AGX-17

Like I always says, if it's good enough for Josh Sawyer to back, it's good enough for me to back.

A History of Britain, by Simon Schama. I have 4000 +/- pages of A Song and Ice and Fire sitting there staring at me, but it's 4000 +/- pages.

Probably had more to do with the fact that they weren't going to reach their goal within the deadline than anything else.

I think this mathematics professor should have gotten a better education in evolutionary biology. Given the size of the known universe and the number of galaxies (billions and billions) and stars in each of these galaxies (billions and billions,) estimated to be in this universe, it was statistically improbable that intelligent life would fail to appear somewhere. Multiple planets which fall into the so-called "Goldilocks zone" have been discovered in the past 15-odd years since successful means of extrasolar planetary discovery were developed and put into use, and we don't even know if Earthlike conditions are the only ones under which life can develop. To attempt to put a stop to scientific investigation for the sake of saying an invisible man, (anatomically identical to the modern men of Earth who evolved from an apelike ancestor,) is the origin of all things sounds more like scientific sabotage than legitimate philosophical discourse. I don't want to denigrate the field of mathematics (as it is what makes all of physics possible,) but if you're content to use math for nothing more than your own personal abstractions, you're probably not inclined to be a truth-seeker from the start, and such a person seems of little value to an endeavour as grand as discovering what came "before." Yes, there is theoretically "room" for some form of god. If science were to ever find evidence that supports a theory of God, I might be inclined to believe in such a "God." Until such a time arises, I see no evidence of this "God" and thus shall not believe in it. This whole fiasco seems more like pre-emptive political damage control to get religious fundamentalists (the Earth is 5000 years old, evolution is a lie, there's no such thing as drug resistant TB or any other microorganism, etc.) off of CERN's back.

If you want to start them, a popup shows up and tells you the suggested level. Doesn't mean you have to do it with that one then, though. I personally like to do Honest Hearts with at least lvl 14 / 15, because then the White Legs are running around with Brush Guns and Anti-Materiel Rifles. Feels cool. :> Playing Old World Blues with level 30 right now and it is hard, but not *that* hard. I am doing fine right now. I've done all of the DLCs except OWB (utterly impossible with those bullet-sponge enemies and nerfed sneaking,) with low level characters (hardcore mode on, of course,) and it was always the most fun I'd had with them. All the loot you get in those areas really shines when it's the best gear you've found in the game thus far. Except Lonesome Road's Elite Riot Gear, which is already just about the best armor in the game (crit chance buffing armor + crit chance buffing headgear + crit chance buffing perk + crit chance buffing weapon + 10 Luck + VATS = 100% crits) Hardcore mode only affects the player by changing how healing/radiation reduction works and adding food, water and sleep needs. Assuming no engine-level changes were made to VATS, VATS should add +15% crit chance like it did in Fallout 3. Did you choose to stop the launch? That's the only option that doesn't lead to severe cognitive dissonance once you continue the main game.

Glanced at my syllabus for Architecture for the first time since classes started a month ago and realized I was 4 chapters behind in the reading. BUT I ACED THE FIRST TEST ANYWAY. Considered buying a whiskey flask so that I can always have bourbon on hand in case I need to celebrate like Chris Avellone.

Mechromancing in Borderlands 2. I think the "girlfriend mode" gaffe was just viral marketing, because Gaige has by far the most complex and nuanced skill trees of any character in BL2.

As long as we're making inappropriate screenshots of Lilith from Borderlands 2... Yes, this is a paintjob you can acquire for the bandit car. The way that big H casts a shadow on that moon is really the most striking visual effect I've seen in games in a long time. Even though Pandora was a moon orbiting a gas giant planet in Borderlands.

Just watched it, nothing more or less than what I expected: a superhero comic movie. Iron Man is the only superhero comic I ever liked for reasons that feminists wouldn't object to, but it had some fun action scenes and that's really all that these movies exist for. Tony Stark could have used more screentime and dialogue, though. I mean, come on. It's Tony Stark.

I don't have any particular problem with people who force government transparency. This. There are few circumstance where anybody should have to suffer extradition to the USA. You just can't trust that country to protect someone's human rights. Anyone tried in civil courts in the US was guaranteed the rights of due process, habeas corpus, etc. until the Bush era congress passed the PATRIOT(it's actually an incredibly uncatchy acronym) Act. Race and wealth still have more to do with treatment in courts in the US than anything else (the wealthy and white tend to come out better than the poor and black.) At any rate, I have no problem with anyone who forces government transparency. It still amazes me how complacent the American people are. I'll go out on a very sturdy limb and attribute it to the cultural conditioning of capitalist self-responsibility and individual isolationism ("Pull yourself up by the bootstraps you lazy poor people! What's physics? That wasn't required for my MBA so it has no value! Read some Ayn Rand you parasites!") They, (or should I say we?) just let the plutocracy grind their faces into the dirt. It can't be stressed enough that big business and government are two sides of the same coin. In Capitalism, power flows to wealth. But remember, all the foreigners denigrating the US, that is exactly the same in all of your countries as well. When the USA is no longer the one great super power, all of you who aspire to see your countries fill that role, you're going to be in the exact same situation as the USA today, eventually (which is not far off from the Gilded Age satirized by Mark Twain. And if you denigrate Mark Twain you're just ignorant.)

