Ineth

No.

(source) propagandistic nature aside, this one is pretty funny...

Btw, Stephen Totilo (head of Kotaku) is starting to come across (imo) as a relatively decent and upstanding guy... Misguided in his politics and allegiances maybe, but still, a journalist who (it looks like) may actually have some integrity, decency, and sincerity left in him. Have we been too hard on moderate anti-gg journalists like him who ended up on that side of the fence mostly by default, and not because they hate gamers? They're certainly not all on the level of Sam "bring back bullying" Biddle.

So I didn't follow gg much the last few days; now dropping back in I see articles like this, with a pretty sober and neutral tone: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/24/how-some-gamergate-supporters-say-the-controversy-could-stop-in-one-week/ What happen to the whole "gg is a coordinated hate movement made up of of evil monsters who must be stomped into the ground rather than allowed to present their side of the story" spin that seemed to dominate the media coverage a week ago? On that note, what happened to #stopgamergate2014 - did that fizzle out already? As for: If this is real then I am sickened and disgusted, to be using a tragedy to promote your own hate mongering and political dabbling, there are no words for such behaviour but pure amoral evil. Sickening. I checked and yes it is real, and that's just one of several recent tweets of hers that go in that direction. And then of course the obligatory disingenuous "b..b..but all I'm doing is asking questions!!" and "criticism/disagreement is harassment!!!" angle. At least it doesn't go unchallenged: https://twitter.com/CathyYoung63/status/525876040120270848 https://twitter.com/SexyIsntSexist/status/526065047727263744 The author of that last tweet also wrote a blog post about the role of modern feminism in all of this, which IMO over-emphasizes that aspect of the greater gg conflict/drama, but is still worthy of a read I think. Small sample:

Delusional culture warriors see everything as a potential weapon, and they naturally project this twisted worldview onto their opponent's motivations as well.

Would you quit it already with the "conspiracy" strawman, Enoch. It does not take a conspiracy of behind-the-scenes comicbook villains with a grand master plan, to corrupt a community of lay journalists and make them engage in: collusion & blindly jumping on bandwagons loosing any and all professional distance to some of the subjects of their reporting giving favorable coverage to their friends / romantic interests / investees without disclosing their conflict of interest giving favorable coverage in return for bribes or favors extreme favoritism towards their sociopolitical ingroup blackballing & censorship of the outgroup disingenuously hiding ideological and ingroup/outgroup based judgments behind a pretense of factual reporting/reviewing All it takes for such corruption to grow and thrive, is for the community to become dominated by too many too similar people with the same authoritarian worldview1, holier-than-thou attitude, and a propensity for groupthink. Social dynamics (like people's desire to be part of the ingroup and their vulnerability to tactics like emotional blackmailing), do the rest. ---------------- 1) In this case modern left-wing feminism / "SJW"-ism, but it can happen with an authoritarian right-wing worldview as well.

You mean like feminism and Social Justice?

Yeah the studies which only consider one or two other factors, if any, in addition to gender, still find a "gender gap". Those are the ones that tend to get picked by lefty politicians. (Except for Barack Obama, who, even in 2014, still stubbornly uses the friggin' 77% figure which does not consider any other factors, just the average salaries of all male vs female full-time workers *facepalm*) In studies which consider as many other factors as possible, however, the gap vanishes.

"Asshat" is also a favorite of mine. OH MY GOD IT WAS ME ALL ALONG. ULTIMATE PROOFZ!4!! Yeah the conspiracy theorizing about the death threats is pretty silly. Chances are that the psychopath who made the threads read lots of her tweets & writing (or how else would he have become mad at her?), and used her terminology "back" at her. Or, you know, coincidence. I know it's hard to relate to how someone could make threats like that; or the terrorist threat against Sarkeesian's speech, that was even more horrible. Like, who does that? Lack of morals would not be enough, because in a country with law enforcement, committing a senseless crime like that really does not benefit them at all (nor their 'cause', whatever they think that may be), so I guess they'd have to be literally crazy too? But difficulty to imagine it, should not be taken as an excuse to lazily (and conveniently) think it's not real, or dismiss its effects on the victims. Anyone who watches the news knows that there really are people like that; people who would also follow through on those threats.

