Zoraptor

I would. The bits that follow the books are internally consistent, the new bits aren't, that's a definite pattern. You could blame Martin for not finishing the books in a reasonable time frame so they can't follow them any more but that's about it; and competent writers ought to be able to keep to basic logical consistency and be entertaining as well. Whatever summary Martin has written for them it's unlikely to be so detailed as to give a strict chronology, and even if they did the show writers could simply decide that nobody cares about details and just do what they think is cool anyway. To be fair to them, the ratings do suggest that people don't care. Though if it were to go on a few more seasons I suspect the gripes would accumulate and shock fatigue start to kick in as with The Walking Dead.

Most of that sounds like the problems with SP, just applied to MP. I should also clarify that it isn't so much SP and MP that I see as separate issues (generally they are too interconnected to be separate) but I see the MP as being separate from the root cause of Andromeda's problems- bad organisation and bad implementation on the management level. That bleeds down to both SP and MP. That is the fundamental conflict with the MP model it a nutshell- companies are always going to try and milk the player for more money with less effort. In this case I find it more likely that it wasn't deliberate EA policy and was just more incompetence from the studio since that level of micromanagement doesn't seem to have been applied to anything else Andromeda wise.

Shame Forbes is such a pain with its anti ad blocker (and such a bigger pain if you turn your ad blocker off) since Erik Kain is always an interesting read. (Google cache version) I'd see MP monetisation as a separate issue. I also fundamentally don't care about it, since I don't play it. But by and large I wouldn't defend anyone's MP policies, I was even mildly annoyed by something as trivial as Larian having the MP rps minigame in SP DivinityOS, and stuff like the 'forced' MP in ME3 to get war score was obnoxious- but it was only 'forced' since I never did it. In Andromeda's case I'd need a fair bit of convincing that MP or EA's policy towards it was the reason the game failed, and BiowareM knew the requirement for it before development started. It's also, in the end, the player's collective fault that such focuses on MP happen, if nobody bought premier packs and loot boxes and game currency and trivial skins etc etc etc then the companies would not do them. Can't generally say the same for a poor SP game though there are examples (Fallout 4).

In theory it was the freighter that hit the Fitzgerald as well, given the position of the damage to it. Who hit whom is not the sole determinant in blame though, if someone turns across a railway crossing and is hit by a train then the train definitely does the hitting, but it isn't the train's fault unless it could stop in time but chose not to.

How do US warships keep hitting massive slow moving oil tankers and the like? Even if your radar was down you can literally just look around (if they don't still post lookouts I will eat my keyboard and post video of it too), and even if... dunno, Russian agents were hacking the freighters and trying to get them to ram the warships the warships are an order of magnitude more manoevrable and far quicker so should easily be able to evade.

While islam does not make that distinction there are plenty of muslims who want to keep politics and religion at least semi separate, and plenty of christians who'd happily have the ten commandments or Leviticus- except that bit about not eating bacon or seafood, just the gay bashing and other convenient bits- as the ultimate law. Historically there was also very little practical separation of church and state up until the reformation in christian nations, and it often continued well past then. After all, the English reformation was basically Henry VIII throwing a tantrum because he couldn't divorce Catherine and making himself head of the church and state at the same time- technically, Queen Liz is still both now. It really doesn't help at all when the west actively promotes the 'Saudi vision' of the middle east and at very very least tacitly supports the Saudi vision of islam which is based on literal 7th century thinking and islamic absolutism (chaperoned by the Guardians of Mecca, the Hashemites Sauds, of course). There might be a realpolitik point to the west letting the Saudis asterisk around in the middle east since they're inept yet spend money like few others, but they let their ideology pollute their own countries as well which is far more difficult to understand. And if there's one thing the Sauds have done genuinely well at it's insinuating their stone age philosophy everywhere there are muslims, but their one point of competence is a disaster for everyone else involved.

At that time the muslims were far, far more progressive than the spaniards who replaced them. That's why there were so many jews for Izzy and Freddy to expel. They also can't rename it to al-Andalus as... there's already an Andalusia region in Spain- both ultimately derive from 'Vandal' though Andalusia region is obviously after al Andalus chronologically.

