Zoraptor

Nerd drama and angst about someone not liking something others do. I do tend to wonder if the "support all RPGs!" brigade has the same opinion of, say, DA3 and universally hope it will be successful. I also have some sympathy with Boo because my immediate reaction to EM's "Thief" after reading the GI article was actually pretty similar.

Uh, Venezuela is one of the US's largest oil suppliers.

Arab Israeli citizens certainly can vote, though many do not.

Currently I'm unemployed, at least in theory, and looking after/ fixing up my parents place hence why I've been posting a lot more over the past month or so. Formerly I've been an Ivory Tower Intellectual/ professional smartass (ie worked for a university) and general computer type person (programming, modelling, data input and analysis) amongst other stuff (managing a petrol station...) In direct monetary terms the value of gold would tank if the economy got really bad, but at that level of bad it would be probable that 'monetary terms' would have lost most meaning, and pretty much everything else would have tanked worse. If things were that bad at least you could use your gold to buy food, because you almost certainly could no longer use paper or electronic money to do so. That isn't the primary reason why most people buy gold at the moment, but it is the primary reason why gold has intrinsic worth in the first place, it's a historic underpinning of the trade system.

It wasn't an authoritarian dictatorship in anything other than a purely rhetorical hate on principle manner. He was probably less authoritarian than, say, Uribe was in Colombia- and they both abided by decisions of referenda that they lost. Rather different than, say, Honduras where elections were held at the barrel of the military's guns and with anti coup media suppressed completely yet somehow contrived to be a 'fair' election in the eyes of the US, no doubt coincidentally the Right party won. That sort of thing started pretty early. A lot of Saul's stuff was sticking asterisks on the end of things Jesus said and it's only carried on from there. "Love thy neighbour*" *unless they're gay

True, every investment is a fundamentally a risk else everybody would be rich, but end of the day if you put a million into gold you'll still have x ounces of gold even if the market crashes, if you put a mill into Enron or the Zimbabwe dollar you'll have best part of nothing at all left.

Probably the best way to think of it is that they have intrinsic value, rather than just face value. Currency, shares and the like are, in practice, dependent entirely on people having confidence in them and if the confidence drops their value drops, and if it drops too much their value is zero. The value of commodities is at least partly independent as, for example, people may not need Apple, but they do need to eat. Precious metals are a little different from that as their intrinsic value is based upon them being valuable since time immemoriable even prior to real currency, not on their need to be used. They tend to go up in price in low confidence times because people are hedging against problems getting worse, eg at present the US stock market is inflated because money is very cheap to borrow, but that money is cheap due to (effectively) running money off the presses and it is quite likely that the current boom is a bubble rather than sustainable growth. If the company you have bought shares in goes bye bye so has your money, if you've bought corn or milk or iron ingots or gold those are not going to disappear- or at least the circumstances under which they would are ones where investments are likely to be the least of your worries.

Hahaha Oh WOW. Rush Limbaugh and Charlie Krauthammer?

I'd disagree, publishers probably do know that demand exists, they just think that insufficient demand exists for their purposes. Most publishers simply do not care about projects at that scale, as their fixed costs are set up for $20 million games selling 2 million+ copies, not $5 million games selling maybe 500k. If you look at something like P:E or WL2 they are scheduled to take less time than, say, Mass Effect 2 or 3, but not proportionately less time- the ME game may have 4+x the budget but it does not take four+ times as long to make. As such they will always target a high absolute return over a high relative return. Such titles, especially retro ones, are also fundamentally contra the sorts of things that publishers like EA, Valve, Squeidos or whoever tend to like- lots of dlc, monetisation, drm and lock in. You won't get many publishers disowning those things (last I can recall was Paradox, lying blatantly, and CDP/R, who actually lived up to it) as many kickstarters do.

