Bartimaeus

How'd it start out well, out of curiosity?

The last one I really tried was AVG like...a really long time ago. "Really try" as in...had it installed for longer than five minutes. Thanks.

My friend gifted Space Trader to me as a joke/to annoy me. I tried it just because, but it didn't work. Whenever I tried to interact with anything, the game would massively lag for like five seconds, every time. Overall, my experience was poor.

Thanks, Reddit.

Are the soul level experience progression rates about the same as they are in DS1? 238k makes me think a several hundred level character in terms of DS1...30-40k was about the range I got for killing characters 10% within my level in DS1, (SL100).

Well, the lack of warnings or moderation may have something to do with the fact that your inbox is full. Happens when you used to be a staff member and you get an infinite amount of room for you PM box...

Time to get security cameras! I'd be super paranoid if that happened to me...

I like the game, but I had some of the same problems as you did, and I completely agree regarding the frankly insane fanbase. A good portion of the game's difficulty is just understanding what the heck you're doing - both in terms of gameplay mechanics, as well as actual controls, neither of which the game really helps you out at all with. Once you "master" the controls - master them as well as they can be mastered, anyways: really, sometimes it seems as though they're bad just for the sake of being bad - then it's just a matter of fighting each unique enemy either randomly succeeding the first time or not and learning to understand them in subsequent attempts. There is some measure of skill required, which I guess is something...but... For that reason, I actually liked the PVP more at times. Except a lot of people are just terrible at PVP (or the game in general, perhaps), which is not so fun when you can wait upwards of 15 minutes in between fights...or longer, depending on the time of day. It's a lot more fun when you actually fight someone close to your skill level...even if you lose. It's not that the game is necessarily bad...it just could've been a whole lot better if it was polished a bit and some sort of very basic encyclopedia explaining game mechanics or something was present in game...never mind all the PVP problems. In other news, XFX is going to RMA my video card. I'm on a $10 backup card that is...actually performing way beyond my expectations. Video card tiers are so bogus, in my opinion. For $10, I should be barely able to play anything with a decent FPS, even on low settings. Instead, my gaming habits are almost completely unchanged. Sure, I have to turn down some settings, but none of the *important* ones, like draw distance or anything. Quite frankly, I think the way video cards are priced is a bunch of baloney...this just further cements my opinion I'll never pay more than $150 *at absolute most* for a video card, and I'll probably stay close to the $80-$100 range in the future. Bah.

I'm not sure I quite understand. Can't be aware of all the things being done on their behalf? If you care to be aware, and prevent programs from acting out of line, I think can be pretty aware of what goes on most of the time on your own computer. I disable all auto-updaters (or firewall them if they can't be/won't listen), don't let programs runs all the time if I don't have a use for them running all the time, and generally know what everything currently running is for. The only thing I can think of that's "automatically" doing things is my defragmenter, but since that's mostly behind the scenes, that's fine. Your second line makes me think of a sort of limited AI...man, I wish I were in the future. I'd totally let an AI run [on] my system if it listened to me and generally followed my policies while being a completely dope AI. @Valsuelm: "Temporarily turned off"? That's the problem - it's just backwards from how it should be. The antivirus always assumes it should be turned on, when I have no need for it to be on all the time. "Temporarily turned on" is closer to what I'm looking for.

Somehow, I wouldn't be surprised if the game is as insecure as its predecessor. I like creating cheats for games I play, (though not necessarily to use, and never in multiplayer), and the things you could do in Dark Souls without the game performing any sort of check, server side or client side, is ridiculous. It would be pretty easy, and not *that* much work, to have the game check player side - doesn't even have to be server-side, so it's not any more work for the server - as to whether a character attempting to join's main stats (and any substats derived from them) compared to their soul level are legit, (as well as check the stats of theirs items). It was embarrassing that Dark Souls 1 was released the way it is, more embarrassing still that they never fixed it, and it'd be a complete joke if they didn't fix it in their second game.

The problem I have with antivirus is that they're always too far reaching, doing too much, not allowing you to downsize their role in governing your operating system. They usually have good reason for it, but as someone who has slightly more computer expertise than your average antivirus user, all I really want from an antivirus is Sandboxie combined with a basic, manually initiated scanner. I don't know of any antivirus that actually is just that...so I opt for not using one, and just using Sandboxie and my brain. The last time I was infected was, ironically, about two years ago when I installed a mod tool for Baldur's Gate that was mentioned as a legit tool in some modding communities, but had trouble finding a working link to, and found one on some random file hosting site that I sadly did not test, not expecting some dummy to infect it. Before that was about 5, 6 years ago for some garbage my brother installed on my computer without my knowledge. So I think I do pretty well.

