PrimeJunta

Gamergate and the failure of ethics [ http://freethoughtblogs.com/indelible/2014/11/02/gamergate-and-the-failure-of-ethics/ ]

Points of interest would be cool. I'd much rather take them than, say, animated vegetation. There are going to be alternatives to fighting; in fact there are several examples in the BB. Alternatives to winning once you commit to a fight, I'm not so sure about. As I said I think "losing scenarios" would be a bit wasted on a game like P:E where the default behavior is to reload if you lose a game. There is Trial of Iron of course where they would make more sense. I wouldn't object to adding a couple, but I'd rather they spent most of that effort on reactivity that follows from choices of what you attempt rather than how well you succeed. As to PS:T, there was a quite a bit you missed if you didn't let yourself die every now and then.

Oh, you meant the standard "lose boss battle -> go to jail -> break out of jail/send party member to break you out of jail" scenario? Sure, there's room for that in P:E. It's not so much a feature as a trope and quest structure; the only twist would be that it's possible to avoid going to jail by winning the battle. The trouble with that is that if it only happens in a few battles, the standard mode of play becomes to reload after you lose. I.e. only very few players would ever even see that branch. I believe they're using the P:E engine, yes. Numenera has much, much less combat than P:E though, and their notion of "Crisis" is way cool and permits twists like this to happen. It also worked great for Planescape: Torment. Thing is, in both of these games it only works because you, the protagonist, are a defined character -- The Nameless One in PS:T, The Last Cast-Off in T:ToN. In both cases you get a special ability that makes you deal with death differently. I don't think P:E wants to be that kind of game. I agree entirely. Where I (possibly) disagree is what constitues "purging of faults and updating" and what constitutes "doing something altogether different." A lot of the things you listed are cool but are not and should not be high priorities for a game like P:E, or indeed conflict with what it is trying to be.

Your last one was most definitely a pony. You would either have to script a "losing outcome" for every single battle in the game and account for the knock-on effects down the line, or create a dynamic world where the "losing outcomes" emerge systemically. The former would be a gigantic amount of scripting, the latter would be a whole different type of game. And finally... yeah, I gotta be that guy. This game isn't about "breaking out of a standard scheme." It is about bringing back a long-neglected standard scheme. Many of the things you listed would be perfectly wortwhile enhancements to it and something that would be nice to have if budget and schedule permits. Some of them are fundamentally incompatible with what the game is trying to be. As to the budget, 4M is not a lot. They have to make trade-offs. One of the trade-offs they've announced they're making very early on is that they want a broader range of different kinds of maps, monsters, weapons, spells, and attacks, even if it means that each monster, weapon, spell, or attack will only get a single animation, or that animations are reused between them.

Yes. The mechanisms are scripting (changes happen through quest branches) and reputation dynamics (changes happen based on your reputation with different factions). Agent AI is not reactive. Haven't noticed. Kind of hard to pull this off in an isometric game I think, when you're viewing the thing from a bird's eye perspective. Haven't noticed anything like this in the beta. I believe this was mentioned as a "would like to implement if there's time" type of feature set. I believe so. That's not really a complex factional relationship; that's scripted AI behavior. I haven't noticed anything like this in the beta. And a pony?

I don't think the timing system has much to do with the problems in the combat at all. OTOH I like the idea of things affecting how long things take at a more granular level than haste/slow.

Nah, now they're naming them after fictional fighter pilots and Friz Freleng toons. (Or places in California, if you want to be boring about it.) Edit: they also finally managed to make a file manager that's actually useful for managing files. Only took them, what, 30 years.

Eye contact for dummies: Seek eye contact. If you make eye contact, smile. If you get a smile back, it's OK to initiate conversation. And conversely, if you don't make eye contact or it is immediately broken, then it is creepy to attempt to initiate conversation. That's all there is to it really.

The solution to that is better AI and more interesting mixes of enemies. If they have naked glass cannons too and use them to target yours, things will get a lot more interesting.

