Yonjuro

What is probably throwing some people off about the above is that "after this" could mean after completing the quest. Maybe it should be reworded to something like "if you accept this task, I expect they will learn of your association with us...." (BTW, for those of you who are part way through and inadvertently joined the wrong faction, you might find that the choice is less far reaching than it seems if you decide to continue the game.)

or, uh, because Schopenhauer wasn't actually a composer ....

Yes. To underline this point, Thaos, the guy in charge, not only didn't commit suicide, he seems to be living forever.

I think I understand the argument you are making: In the real world there are two arguments people make in favor of religion (really three, but two valid arguments) the first is that a particular religion is true and the second is that religion as a whole is useful as a means of social control. It sounds like you are using a variation of the latter argument. You are saying that because religion is a useful means of social control and, as an added bonus, the gods in this setting can actually physically help/hurt people, there is nothing else one should desire in a religion. Is that your position?

You think people are saying "we agree that these things are bad but it doesn't matter because you can skip them." What most people are actually saying is "we don't agree that these things are bad, but you are free to skip them if you don't like them."

Camping supplies is an orthogonal issue. You can obviously try something different by, e.g., having no tank in your party (or no wizard/druid) or a party without either of them. The number of camping supply slots doesn't prevent you from doing that.

So, if I understand you, you think it's a distinction without a difference. I think I have two issues with that. First, isn't it a little bit broken to have the majority of the population thinking that the gods created them when it was closer to the other way around? Put another way, even if you think it would be a better tactical decision to not piss off the powerful beings, doesn't the truth matter? Second, there is already an example of killing one of the so-called gods and Thaos is genuinely fearful about what animancers are going to find, so, presumably there is away to, umm, fix this. So, in the sequel, let's call it - PoE2: The Inquisition - your character will be torturing heretics to keep the truth from getting out? Isn't that kind of evil?

I see where you are going with this but let's be careful: You can prove that a particular glass doesn't have milk in it, as you said. What you can't prove is that there does not exist a glass anywhere in the cosmos that contains milk (though you could, of course, prove that claim false by demonstrating a single glass with milk in it). To prove the negative assertion would require knowledge that you can't get without looking absolutely everywhere which is impossible. That is the sense in which "you can't prove a negative." Ok, but specific god claims are no different - you may very well be able to prove that a particular claim or set of claims about a particular god or gods is false if there is a claim that the god manifests in a physical way that you can measure. E.g., you can prove that the sun is not dragged across the sky behind a chariot by the sun god. Of course, doing so doesn't prove that there isn't a sun god - perhaps it orbits the sun hiding in a tea pot that we just haven't found yet (as so many gods have 'decided to do' ever since we have developed the ability to measure them). Anyway, your point about burden of proof is spot on, I just wanted to be a little more careful (ok, ok, pedantic) about your lead in.

At the risk of sounding like a 'dogmatic secularist', are you suggesting that the population as a whole is not smart enough to be trusted with the truth, so lying to them might be the preferred option? If so, isn't that a little ( <-- comedic understatement) condescending (albeit towards fictional beings)? In the game world, the people who made up the rules and etched them in stone (or, rather, in soul constructs) were more primitive people (in every way except for their one technology which was hidden and forgotten about to preserve the lie). Why is everybody supposed to follow the rules they made up? If you feel that it's fine as long the system works, is that true (for you) in the real world? BTW, just to state where I'm coming from (or where I think you might be coming from), I'm assuming that, here in the real world, you might be an irreligious person who thinks that religion is useful for 'the masses.' Hence my use of the word "condescending." If I got that wrong, just let me know.

If the gods are serving the function of celestial dictator who give you things for doing their bidding and hurting you if you don't, then sure, there's no practical difference (except for one major loophole). However, since the rules that these constructed beings are enforcing are just arbitrary stuff made up by previous kith, that certainly makes a difference in terms whether they are worth following or should be overthrown. The latter option is the loophole that I mentioned where a group of motivated kith joined forces to kill Eothas. If the rules of the world were just made up by beings no different than those being coerced into following them, why should they follow them? Isn't overthrowing the dictatorship a better option?

Yeah, but that only happens if one of them kills all of the squirrels first.

I really don't understand people complaining about other people who don't like the game. I really don't understand people complaining about other people who complain about people who don't like this game... I can understand why people who come here to complain about people who complain about people who complain about the game complain about people who complain about people who complain about people who complain about the game - that makes perfect sense. What I don't understand is why people who come here to complain about people who complain about people who complain about people who complain about the game don't complain about people who come here to complain about people who complain about people who complain about people who complain about the game who don't complain about people who complain about people who come here to complain about the game. Can someone explain that to me please???

