Spider

Never bothered much with elves, mostly because whenever I was late enough in either game to get the option, I already had an army of other stuff and easy ways to get reinforcements. I did like the dwarves in AP though.

Yeah, I like moral. I tend to try hard to not have mixed races in my stack if possible.

I'd start with The Legend. I don't percive any real difference in quality between them, and the mechanics are basically the same. So might as well start at the beginning.

That specific example was a tech demo where Obsidian devs were showing off a potential bossfight involving one of the south park kids riding a huge bat. The critique from Matt and Trey was that it wasn't "south parky" enough. Don't think it was ever shown to the public (nor was it intended to).

I'll make a reversal on my previous post, but her not taking a stance on camera is part of what I've come to like about the video now that I've processed it a bit (and read more comments). It's true, she most likely things these tropes are bad, as does her base audience. However, she isn't presenting it as such, so the viewers get to form their own opinions whether or not they think it's a bad thing or not. Like others have said, it plays much more like a research thesis than an opinion piece, and that was probably the best way she could have taken this. Regardless of which, the fact that a forum like this have ten pages of (mostly) civil discussion of the topic means her video had it's intended effect. We're talking and (more importantly) thinking about these issues. We may not agree the excessive usage of the DiD-trope is a problem, but having to articulate why you feel that way is still a good thing.

The question, I think, is which OS do you have on the computer? Edit: Just saw W7 Ultimate, but is it the 32-bit or 64-bit version?

Yeah. He pretty much sum up everything I feel as well.

I think Anita Sarkeesian's was very well thought out and explained. I thoguht she explained why she started looking at Mario very well. I agree that she needs to look at more contemporary games as well. Bbut given that this was part 1 and she said she'd do just that in part 2, I don't think that's a problem. She was also going to look at role reversal in part 2, iirc. What I think was a problem in the video was the assumption of the audience's pre-knowledge. She's looking at games thorugh the same methods that have been established to analyze gender issues in literature and other art forms. All the tropes have long since been established. And while she does do a fine job of explaining what the particular trope is, she never really goes into WHY over use of tropes like these are a bad thing. Basically she's assuming her audience is already familiar with the theories which she are applying. I think she with these videos will reach an audience not previously familiar with those theories, so there is a bit of a lost oppurtunity there. For reference (so I don't make myself guilty of the same thing), if our society's culture present women as (in the case of this trope) victims a majority of the time, it will reinforce that stereotype in our subconscious, making it harder for women everywhere to be seen as capable as men. Fairly short and simplistic explanation, but anyway. So yeah, I feel like she's targeting an audience already familiar with questions like these, while it's quite possible a majority won't be.

How do you figure that? if anything it's proven that the niche market is a fairly small, but very dedicated segment. PE had somewhere around 80000 backers. In a business where normal titles expect to sell over a million that's just not an impressive number. What is impressive is that groups willingness to spend, on average, $55 before the game production has even started. So small, but dedicated, is all we know so far. We'll have a better gauge on how large that market is once these games start getting completed and there are actual sales numbers to go with the pledges.

Why not? If they prefer the crowdfunding model over the publisher model, what is wrong with them going all out on the former?

Oh absolutely, unifying the comms are certainly a good thing. I just know that when you go through some planets, getting over 50 coms can be fairly fast, and then you won't be able to get new ones for a while. So if you cap out on Coruscant (which is easy to do), you may not want to get level appropriate at that time, since you won't be getting any more at taris. I'm guessing this cap is in place due to makeb, because it really makes little sense when leveling from 1-50. I don't mind the weekly caps on the other types of coms, I just think it'll worsen the leveling experience for new players.

Yeah, except that pile is very, very small. Planetary commendations being capped @ 50 per week means if you're going through 1 planet per evening, you'll likely be capped after the second and then not get any more.