What game is this? "Salt-Upon-Wounds" reminds me of some of the Dustmen names from Planescape: Torment... Vintorez is much more useful in SHoC/CS than in CoP. It's a sort of jack of all trades, master of none...which is great when it's your only rifle, but not so great when you can specialize by having two large weapons like you can in CoP...even though I still did use it in CoP. I usually used the Protecta as my other weapon, because it was such a fun shotgun, unlike most of the others, (in my opinion...besides perhaps the SPAS-12 to a much lesser degree).

Ah. I never had much trouble with bullet drop, personally. I've never liked really the higher powered feel (and lower handling!) of the SVD/SVU, though.

I recall liking the special Vintorez more...I'm struggling to remember its name. Tide, maybe? Then again, I always liked the regular Vintorez more than the regular SVD/SVU.

Trying to play Civilization 4 with some popular mod called Realism Invictus, after my bout with Civilization 5, (which was the first I played in the series). Certain control functions and conveniences in Civilization 5 are missing that made me nearly scream in frustration after about the first twenty minutes, (I actually uninstalled the game after I figured out that the game was freezing because I was trying to delay making certain decisions - for those who you haven't played 4, but 5: imagine that the game prompts you with choosing the first thing to produce in your city after settling it, but you want to do some other stuff first, so you exit out of the window...only to find that the game is now completely unresponsive besides for a few choice (and useless!) windows/buttons, including the main menu as well as anything else that's actually useful - anything that would let you resolve the to-be-decision that you just delayed, for example. Coming from Civ 5, this reduced me to near insanity in short order...but I reinstalled it to give it another try, and it's going much better). I like some things better, as well as some things worse. We'll see. (e): sentence structure (e): sentence structure again. What a mess of clauses everything in between those parentheses is.

Um...are you a new mod? The opposite, if I'm not mistaken.

"Tougher" classes? Such as? My idea of the tougher classes - i.e. the classes I do least well with - were always Pyro and Heavy when I played. Then again, I thought any time I didn't get at least a KDR of 10 was doing poorly...and since I was generally okay as a pubstar with any of the classes, and Pyro and Heavy had the least versatility of all the classes, it usually lead to not as great KDR as any of the others. My most kills in some random pub was I think 72 as a Sniper...on 24 man 2fort. I wish I could actually check, but Valve goofed many years ago and enabled achievements/stats for when sv_cheats was enabled for a short period of time, (maybe a week), and I just happened to play that one custom practice map that I can't recall (that I don't know if is popular anymore) without knowing that and completely screwed up my stats. (e): In regards to Stalker: I'm surprised people found CoP scary in the least. Something about it was a bit different for me than CS/SHoC in that I don't think I felt much frightened or surprised at hardly any point in the game. SHoC is still definitely my favorite for that. I recall the underground section feeling pretty cheesy...not to mention the part that comes after. Game cutscenes were never one of XRay's strong points, and SHoC/CS did well to completely avoid them...besides those three level pan overs (the Agroprom assault, the Rostok Scientist rescue, and the Stancia/CNPP assault) that were more annoying than useful.

I used to feel the same way, (like, just a scant few months ago), but adapted when I saw that it was actually pretty useful. Ah well.

I just use /r/buildapcsales and /r/gamesales on reddit for this type of thing. Generally easier to search, too.

Yuck. I have not actually played DE:HR (or Skyrim, for that matter ) - well, not for more than half an hour, anyways. I disliked the controls enough that I gave up almost immediately...and also because I wasn't much interested in the game to begin with. Nevertheless, I thought what I said was probably true of the game. "wut" happened to your quote of my post?

If you left out certain things, map markers for example, without changing anything else, the game would almost certainly be broken...because the designers assumed you would be using those "features" and didn't provide any other way of figuring out where your objective is without using them, (that's why, without completely revising journal entries to provide more hints, you can't just plain disable map markers in the last two Elder Scrolls games - you'd have no idea what you were supposed to be doing just from what NPCs say alone, and the vanilla journal entries are just as useless, if not worse). Too hard? Yes, because the game wasn't designed (sensibly) for it...which is what his complaint is derived from, if I'm not mistaken.

Bah. Freedom scum. (I actually never chose sides because I never really liked the idea of the mass murder of others purely for their idealogical tenants vs actual actions (like bandits), but that's just me. )

Automatically win? De facto or de jure? I play with all the victory types disabled because they all seemed ridiculous and artificial, so just let the game be what it is without silly automatic victories, so I'm not that sure of all of the victory conditions. Not that it matters, since I never get close to fulfilling any of the normal victory conditions because the game long before becomes broken and unfun before then.