"earn less than men" is a canard that just won't die. It's like the high council of feminists came together and said: Damn, repeating it ten million times still did not make it true. Lets try and see if it becomes true if we repeat it a hundred million times! "get worse treatment than men" is a popular claim, but probably not supported by evidence if you look at society as a whole (rather than looking at specific situations where women have it tough, like trying to establish themselves in a certain male-dominated niches). Note that: The U.S. judicial system, for example, definitely does not treat women worse than men; quite the opposite. The fact that a man getting slapped or punched in public is more or less socially acceptable, but when it happens to a woman we can't help but be outraged, indicates that general social etiquette that we grew up with, does not favour treating women worse than men. As for online abuse, I think in one of her videos C.H. Sommers presented some interesting studies which actually counted and classified abusive tweets and comments (rather than spinning wild theories based on anecdotes, like other feminist tend to do), and those studies concluded that the amount of abuse received does not statistically vary with gender, except for well-known celebrities where the male ones actually get more abuse.I sometimes wonder if the reason that so many women feel they are being specifically targeted by online hate, is that the social etiquette of Western culture leads women to be treated more courteously and less rough than men in real-life, but on the Internet that etiquette breaks down due to (semi-)anonymity, and women get the same rough treatment as men except they aren't used to it. But this is a dangerous path of thought to explore; it probably makes me a misogynisttm just entertaining the possibility... "Men should take a couple of steps down" -- even if your empirical claims were true, why would men need to be devalued? Surely, the just path to equality would be to make sure everyone has the same opportunities as those 'at the top of the ladder', rather than trying to artificially bring them down.

From what I've caught, the backstory was: Wu created a meme based on a picture of a screaming autistic kid, with snarky punchlines insinuating that gamers are misogynists, crybabies, etc. and she and her twitter friends created lots of entries for that meme. A female gg supporter who suffers from aspergers took offense, and Wu responded by calling her "you gross ****ing aspie", but later deleted that tweet and claimed her account had been hacked. 8chan created a parody meme based on Wu's meme, with snarky punchlines targeted at Wu (or people on her side in general). Wu went to 8chan, was shocked at the sheer amount of pics from that parody meme that had been posted in that thread, and called it harassment (and complained on twitter that she was being harassed). At some point, her home address was anonymously posted on 8chan (i.e. she was doxxed). Based on a screenshot from that thread, it looks like the other 8chan users did not approve of that doxxing though, with some of them condemning it, others posting comments like "Nice try Brianna" suggesting that they believed it to be a false flag. A short while later, a throw-away twitter account called "Death to Brianna" tweeted extremely nasty death threats at her. Although that account never mentioned gg or anything gaming related, the time when it happened is circumstantial evidence that is was someone related to the gg/8chan drama. I might have gotten something wrong of course, since I was not in there first hand.

However, it is something every GM at pen'n'paper games was 'forced' to do from time to time. There's nothing worse than missing on the thrill of an encounter you ve planned way ahead, only b/c the players have become stronger than you expected. I find nothing wrong with that, nor my PCs the times I tell 'em I did it. Actually, they support my doing it. Hm it might not be so bad with unique bosses, I guess. But if you fight a kind of monster at level 2, and then meet the same kind of monster again at level 8 and the fight doesn't feel any different because your improvements to DPS are being cancelled out by HP scaling on the other side, that would suck.

Level scaling of encounters can be a good thing if it is applied in moderation and done right (by adding more enemies), but horrible if done wrong (like invisibly scaling the HP's or other stats of enemies, as that pretty much negates the hole concept of character progression and gaining power).

We're over >200 votes, so here's another (probably last) result chart: Immortalis' prediction seems to have come true: Combat XP support increased to roughly 50%... The chart showing how people voted at different stages of the poll: http://i.imgur.com/4fjZwlX.png (Note that those are not cumulative values; each bar only shows how the people voted during that time segment.)

I suppose completing quests is not quick & repetitive enough to count as "grinding". It's true that trap/lock XP could reasonably be called grind-xp though, if it leads people to picking locks and disarming traps which they didn't have to, just to get more XP. I don't get this at all just how many locks and traps do you suppose are going to be placed in the game that don't need picking or disarming - are they just for show? Did the programmers need to practice placing them? Sometimes there are different paths to get into a locked room. e.g. the big room in the Skaen dungeon (I think), and the locked room in the back of the village shop, which you can reach without opening its door, by going through the Skaen dungeon and then up a tunnel into the room. If you already got in somehow but nonetheless choose to pick the lock of an alternative path to get in, that could be called "lock XP grinding" Although you're right that the opportunities for this are limited. But then again, the opportunities for kill XP grinding are also limited, or are there respawning monsters in the game? As for traps, I encountered at least one in the BB which I could not disarm, so I had to go around it. If disarming traps gives XP, that means you have to have a character with maxed Mechanics in order to get all XP. That's not grinding, but probably still "degenerate"...

I sympathise to some extent, but please note that it is a game devevloper's job to add constraints and rules (if necessary, strict ones) in order to make a game fun even for players who exploit all the game's rules & features in their favour. Players shouldn't have to say "I'm purposefully going to avoid this and that feature, in order to make the game fun". It should be challenging and engaging, with all allowed features. Chess would not become more fun if the movement restrictions were removed and players would be allowed to move any piece in any way the want. It would become a pretty boring and senseless game that way, and players would have to add their own restrictions back in to make it fun again. Please note that I'm not trying to demolish your whole argument by pointing this out; as I said, I partially agree and I've been known to shamelessly powergame myself... Just trying to remind everyone that things are not as black and white as "allowing multiple play styles vs being a nazi", and that adding artificial restrictions and limitations is, in fact, what game design is all about -- "if in doubt, allow everything and let players choose if they want to exploit it" is not a good design principle.