That is exactly what I think you should not be able to do with impunity and without use of special abilities, IE games be damned. You should be in trouble if you get engaged in melee by something that's better in melee than you are. Inherently squishy units should have ways of dealing with these situations—like, y'know, magic for spellcasters and Escape for rogues. But it totally should not be something any toon can do at any time. It removes an enormously central element of tactics in gameplay, so much so that without it I'm a bit uncomfortable even describing the combat as tactical. And yes, that applies to the IE games as well. Edit: just got to the your post at 02:12. Let's drop this topic for now; I'm in full agreement with your priority list. If it still feels bad after those are taken care of, I'm willing to reconsider my position.

Which can be addressed by adjusting how engagement/disengagement works. For example, add a zone of control around the toon, determined by weapon reach and visible in the UI, within which you can move without provoking a disengagement attack. You're throwing out the baby with the bath water here, Sensuki.

Yes we do, no they didn't, and yes we do.

Here's a pretty good summary.

Perhaps. Then P:E needs a mechanism better suited for RT for the purpose. No they were not. If they were, the IWD maps wouldn't be designed with all those narrow doorways that were the only thing that put any structure into the encounters. Again: if you put two fighters side by side both within striking distance of the gap, enemies should not be able to just run through it. A heavy's role is to block movement. You should not need to micromanage this. "Forcing the enemy AI to attack your front line" is a lousy way of doing it. Why not add aggro mechanics while you're at it, and go full WoW? Sure, there were lots of other tools you could use to win battles, but IMO it is no too much to ask that a game with tactical combat has a decent implementation of the most basic element of combat tactics, controlling battlefield space by the positioning of your units.

Both. (In all honesty though, primarily enemies getting past my frontline. If I line up three characters, it should not be possible to just run through them.) The entire point of having a front line is that it stops enemies from getting to you back line. If there's no mechanism in place to let it do that, a big dimension of tactics is gone. Sure, this was the case in all the IE games and their DnD successors, but it's not the case in any RTS game worthy of the name, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be possible to make it work in P:E. AoO's were an attempt at addressing this, but not very successful in a RT game (although they worked well in ToEE). There's got to be a better way. I would start by allowing a zone within which you can move while being engaged so that e.g. you can reposition yourself. Two combatants circling one another.

@Sensuki I strongly disagree with you about melee engagement. The one thing I hated about IE combat is the way toons could just scoot past each other with impunity. To make for interesting combat challenges the maps had to be really contrived, with choke points designed to be plugged by two toons shoulder-to-shoulder. Restricting movement is the point. I.e. if they do remove melee engagement, they had damn well better come up with something else that lets us control the battlefield in the same manner.

Okay, early impressions. The variety of talents is delightful (and I really love some of the names—very DnD-ey, in a good way), as is the way they blew open the builds, esp. the fighter one. Now it is pretty close to what that original vision described--you really can take it in different directions, although the best class abilities are still front-line oriented. But that's cool. Not so thrilled about the decision to completely connect skills to talents. I think the intent is to give you an optimization problem, having to find the best compromise between the combat talents and the skills you want to have. It's not a very fun optimization problem though IMO. I'm either ignoring the skills and picking the talents for what they do, or ignoring the talents to get the skills I want. Either way I'm treating one fairly big subsystem as irrelevant which can't really be the intent. I would rather see that decision rolled back. The old system was mechanically fine; just the level-up UI was kind of... not good. Why not just have a simple, basic point-buy system with the price going up geometrically? Display your current skill levels, the cost to level up each skill, and the number of skill points available. Cf. VtM:B for example. Lots of small but nice improvements to the UI in many places. Give a much more polished feel to the whole. Some (not all) of the character model heads now look good even in CC, which does a lot to make the game look less "cheap". I'm am getting pwned by the beetles. Ouch. Dunno if it's something I'm doing wrong or if they really did make them that much tougher, but... ouch. Dengler still won't talk to me. Do I have halitosis or something? Like the loading screens. Another nice bit of polish there. Loading times though still need optimizing. I find it especially jarring to have to wait when entering buildings. Do something about that plz? Overall? I like the way the game is starting to cohere visually. The new icons, loading screens, tweaks to the UI, tweaks to the character model, etc. are extremely promising. If all they do on that front is make moar icons for everything, I'll be pretty happy. I like the revisions to the character-building mechanics... other than the choice to link skills and talents. I like bestiary XP, but don't like trap/lock XP. The BB is too small an the XP awards too inflated to say much more on that though. The combat however isn't progressing as fast as I'd like. Despite the individual improvements to the combat UI the overall experience hasn't jelled. It's doesn't "feel" any better than in 278; it's still chaotic and confusing, and it's hard to tell what you did wrong when you get your ass handed to you. That's a bit disappointing since they have had a while to iterate on it by now. I think the main problems right now are with pathfinding (still!), movement speed (still!), and numbers balance. The balance also appears to swing wildly from buld to build; 278 was pretty hard, 301 was easy, 333 is very hard. Keep banging on at that though, you will get there... but this part does need attention.

