marelooke

So this popped up in my suggestions the other day. As you all are probably aware it has been widely reported that the UK says lootboxes are not gambling, of course the truth is a lot more nuanced and Bellular goes through the entire parliamentary hearing (of which most "journalists" read the first paragaph or so, apparently): The TL;DR could be summed up pretty accurately as "The UK doesn't consider lootboxes gambling (by their legal definition), but the UK Gambling Commission argues they probably should be."

Given how Epic basically bought them out (to the detriment of said backers) I doubt they'd be happy about not getting what they paid for... Working on something else would be pretty ballsy, I for one, won't support them again as their word has been proven to be worth about as much as that of the average politician.

I think I stepped through a portal into some Bethesda game... I was only going to build a small outpost to capture thralls. Got the capturing part down. Might have slightly failed in the "small" department though... The huge circular(-ish) roof was a nightmare to build. I still want to add a Set temple somewhere, at some point. Open roof over the Wheel of Pain and kitchen right next door for some added persuasive powers. Can't have Keyrock claim I'm a softie again! Since I have no real reason to start any new building projects in my single player save I've gone back to the bucket list: Killed the undead dragon, was a tad easier than I expected (but I expected it to be really really nasty, so there's that) The giant spider, on the other hand, was a lot nastier than I expected... Killed all the different dragon types (Red, Green and White). I mean, that's something you have to do at least once in our life, amirite? Killed the White Dragon a few times to get a head for a trophy, after a bit of Googling it turns out the White Dragon Head Trophy is not implemented yet. Whelp. Still to go: Completing the Warmaker's Sanctuary dungeon and dealing with some other new bosses added in that recent update (already fought the boss birds, those are nasty as hell) Craft the Heart of the Sands (so I can then create the item to remove the bracelet as I have all the other parts), which means I need to get past the whiptail cats that have shredded me each time I've tried. Different approach appears to be required (might bring a thrall to deal with them, for a change, I usually don't use them, except for bearers) Completing the last few Journey steps ("only" 5 to go....)

Kinda selective about which commitments they keep, aren't they? But I can't really argue against not working their staff to death either.

Messed around some more with the Conan Exiles dedicated server. My base got to a decent size and stuff got kinda really laggy. CPU was still bored and machine wasn't OOM. Load didn't really go over 1.2 (which is still fine for a dual core, but most of the time was between 0.6 and 0.8) either either so not sure what's up with that (I'll go with "badly optimized software"). Willing to open it up if people are interested but something tells me that having multiple players might not be a good time. In hindsight I should probably just have tried loading my single player save on the server, something tells me my archway base wouldn't go over well... Either way, got around to cleaning up the Dockerfile and put it all on Github here, so if anyone has some beefier hardware lying around, there you go

Right, had to look that one up since I haven't played through The New Colossus yet and I'd forgotten about the suit in The New Order (worn by someone else). Still he only needs it because of an injury, not because he's just not trained well enough to do what he does. Either way I figure that to be a minor detail (didn't even notice his focus on it, honestly), the stuff that interested me, personally was the RPG mechanics and the looter-shooter parts, well and the behaviour of the protagonists (which I, as I already mentioned, already abhorred after the announcement). Sounds a lot like a worse Shadow Warrior 2 to me, which I also thought was pretty bland when compared to the original reboot and was ill served (imho) by similar mechanics that are apparently being introduced here. Except Lo Wang was a tad more likeable than what I've seen of these two sisters. EDIT: in case you want a bit more of a non-funny, accurate review: In case it matters, I'm with Lawrence on this one.

If you mean the appearance of the protagonists, then I can agree (though I do see his point, which doesn't mean I *agree* with his point, let's make that clear here and now). Their behaviour, otoh, yeah, I do have a problem with that, it turned me off of the game as soon as I saw the announcement video. I feel the need to point this out again: I never claimed I agreed with all his points necessarily, I just thought the video entertaining. As I said, the protagonists' behaviour turned me off from the game immediately, so I am quite aware I'm not in the target audience, just enjoying me some schadenfreude (if nothing else, AAA titles tend to provide plenty of entertainment that way alone).

Ok, so unfortunately as I feared, no more fine grained control Thanks for the effort of explaining though!

BJ didn't need any armor though? I mean, doubt they'd have let him keep it when they locked him up and he was just fine. He was also muscular to the point he made the Governator seem scrawny. Either way I thought his point was more that they wanted to add girl power without wanting to "compromise" by making the girls look like they'd be able to do the stuff they're doing (which would mean they'd have had to be quite a bit more muscular than the, as the author puts it, "scrawny teenagers" they are). I would tend to agree on that point. Easiest way to make someone strong without making them look like they work out? Exoskeleton! Nano-suit! As for the "story" as someone put it on Steam: could have been a great story about living in the shadow of BJ and his accomplishments/reputation or merely the fact that he's killed thousands, instead they went with whatever the hell this cringy mess is.

