Ethics Gradient

Can't say that I have, but if anyone is looking for a master class in how to burn bridges in a small community, they've come to the right place.

In the US, as part of your compensation, the employer pays your salary and subsidizes your private health insurance. The employee chips in a little of their paycheck, but your insurance benefits easily cost the company several thousand dollars per month. When your paycheck stops, so does your private insurance. In America it's been a fact of life for decades, and only in fairly recent history has anyone attempted to address the issue. The concept of job "lock-in" is very real, and employees are often hesitant to leave a company because they will lose their employer-sponsored insurance plan. Of all the details in this dumb drama "the sudden cancellation of my health insurance" bit is 100% sensationalism. It's a fact of life, and would be equivalent to whining that your paycheck ended after you quit. And as I and others have brought up, the moment you're terminated, you're eligible to enroll back into the plan through COBRA. It sucks to be responsible for those thousands of dollars per month to continue your private health insurance, but there is seriously no company out there that would, as a normal practice, continue paying for that benefit after an employee's departure.

I'm not saying it's right or that people shouldn't fight against it. I just don't think that people should be treating Obsidian like they are some sort of monsters when, despite how it's apparently been painted, what they have supposedly done is basically standard practice in a lot of companies. The way it is described, the whole situation feels more like a "Golden Handcuffs" kind of scenario than anything else. Recruiting top-tier talent is hard; getting them to stay put for for long enough to be of value to the company is sometimes even harder. Josh even briefly touched on the subject in his most recent talk at Reboot Develop 2018. For example, a simple incentive would to write the hire contract to include some sort of language like: "I agree to work for the company for 5 years, at which point they will hand me my giant sack of money they've been slowly filling up" and let the employee judge very carefully if they want to bail before the payoff. Should they leave anyway, it seems entirely plausible that a new contract can be made where they would receive a portion (or all) of the incentive in exchange for some other set of terms (like not designing things for anyone else). There is a fair bit more leeway in enforceability once you accept money for such an offer. Edit: Anyway, yeah. It's a little depressing to be discussing this on the eve of Deadfire. But none of the accounts seem to describe actual malice, just a bunch of unfortunate circumstances.

WTF? Is Satan managing Obsidian now? There's no guarantee that your former employer has to continue to pay for your health insurance after you depart. Sometimes it ends on your termination date, sometimes maybe it'll ride out to the end of the month. That's why we have laws like COBRA that allow you to continue your insurance on your own dime while you search for a new job or insurance plan. If anything, the criticism should be directed towards America's system of employer-sponsored insurance, than a dig at any one company. It is both standard and terrifying to lose your paycheck and insurance on the same day, but hey, that's the system we've built.

Hah. Same here! Though, Deadfire fever is currently at an all-time high. I feel like it's guaranteed to be a while before any Pathfinder news slips out.

As of the last backer beta, there are 6 Female and 3 Male Orlan player portrait sets. Potentially more to follow since the male sets don't look like they're fully populated.

Non-competes are damn near unenforceable in wide chunks of the US. There is only a limited set of situations where they often apply, and departing party would have to do something overt like run off with a client list and attempt to directly poach work from their former employer. As it turns out, it's fairly difficult to enforce a contract that may deny someone their livelihood by vaguely defining anything they do as "competition". It's a lot of dumb drama going back and forth, but Chris is totally right on one aspect: It never hurts to run paperwork by a lawyer and get their take on it.

They totally should be. The latest beta release just didn't include them (or "hid them," as alleged) for some reason. Obsidian has slowly been clamping down on spoiler assets and unfinished artwork in the betas, so it's not too unreasonable to assume everything will be back in the usual places post-release.

There are actually a ton of non-cheat commands at your disposal. For instance, pop open the console and type Find Set or Find Toggle and the log window should display a whole list of things you can do. Find is also super useful for cheaters too. Find Give should print off a whole bunch of simple cheat commands.

For those not following the gossip chain, Infinitron's post above is Part 3 of this week's WTFBBQ Drama Previously on WTFBBQ Drama Part 1: The Initial Post. Part 2: The Rebuttal.

Yikes. That thread over on Codex has been a trip to read. Nice work, Infinitron.

Oh Eric, why must you taunt us so? Alright everyone. Break's over. Back to work!

One of the devs confirmed it to be a one-hander over on reddit.

The game client offers to download an encrypted form of the game, and on release it gets the key to start decoding. Preload really helps out those with "meh" internet connections, as it gives players all weekend to download the full 35GB game. If you have a really fast network connection, it sometimes doesn't matter all that much.

The Pike portrait also had a minor revision in the last few days. Must have been one heck of a weekend to come back with a scar like that.

That code has actually been featured three times so far. It's so good, we just can't get enough of it. 25. EQC3bw - Versus Evil PAX Tweet (28 Mar), Stoic Tweet (08 Apr), Backer Update 46 Tweet (30 Apr)

Deadfire goes live 10 AM Pacific time, on the 8th. Preload begins Friday for Steam. That is all. Further confirmation and meme

Yup. That marks the third appearance of that code. I updated the front post to note that. Seems to be a favorite. Not sure why...

Boom. That's all for today. #code_hype

aFJJ8F 6X4EYa BprrJv Backer Update 46

You appear to be posting in the wrong forums. The fine folks over here might be able to better answer your question: https://forums.obsidian.net/forum/91-pillars-of-eternity-characters-builds-strategies-the-unity-engine-spoiler-warning/

Not by hand no. Fans would need to develop a node-based dialog editor like Obsidian uses in-house. The xml files are all there to see in: /exported/design/chatter /exported/design/conversations Which then reference the localizations in: /exported/localized/xxx/text You can certainly tweak a little bit here or there, but there's a lot to keep straight if you are making any significant changes to dialog trees.

I assume this is the tweet in question? I've seen some other confirmations around that the review copies are indeed out. Embargo lifts on release day, May 8th.

Pfft. Math. Yeah. You're right. 75 base..., plus 3. After you factor in the race and culture bonuses, the Xoti on the stream is only running a surplus: Dexterity +1, Intellect +2

1) Depends on where these stats came from. If it’s from Wednesday’s dev stream, then there are likely to be modifiers that need to be accounted for. Yeah. That Xoti build is definitely running a little hot. She's at a +6 from the base 75 attribute points that all the Deadfire companions are expected to have. The twitch stream was showing off some high-level content, so 81 points doesn't seem too out-of-spec.