What everyone else said and there is a key hidden on the level too. (You need to be in scout mode with high enough mechanics to find it).

I understand your larger point but I think you can fix this particular example with number tweaking. The cost of disengagement can be dialed in as anything from instantly fatal to zero damage with number tweaking. In addition, the items and abilities to mitigate the disengagement costs (such the 'cloak of ability to ignore the engagement mechanic' - whatever that was called) could also be tweaked to make engagement a smaller (or bigger) consideration. I could imagine some adjustments to this if, e.g., the devs watched some players and noticed that nobody moves in combat ever they might want to dial it back to make movement cost less. Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the CC spells get 'turned up' a little bit if the devs notice that players just ignore them and wait a few seconds to to regain control of their party members. I would put that in the category of a little bit broken currently, but fixable with number tweaks. Really, I think it's one of the strengths of the design that turning a few knobs can change the importance of something in a smooth way. For example, the petrify ability in PoE freezes a character and makes them take (health) damage much more quickly. The devs get two knobs to turn (how long does it last? and how much extra damage does the victim take?). There is a smooth function that makes petrify anything from a minor hiccup (or even, literally, nothing) to an 'I win' button (or, rather, a one hit kill).

Well, most of them aren't necessary for most fights, so one reason not to that is that you would need to rest before every fight to get the spells back. You can do that, of course. Then again, if you are going to that, you might as well rest 10 times before each fight and carpet the area with 30-80 thief traps (depending on your level) which will kill almost any group of enemies in the game. Of course, just like casting every buff spell that you have before every fight, that 'strategy' wouldn't be as much fun as figuring out what you actually need to do to win the fight but YMMV. TL;DR: yes you can do that in BG, but the game isn't as much fun that way so why would you?

Am I a bad person for hoping this happens? No, but your reputation with Eothasians is tending towards CRUEL if you keep this up. Let that be a warning to you!

But they do not have an engine. They created a game using the Unity3D engine. ... Yes, I understand that. See the part of my post that I've left in the quote above. Yes, you certainly said that but it still isn't true. Or, rather, it isn't the only way that companies make money from open source. Open source makes sense any time that the thing that you give away is not the thing that makes money for you and, that by giving it away, you can do more of the thing that does make the money for you. There are a lot of business models that include open source and make money other than the one that you mentioned. See upthread for some additional examples (and there are more). It isn't a crime. Breaking DRM is a crime in the U.S. (since the DMCA) so that may be what you are thinking of. You don't need to argue that - I agree. My point in this discussion is that, hypothetically, a game company like Obsidian can open source some code (which is not their high value IP) and make money licensing their content (which is their high value IP). Doing so makes sense if doing the former increases their ability to do the latter. Just so that we're clear, no, I am not arguing that Obsidian should release their ruleset (or that they should release anything else) as open source. My point is that open sourcing some of their code is not the same thing as giving the world permission to copy any and all of their intellectual property as someone seemed to think (though it turned out that he didn't actually think that as was eventually uncovered in the discussion). Are you comparing the PoE community with professional programmers who - mostly - actually know what they're doing? I would not make that claim. It might not be obvious when you only see screen names and avatar pictures but, several people who regularly post here are professional programmers with decades of experience who very much know what we are doing.

I mentioned browsers (and web servers) due to the trend of the web being the destination and the browser being one and only UI for a lot of people, but fair enough - you did say operating systems so ignore the part my post after Android. It sounds like we don't actually have a disagreement then. (It isn't the first time two people have misunderstood each other on a message board.) Nope, don't include me because I agree with you on that too. It isn't necessarily true that that an open source game engine can't be used to make profitable games but I agree that Obsidian is not in a position where it makes sense for them (mainly because they are more interested in continuing work on the franchise rather than getting others to continue it while they do something else).

this doesn't help, it had nothing to do with my question :/ I knew all this, I was asking about the dots above the head. Indicates how much endurance the character has left. It's the same information as you get by looking at the portrait but you can see it when you mouse over the character.

Nonsense. I guess insane men like Joker could talk about nonsense Haha! I didn't know the reference. Hmm, I guess 9 out of 10 psychopathic supervillains agree then?