Whoa, big update. You guys been working hard. Surprised you changed the skill system so drastically, will be interesting to try that out. Still don't care for the idea of lock/trap XP. Very happy about the massive number of talents, general combat and pathfinding fixes, and adjustments to core abilities. :runs off to try it:

@Zoraptor IMO the big tragedy of the Egyptian revolution is that the non-MB opposition couldn't get their act together. If they had agreed on a single candidate he would've had good odds of winning. As it was the vote was split. I would probably have held my nose and voted for Morsi as well in the second round, given the circumstances. Both of the opposition groups had their shot and blew it -- the secularists before the elections, the MB when they got into power, so here we are, with the generals back in charge.

Nastiness is not a defining characteristic of Salafism though, at least in the respect that all nasty (sunni) muslims are Salafi. MB, like AK, are (broadly orthodox, sunni) Islamist rather than Salafi, who many Sunnis don't even regard as actually being Sunni. It's all rather complicated though, due to various Gulf States supporting different movements of differing levels of whackiness that look fairly similar from the outside. In terms of Egypt, since Qatar backs the MB the Salafi Al-Nour party (second largest after the MB's political arm, and considerably more extreme) stood aside when al-Sisi launched his coup because they're beholden to Saudi Arabia, who don't like any other arab state having influence and think Qatar are uppity. That is one of the primary reasons for all the in fighting in Syria and in Libya, as well as the rise of ISIS. Qatar actually has more Salafis by population proportion than Saudi, but basically all Salafi (AKA Wahhabi, though they don't like that term) movements are sponsored and run by Saudi either officially or through back channels because Saudi is their spiritual home. Very little in the Middle East makes consistent sense from a western perspective, which is why the west keeps on stuffing up. Saudi sponsors Egypt, who then bomb a Saudi proxy militia in Libya- you look at it from the outside and just end going huh? a lot. Point conceded, I was careless in using the word Salafi to describe the MB. That said: when in power, they were remarkably unwilling or unable to stop the actual salafis from making real mayhem—murder, arson, other terror attacks on secularists and non-Sunnis, and what have you. I am not certain about the reasons. The uncharitable interpretation—and the reason I characterized them as salafi—is that they, or at least the fraction in power, did this intentionally, maintaining a somewhat moderate facade while letting the guys with the bigger beards do their dirty work. The less uncharitable one is simply that they were incompetent. Either way, major disappointment. I wasn't happy when Morsi got elected, but I expected him to at least try to balance the concerns of Egypt's various consituencies. Instead he let the salafis run amok while pushing hard for Islamization of the legal system. The outcome was pretty predictable—the non-Islamist factions who voted for him to oppose the Mubarak regime pick quickly defected and opened the door for the full-bore counter-revolution that they got. Now they just have a younger, healthier Mubarak who'll likely keep that miserable excuse for a system going for another 30 years. Short version: you had a shot at something better but boy did you screw it up, ya Masr.

