Hurlshort

Wow, that's crazy.

Divinity: Original Sin and the Shadowrun games.

I finally decided to revisit The Old Republic and check out the housing. Holy moly, they did a good job with that! I bought a place in Coruscant and unlocked all the rooms with my stash of credits, and then spent awhile decorating it with my stable of characters. I've got a lot of cool stuff, but it still feels pretty empty. Definitely a welcome little diversion from all the story stuff. I visited a public house in Tatooine just to see what other people are doing. They give you a lot of real estate to work with!

That looks fantastic, but it was this:

Ubisoft owns the Might & Magic trademark. And guess what? Ubisoft was involved with Might & Magic X. Ubisoft is the publisher. Might & Magic X requires UPlay activation. BTW, I looked through the Might & Magic X wiki page on information about its development, and it does not say anything M&M X being a crowd-funded project. I do not think it is. I know Ubisoft partially if not entirely funded the game. Where did you get the information that M&M X was crowd-funded? M&M X used early access to help drive the development of the game. Early access is a form of crowdfunding, the game was in the very early stages when they opened it up to people. They kept detailed developer updates and used the feedback of the crowd.

Since the thread is about Sony Online Entertainment, I tried to see what type of money they are pulling in. They have a huge stable of MMO's. But it is hard to get a clear picture what is doing well there. I would guess the Everquest games and DC Universe Online are stable, I've played those a few time over the years and they are always healthy in both players and content.

You are entirely correct MW. TOR is a really bad case. They simply spent way too much in development. There is really only one game that has ever managed to maintain a high subscription rate over the course of years, so it should not be the model, it is the exception. That being said, they cut back on staff, changed to a different business model, and now they aren't bleeding money every month. In fact they have become a healthy contributor to EA's profits. They are operating in the black on a monthly basis, but I have no idea how far they have to go to recoup the initial investment. Elder Scrolls Online has kept their profit/loss reports close to the vest. The fact they haven't released on consoles makes me think they are struggling, but with the success of so many others going to free to play, I no longer see that as a sign of doom.

Considering the MMO market is thriving with a number of titles, it seems to me like you don't know much about the market or the genre. You don't need anywhere near WoW numbers to turn a healthy profit.

Might & Magic X was pretty much crowdfunded, despite the developer being under the wings of Ubisoft, and it turned out to be a great choice for all parties involved, including the gamers. If EA was behind a developer looking to kickstart a new and interesting game design, I don't see why that would stop me. It gives us a chance to see good studios branch out in different directions.

That may be my fault, I read it and thought you folks might find it interesting, and I didn't know where to place it. I did not feel it merited a new thread, and given the fact this thread has addressed feminism before, I assumed it would fit well here. I haven't really kept up with this thread all that well until I posted the article, so I apologize if it came across as baiting.

I have about 10 pounds or marinated tri tip sitting on the counter, and I'm getting ready to BBQ it for my wife's 40th Birthday Party. I'm enjoying a super hoppy IPA while I wait.

How about a Warhammer 40k version of Fiddler on the Roof? Or a Steampunk Mary Poppins? Scratch that, Mary Poppins was already Steam Punk.

I thought the reformed troll aspect was interesting. Granted it could be entirely made up, but the idea that there was a rock bottom where said troll realized they had a problem presents an interesting parallel to other kinds of abuse.

This was an interesting read: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/02/what-happened-confronted-cruellest-troll-lindy-west?CMP=share_btn_tw

Obsidian does not run the AW forums, it is off-site. The status of the forum has little to do with the development of the game, so I wouldn't worry about it being in limbo. If many people are getting regular errors on the forum, it likely has to do with whoever handles the hosting.

Good luck disobeying a police officer who thinks they have a right to demand of you whatever it is they are demanding and not having violence soon visited upon you then. And if you actively defend yourself from that violence, or even just reflexively react to it so the cop can say you did something threatening, good luck not getting killed. And if that happens I'm sure a thread here will be started, and many people will say killing you was justified because you didn't comply with the officer's demands and then threatened or attacked the officer (they will completely ignore the fact that you were attacked first). It requires no luck at all. It would actually require a metric ton of bad luck to get into such a situation as a law abiding citizen. Most people are never going to be anywhere near an escalating force situation with the police.

We should also probably keep in mind the fact that the police are dealing with a very different audience than a teacher or a bank teller. Hostility is the status quo in many places that as police officer has to go. If you walk into Wells Fargo shouting "F the Roth IRA!" then you will probably have a pretty bad banking experience.

I am a bit surprised so many of you are interested in American Sniper. He seems like a classic unreliable narrator to me, and so I've avoided a good deal of the story, both in book and movie form.

I use verbal coercion about a thousand times a day. Is that something serious?

You fail at math. The average based on the data there is about 1114 deaths a year. Regardless, even 500 is no small number given what we're talking about. I blame the meth/lottery tickets for my bad math. There are a lot of flaws with these statistics. 1 death caused by police could be seen as too much, it depends entirely on the circumstances.

Considering they source everything, if there's anything erroneous it's more than likely due to an article being wrong. The number of deaths it cites in 2014 is 1104 as of this post, not 1966. The 1966 number seems to be the total number of police killings listed on the site since it started tracking them in 2013. There are no accurate governmental figures on how many people are killed by police nationwide, so someone took it upon themselves to start compiling the info. Go them and hooray internet for making it relatively easy. Yeah, I see that is pretty egregious. The government should be tracking these numbers closely. The police are a paramilitary group, despite being run at local levels, they should still be expected to meet certain federal standards, and accurate reporting on a major event like this should not be hard to find. I am all for full disclosure. I know some of you think I'm all about defending cops. On an individual basis, I believe many of your low opinions are baseless and dehumanizing. As an organization, however, I see a ton of ways that police departments across the nation need to be overhauled and reformed. Basically I don't think many of you are seeing the forest through the trees. Demanding reform and better accountability = good Treating every cop like a thug = bad One accomplishes something, the other accomplishes nothing.

So about 500 deaths caused by police a year in a nation of 316 million people. Basically I have about the same odds of winning the lottery as I do of getting killed by the police. I think I can increase my odds by buying more lottery tickets OR buying more crystal meth.

We also have a ton of new tools to keep track of our own security. Sure, my credit cards are vulnerable, but I can also check my balances every second of every day if I want, and raise a red flag if I see a problem. I can track my credit scores more clearly, I can dispute things more easily, etc. Consumers have a lot of tools to protect themselves, and they can do so from a device they carry around in their pocket. Your personal risks are very well mitigated.

Yeah, I'm concerned, but it's not like Sony was doing a ton to develop their MMO's. They had downsized quite a bit over the years. Still, it had a nice stable of games and they were all receiving decent support, so hopefully that will continue. It will be interesting to see what this means for Everquest Next.

Every parent I know has their kids using a tablet, so I'm guessing a decline may be overstated. You basically have an entire generation growing up with tablets as their primary entertainment device. Personally I use my kindle every day for reading, it has replaced books. I still prefer my laptop for everything else, but I think moving forward, that will be more niche than using a tablet.