PK htiw klaw eriF

Those miners just need to grab their bootstraps and start a business. With a small loan of a million dollars they could become the African Jack Ma.

Excuse you pinko, FREEDOM is when the cops can throw you in jail for no reason and when the age of consent is lower than 16.

Well historically socialist movements have strived for more money, less hours, more benefits, etc. like the early US labor movement significantly featuring anarchists, socialists, communists, and trade unionists. I'd say wanting more **** counts as greed. Similarly in the US wage theft is around the same $ amount as all other property theft combined, and if the employer-employee relationship ain't capitalism then nothing is. You could further argue that the history of imperialism and colonialism entrenched in the development of capitalism are examples of theft of large amounts of land and resources to fuel a burgeoning industrialization. In any case it's evident that as capitalism actually exists, theft is a strategy that yields benefit so "envy" is as beneficial as greed. Of course analyzing economic and political systems around "sins" is going to be extremely reductive and you could probably pack them all in any given thing. Like socialism is sloth because lazy proles don't want to work 40 hours a week or capitalism is wrath because it has a habit of launching coups when the market ain't free enough.

It'd be surprising if Eora as an IP was completely abandoned, but it wouldn't surprise me if Deadfire was the end of PoE as an isometric RTwP RPG and new entries were stuff like Eternityrim or Pillars of Original Sin.

I was speaking generally, for example DOS2 and Skyrim (special edition?) disable achievements if you're using mods, though there are common bypasses to enable achievements. I could be wrong, but aren't the vast majority of console functions locked behind iroll20s? If so, I don't think it's controversial to say that using the console effectively disables achievements.

Probably, Deadfire is an improvement in many ways but it is the same kind of game as PoE.

Mods and console usually disable achievements, and they seem to be fairly popular especially if there is a steam workshop (ease of use). It's hard to control for this, but without mods maybe half of people who own the game will go far enough to get the first act/area achievement. Furthermore, it seems like achievements structured around things that are outside of what the game tells you is good (like causing a mutiny or pissing off companions in Deadfire) are the least likely to be achieved. Deadfire may be problematic for this analysis, because players are rewarded in game for picking up achievements with Berath's Blessings and this may have increased achievement hunting. I personally don't care about achievements, but I have all of them for Deadfire because there is an ingame incentive to. There are no studies or hard data I'm aware of.

When I say intro, I'm talking about cinematics and non-gameplay sequences, not the 1st area or whatever. When you start Deadfire there's a 10 minute segment before character creation that shoves lore down your throat (it teaches you nothing about mechanics), and you could not skip it at launch. If it's skipped, you miss nothing but some bare bones context about what happened in PoE that could have been effectively repeated by the first few people you talk to in the game with nothing lost. To this I think that the intro should be a minute at most that sets up the immediate situation and leads directly to character creation. The starting area absolutely should inform of the (basic) lore and teach the gameplay basics (combat, stealth, crafting, etc.).

Regarding using steam achievements to track completion, I forgot to take into account mods and console commands (they disable achievements in all games), as such the % of achievements only reflects Steam players who did that without using mods or the console and Steam players who used mods or console with some kind of work around like the IE mod for PoE. This is more likely to affect Deadfire and DOS2, because they have Steam workshop which means more mod use, but with what data we have access to there is no way to tell what number of players used mods and the progress made by said players was. Yeah, I think the game shouldn't slam you with an intro that keeps you out of actually playing the game. My ideal would be to have the introduction woven in to gameplay, PoE actually did this pretty well because after getting a brief vignette of your current condition and character creation you were placed directly into the game. PST's gameplay outside of conversations (which you are forced to do in specific parts of the game) is offputting to the point I can't really justify spending several hours playing it again. It's just not very good as a game, what is good about it feels completely separate from the existing mechanics and is why I feel like it would work better as an interactive storybook than it does as a D&D game. BG, while bad, does have a niche as one of the few truly low-level games out there and can be imported to what folks around here still consider to be one of the greatest games of all time, as such I would have an easier time justifying playing BG, despite the bad 2e mechanics and either very bad or non-existent encounter design.

As other have said completion of a game is relatively uncommon and not a good indication for long games like Deadfire, but the steam achievements reveal something more interesting where less than 2/3s of players made it off the starting island. To compare this to PoE, less than half of players made it to the end of Act 1, which to be fair is significantly longer than getting off the island, and only 13% finished the game https://steamcommunity.com/stats/291650/achievements EDIT: I forgot to take into account mods and console commands, as such the % of achievements only reflects Steam players who did that without using mods or the console and Steam players who used mods or console with some kind of work around like the IE mod for PoE. Anyways I think we can draw a few general conclusions, that a significant amount of players will put in little to no time playing a game they have (whether purchased or gifted), that many will not complete the game and quit after a few hours, and that unintutive gameplay won't be pursued by most players (in these cases few relative pacifists or intentionally pissing off companions) Specific to PoE, Deadfire actually had a higher percentage of players finish the game, which we can interpret as either higher target audience approval or more dedicated players relative to owners of Deadfire or that Deadfire can be completed quicker than PoE. I don't think any of these facts or assumptions can readily explain why Deadfire under performed commercially, to compare it to a game that was wildly successful only 23.4% (at most, could be as low as 11.5%) players managed to complete DOS2 and only 60% got past the 1st act https://steamcommunity.com/stats/435150/achievements Josh's comments about Deadfire having less awareness remains the explanation I have the easiest accepting, albeit it is one that is more difficult to address. And one last thing, Planescape Torment is the IE game that has aged the worst. It's a great interactive storybook but the gameplay is absolutely horrendous, and I can't justify replaying it like I could BG or IWD. Fite me irl.