Got 3 days of free gametime from Blizzard, not sure if nice or desperate of them. Anyway, mostly been alternating between playing on the Conan Exiles server I set up and an official (PvE) server for comparison's sake., and trying to tune the former, of course. Docker images appear fine and reliable now, unfortunately haven't been able to figure out the server browser issue, which is really annoying as it means you need to enter the server details manually, twice: once where it checks server mods and then it restarts with those mods activated (probably can skip this step if single player mods = server mods), fails to automatically connect and then you gotta enter the server details again and it actually connects. Either way going to clean up the images and then post them, might toss them into the official forums as well in hopes they're either useful to someone and/or someone can help figure out the Steam issues. As for performance, it's generally, ok-ish, occasionally it desyncs and harvesting appears weirdly laggy, mostly noticeable with skinning (first action generally appears to not register, so you have to re-harvest). It's slightly worse than on an official server (which still have issues with it) but it's playable (though I have not attempted any real bossfights focusing mostly on building to see how the server handles big builds so I might reconsider that stance when I get murdered due to lag spikes :P) Performance issues might be memory related (as I mentioned previously) since I play with the server's console on my other screen and CPU cores rarely spike to 100% but memory consumption is rather high. According to Funcom 8GB should be enough for a 10 player server but I have my doubts that's actually the case. I'd been considering getting extra memory anyway so I might see if I can still get some of the correct type and whether that improves things. Another possible cause is the game throttling maximum (network) throughput per-player. I've already increased these parameters somewhat with limited success but I might try and bump them up some more. On the positive side I noticed that when playing on a dedicated server rather than single player physics actually work properly, both cloth, hair as well as the various dangly and bouncy bits. Makes it hard to go back to the static clothing from my single player game now. On the negative side some bugs that appear also in single player are a lot more common (like corpses going invisible)

The game might be bad, but this review was comedy gold.

Can confirm for Origin, uses about 3MB in that state. Uplay actually appears to be gone though, so maybe they already fixed it.

Does this only work for DRM free applications, or does it mean it doesn't pop up the respective launcher but it's still running in the background? Just for funsies I had a look at all the launchers I have around when they run in the background (everything approximate, of course, and I gave everything about 10min to "settle" after launching them and/or waited for any upgrade and updates to complete): Bethesda.net Launcher: 560MB(!!!) Steam 150MB Gog Galaxy 150MB Battle.net 110MB (as a bonus, I updated WoW and that added another 400MB process for the duration of the update) Uplay 110MB Origin 85MB Kinda surprised Origin was the leanest one, honestly, it always looked so bloated, but it turns out that's just the UI being...not so great. Obviously there's nothing scientific about the approach (small sample size is the least of the issues ), just figured it was a fun thing to do. But yeah, running all of them eats up over a Gigbyte of RAM, half that if you are sensible and stay away from that Bethesda abomination (not to mention that quite a few of them almost constantly "do stuff" in the background and thus (lightly) tax your CPU as well). Didn't test Epic's thing because I disagree with their way of doing business, so I'm not doing business with them for the time being.

It's just software, if well maintained it can go on for quite a while. Of course most games (including MMOs) are not built to last. So a lot of them run into issues with spaghetti code or other hacks to just get things out the door. Blizzard spent a bunch of time refactoring WoW's engine to future proof it, for example. The ironic thing is that I'm sure many of them thought these games wouldn't last this long and that they'd then just make a successor. Then they discovered that creating enough content to keep players busy isn't exactly easy (or cheap), so now they're all stuck with games built on shoddy foundations that many of these companies don't have the will, talent, or money to refactor, assuming they even created or own their own engines (*cough* SWToR *cough*). A pretty good example of doing it right, imho, is Warframe, where they figured out that paying the up-front cost of creating a well engineered engine means they they just keep up with the times. On that note (and since you mentioned ArenaNet) Guild Wars 2 is still running on an upgraded GW1 engine, which, apparently is a huge blob of spaghetti code that they're afraid to touch. At least "spaghetti code" is the default reason they used to decline implementing any UI improvements (though they've announced build templates now). Probably depended on your realm, your guild (and its reputation) and how active you were (playing consistently around the same time kinda helped in my experience, as you'd just start running into the same people and thus build a reputation, meaning sooner or later people would just ask you to join). I never really had trouble finding groups once I got over the anxiety of joining PUGs (and I mained a Mage, so no tank/healer privileges). I loved running dungeons though so I spent most of my (game) time in them (at least during TBC, WotLK dungeons were mostly a snorefest, unfortunately)

Well, ESO can be played without a subscription, which is what I meant, you still have to actually buy the game and expansions (the way GW2 used to be). So I guess it's B2P. Without a subscription you don't have access to the crafting storage though (forgot the actual name) which just makes gathering and crafting a massive pain, to the point I'd consider it unplayable without (but ymmv), assuming you care about crafting, of course. If they changed that then maybe it's worth another look.

