Enoch

I didn't manage to get Jaime out of Damonta. Granted, I wasn't making any special efforts, as I generally dislike having to deal with AI-driven "helpers." The Provost was waxed by Rail Thieves and the Scorpitron. (His charging up to the latter and inflicting 1 Dam/shot from his pistol was worth a laugh, though.) I killed Vax myself after it did a better job shooting Rangers in the back of the head than it did hurting the enemy. Any Animal-Whispered "friendly" that thinks it's a melee combatant is promptly dismissed.

Oh, I'm certainly no day-1 buyer. I just happened to read a couple reviews and was thinking about eventually playing it. I played ME3 on the 6-month-delay plan, and I think that's the way to go, generally.

It's looking like I'll probably play this at some point, even if it isn't for another 6 months or so. The question being whether I'll jump right in, or do some of the earlier games first. I played DA:O when it was relatively new and really enjoyed about 80% of it. But the late-game gameplay was so repetitive that I only stuck it out to see whether I'd get the option to stab Morrigan in the face. With that option sadly unavailable, I decided that my character was also sick of his existence and had him off himself to end the blight. (I messed around with a few other characters to try out the other origins, but never got close to completing the game a 2nd time.) When Awakenings came out, I was still cool on the gameplay and was generally uninterested in playing a fill-in character with my Warden dead. And, as I said, none of my secondary characters got especially far in the game. So I never bought it (or any of the other DLCs apart from Shale). As I've mentioned elsewhere, DA2's demo convinced me not to buy it initially, and the general community reaction kept me away. Admittedly, if I gave the game a chance, I would probably get used to the awful camera and to letting the AI run my NPCs more than I typically do. And I do find myself growing curious just scanning discussions here and skimming over some of the accounts of the choices that you can make in Keep. Most likely, I'll just mess around with Keep to create the world-state that I find most entertaining. (I'm picturing a wholly self-absorbed Hawke who takes the "whatever is best for me in the extreme short term" solution to every problem-- not a character concept that I would typically play, but as stage-setting for DA:I, it sounds fun.) Still, I am finding myself surprisingly tempted to go through the whole shebang from the beginning.

"Actually, it's about ethics in games journalism." (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

What, nobody else likes 40-year-old, 20-minute-long, quasi-free-jazz bass clarinet jams? Hmph. Alright then, here's something slightly more modern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDOAndsaLEw It's good, but it's no Eric Dolphy.

Well, as far as I know, there is only 1 gorilla suit available. But it'd be worth using a save editor to get a few extra copies.

I've toyed with the idea of having two 1-INT front-liners and 2 10-INT back-liners. The group would have the same aggregate SP/level as my present crew (INTs of 4, 4, 4, and 10), but I wonder if the front-liners will suffer because they aren't able to max their main weapon skill quickly enough. Start them each with 3 ranks in their weapon skill and 1 rank in a 3rd-tier non-combat skill (Alarms? Mech Repair? Brute Force?), but completely max-out the weapon before putting a second rank in the other skill. In this vein, I suggest making a 1-INT brawler with Brute Force as the secondary skill, naming her Ko-ko, and having her wear the Gorilla Suit for the whole game.

Out of curiousity, what CLASSIC stats did you go with for that leader character?

Clearly a foul. Sure, the DB made certain that the officials noticed, but it's obvious that Graham pushed, that #20 ended up on the ground, and that it meaningfully affected the play. When you're trying to slow down from a sprint and adjust your feet to make a well-timed jump for the ball, it doesn't take much contact to knock you over. That said, I'd be happier had it not been called. The 49ers are so much more entertaining when their coach's tough-guy act crumbles into one of his bouts of whining.

Eh. Can't be worse that Dorito-flavored Doritos. Or Mountain-Dew-flavored Mountain Dew. (And, for the record, I'm totally not a junk-food hater. I probably eat more than my share of manufactured convenience food. I just pick the ones that don't taste like ass.)

