

Balance isn't about symmetry; all excessive symmetry does is make a game boring, and draw more intense focus towards the things which aren't symmetrical. Balance is about variety. The game is more fun when you're using a variety of positioning strategies to get tasks accomplished, and less fun when it's the same old thing every time.

Adding encumberence and limiting stash doesn't really solve anything. Players could always return to pick up extra loot, and would be encouraged by game mechanics to do so. So you'd end up with a situation where the fun way to play (just go through once) is opposite the min-max way to play (multiple trips). Thus encumberence is an anti-fun mechanic. Now, limiting merchant gold, that's the real winner. It gets to the root of the problem - the liquidity of loot - and confronts it directly.

I like single-classing systems, like PoE. I like classless systems, like Divinity OS. I think multiclass systems are horrible. They basically combine the worst of both worlds. And yes, I'm hating on D&D.

Where is the "dislike this post" button?

What we need is a seven-striped flag 2km tall and 3km wide. On the moon.

Yep. That's a good summation of the evidence. I haven't the foggiest, either. Like I said, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. All I know is, according to physics and video of the towers falling, the planes alone didn't cause the fall. It's a hard thing to accept. Because it's not all wrapped up with a nice little bow. It's why crazies make nice little implausible bows to put on the whole thing. I don't.

They have, though. A little less than 3 inches during that time. We're all going to die.

First link: I like that site. If you use the graph to view actual temperature data, you will notice two things:1. There is noticeable temperature increase from 1900 to present. Global warming exists. 2. The actual temperature data from 2000 to present is less than the projections from both the extreme SRES A2 and more conservative SRES B1 models, both originally presented in 2000. Which lines up with what I've been saying almost precisely! It's a real problem, but one which "scientific" speculation has exaggerated. As for the second link, ocean levels have been rising 0.35cm since the early 90s. The most likely estimate for how much they'll rise in the future is... 0.35cm per year. About 1cm per 3 years. About 1 meter in 300 years. It is, no doubt, a problem which needs solving. But let's get real about rate of escalation here. The scientific foundation for tripling this rate is mostly speculation!

Not believing in science is sort of like not believing in microwave ovens.Never said I doubt the science. It's just that a realistic look at the data doesn't put us on the brink of catastrophe, unless you couple that with a cynical view of how long it takes to enact widespread social change. I also admit that having such a cynical view is totally reasonable. Exaggeration for shock effect is arguably ethically justifiable. Afterthought edit: But just as an example, if you're doing a calculation of how much polar ice will melt due to global warming, and you transfer all of the melted volume to ocean volume, you fail on two counts. First, obviously, solid water has more volume than liquid water. Second, the dew point rises as temperature increases, meaning more water vapor trapped in the air. I boycott them myself. Not because I'm scared of radiation or anything, I just think microwaved food tastes horrible.

I think global climate change is a little exaggerated but overall true. I think it's very important that we do something about it in the next few centuries or so. Outside of the dangers of procrastination and inertia against social change, I doubt it's important to do anything about it during our lifetimes (unless you are passionately concerned about Amazonian frogs, etc). But those two things are actually pretty big social problems, so I genuinely believe Al Gore has our best interests at heart when he stretches the truth. He has a point: why wait?

I'm not included on your list. I feel left out. If you're looking for a new controversy, I'm more than willing to defend the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. I am not a conspiracy theorist or anything (I offer no answer regarding who made them fall or why), I'm just saying the pure physics of how the buildings fell is not consistent with the official story. I'm pro-vaccination, believe in the moon landing, etc. Feel like you're doing "9/11 truther" a disservice placing it in your list.

Disagree with rogue and fighter on your list. A lot of the rest is caused by the silly per-encounter spell mechanic.

The ranger definitely isn't underpowered. Maybe compared to a cipher, but what isn't? The only problem is that it doesn't really feel fun. Fun and efficiency are two different things.

What's interesting about this study is that it focus is Early Childhood Intervention (ECI), a US federal mandate on states to provide services to developmentally delayed children from birth to three years with state-funded therapy and other services. Although it would constitute some form of fraud (ethically, if not legally), a child who is marked as having a "genetic" or severe "social" disorder is much more likely to receive services, while a view that such children are "culturally normal" would no doubt lead to a denial of service... an outcome the parents who apply no doubt wish to avoid. Assuming the sample is drawn from ECI applicants, all of the parents either genuinely believe or falsely represent their children as fitting the program qualifications (or some murky medium between those two extremes)... otherwise, why would they bother? If you asked the parents themselves about a view that their child lacks a genetic or social disorder, that the behavior of their child is "equal" according to a "separate" standard... well, you can imagine. I feel that study has more to do with parents anticipating racism, than racism at that actual moment. By which I mean: black parents who believe the key to career success in their child's future will depend on their ability to "speak properly," by which they mean: speak white. This does say something about institutional racism in the employment marketplace, but I imagine a less skewed look at the data from the study would show that all ethnicities attempt to get their children into ECI on sometimes legitimate and sometimes dubious claims of disability. As for me, I'll be completely honest: I have three kids, and my eldest has autism. Because of him I learned about ECI early on; he receives services. Applied on the other two based off minor (one might say trivial) fears. They both got rejected, in part because I'm not willing to lie my *** off.

Hilarious. You point out an INDIVIDUAL as an example, and a questionable one at that, for SYSTEM-WIDE racism. I almost could not tell whether your post was intended as satire or not, until I browsed through some of your earlier comments in the thread.Am I pointing out an individual? Or am I pointing out producers, writers, distribution, and marketing folks, as well as thousands of fans nationwide? I guess, technically, the former. I really should have said Chappelle's Show, the more proper term for the organization/cultural phenomenon.

@Serdan: I can think of at least one example of national-level systemic racism perpetrated primarily by an African-American (although supporting structure was no doubt multi-ethnic). Kind of directed at Caucasians, but more equal-opportunity racism, including against other African-Americans. See if you can figure it out without the spoilers. No doubt, if you break things down to regional, municipal, or household levels, there is significant ethnic variety of perpetrators of systemic racism.