Taking more time to cast more powerful spells doesn't have any flaws to it, to me. They could add ways of reducing casting time (i.e. more use of a spell gradually reduces the casting time to a point, maybe a total 10% reduction at most,) but overall it's both logical and balanced. If a spellcaster is about to truly devastate the enemy mob or boss with some wildly powerful spell, there should be some major drawback/vulnerability, and that's already been established with both casting time and cooldown. High level enemies and bosses should prioritize spellcasters and ignore all other classes, because their level of experience suggests they ought to know that spellcaster chanting and drawing magic circles off to the side there is by far the biggest threat to their lives. That would also force Tanking to be a highly active role (acting more like a literal human shield than a more or less stationary beacon of threat generation.)

An assassin/rogue type class should have some kind of soul ability that allows them to conceal themselves. Either some sort of invisibility or some kind of "hidden in plain sight" sort of thing that prevents enemies from noticing them (or both with the less effective skill being available at lower levels,) without looking like they're trying to take a dump in the middle of a fight. At the same time, I feel the idea of "backstabbing" is kind of out of place, because the term implies that the victim trusts the attacker not to attack them, and in reality getting stabbed anywhere in the trunk/torso is a lot more mortal a wound than getting stabbed in the back in a video game. I don't get why you can't aim for the neck or the armpit (both high-value target areas in real blade combat.) The problem with trapping is that it's typically an ambush/defensive tactic, and the player is almost always on the offense in these types of games. My last experience with traps in a CRPG was Dragon Age: Origins, in which it was utterly worthless. Not only did it do practically no damage, the debuffs lasted a matter of seconds. Couple that with the fact that you had to sneak forward, sans party, to plant them, then make yourself noticed, then try to get stationary guards to follow you back through the trapped area... It's really just not viable if you're not planning any quests based on "Orcs Must Die!" It could definitely be valid as a part of the Stronghold element of the game, assuming it's going to be periodically attacked by hostile factions or unaffiliated NPCs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzthPJfTxPQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vubtGImJXqk BTW, you shouldn't have posted this thread because now I have a few dozen videos to post and I don't want to spam the thread.

Like PsychoBlonde touched on, a possible middle ground could be that those characters not in your party at the moment could be doing freelance work in the meantime to keep busy, which nets them some experience, though only a fraction of what the player's active party receives. I've played games where characters not actively in your group can be assigned to pursue different goals (money, experience, etc.) and it worked well enough.

That's another cardinal sin of fantasy and sci-fi writing, that humans are culturally diverse and every other race or species is a national/planetary monoculture. And when humans are culturally diverse, it's always blatantly derivative of real-world cultures but "with a twist!"

The US military's DARPA has been R&Ding actual "power armor" for combat for something like a decade, now. The "Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation" project.

Because lottery systems generate more money than explicit sales. They create addiction behaviors even when people don't get what they want. They sell those booster packs instead using Bioware points, which are sold with real money. It looks like you've never played TF2, because TF2 items are purchased with real money exclusively. You don't get in-game points to spend on items. The only non-commercial way to obtain items is through random drops (unavailable to free players, thus incentivizing an in-game purchase,) or to permanently destroy them and use the resulting "metal" for trade or crafting (which is itself a roll of the dice.) They also have a lottery system similar to the booster pack concept (which, by the way, was very likely the inspiration for ME3's system,) in the form of crate drops. This is also the main driver of the TF2 economy. Players will get "mann co. supply crates" randomly given to them while playing, and the only use they have is if you use a key ($2.49 US, the only way to generate a key in the game is by purchase,) to open them. Why bother opening them? It's the only chance to get an Unusual hat. A cosmetic item that provides no gameplay advantage yet can be sold for up to hundreds of dollars in real money. The prospect of making a real-world profit is a much greater driver than the chance to get an untradable MP character class or item. It has been widely publicized that Valve has actually hired a real economist to study and deal with this burgeoning in-game market. As far as I know, EA has yet to hire a full-time economist to track booster pack sales. I would not hesitate to bet that Valve's Mann Co. Store has generated orders of magnitude more revenue than Bioware points strictly for ME3 booster packs (because Bioware points are also necessary to buy DLC for PC versions of Bioware games, those revenues should be omitted.) I don't think either company will make public the sales figures, but the fact that TF2 has a thriving, ludicrous real-cash economy surrounding it (and a real economist analyzing it,) is strong evidence that it's a more successful system than ME3's comparably simple lottery.