EA gave them plenty of time and (it seems at least) plenty of freedom to do MEA, can't really see anyone to blame other than Bioware for the project not being well run. Only thing you can blame EA for perhaps is deciding Battleborn 2.0 Anthem should be a thing in precedence to anything else, the sensible approach may have been to have the Montreal team do that (since they did ME3 MP) and have the Edmonton team do Andromeda. Then again if Anthem works it'll make a lot of money, if it works. Only good thing for Mass Effect as a whole is that at least Andromeda is discrete, if they want to do another game it can basically be ignored or used as much or as little as they want.

Origin had a refund policy in place long before steam finally caved into market pressure and added one themselves. Steam was legally required to institute a refund policy to continue selling in some areas- here for example. If it were just up to market pressure, well, market pressure hasn't done much to improve, say, steam's dreadful support system nor to stop them selling broken/ shovelware/ abandoned games. Their market position is too dominant.

Origin has a 7 day return policy on preorders. Don't know how long you can play over that week before they decide you're taking the mick asking for a refund, but it's probably longer than steam's 2 hours.

Due to my strong willpower and ability to resist commercial urges I'm not playing ME: Andromeda. I may be playing Inquisition though- and I may quite like it, at least at the moment and with realistic expectations.

If it were successful they'd still be doing dlc and associated patching. Completely unsurprising that nothing else is coming though given that the studio that made it is goneburger- and from EA's pov they'd be unlikely to turn perception around whatever they did at this point. Looks like one of the more disastrous releases in recent history perhaps rescued somewhat by its preorders.

AMD has a stake in HBM, iirc, which is why they use it. Theoretically its benefit is being able to use less of it for the same effect which ought to use less power and be cheaper even if it's more expensive per GB. They've got stung because it's new, and the main manufacturer (Hynix) hasn't been able to produce the chips they promised so they're using slower chips and trying to make up the performance in other ways- presumably, from the power draw and water cooling, overvolting. If they can get the memory up to speed Vega RXI could get a decent 'free' performance boost and power draw drop at the same time which would help competitiveness, but that's all conjecture and won't help now.

It's competitive, at MSRP. Vega56 especially so. Doesn't look like MSRP is going to stick any more than it has with 580s (and 1070s for that matter) so who knows how competitive the pricing will end up being. The whole production cycle sounds like a bit of a mess though, since it seems they've had to switch memory providers and the like. I'm still pretty keen to pick up a V56 assuming end pricing isn't totally stupid, but it would be around christmas and an AIB rather than reference. Their end goal is obviously to do a 'proper' APU system, this is a rather messy early step along that path.

Libya is Europe's fault, all the big movers were European (Sarkozy trying to Wag The Dog away his single figure approval ratings, and the UK primarily) and Obama probably would have liked to stay out altogether but couldn't let his allies fail. What happened after was stupid and predictable, but neither the US's fault or problem. Of course outside of Libya itself it's mostly Italy- that wasn't keen at all- bearing the brunt of the problems now, not France or the UK. Few people really care about what happens afterwards anyway, not like there's a deficit of people wanting to repeat the same mistakes again as if there would suddenly be a different result. Not really, 'secular' even with the quotes is better than fundamentalist whatever the system. In, say, Saudi Arabia you could be arrested for all the same things as in Syria- supporting reform, not liking the leadership etc etc- as well as practicing the wrong religion or being the wrong sect. You're also far more likely to evolve as a society if you're secular as you don't have to reform both the governmental system and the 'moral' system as well.

(1) Iraq was secular* under Saddam, as baathism is a secular philosophy. Same as Syria is secular under Assad, and Libya was secular under Gaddafi. (2) There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq prior to 2003, and no credible links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. That's as debunked as his active WMD programme in 2003. (3) The Saudis were and are a joke, if a rather grim and unpleasant one. If it had been the Saudi/ Iran War instead of Iran/ Iraq War the IRGC would have been in Riyadh in months if not weeks even if they had to swim the Persian Gulf unless someone actively bailed KSA out. They have money, and use it to buy influence, and they have Mecca; that's the extent of their pluses. Personally I don't have much doubt at all that GWB was more or less honest in his approach to Iraq and believed what he was saying the vast majority of the time, he was just wrong and sometimes handed incorrect information deliberately by others. The neocon wing (Cheney etc) and even Blair (who almost certainly didn't believe what he was saying but may now have convinced himself otherwise) are more morally responsible; Bush's main sin was naivete. *pluralist, actually; even Kemalist Turkey wasn't really secular.