You never did the pvp pylon quest did you? It's by far the quest that takes the longest to complete. It's also the only pvp quest to give a blue token, the other one gives a green. And while the heroic and the combat specimen quest were a bit long, the other three quests were much faster than any of the pvp quests. Doing just PvE would give you 2 blues and three greens each day (once you had newcomer, 1 less blue prior). That's (630x2 + 270x3) 2070 per day. Enough to max out your reputation each week, but not enough to store enough coms to get to champion, at least not by doing it on one character. However, killing Xenoanalyst II gives you purple ones, and more of the tokens you need to actually get any of the rewards in the event (which by the way the pvp quests provide none of). So doing only PvE quests would give you another 2880 rep per week. So the event was hardly pvp biased. I do agree that it was much beneficial to do the heroic in the pvp zone, but that's because if you do you accept the risk of being ganked or otherwise disrupted. I think that's a perfectly fair trade-off. So doing only PvE quests on one character, the first days you'd get 270x3 + 630 each day, until you get to 7500, which would be completed on the fifth day (remember you get 630 to start it off as well), then you'd get another blue each day, like I said. You'd also get 1440 for doing the run-around-plants quest. So first week you'd get 16920. Any subsequent week you'd get 17370, for a grand total of 51660 from just doing all the pve quests once a day on one character, not touching the pvp at all. You only need 40000 to get to champion, so even skipping the quests for about 5 days would still be fine. Of course, you're F2P player, which changes the math significantly. You get one third less reputation points for each object, which would result in 34000 total (slightly less even since it'd take a little longer to get Newcomer), though with a single alt running just the quest inside the ship once per day, you'd make 40k easily. If you only have one character at 50 though, then yes as a F2P player you'd have to pvp some to get to 40k reputation. Another thing. The pvp flag is very easy to get rid of. hang around in a safe zone for five minutes (like your shipt, the fleet, your factions camp on ilum) and it'll go away automatically. Unless you toggled it manually, then you have to toggle it off first, then wait for five mins. I agree that getting rid of it should be easier, at least when going in and out of the pvp zone (flag inside, remove it once you exit), but waiting for five mins isn't that bad

They do deliver it digitally somewhere, just not in the US. They've launched their site HBO Nordic where you can sign up for a Netflix-like digital distribution for the same cost as Netflix would charge. So a subscription fee of about $10-12 I think a month. And all shows are available within 24 hours of their american launch, with Swedish subtitles (or Norwegian, or Danish). That's a very good way of combatting piracy. Though people are complaining that if you sign up for the digital service you'll have to sign up for an entire year, something Netflix apparently doesn't force you to do.

Using abilities on someone pvp flagged has, as Alan said, always flagged you. Same with entering the opposite factions base. If you remember hanging with imperials in their base on hoth, frankly your memory is wrong. That's never been possible. And no, I don't believe there is any sort of consensus that those abilities were removed due to their uselessness in pvp, nor do I think that most changes are pvp focused. Since the game launched, there have been a grand total of 4 pvp updates, if we count the ilum event (which had more pve elements than pvp ones, and no one was forced to dp the pvp ones, and even in the pvp zone fighting was rare). They've gotten two warzones, the ranked system, and now a quarter of an event. PvE players have gotten a fair bit more and are about to get an expansion. True the expansion will update the pvp systems a little as well, but all the actual content (from what I've seen so far) will be pve based.

Perosnally I just don't care either way. I can understand why they're being removed and I explained as such. If I have access to those abilities I will use them, but not having them won't affect my gameplay in any significant manner. I'm not the one complaining about there being too many abilities, in fact I argued against it in this very thread. I just pointed out there are people who feel that way. Why you're bringing pvp in to this particular discussion I don't know, since those abilities have never been usable in PVP. They're PVE abilities being removed for PVE reasons. But in regards to your question, according to Bioware information a while back, over half of their playerbase engage in pvp from time to time, so yeah pvp players are the pre-dominant type of player, or at least used to be. I would personally love to have all classes have different skill trees for pve and pvp, I think that'd be awesome. It's a non-trivial thing to implement though and this game wasn't designed with that scope in mind, so I'm pretty sure that's something we'll never see.