It's not as if they haven't replaced guys before... (Video unrelated)

*Chuckles* It's quite humorous seeing you flailing and flip-flopping like a drowning man. The last gasps of air as you try to fling this back onto others before finally drowning. I can picture it now. Grom-wah waving his hand angrily trying to argue the point and then seeing you finally go under. But that's okay Grom-wah, you can still believe what you want. You keep that charisma around 4 and 5 on your characters. Some of us will have a leader with a CHA up to 8 and actually test this in game without the hypoethetical theorycrafting that you're trying to tell us and say our leader doesn't make a difference. hehe, your characters with 4 or 5 charisma. Yeah, great testing. *guffaw* Huh? As I read Gromnir's posts, he never suggested that having more than 1 ranger with CHA>1 was useful. He has been consistent in asserting that the XP effects of CHA are too insignificant to justify investment in the attribute, and that the one thing that makes CHA desirable (at least since the most recent patch changed the rules) is that it dictates the radius of the +2%/Level hit chance boost around a character with the Leadership skill. (FWIW, I agree on both points.) As such, his guess is that a CHA around 4 or 5 is the point where investment in the attribute is cost-justified. (On that point, I don't have enough information to make a judgment. I know that 7 is enough to have a healthy radius; if I built another team, I'd try a lower CHA than that and see how it worked.) Anyhow, the willingness on both your parts to continue baiting one another is tiresome. Gromnir (at least his board personality) is a pugnatious guy and seems to get significant satisfaction out of puncturing what he sees as weak reasoning, and you seem to be oddly defensive about having built your team the "right" way. Neither of you is going to convince the other, so why not just leave it be? So... There's something particularly entertaining about punching a giant robot scorpion until it explodes.

Well, as of the end of ep.6, there is only 1 known living force user (maybe 2), so, kinda.

I'm not sure I agree-- true, the game isn't especially difficult on the default difficulty, but it is also pretty easy for somebody to stumble into some pretty poor character-creation decisions that could cause some major difficulty spikes later on. If, for example, you assume that Combat Initiative is similar to D&D initiative (i.e., affecting only order of action, not frequency), you're going to be prioritizing the wrong attributes for combat purposes. If you don't read the nitty-gritty details of the effects of all the attributes and instead allocate things intuitively based on a skim of the tooltips and experience with other games (melee characters probably need strength; coordination sounds like D&D dexterity; guys with speech skills probably need charisma; luck's effect on loot sounds useful; etc.), you get some crappy characters. I wouldn't necessarily characterize that as "total noob" behavior-- it's not as if they're silly enough to buy a skill rank in Barter. Edit, to answer your question, there are only 3 ways in which attributes impact skills: 1) The radius of effect of the hit-chance boost from a character's Leadership skill depends on their Charisma. 2) You need a high INT to take high-level ranks in Surgeon (but only Surgeon, and only INT-- idiotic computer hackers and surgeons with terrible coordination are no problem at all). 3) Each rank of Strength (as well as each character level) gives a slight damage bonus when using Brawling weapons (but not Blades or Blunt weapons). This is in addition to the documented boost to the critical damage multiplier. (IIRC, the first one of these is the only one that is explained to the player in character creation.)