(You realize that I am not arguing that Obsidian should open source anything, right? I am arguing against the blanket statements made about open source. Anyway: ) Suppose we go with your interpretation of the motivations of all of the people you mentioned, for the sake of discussion. A company that makes games could find that is in their best interest to open source the game engine that doesn't directly make them money, and sell games that run on that engine which do make them money.To make that business decision, they would need to look at risks vs. return. And, that isn't one of risks. If a larger company wanted to steal their IP, the effort to reverse engineer the engine wouldn't prevent them from doing it. The fact that they would obviously lose a lawsuit would. It would be easier to prove the lawsuit if the code was the same. That's why companies do clean room implementations (where the project team purposefully doesn't look at the original or read anything about it) to avoid IP litigation if they reverse engineer something. It is a platform - that's the point. If Obsidian wanted to license their rule set, look and feel and/or lore to other companies they could give away the software that implements it and license the IP in way that maintains their control over it. In a world where people were clamoring for new games like PoE and where Obsidian had too many other things to do, it could be a viable way to make money off of the IP. I don't think I have just described the world as it is today but that is a situation where open sourcing the engine would make sense from a business perspective for a game company the size of Obsidian that reduces risk for everyone involved by reducing wasted effort ( -- there are other ways to minimize that risk, of course). All of the large open source projects that we have talked about have very strict coding guidelines and they don't accept code that doesn't meet the guidelines. This is very easy to verify for yourself if you don't believe me. This something that you think you know. Reality disagrees with you. You can look at the guidelines and the code of successful open source projects and see that it isn't true.

Making software open source doesn't mean that you give away your product for free. For example, if you have a game engine and a script compiler and some other components that you use to develop games, it can make sense to open source some of them. It doesn't mean that you give away the games. Of course they overlap. There are plenty of examples where people and companies contribute to open source projects for good reasons. Right. And not having the source code at all is also not an impediment to piracy. Open source and piracy have nothing to do with each other. Nobody other than you is talking about Obsidian giving away the game for free. The question is whether the engine that runs the game would be worth open sourcing. It probably isn't - for the reasons people have already covered, but it is a reasonable question to ask because it has nothing to do with giving away the game for free. Open source doesn't mean non-profit. Ok, let's try to get your impression a bit more in line with reality then. Here are few prominent examples: The Linux kernel was developed by a hobbyist and is maintained by volunteers with lots of code contributed by commercial companies. All of the GNU tools that make Linux (and other operating systems) useful are open source (the emacs editor, the gcc compiler and hundreds of other projects). The Android operating system is open source with most of the development coming from Google. The programmers at Google are compensated very well for their work. Other groups that want to use Android for their own purposes also contribute to the code base. The Chrome browser is open source and also developed by Google. The Firefox browser is open source developed by the Mozilla foundation with the development paid for by donations. The Apache web server that runs the majority of web sites in the world is open source (and often running on top the Linux operating system equipped with the Gnu tools ). And so on. There are often good business (or organizational, or personal) reasons for open sourcing code and for contributing to it.

Nonsense. Some of the best software available (and most successful both in terms of user base and money) is open source. Some programmers get paid to write open source software; others volunteer. Wrong again. The source code can be open without the data used for the game being open or vice versa. There are lots of possibilities. As you said, it is possible to pirate a game without the source code; you should be able to think about that for about one second and realize that you are making no sense. Whether open sourcing the code is a good idea for Obsidian depends on a lot of factors and is their decision, but your general statements about open source are unfounded and ridiculous.

I suppose the loot is pretty powerful compared to BG1. So I guess the problem with loot being uninteresting probably has more to do with bonuses items can have becoming uninteresting because they're on so many items, and those items frequently just have a random smattering bonuses with no real theme to them. It could be. Spiderbane was interesting because it allowed one character to ignore spells like web. Your own party could cast web and then have Minsc stroll into it and go to town on enemies (useful in one of the cloakwood mines fights, in particular - also in the final fight if the web traps got triggered). That is, it was interesting because it opened up a new strategy and allowed new tactics. Then again, somebody posted a character build that used one of the 'Retaliation' items as a key component. There could be interesting things to do with some of the PoE items that people haven't figured out yet. That's a fair point. Part of the issue could be that it is difficult to see the effectiveness. If the fights seem randomly easier after applying enchantments/finding enchanted items, but it isn't obvious why they are easier without digging into the log, then it might make items seem less interesting. Maybe there's a good UI fix for this part of it.

Quite the reverse. If you have 2 (or multiple) opponents, that is exactly when you need to keep moving to get your opponents to interfere with each other. (Hint: your lack of movement is why you keep dying so quickly when you do the experiment you mentioned.) (Hint 2: moving doesn't mean you turn your back on your opponents.)