I suppose completing quests is not quick & repetitive enough to count as "grinding". It's true that trap/lock XP could reasonably be called grind-xp though, if it leads people to picking locks and disarming traps which they didn't have to, just to get more XP.

That (modified) Numenera XP system works in Torment, because every single combat encounter in the game will be a special scenario ("crisis"); a spontaneous quest so to speak, with a reward for success. On the one hand this means that it's technically a "Quest XP only" system; otoh it means that all combat will be rewarded. I don't see how this could be adapted to PoE's trash mobs, but the idea of "special combat scenarios as spontaneous quests with a XP reward" could certainly applied in addition to trash mobs, for non-quest bosses like the spider queen -- as already discussed elsewhere.

Not sure if Bruce actually does this, but yeah, the Anita crowd sure enough does, and I find it ridiculous as well. They're like, "Whoa, whoa, what was that? After killing 50 male NPCs and 200 gender-less monsters, did the protagonist seriously just kill a female NPC? How dare the game's developers include such misogyny ...rabble rabble... male power fantasies ...rabble rabble... patriarchy oppression rape culture ...rabble rabble...!!! The struggle for gender equality requires that the ability to kill this virtual women be removed from the game!!!" I just... don't get that "argument". Maybe one of the resident forum feminists can explain it for the rest of us?

You'll get off your arse and, just like that, make a game which realistically would take millions of dollars and many months to make even for an existing developer/publisher who already has all the necessary human capital and infrastructure? And you'll do this by yourself, in your spare time on a weekend? Come on now, I know there is lots to be criticised about Sarkeesian's videos (from the pre-determined conclusions, cherry-picking, and general intellectual dishonesty, to the offensiveness of her - and other feminists culture warrior's - underlying presumption that society can and should be made a better place by policing & censoring media content that men like to consume). But lamenting that game developers/publishers don't make games sufficiently to one's liking, isn't in and of itself objectionable. Gamers do that too, like, all the time. In fact it's probably the main raison d'être of many gaming related online communities. Making your dream game yourself, simply isn't realistic unless you've chosen that career path.

er...it hasn't (?) - Combat xp 70-votes, Bestiary xp 90-votes (?) It's been catching up to it but isn't over it. archangel is probably referring to the bars in the histograms I poster earlier. But those bars don't show the cumulative score, they each reflect only the votes cast during the corresponding time segment. In other words, of the people who voted on (roughly) the first day of the poll, a higher percentage selected Bestiary than Combat. But among the people who voted on (roughly) the second to third day of the poll, Combat was more popular. Overall, Combat still scores lower though.

Ok, remember when I called Erik Kain an "anti-gamergate moderate" earlier in this thread? Well I guess I have to revise that, as his more recent writing sounds decidedly pro-gamergate (though still moderate and professional): http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/10/09/gamergate-is-not-a-hate-group-its-a-consumer-movement/ Maybe the hate he received from culture warriors and other journalists for failing to toe the party line 100%, pushed him over the fence... Anyway, the sad thing is that there is now not a single anti-gamergate journalist whom I respect - from where I'm standing, it looks like their side is now entirely represented in public by writers who are only interested in furiously vilifying and denouncing both #gamergate and gamers (and anyone who does not join them in that crusade).

More fun with statistics! This time, four histograms showing how some of the voting patterns in this poll changed over time, based on the data from my previous three result charts: And now for some idle speculation on the reason for those changes in voting patterns... theory 1: randomness this explanation is boring, so lets ignore it theory 2: hard-core vs casual maybe the kind of dedicated Obsidian forum members who check for new threads regularly and were thus more likely to vote mere minutes or hours after the poll was published, tend to have different opinions than more casual PoE fans who are more likely to only discover a new forum poll after a few days? theory 3: timezones When the poll was published it was 18:17 in New York, 23:17 in London, and 09:17 in Sydney. So maybe the left parts of the histograms reflect the American, East Asian & Australian position on XP mechanics, and the middle parts the European, African & Middle Eastern position? Doesn't explain the significant changes in the right-most parts though... Feel free to join me in this extremely meaningful and important discussion! (yeah, I know, I should find something more productive to do to stop feeling bored...)

150 votes = new chart: The lead of "Bestiary XP" over "Combat XP" has shrunk quite a bit since I made the previous chart.

The female narrator in IWD2 was arguably even better. PS: Damn, Sensuki, now you've reminded me how cool the Severed Hand "dungeon" is... (in both IWD games) Must...resist...starting new game...must...keep in mind plan to wait for IWD:EE...