Chavez was a magnificent troll, and he targeted people who absolutely deserved to be trolled harder than diamond- Goat W Bush, the sort of people who would call him Stalin or Mao etc, and his best troll was waiting until the US said they supported the 2002 coup before jack-in-the-boxing out of the presidential palace with his paratroopers. He wasn't exactly Gandhi and would have been better to temper some of his reforms with a bit more reality and a bit less hyperbole, but he did a lot for the poorer sections of the population than previous governments had done. As for press freedom, the ain't many places in SA that don't have problems, you just don't tend to hear much about them when it's the pro western governments doing the repressing (see Honduras 2009+)

So did I. $20 felt a bit less like taking the mickey than $25 did after the WL $15 entry, and that removed most of my objections. Might up the amount later, but it would need something stellar to get more.

There are insufficient asterisks in existence throughout the multiverse to adequately convey my thoughts on this 'Thief' reboot. If there were a checklist for the 12 Signs of Impending Decline they've managed to check just about every one.

A bit too simplistic. Really high sensitivity targets ought to be on a wholly separate network, though this does not always save them eg the Iranian nuclear infrastructure hit by stuxnet, but for practicality you tend to want people to have access to the internet, email etc without too many hassles. You will often also want to have other devices (phones, pads) to have access, and by their very nature those are prone to wander onto unguarded networks. Given that, you have to balance security against reducing the all the advantages networking gives and make a decision about exactly where you draw the line on that equation. You will also, of course, get assurances from your security people that they are competent and everything is up to date. It should be noted though that it is hardly just the Chinese who do that sort of thing- the classic example being the alleged siphoning of information to Boeing by the US government from Echelon so they could outbid Airbus.

They all (exc the Britties, who always increase indirect taxes instead) have increased VAT, which is the classic consumption tax. Since two of those rises are directly referenced in the links and you've accepted it's the case with Greece (and it's a not directly on topic) I'll not provide more links, if you want to check it out yourself you can always google Portugal VAT rise (2011, IIRC) and Ireland VAT rise (2012, IIRC). VAT increases are particularly bad because they always hit those with less discretionary income hardest, those with discretionary income can simply stop spending- which, of course, is bad for the economy- while those who have little to no discretionary income find themselves with even less.

They have: Britland Portugal Italy (recent elections notwithstanding) Ireland Greece Spain At the very least France and the Balts as well. While it is pretty stupid the ultimate problem was overspending in the good years, now they only have a selection of various poor choices. They've gone for the one which best matches the fiscal orthodoxy du jour, which is of course coming from the same people who completely missed the crisis (encouraged it, even) which is largely responsible for the problems being so bad.

Can't say that I particularly liked Risen 1, something about the progression seemed a bit off. In Gothic 2 if I ran into low level enemies after a certain point there was no way they stood a chance, but in R1 my high level guy still contrived to lose to things like vultures (and those gnomes, those horrible horrible gnomes). I think it was the locked camera perspective if you dodged, way too easy to lose where your enemies were. Played a bit more BG2, got past Suldanesselar and killed Gromnir- Ha! Good fun- who proved that it isn't just my party that sometimes suffers hilarious saving throw failures. Yaga Shura's fire giants are absolutely brutal for guys that don't cast spells and with better calls for help, plus the inclusion of a dragon (can't remember him being there in previous playthroughs) really puts the molten sulphur on the cake.

Pretty much ^^^ exactly. Most governmental spending, even 'wasteful' spending tends to at least get spent directly in the economy. If you do as has been happening a lot in Europe and both cut spending massively- thus raising unemployment- and increase taxes then you aren't going to get growth any time soon because you're hitting your core employed workforce at both ends by shrinking it and by wringing more tax from it. There's only a finite amount of money and those policies reduce how much is available. The flow on to businesses that rely on that discretionary and even non-discretionary spending just depresses things further, as they fail because their customers have no money or confidence. The amount of pandering to credit agencies and the like- who were singularly useless at very best when it came to correctly rating the institutions largely responsible for the financial problems- is pretty ridiculous.

It's true, there's notabl elack of typos in stuff Volo quotes, so he clearly uses Ctrl+C/ Ctrl+V rather than transcribing it himself.