They have a poor grasp on it, and I don't think even the russians would claim the Kuznetsov to be a successful ship. When it sailed to Syria it was the other big ship (Pyotr Veliky) that was far more significant though ignored by the media, and the Kuznetsov was there just for training and evaluation even after all its theoretical time in service. They did have the unique problem of the Black Sea transit and the Montreux Convention barring aircraft carriers though, so it had to be designed oddly so they could claim it wasn't an actual carrier.

DAI GOTY is more expensive than Andromeda, which is a bit annoying- it's the base game that is really cheap. I am pretty tempted to pick one or the other up, but they are probably the sort of game I need to buy and play immediately so that means one only. I'd probably enjoy either well enough since I have pretty realistic expectations and won't be expecting masterpieces, plus I tend to find cringey writing amusing rather than annoying so long as I'm not expecting Shakespeare. I am definitely thinking that a bit of distance between DAI and Witcher 3 may be an advantage though in retrospect.

One of the more infamous ones too, since ostensibly it was sold for use as a floating casino then ended up rebuilt as a 'proper' carrier. I couldn't fault Ukraine for selling it anyway, it was just going to sit and rust otherwise and at the time they had zero loyalty to the US. Selling off rocket motors to the DPRK in 2016/7 is a whole different kettle of fish though, since they put much of the US within at least theoretical rocket range. I won't be holding my breath for condemnation from McCain, Graham et al though.

So Origin is having a sale and I'm vaguely tempted to buy DAI. Anyone want to talk me out of it? I know it's kind of bland, but it's the same price as a coffee, albeit a fairly large coffee from a premium cafe. Also Andromeda is on sale for 15usd in kiwibux, which must be the steepest price decline ever.

I hope Christopher Tolkien doesn't blunder across that, it'd probably give him an infarction given his dislike of the far more faithful LotR films. At least a sexy female humanoid Sauron would make some sense given his history as a shapeshifter able to take pleasing forms. Yeah, up to Numenor, but baby steps. I'd forgive them if they pull another FEAR2/ Alma though, if only for the (literal) wtf factor.

I had a bit of a giggle at some of the articles on the subject trying so very hard to avoid saying 'Ukraine' but using 'ex soviet' and the like instead. Controlling all industry isn't historical fact except from Goebbels 'total war' speech which was Feb '43 just after Stalingrad, from memory, and after which they were on a, well, total war footing. The UK had total governmental control of the economy far far more so than Germany up to that point- anything could be requisitioned, you made what you were told to, ration cards were in effect etc etc. That's why war production in Germany peaked not in 1940, 41, 42 or even 43 but in 1944 despite all the allied bombing and them starting to lose all their mineral resources plus wasting huge resources on dreadful return pie in the sky wunderwaffe; because up to 1943 companies had happily been producing luxury items and the like alongside the tanks and planes.

Sounds a lot like Men of War from that description. Those were enjoyable games, not particularly realistic, but good fun. Yep, they're really dragging their feet there.

It's not about realism in the show vs. real life but about realism in terms of internal consistency, and that's been lacking this season, due to a number of factors. Yep, verisimilitude. To be honest it's lacked whenever they've either not had book material or deviated significantly from it so not just this season. I can criticise George Martin for being a pedestrian writer, but his writing is probably the best for internal consistency I've seen (unlike, say, Malazan) so when they've followed his stuff they haven't had to worry about consistency. If you actually spend any time thinking about some of the distances and timings involved in just the battles the last seasons you find that people literally have to teleport for it to make internal sense eg Euron this and Littlefinger last.

They are basically 'State Capitalist', which is hybrid economic system with elements of western style capitalism but also an extremely strong interventionist streak and many state run companies along with the private ones; and with the private companies being wholly subservient to the state. By many arguments that is what later 'communist' economies actually were anyway, even when they claimed to be 'communist' planned economies (of which DPRK is probably the only current example). Sorry, that sentence doesn't make much sense. They certainly want stability so as to stay in power, but also because every time China goes unstable bits break off and literally millions of people die as well as the ruling clique losing power?