marelooke

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.

I had been considering joining some sort of server (as if I needed an excuse for more building ;)), so I'm all for it. I had also been considering running one (been tinkering with a Docker image on and off as I don't want to install Wine, Steam, and co straight into the OS), though mostly to check out the differences between solo and dedicated because I'm not so sure my hardware could handle many people (but I have no idea how taxing the dedicated server is, so maybe it can host like a 10 slot server). Server settings would need to be discussed, I imagine. Like PvP or no, decay timers on things (eg. buildings, thralls), what is considered acceptable (blocking off resources spawns can be real nasty if there's no raiding). I mean, I know you're all real gentlemenbarbarians, of course, who'd never even consider such a thing...buuuut And, of course, which, if any, mods to run (which, I imagine, would depend on whether people are into PvP). I'd argue the game is not really balanced around single player, that's why the server options are wide open when playing solo, especially increasing either gather rates or decreasing resource costs are fair game imho (I think I have costs set to 25%, didn't touch gather rates), for solo I'd also turn off decay (but I'm Bob the Builder, so yeah, I might be biased) and bump up the speed of thrall job interviews. FWIW my current mod list (mostly the same from before): There's a few others I've been eyeing, like Emberlight (adds a lot of crafting and RP stuff) or the Glass building mod but I'd prefer to mess with those in a sandbox (or on a server) as I don't want to break my save in case they turn out gamebreaking or just not useful.

"Port to Shat plx"

(implied explosions behind my character)

Depends on the length of the game. Doing something that precludes a satisfying ending in a 10hour game is a lot less agonizing than making a "wrong" choice in something like The Witcher 3... Well, depends on the type of grind, how mandatory it is (is it progression blocking or optional) and how many ways there are to get to your goal. I absolutely detest "daily quest" grind in the likes of WoW but I don't much mind murdering the same mooks over and over to gain reputation with a faction, or to get some item to drop, or somesuch (assuming said murdering is, in itself satisfying aka. the combat system isn't total garbage, but then why play in the first place?). If I can combine that with something else (eg. some quests here or there, or collecting doohikeys I can do something with) then I don't really mind. There shouldn't be downtime though, not "kill this guy, now stand around for 5minutes so you can kill this exact guy again". Yeah, no thanks. So basically if there's no pressure behind it (eg. you shall do this grind to get your "item level" high enough so we arbitrarily allow you to now enter this new dungeon) then I'm generally fine with it. Case in point: I've grinded quite a few reputations in EverQuest 2 just to get cool titles or new furniture to make (my character was a carpenter), neither of those was the kind of progression blocking chore games like to (try to) foist on you and they didn't prey on FOMO by making it time limited either. Some of those took me months to years to eventually complete but it's not like they were going anywhere. They also have the advantage of not being bound to chance (this recipe book has a 0.01% chance to drop from Lizard People) while still making certain things somewhat rare (as not everyone will bother with them) As for wishlists, the Steam one is annoying in the sense that you can't hide it without making the entire profile private. Using it as a "watchlist" has backfired around my birthday on a few occasions, and the "follow" feature is too invasive as it then just spams you with all their news updates. Gog's nicer in that way (I think, don't have any "friends" on Gog) and the e-mails are a nice feature.

They still do a lot better than most, but despite me still liking the game very much let's put some potential negatives on a row: Riven mods: there's 4 layers of randomness involved: chance to get one in the first place, chance to get one for the weapon you want it for, chance to get the stats on it that you want and then the chance to roll "ideal" numbers on those stats), which means that realistically if you really want one you'll have to buy it off of other players (with premium currency, of course, as barely anyone will accept anything else). There's a reason this system often gets compared to Diablo 3's market (or lootboxes, but that's kinda stretching it, even though it is designed to make people spend). However, unlike Diablo 3's stuff Riven mods provide bonuses you objectively don't need, so many people just ignore they exist (including yours truly) with no impact on their game. It really only preys on players that want to hyper-optimize their gear even if there's no cause to do so (the day they become mandatory is the day I quit playing) Nightwave: basically a battle pass, as such it preys on people's FOMO. Makes a lot of things slower to acquire so it potentially slows down new player progression, definitely impacts the easy come/easy go aspect of the game. TennoGen (skins based on community designs): on PC only purchasable with real money (not with premium currency, unlike on consoles) and the prices are downright ridiculous (~6 EURO for a Warframe skin nowadays, for reference for our non-EU members: an AAA game is around 60 EURO over here) Void 2.0: the Void is where you get "Prime" gear, which is basically buffed versions of regular gear with more bling. With the changes they did they added another layer of grind to it. For coordinated groups it's an improvement over the old system, for everyone else it's more grind (and arguably more boring than the old system), so it pushes more people towards just buying the "Prime Access" (or buying from other players, which once again means more premium currency). Of those 4 only Nightwave (there are Nightwave-only resources that you need to build certain Warframes and weapons) and the Void are pretty much mandatory to interact with.

I reduced building costs (other option is to increase gathering yield), mostly to avoid the gathering getting overly tedious. Still this would be doable with "vanilla" settings, at least in a solo game. The location itself is really close to large amounts of Brimstone, as the croc cave and the other brimstone cave are pretty much right at the other side of the newbie river from here. There's Iron (and Coal, but barely using that anymore) there too, but not in such large amounts, so I tend to just "import" that from my tower near the Unnamed City (where iron is plentiful). Ichor is easy: just put down loads of fish traps and then keep the Fluid Presses going (gets large amounts of Oil too, so nice bonus there and the reason I barely use Coal anymore). It's even easier now that the latest patch increased how much of certain things you can stack (Iron and Steel bars stack to 1000 now, I think), so dragging it from one base to the next isn't quite as tedious anymore. Oh, and I'm a massive packrat, so unless I go somewhere for a very specific reason (read: bossfights) I run around in Light Armor, combined with the 10% carry weight bonus you can carry quite a lot so I tend to just keep going until I hit my encumbrance limit, then I either dump the heavy stuff in a chest to pick up later with a Bearer or return to a base to unload. For gathering it makes rather a large difference which quality tools you use (the upgrade is also rather helpful) higher tier ones can gather quite large quantities rather quickly. If you bring a Bearer you can just unload to the thrall and keep gathering for quite a while. EDIT: and I've been working on this for a while now, there's that as well, didn't exactly plunk this down over the weekend. Judging by my screenshot folder I started half March.

My build is getting a bit out of hand, fitting it meaningfully in a screenshot has gotten rather hard. Anyway, might be interesting to see how I go about building. So I ended up finishing the palace wing of my palace (at least the structure part, need to decorate rooms etc still. From the entrance to the end I built a big throne room: Dragon heads are kinda big, but I managed to fit one in the equally ridiculously big Map Room Overview including my initial base at the bottom of the arch, for scale. The palace I built is barely visible here (it's behind the Derketo temple, which is the yellow or green(*) light beam) I'd probably have to make a video of sorts to fit everything in without it feeling too disconnected or resulting in a truly ridiculous amount of screenshots... In total there are 4300 T3 (Aquilonian) building blocks used in this (so far), of which 1181 are foundations (not counting all the Stonebrick for the ramps and the Sandstone Foundations used underneath to level out the terrain) (*) yours truly is colourblind

TennoCon (the Warframe conference) was this weekend, I think the most relevant part is that there's a new player experience overhaul upcoming (about time) and that the game gets a new (very cool) intro: Bunch of other new stuff being announced (new rendering engine, ship space combat, etc.), but I figure this to be the most relevant to those not already playing the game (especially those that got turned off by said new player experience), no ETA on any of the new player stuff though.