Was 1.12 the "TBC preparation patch"? I mean, I sure hope it is not, because if so then that's not vanilla, like, at all, that's like setting up a TBC realm and letting people start at the "WotLK preparation patch" (which would be the patch that added achievements), it made power levels go through the roof and many guilds that weren't able to get anywhere prior now could easily clear at least some of the earlier raids.

Cataclysm was Blizzard realising they messed up with progression and difficulty during Wrath of the Lich King and trying to right the ship. Heroic dungeons were actually hard again, as were the raids. Unfortunately they didn't have the foresight to also remove LFG (aka, to realize that there was no way back), so what ended up happening is that anyone who wasn't a tank spent stupid amounts of time in a queue trying to get into dungeons, only to have the tank quit after the first wipe. Pandaria was just a daily quest grindfest in a crap setting. The cliché laden faux-eastern stuff really doesn't do it for me and the fact that you had to grind through so many goddamn dailies for anything was just horrible. I raided for a bit in Pandaria and then just called it a day. Current expansion basically feels like Pandaria levels of Grind with just as bad of a story (at least the bits I saw of it before calling it quits) community in the game is also entirely dead. Leveled through 2 expansions (whatever came before Legion and Legion and then partway through BfA) and there was no-one talking anywhere, ever. And no, that's not an exaggeration for effect, even the major hubs and cities were dead. I haven't actually played FFXIV, I tried the beta (so the pre-re-release version) and wasn't too impressed (but yeah, we all know how that ended up going) but the FF aesthetic doesn't really work for me, generally. I might give it a go eventually though since it's apparently pretty good once you get past the early bits. As for the other MMOs: ESO I thought was just boring and the only thing it had going for it was the setting, lack of storage in the F2P version also makes it unplayable as a F2P game as far as I'm concerned. SWToR was ruined by the terrible engine, but at least the levelling was fun the first time around. GW2 was fun, but the tedious bossfights in the stories (usually in hour long missions that you have to re-do if you decide to bail) have really stopped me from attempting them in the latest Living World seasons. The fact that the answer to getting anything desirable at endgame is "grind gold" (or buy gems and convert them to gold, gee wonder why all that grind is there) is also a huge turn-off. And of course then there's the loot boxes, excessive reliance on cosmetics (that have gotten really obnoxious, visually, over time) and the points that Nike! makes in his video. EverQuest 2 was just sunk by the people who bought it from Sony, the game's been turned into an Asian style grindfest, the latest expansion basically makes the class you chose irrelevant as well as you "ascend". Suffice to say I'm amazed that given the plummeting playerbase the game is still around. Guild Wars 1 is still pretty darn good, but of course no new content is added Age of Conan, kinda hard to judge, I tried it a few times, never could get into it. Looks pretty darn dated as well nowadays. EVE Online is EVE Online, not much to add there. Game just requires way too much time to get anything out of it for me personally. LotRO supposedly has been going downhill fast, barely has a raiding community according to a friend of mine who used to play it and exploiters just run rampant. Classes apparently also have been streamlined so they lost their uniqueness. Can't really think of any other major MMOs that are still around off the top of my head (without getting into the MMO shooters).

Bunch of upheaval in MMO-land. It's starting to look like WoW going in the wrong direction for expansions on end might finally be catching up to them and they're very much likely to lose their No1 spot to FFXIV... Guild Wars 2 also isn't doing particularly great for the more hardcore players, here's a breakdown of what went down there for those interested: I do tend to agree with skillUp that there's a relation between hardcore and casual players and that if either is unhappy, or straight up quitting, it'll have a considerable impact on the rest of the playerbase.

My main interest is to see how people will deal with the old raids. I never played vanilla (started early TBC) and even if there were TBC servers I doubt I'd go back as my guild is long gone, the realm community is long gone (thanks LFG) and I kinda don't have the amount of time I had back then either. To top that off I probably look at games (and MMOs especially) with a rather different lens so it'll likely only distort the fond memories I built up in those years (despite my...situation, back then) I hope it does well though and results in a massive direction change for WoW. Lord only knows it needs it.

Hmm, I couldn't find a separate setting for the wishlist. As far as I understand the only way to hide it is to make your entire profile private, which isn't what I want... If it is possible then, errr, how? (already had to search to find out where the privacy settings were, seeing as they're in such an intuitive place...not)

Yup, that's what I used to do until people started gifting me stuff from said wishlist...

Grabbed the Death of the Outsider DLC for Dishonored 2, so now I just have to finish my no kills/no detection playthrough of the original and its DLCs...