Well, if skill-use XP counts as quest XP (and I think it does), then it makes some sense to concentrate XP-earning skills on a high-CHA character to maximize total party XP. But the effect would be super-marginal (something in the area of 1 extra random encounter per map), and pouring lots of points into both INT and CHA is going to lead to a super-gimped combat character. Even if you tank Luck and leave Strength at 2, putting 8+ into INT and CHA leaves you with only 7 or 8 AP and a CI of 10 or less. Maybe if it frees you up to make the rest of your party into 16+ CI monsters I could see it. But I'd probably rather have the (marginally less efficacious) XP-boosting skills on my dangerous combat characters, to help them get their main weapon skill into "consistent hit" territory ASAP. And, the way this game is constructed, I'm having trouble seeing a 10% difference over the course of 30 levels as especially significant. The pacing of the game limits the degree to which XP earns you increases in effectiveness. (Which, by the way, makes sense in a game that allows random-encounter grinding.) The skill-check difficulties are paced pretty consistently (1st-rank checks at the radio tower, 3rd-rank checks at Ag Center, 5th-rank checks at Rail Nomads, etc.) and don't often reward having an unusually-high-for-this-area skill level. As far as the fighting goes, once you get 7 or so points in your Rangers' main combat skills (which should be achieved before you notice much CHA-based spread in your characters' levels), the big step-ups in the combat effectiveness of your party come from gear, not from levels/skillpoints. Specifically, the new types of gear that open up as you progress through the main plot (Access to Ranger Citadel merchants, Access to Eastern AZ, Access to LA, Access to Hollywood, etc.). It'd be one thing if, for example, some LA-tier gear was available in AZ, but behind really tough skillchecks, but, with very few exceptions (mostly, the toaster that lets you buy the GRB), that's not this game. The loot is deliberately paced. IMO, if you want an XP boost, it makes much more sense to spend 20 minutes fighting random encounters than it does to bump your characters' Charisma. XP is not scarce in this game; attribute points are. That said, you should get 5 or 6 ranks in Leadership on a character if you're planning to take any NPCs along. And, if you do, with the accuracy boost now at 2% per level rather than 1%, enough CHA to ensure that it affects most of your characters most of the time is probably not a terrible investment. Plus, Pizepi is among the most effectively built of the joinable NPCs, and you need somewhere in the area of 21 total party CHA (including NPCs, dog collars, and honeydews) to get her. So do what you want-- all told, CHA has more going for it than Luck does (it's at least somewhat useful on 1 character!), but be aware of what you're buying.

I may have missed something here, but what exactly is a screenshot supposed to prove? Do you think Gromnir is lying about what he's seeing in the game? Not sure why anybody would bother doing that.

Hey, look, a new patch! Relevant to the current discussion, one of the fixes is that it "corrected the Leadership hit-chance bonus."

For what it's worth, my Leadership character has Lockpick and a 5-CHA advantage over my 10-INT guy with Demolitions and all the Ass skills (well, his investment in Smart ended when I got Pizepi, but I still use him if a check is low enough that he qualifies), and the 10-INT guy is slightly ahead, XP-wise. (They're both about 2 levels ahead of my most-lagging character, whose non-combat skills are Perception and Weaponsmith.) It's not totally useless, but it seems that the value is quite poor.

Well, Senators are on a 6-year cycle. And, 6 years ago was a wave election for the Democrats, with huge turnout by people who were pissed at W and/or wanted to vote for the first black President. That led to a number of Senate wins for the Democrats in states that are normally bad bets for them. To a great degree, those Senators have just lost their re-election bids. That's why the map was bad for the Democrats. Plus, low-turnout off-year elections usually go to the party whose supporters are more excited or angry about stuff. And, yeah, there are a lot of people who are angry at the President for a variety of reasons. The one race I observed relatively closely was the surprise Republican win for the MD governorship. And that was a case where, quite simply, the Democrats nominated an awful candidate who ran an ineffective campaign, and the core Democratic electorate that usually carries the state (i.e., the DC burbs and the city of Baltimore) just didn't have anything to get excited over. With the House and statehouse districts aggressively gerrymandered and no Senate race this year, the gubernatorial race was the main thing that was supposed to draw core-Democratic constituencies to the polls. And Anthony Brown made a terrible pitch-- his campaign's scare tactics were ineffective (he focused heavily on Hogan's anti-gun-control record, which is an unpopular position in MD, but voters know that a rollback of firearm restrictions has no chance of getting through the Assembly) and he never did much to rebut the Hogan campaign's main point on taxes.

Hilarious bug/feature: the Monocle trinket (meaningful penalty to CI, +3 to attack range) works for melee combatants. Put on a Monocle, and you can Hadouken somebody 10 feet away. (Slowly.) Also, thanks doing the rogue-chance testing, Gromnir.

