majestic

If you want PvP in a game like most of them, you'll need factions to drive it, though you can work around that I'd imagine via merc companies or something else. Not sure that would really effect much of a MMORPG's death, though. Is it a problem to just play the same faction as your friends and just have alt for the other side ? Or you do it the EQ2 way: have two factions for story purposes but let the players play together during general gameplay. Enemy faction NPCs are KOS but players can do whatever they want (which made some quests interesting as you might have to hike through an enemy capital to help someone or run into NPCs that are hostile to only some in your group). You can even betray your faction (which means losing your class: going from Good to Evil, for example, a Warden would become a Fury) and there's even a hub for people in between factions (or you can just stay factionless, though I never did the betrayal thing so the specifics of it I don't know either. It's a huge rep grind, that much I know)... The betrayal thing wouldn't be relevant in WoW due to how they just have the same classes on both sides nowadays, in EQ2 otoh it is the only way to have a Dark Elf Warden (since Dark Elves are an Evil race so can't pick warden on character creation). I don't remember how PvP worked, but having it faction based wouldn't be such a big deal though given how both factions had different classes it would be an interesting balance exercise. Mercenary companies, as you suggest, would also work. Or the Guild Wars 2 way: World vs World (which would translate to Realm vs Realm in WoW-speak) would be an interesting way to go for a game with the population to sustain such a thing. The reputation grind of the betrayal questline wasn't that bad. Having to camp named mobs on the other hand was. You could spend weeks waiting for the right mob to spawn even if you farmed it every day due to ridiculous spawn times and chances - either a mob only spawed once every X amount of time or it spawned in a couple of minutes with a sub one percent chance of spawning the right one. Oh, and there was no PVP in EQ2 for over year. It got patched in later, first as open world only, later with some WoW style battlegrounds, but neither Sony nor Daybreak were ever captable of overcoming the big problem of EQ2 PVP: It was bolted on due to how popular World of Warcraft was at the time. It turned out to be impossible to balance what with EQ2's 24 classes, faction class restrictions, alternative advancement paths, quest buffs (that even carried over into battlegrounds) and an equipment and stat system never meant for PVP.

But... but... why?

Wanderon is a trucker too. Or at least he used to be.

There's at least a couple threads (linked here and here for convenience) on it in the Deadfire section. I also have my doubts that it will be considered a flop, massive or otherwise, but at the same time I doubt it's doing the numbers Obs was hoping for. There's a different issue with Deadfire. If it were just for Obsidian, the way Deadfire appears to be selling based only on known Steam sales would be good enough but half the game's Fig campaign budget came from investors and I doubt they'll be happy if the game just about breaks even for them (and for a 1k share that's at just under 600k units sold in the long term, per Obsidian's own projections). And, well, Deadfire was Fig's poster boy game.

Raptor: Call of the Shadows. At the risk of triggering SM117 here, they really don't make 'em like this any more. =/

No, it's not 6, at least not when doing this the way the quiz was intended (if 6 were true then 5 would be false and we'd have to look for an answer in 1-4 - which can't be if 6 was true). I'm pretty sure the answer is 5. 6 would be false since it is one of the above, 2, 3 and 4 would be false because the solution is below and 1 would be false because there is no way all the below answers can be true (se 6 contradicting 5). I agree that the wording is confusing, which I assume is because we're not English native. I would have expected this to be some sort of lateral thinking puzzle (how can there be answers to a question never asked?) and when approached like that 6 looks really promising as an answer. *shrug*

Possibly the best music video ever.

In that case you might like Santiano too...

Diego sez Brazil was robbed!

Scored an awful lot in this tourney, yeah.

Yay!

Volourn is not entirely wrong about NWN. The game was a great template for hours of fun. He just confuses fan made content with the original campaign.

Jar Jar ended up being a stand-in for everything in The Phantom Menace. Mostly because he was the most iconic and arguably irritating part of the film. It certainly also didn't help that he was the only character in the movie with understandable motivations and even someting of a character arc while at the same time being only in the film because Lucas wanted to sell Jar Jar toys to little children. In essence, well, Jar Jar was a very memorable part of TPM, and not in a good way.

Well, not exactly a book but I've spent a good deal of time reading Atomic Rockets through the years. The site is old and it shows, but is constantly being updated and worth a look for any fan of sci-fi who likes real space physics.

Wow, the world's ending outside at the moment. Or at least it sure sounds like it. Massive rain, storms, good old hail. Damn. edit: Nope, cancel the apocalyptic suicides guys. It only lasted for four minutes.

Well apparently Sanchez free style wrestling Kane in the box should not have been a penalty. Why? Well, because. Whatever. Diego says so too. Speaking of Rollmar: Made me laugh.

Diego, is that you?

It's not only politicians. Not that long ago our content mafia sued local ISPs and demanded that they block the larger sites known for copyright infringement. The courts eventually ruled in favor of the copyright holders. In a hilarious motion all of the ISPs agreed to implement the filtering on a DNS level which is really cheap to do, fulfills the terms set by the court and is utterly ineffective - because elderly judges in the high courts have no idea how the internet works either.

**** off, that ref was ****ing awful. England spend the whole match mucking about and dropping at the slightest breeze and he just went with it. Eh, cause Colombia was any better? If the referee had really favored England he would have sent off half their team with red cards for their constant complaining and overall conduct. That entire game was dreck.

Yeah, thanks for the reminder. I mean I don't have a Humble subscription but I still had an active SWTOR subscription even though I haven't played since defeating Revan in SoR. Every time I saw that the payment was due I figured "ah hell, now I have 6 months left, I'll surely play again!" and never did.

It's not about copyrighting memes. Most memes are actually violations of European copyright laws because many (if not all of them, but I don't really know for sure) of them lack a fair use clause. This is one area where the US copyright is superior. So while you creating a meme from an image of a source that falls under copyright protection (say a shot of DiCaprio from the Great Gatsby) is fair game because of fair use it would violate our copyright laws and would have to be filtered out. That's why people call it the meme-killer law. It's not actually about memes but it easily illustrates the downsides of the proposed legislation. In reality it's about large online services (e.g. YouTube) cutting into traditional content mafia revenue streams. It's not much of a surprise that this regulation was spearheaded by Germany - seat of some of the largest newspaper and book publishers on the planet.

It's difficult because it has a major psychological component and a "time" component. I spent my first PoE run with a character that got worse with every patch through no fault of my own. If I had picked a rogue my experience would have been different - they just got better with patches because they were in a really rough place to begin with. Even if it was objectively the right thing to somewhat equalize power levels between classes it certainly didn't feel good, and as far as the timing component goes none of that would have happened if I had picked the game up a couple of months after the launch. Playing a balanced game doesn't reduce enjoyment - getting the nerfhammer every time for your choice of character does.

And even then Sweden's goal was more of an own goal by Switzerland than something they've managed through decent play.

Oi.

I actually fell asleep on the couch for a good chunk of this. I think it was time well napped.