@Rostere I thought that too until I saw what Morsi did when he was in power. It wasn't pretty. On the other hand, the AKP has been getting nastier lately as well.

@BruceVC You have to look REALLY hard to find an example where a Western intervention led to a situation that was unambiguously better for the people in the affected country than before the intervention. Kosovo is often trumpeted as such an example, but even that is pret-ty ambiguous when you look more closely, and just about everywhere else it's been between a disaster and a catastrophe. With that kind of history, "whoa we meant well" is kind of a lame excuse when it goes pear-shaped again. The only thing you can really say in favor of the Libyan intervention is that a civil war was already in progress under its own steam — the Arab Spring was not a Western plot; in fact the US especially had a strong preference for Qaddafi, Mubarak, and Ben Ali and was spit scared that the revolution would bring hardline Salafis into power, as happened (briefly) in Egypt until the US-backed thugs kicked them out — and it's debatable that things would have gone much better without the intervention. This is why I am almost categorically opposed to "humanitarian intervention." Even in the rare cases that the motives are primarily or even significantly humanitarian, it's much more likely to make things even worse than better. And usually "humanitarian intervention" is simply a fig leaf covering good ol' post-colonial power politics. I'll leave that "almost" in there to allow for the extremely unlikely case that the stars are perfectly aligned for an intervention that really is likely to work and make things better. I.e. you can't export democracy at the point of a cruise missile, or even in a briefcase full of Yankee dollars. You can choose whether and how to engage with odious regimes and the people living under them and try to influence things that way, but ultimately it's up to the people to decide what kind of government they want to live under, and whether they hate the current one enough to overthrow it. The only Arab Spring revolution that did make things pretty unambiguously better was the Tunisian one, and that happened entirely under its own steam and caught everybody with their pants down so they couldn't screw it up. Also, a point of advice for any would-be revolutionaries: don't trust foreigners or local fascists to save your revolution for you. The help is never disinterested. If you're not strong enough to pull it off on your own, it will get hijacked by fascists or foreign interests, and things will be worse than before.

I tried, in the other thread. Feeling too mellow for it today.

First computer game I played was Hunt the Wumpus on a Stanford University UNIX mainframe in 1977, when my dad was there as a visiting researcher. Some days I stayed in his office, and the Wumpus kept me good and quiet. Since this is all about bragging rights, I decided to count my gaming career from that, to just squeak into the "36 years or more" category. The first game I really got hooked on though was rogue in the early 1980's. Played that from my dad's dumb terminal phoning in at 300 baud.

@Rosbjerg That's true up to a point. However, if you list the richest countries by GDP per capita, it's not the same as the list of happiest countries: 1 Qatar 145,894 2 Luxembourg 90,333 3 Singapore 78,762 4 Brunei 73,823 5 Kuwait 70,785 6 Norway 64,363 7 United Arab Emirates 63,181 8 San Marino[6][7] 62,766 9 Switzerland Of these I think only Norway and Switzerland are even on the happiness top 10. There is an economic indicator that does correlate fairly well with "happiness" though: GINI coefficient. It measures economic inequality. Here's a list of the top least inequal countries (if information is available:) 1. Denmark 2. Sweden 3. Norway 4. Czech Republic 5. Austria 6. Slovakia 7. Ukraine 8. Belarus 9. Finland 10. Bulgaria Five of the top 10 "happy" countries are on that list, and even in roughly similar positions. Of the countries that are not, Ukraine, Belarus, and Bulgaria are pretty damn poor, and the Czech Republic and Slovakia also not as rich as the five that are. I.e. it's a workable hypothesis that broad-based prosperity—i.e., a high level of relatively evenly-distributed prosperity—does contribute significantly to happiness. That also makes intuitive sense to me by the way.