They're removing a set of fairly marginal abilities in an expansion that also adds new clickables to each class. I really don't think that's a very big issue. To clarify to those who don't know the abilities mentioned, they're removing abilities that can only be used on stunned opponents and deal a fair amount of damage (though not super much). The can only be used on strong mobs (grey stars) or weaker, and not players. So basically they're abilities that work against opposition you already have very little problem with. I think removing abilities that gets used this rarely is a good thing as it prevents ability clutter (there are people in this thread who have complained that they have too many abilities for example) and the slight benefit they bring is fairly insignificant. Not sure what class you're playing, but you'll get new toys to play with regardless (and pretty much all new abilities are pretty sweet). Edit: Also, most dps classes (and tank classes for that matter) are dependent on combos of some sort. mercenaries want to apply heat signatures to have their heatseeker missile hit harder (and they want unload to have it's cooldown reset, and railshot to hit for more), marauders are heavily dependent on different internal combos in all skill trees, and same goes for both assassin and sorcerers as well. So it really has nothing do with acquiring combos being too hard, just that some combos offer such marginal actual value that it's just not worth it.

It's very rare that the CPU bottlenecks anything graphics related these days, so I wouldn't worry about that.

Yeah, it seems like a fair compromise, I am happy with this solution

You sir, have excellent taste in music.

Ooooh... Maybe it's time to actually play that game. isn't there a high res mod out there somewhere that makes the graphics at least passable by today's standards?

Yeah, the repair costs have gone up. A wipe used to cost me about 8k, now it's up to 15k or so. Hopefully that's what they're fixing with the patch tomorrow. And they'll fix the gtn snafu as well, but not tomorrow.

Ops group don't work too well for regular quests. An ops group is essentially a grouping of groups. So objectives only update for members of your subgroup (ie, you activate an objective, you and three others get the quest updated, you aggro an enemy only the same people will get the kill). Loot drops are shared though, so any quest that requires mobs to drop loot works fine in an ops group.

The (catastrophic) intro until Flemeth + the somewhat more entertaining Isabela recruiting mission spliced in. Mmm, Isabela... While I applaud the decision to make the demo, the intro level wasn't exactly the best one Bioware's ever designed (close to the contrary, I'd say), and probably succeeded in turning off a lot of people who might have been on the fence otherwise. The demo actually got me to buy the game. It convinced me that while the camera was horrid, combat would still be fun, and the new flashy maneuvers was kinda cool. Though I kinda wanted an excuse to get the game, since I liked the first so much. My instincts told me no though, and unfortunately in the end they turned out to be right. So yeah, demos are a double edged sword. Given their length, they can sometimes not show you enough, and sometimes not show you how tedious somethign will be after doing too much. but they're better than not having a demo regardless.

To get rid of pvp flag, toggle it on manually, then off again and hang out in the imperial base for 5 mins. No more getting jumped when doing the heroic. I thought it was pretty easy though, me and a friend did it the two of us, but we're kinda overgeared for it I suppose. The champion and turret you encountered was probably the imperial base? I thought the event was pretty fun. We had a group in the pvp zone and while it took a while to get those quests done, it was still great fun. Since it's free for all, you're never really safe, but neither is the group attacking you. So kinda exciting. But I wouldn't go in without a group of 4 I don't think. We also got a group together to down the two ops bosses you can do without having access to the ship. They were cool. Not too complicated mechanics, but they packed a punch. Today was a bit of a laggy day. Ilum wasn't so bad, but section x and fleet were horrid. Section X had gotten better, but today it was back to it's old self again. And yes, I'm on the Red Eclipse, but mostly imperial side (I have characters on republic side as well, but my guild is imperial).