That'll be worth a watch. Ended up watching Look Who's Back and thought it was funny, if a little too on the nose for the current climate.

That's an opinion bruh, there is no objective criteria for what constitutes a spiritual successor.

After getting his ass kicked by his neighbor, he's slowly been losing his mind.

Yes, if it requires the existence of a state with the ability to imprison, kill, and otherwise punish then it infringes upon liberty. You yourself claimed, quoting Paine, that this was a necessary evil. If your conception of liberty doesn't consider getting imprisoned, killed, or punished by an authoritative entity that will imprison or kill you for noncompliance an infringement then I have to question its coherence. If you think that without a state to enforce rule of law you would kill anyone that comes across your path, I think that says more about you than the necessity of the government.

I played Kingmaker for maybe 2 hours, picked a feat that didn't work and ran into several bugs. I'm going to wait a few more months and then give it another go in the hopes it isn't a mess. Anyways I'll echo complaints about sales figures not correlating to quality. I think that Deadfire made some pretty egregious errors like the inversion stuff, the ship combat, and a lack of sea monsters in a region that's supposed to be infested with them. But flawed games still sell well so gameplay issues alone aren't necessarily a good indicator of why or why not something sold poorly. I doubt any one thing is really a good explanation as to why Deadfire was a commercial disappointment, so I think claiming whatever game that did something different is better because it sold more copies isn't a very good argument.

I watched Dolemite Is My Name. As comedies go, it was one of the better ones I've seen and it was nice to see Eddie Murphy again.

That's an ahistorical view and only applies if you believe the government is a necessary component of any human interaction and the state is any form of organization, which is an awfully strange take from someone who repeatably calls for getting the government out of people's lives. And frequently, that is nothing. To say nothing of seizure by the state or financial entities that is perfectly legal. The last couple of centuries would beg to differ. Then your problem with socialism restricting liberty is inconsistent, because you are supporting the restriction of liberty in the name of property. It's immediately stolen by the state and inevitably paid in fees required for living. The days of the small craftsman are almost all over, for the majority of the world labor is alienated from life. I'll believe that when Texas executes a corporation. Yeah, my mom going through cancer was a pretty big eye opener for me. Right now a friend of the family has stage 4 cancer with large lumps growing on her and has to go to work in this miserable condition or Home Depot will pull her insurance. And damn dude, it's been a real long time since you've been around these parts. How's it been going?

Eh, forums miss subtextual context pretty easily.

I can read my friend, I'm claiming that you can't call someone a statist if you believe in the necessity of a state. This is ribbing on GD (and right-libertarianism in general), who has previously used statist as a negative. https://forums.obsidian.net/search/?q=statist Anyways, "penultimate utopia which is probably indistinguishable from any number of paradise afterlives" is meaningless, the same can be (and usually is) said to dismiss anything that seeks to change the status quo in a meaningful way.

Then you don't have any business calling anyone else a statist. How does this not equally apply to capitalist society? Not only does the state enforce property at the barrel of a gun, but for the vast majority of people housing, food, and labor are not exclusively theirs and can be taken at will. By your logic living imperiled is natural and liberty is a pipe dream.

Libertarian started being used by Dejacque, a 19th century french socialist, because Proudhon was too misogynistic and anti-semitic. It wasn't until radical liberals needed something new to call themselves that it meant anything but anarchism. Then your knowledge is limited, because it has been a thing for over a century and was the lines (one of) the first socialist organizations split over. Read God and the State. Property and (neo)liberal economics require a state to enforce property relationships with force, if anything it's right-libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism that break down when it comes to property.

I think they're in jail, if I'm not mistaken KXL protestors got lengthy prison sentences that were absurd relative to action. The possibility of getting locked in a cage seemingly has a chilling effect on the desire to act. Anyways soil degradation is yet another environmental issue, we've got maybe 60 years of being able to grow food left if things don't change. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/ Of course the solutions aren't easy, because it would require ceasing the use of many chemicals in farming as well as ending deforestation and there is no tech solution to the problem.

We are all children of God-King Soros.

Maybe "She's Gen Z, not a millennial", which is true. Of course the people who usually make that argument are massively rectum ravaged over her, so who knows what we will see.

He's also the Cardassian that tortured Picard, which is a much better role than an immortal incel looking to become a god because the girl he was crushin on rejected him.