Don't bother, doing side missions nets a lot more experience. Plus it's a lot faster. I recently went to that site raptr and it told me i'm the #1 player of Fallout New Vegas. I've never gone back and made my Steam profile private, I'll never get a job if anyone knows how much I've played that game. High chance of orange drops from The Warrior and guaranteed from Terramorphous. If you're really desperate you can quit & save before hitting the Moonshot button after beating the Warrior (that's where the Orange drops, not on the initial win,) and there's a save scumming method outside the game (normally prevented by the game's autosaves,) to keep rolling the die until you get something orange. if you don't want to exploit/save scum you can get someone with the Conference Call to help you farm Terramorphous.

They add "free" content updates to multiplayer pretty frequently, but acquisition is done in a collectible card game format. You earn points by playing and completing MP missions (or pay real money for Bioware points) to pay for booster packs that have random contents. So you do 6-7 missions (the worst part is that these rounds last upwards of 20 minutes and aren't all that fun, being a horde mode and all,) earn 100000 credits and buy that elite spectre pack hoping to get a new character or good weapon. The more expensive the pack, the higher chance of acquiring rare items. The top tiers "guarantee at least one 'rare' and a chance for an 'ultra-rare'!" that sort of thing. I'm surprised they haven't gone with the Team Fortress 2 model and just put everything up for sale on an in-game store so players can specifically buy the items and characters they want. Valve has made so much goddamn money on that game since switching to the F2P model... The story was around Dark Energy, the real-world physicists' theoretical driver of the universe's real accelerating expansion. Dark matter is a term referring to unseeable matter which makes up the bulk of the mass of galaxies we can see looking into space. Dark Energy will eventually win and the Universe will just keep expanding until there are no stars in the sky. One day, all the stars will burn out and the empty black void will just get bigger and emptier. All life and creation will end. This is the real-world theory for the universe's fate. Anyway, the only way the original ending makes sense is if Reapers are some sort of Dark Energy sink, which makes no sense. The idea of forcing us to choose to save the universe for all time or save ourselves in the moment is an interesting one, one I'd like to see in a game, but the Reaper variation is simply nonsensical. If it revolved around a choice between activating some machine that will reverse Dark Energy and result in what physicists call a "big crunch," returning the universe to its primordial state before the Big Bang (and thus allowing a new big bang to occur,) I think that would be best. Have the Reapers do what they do to guarantee the reversal as well as preserve the sentient races of each variation of the Universe for posterity while allowing the universe to continue existing indefinitely.

A western style monk would have no concept of zen, and the only way they'd know archery would be if they were former soldiers who decided to become monks. And they'd be giving up their vows to engage in combat of any kind.

For a recent example, Borderlands 2's "True Vault Hunter Mode" allows you to start from the beginning with a character who just finished the main storyline (there is post-game play for DLC purposes and finishing side missions, as well.) It simply increases the levels of all the enemies and areas you encounter (the base game has no level scaling, but DLC does.) By the end of TVHM you're dealing with enemies who are several levels above the 50 cap, so it can get close to undoable without help from friends or overpowered, super-rare gear (for which ingenious players have found ways to grind for in a game designed to prevent grinding.) BL2 actually has a decent EXP/growth model. Almost all the EXP gained is from questing (missions, they don't want to sound like a fantasy game for nerds ahawhaw,) and bosses. Normal enemies, no matter how tough, only award paltry amounts of experience, and effectively zero if they're below your current level.

If I were doing a doctoral thesis in abnormal psychology, I'd have a perfect subject right now.

I actually liked the idea of bankrolling and building the stronghold from the ground up. Not like minecraft, but hiring workers. Since it's presumably not going to be mandatory, it can be a pet project for a successful adventurer to pursue (adventurers tend to do a lot of travelling anyway, so building your own fort seems a bit excessive if you're not being awarded land and title by some lord or king. Then again, most kings don't like their noble underlings to have castles from which to launch rebellions.) At the same time, gunpowder cannon made castles obsolete, so it seems more like a manor house or estate would make more sense.

I think it's more important to be able to easily identify the specific spell or skill rather than the broader category they fit under. You're typically attaining these spells and skills through manual choice, so you're being introduced to its effects and purpose when you're being offered the chance to acquire it. Since real-time with pause allows you to, you know, pause, there's no need to frantically just click whatever "red/offensive" spell is closest to your cursor in the heat of battle without regard for its specifics. Background colors would be useful just for the sake of organization rather than specific identification.