Austerity is working pretty much exactly as expected- if you take large amounts of money out of the economy it will contract and that is what happened/ is happening. It isn't even reducing debt, it's just reducing the rate at which it accumulates. Only way to fix it is to build a time machine, go back to high growth years and politely suggest that (1) banks aren't omnipotent and cannot suspend reality by wishing real hard/ giving big donations and (2) running deficits in good years as well as bad is moronic, poor stewardship, and cannot be sustained.

Likely, but no outright confirmation.

Not sure about that- the problem may be that nobody wants it and Hasbro isn't willing to fund games themselves. They did say the Planescape setting was available for licensing recently, and that at least implies D&D as well.

K2's never been out of print retail, there was another pressing not that long ago as well. In any case [game] being available after a hiatus is a feature of DD in general- GOG is probably responsible for more old games being available again than steam, especially since a lot of the old games steam does sell are rebranded GOG releases.

I wish people would be a little bit more consistent in their criticism. Paradox releases a bunch of cheap games, often of rather... questionable quality, which are basically "throw ideas at wall, see which stick" trying to replicate the success of Magicka, and they are effectively glorified dlc front ends. By and large they get away with that strategy with little criticism, yet it is hardly a million miles from EA's. They both do it for the same reasons, the sort of people who buy awesome robe and staff dlc for Magicka/ appearance pack 212 for The Sims are easy to sell to, as opposed to discerning consumers of good taste, refinement and breeding, who are hard to sell to, and it is inherently easier to get people to spend small amounts of money. All businesses love their customers being easy to sell to, so that is what they aim for. The inconsistency is really obvious on a site like RPS where they mine hits by OMG EA! Ubi! Acti! headlines about every week knowing that there'll be a Pavlovian response, but if a smaller company decides to do something like mine dlc for cash it doesn't even rate a mention in their "here's the latest shovelware" release news. And if Valve were ever to start doing microtransactions or frivolous dlc, or randomised drops sold for cash with a share going to Valve in an auction house, in that purely theoretical universe I'm sure they'd be crusading against that as well*. I quite often find I don't end up finishing games any more because I cannot play them for a few days, or a week or two and simply lose the thread of what I was doing. It's happened to me at least three times in both Gothic 2&3 neither of which I have finished despite enjoying both. In contrast, I finished BG2 in 5 days when it came out despite being in uni- and just prior to exam time, too. *Not specifically a dig at Valve (want to take it as such, go to the Steam suxxors! thread) who are after all just monetising markets like EA do, more so at the double standards even the more highly rated games journalists and especially the internet at large have. [1000 posts on vaguely on topic stuff, party time!]

Or maybe not. There's a world of difference between a $25 buy in for a company with a Proven Record of Excellence like Obsidian and one whose main claim to fame is running a successful kickstarter, and whose game offerings to date have been... hmmm, at best. Difficult to justify a 66% mark up for the Numenera base tier over the WL2 base tier when effectively nothing has changed in the meantime. That's more than 6 Outcasts worth of money.

I can say exactly that- it's the same reason Origin and Uplay can claim eleventy billion subscribers when their offerings have a poor reputation. If you've bundled it and made it compulsory then you have a captive audience, those who want to play the games that require it. If HL2 sells 8 million copies then you have at bare minimum 8 million customers. And if you're the first to do it- and the only one to do it with 3rd party titles- then you've gone a long way to capturing the market. And no, we would not be dominated by anyone under my scenario. Don't like Origin? Don't buy EA games. Don't like 'ActiBattle.net'? Don't buy Actiblizz games. Don't like Matrix? Don't buy Matrix games. That's a far preferable situation to: Don't like Steam? Don't buy [long list of 3rd party publisher + Valve] games as the situation is now, as it is based on choice rather than restriction. You'd still have the actual independent stores like 'D2D'/ GG/ 'Impulse' and they would not be beholden to one competing behemoth either. EA could pull their games, certainly, but that would only be ~20%, rather than the ~70% that Steam enjoys if they ever wanted to get nasty with a competitor.