Hmm, nostalgia. My first ever games were pitfall.exe (this is not the Pitfall most people would apparently think of) and Elephant Herding on an XT (we did have a monochrome screen though, no fancy colours like in the Youtube video) My parents didn't really upgrade away from that XT for aeons (we went from DOS3.1 or so on that XT to Windows 95, I pretty much skipped everything in-between). The first graphical, and mouse driven game I played was Abuse when we were on holiday in the UK, by Crack Dot Com (which is open source nowadays), still love that game and fond memories of playing that with my dad (taking turns, of course). When they finally did upgrade we got Jazz Jackrabbit with the new PC, still got fond memories of playing that with my sister and still love the music (though if I play that around the house my gf is liable to kick me out ;)) Next up was the first Tomb Raider, my first real 3D experience, never finished that game, but lots of fond memories. Then there was Dungeon Keeper (the first one, and the best one, by far) first game that utterly hooked me. Game balance was "meh", but if balance in a single player game gets in the way of fun it can go take a hike as far as I'm concerned. I did dabble in RTSs a bit, mostly under the assumption that, being a chess player, I'd enjoy the S-part but I didn't really find one that hooked me (in retrospect would have been better if I had stumbled upon some turn based strategy game, but RTS were all the rage back then) until I ran into Warzone 2100 (also Open Source nowadays, heh). Played that start to finish, the pacing was just right and the setup with the persistent maps that opened up gradually and returned for multiple missions (with all your units and base still on it) was just awesome. It was also one of the first 3D RTS games and it's use of LoS was pretty neat. My introduction to RPGs was Baldur's Gate 1 in a cyber café, the combination of story with RTS-like combat (and pausing! PAUSING!) appealed to me and I saved up and got Baldur's Gate 2 (good thing too, in retrospect, doubt I'd have enjoyed BG1 as much) and that blew my mind. Being able to exchange tactics with a friend (who's unfortunately not much into games anymore) certainly helped there. I'd never replayed a game this much before, and I don't think I've ever replayed one as much since, especially such a long one, well, except maybe... S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. One of my friends in college had this tendency to acquire...demos...of new games just because he could, occasionally we'd gather up and try out a bunch of them. I vividly remember us being at my place (yeah, we're a few years further down the road now ;)) and starting this and just getting utterly destroyed in the first mission. Out of the three of us present I'm the only one that actually finished that game (not sure if anyone else even gave it another go, honestly), and again and again. I played a few more hours on that, errr, demo version and just ordered the CE. Probably finished the game before that arrived and just started over on a higher difficulty. I think that's one of very very few games where I ended up turning up the difficulty to the maximum with absolutely zero regrets, and if I get in the mood for some Stalkering this is still the one I'll reach for, despite Call of Pripyat being technically superior. The first one just oozed atmosphere, especially with all those labs.

Took me a while (too long, honestly), but I got a working Conan Exiles Dedicated Server Docker image. I was about to give up on the project when the thing suddenly decided to actually allow connections (server started fine before, but errored out each time something tried to connect), so I ended up trudging on after all. The in-game or Steam server browsers don't find the server and I'm not sure why, but at this point I'm already happy direct connections work (at least from within my local network) The documentation for the dedicated server is pretty much non-existent, wrong, outdated or a combination of the before and the logs are pretty useless as well. Shame they broke the supposed promise for a Linux version of the server as well, that'd have been a tad more convenient (and who voluntarily runs servers on Windows anyway?) I'm now seeing if I can automate mod updates and then I'll probably throw it up on GitHub at least. As far as performance goes, eh, not sure yet, the load on my server doesn't go above 0.6 while playing which is still just fine. CPU also doesn't seem to particularly care, memory is a tad tight (can probably free some up rather easily) and some things in the game do feel laggy (eg. harvesting corpses). Will have to do some more profiling to see whether it's actually playable for more than just kicks. In the event I do decide it's feasible to run a small server I intend to make public backups of the server database (well, accessible with the server password), this means that in case something happens (most likely some SteamCMD or Conan Exiles update breaking things) or performance does turn out unbearable people can download the database to their single player game and carry on (or host it elsewhere, of course). Server settings are not present in that database (something to be aware of when using something like Mikey's Toolbox to create and manage multiple single player games as well) but everything else is (player stats, buildables, etc)

With Diablo Immortal I guess it's also about what such a thing represents. These kinds of mobile games tend to be the bottom of the barrel when it comes to ethics as they tend to be about squeezing as much as possible out of their audience by any means they can get away with, seeing a company that was supposedly about making good games stoop that low is bound to anger some people. (even though they've basically been owned by Activision for ages so they ought to have known better) If nothing else this just proves that Blizzard has now truly been swallowed by Activision, with everything that entails.