@ Meshugger: Waah, they said mean things about me! They should be fired for hurting my feelings! @ TrueNeutral: Well, from what I've read of your contribution to these threads, you've got a better reason than most to care intently about the quality and honesty of games journalism-- it affects your livelihood and that of the folks you work and associate with. And the point about reviews and critiques is solid-- games journalism has very low standards, because it is not especially attractive to folks in terms of either money or prestige. But from the point of view of an ordinary consumer, if you take folks at their word and assume that this is only about games journalism ethics, the emotional intensity of their complaints take on . I don't doubt that such folks exist, but one can understand how opponents and mass media folks covering the controversy have concluded that most of the vocal supporters are at least a little influenced by stuff beyond media ethics.

I'd just like to state that I in no way condone or associate myself with this statement. /rapidly backs away from Malcador What, that wasn't a trenchant comment on the human condition? A memento mori, if you will? These people, as all people do, need to die someday. So consider, perhaps, how much of your dwindling time as a conscious being you are willing to spend worrying about what they say, do, or think.

The justification for games journalists to speak out about the toxicity of games commentary towards women was really quite clear-- they and friends of theirs experienced it first-hand, they decided that it wasn't the kind of thing they couldn't continue to abide silently, and they made a statement against it. They did this with no clear financial incentive (other than the normal "I get paid to write a column" stuff), and in doing so risked alienating a portion of their audience and attracting the ire of those hateful **** at the core of the problem. Is that "dictating a narrative"? I dunno. Columnists are paid for their opinion, and they delivered it. It seems to bother you that their opinion didn't bubble up from the folks you consider "average gamers." I'm not sure where you're getting that most gamers are or should be up in arms about all this. In reality, most people who play games are ambivalent. Sure, if you press them, they'd say that folks who comment on gender politics in games don't deserve the abuse they have historically gotten for speaking their mind, and that reviewers shouldn't allow their work to be affected by the ads that games publishers buy on their employers' site. But if those beliefs influence them to change their behavior at all, it's only to avoid reading comments and twitter replies to certain articles and to develop their opinions of games from sources outside paid games media. Ultimately, the stakes on the GG'er side are so low that the people who appear to care intently about the cause all either look pretty weird, or are motivated by opportunism (drawing attention/clicks/follows by ratifying the views of supporters) or hateful tribalism (see Trashman's "I'm really in this because I hate SJWs" post above). This is why "actually, it's really about ethics in games journalism" has become a laugh line-- anybody who cites that as a basis for the kind of emotional intensity you see from much of the GG crowd either has humorously bizarre priorities or is lying to you (possibly deliberately, possibly because he lacks the self-awareness to understand his own motivations).

Ah. And, as I see it, the "feminist group" was not "dumped" into games media. Games media finally openly acknowledged what is blindlingly obvious-- that it was no longer acceptable for the community of "traditional gamers" to blithely tolerate those who heap scorn and abuse on anybody with the temerity to point that mainstream games regularly trade heavily in cheap titilation and casual misogyny. Calling out this kind of stuff in other media has been a prominent and accepted element of critical responses since the 60s, and the time has come for games to stop being the exception. Did some writers consipire with one another to do so? Sure, and understandably so-- it helps a lot to have open support from other like-minded individuals when you're stating agreement with a position that has gotten many others abused and harassed. Is this at all unethical? It is the most ethical thing that games media folks have ever done. (The conduct of some of those like-minded folks in the industry since then, less so.)

This made me laugh a bit. I mean, you're essentially setting an impossible burden for anybody who wants to be a games reviewer. They're supposed to know exactly who the consumers of a game will be, weigh the factors they consider in reviewing it based on the desires of those consumers (which, again, they are supposed to know innately), disclose all those factors and their weights, and still write a review that people are going to want to read? That's something that nobody has done or seriously asked for in reviews of any media. What I'm really hearing is the unrealistic expectation that any reviewer whose opinion is affected negatively by a game's disturbing portrayal of women is and should remain "niche," and that the reviewer should warn everybody when they come out of their corner so that you won't have to be challenged by their opinions. Because they haven't "earned" the right to express that opinion based on your impression of what the free market for games media is or should be.