Gorth

Should you ever play on Harbinger drop me a message. 'Macroth' on imp side or 'Blind Justice' on pub side. At least pub side I would be able to hook you up with some nice people. Unfortunately I don't play much on TRE anymore, although I do pop in sometimes in the early mornings my time (that would be early to late evening Fridays and Saturdays European time). Sort of fits nicely with server depopulating and my real life day about to start.

Hmm.... it's not really a fair comparison, because the rose coloured nostalgia glasses does compensate for some of the technical weaknesses of older titles. So listing the crpgs that left the biggest, lasting impressions on this greybearded gamer. In no particular order: 1. Nethack 2. Ultima IV 3. Temple of Apshai I left out my all time greatest game favourite 'Lords of Midnight' as that one is genre hybrid which is hard to really classify. Should probably have a category all of its own (turn based exploration-strategic-warfare-roleplaying-game).

Much to my surprise we actually managed to find 16 people yesterday. 16m is tonnes of fun and poor Styrak bit the dust (16M HM SNV)

Friends and the social stuff is the only thing that keep me (barely) interested in the game at the moment. Going to grind a few max level alts over the next month, but it's infinitely more fun when doing it with aforementioned friends. Class balance is at an all time low with so many problems that you despair just by thinking at where to start listing the problems, nothing new to do with friends/guildies in the game besides uprisings and a warzone for the last two years... it's like dealing with a patient in a state of coma. Will it ever wake up and try to interact with the players again?

A Decade of Death... Somebody compiled a list of Australia's deadliest animals over the decade 2000-2010. And the "Winner" is: Who would have thought. Lets exterminate those beasts for the safety of all Australians! Same numbers broken down by state: Yeah, guess which state I live in

Not trying to turn this into a politics thread, but he would probably also claim the credit for daylight savings

Who would have thought it... an uprising actually posing a challenge? We sure had our (the little pub side guild I'm in on Harbinger) with the bonus boss in Destroyer of Worlds (a boss named 'The Caller in the Dark'). This was in HM though, I wonder if he's just a tough opponent in story mode. We actually had to swap a few character alts to get the right team composition to beat him (2 gunslingers for the 35m range, commando healer and shadow tank). Gunslingers are safe from his AOE damage when more than 30m away and only have adds as a problem. Poor healer had to run back and forth healing tank and us gunslingers when adds had been chewing away at our health and yes, they do a lot of chewing So we took turns using shields, diversion and knockbacks to keep them off us.

Nature is so blasted overrated sometimes... woke up at 4am when the Kookaburras started. Didn't stop until 5am. That's when the pigeons (aka "flying rats" locally, being for all intent and purposes rats with wings) started and didn't let up with their infernal noise until 6:30. Not a cat around when you need one Kookaburra sound... https://youtu.be/UXA0-YAoo9Q

I think Trump suffers from a small male reproduction organ complex and wants to compensate by building a wall larger than the one in China

Playing a bit of Pillars of Eternity. Went into a lighthouse Defiance Bay. Bad idea Need better preparation for that.

While they would probably never come out and say it, my personal suspicion is they have been stalling for time for a long time. Ever since around the introduction of the DvL event. Failed attempt at crowd control of the customer base?

5.1 details have been released... To summarise: Old gearing system, split in PVP and PVE. In PVP you would earn commendations and could buy gear. Turn in old gear and more commendations to upgrade to the higher tier. In PVE you could earn commendations (which was renamed data crystals because commendations were too confusing) and buy non optimised gear from vendors. Doing operations could give you tokens to buy optimised gear for. Bioware thought this was waaaay too confusing for people so they simplified it. Now you can do certain activities which earns you a currency which will enable you to buy a token for. This token, together with another currency earned in another way can be traded in for gear (with set bonuses where applicable). To upgrade this gear, you can trade in the gear together with more of the latter currency. The latter currency is entirely based on grind. In addition, you can also run operations and with luck, get a token from the first bosses, last boss is a guaranteed drop. This token, like the previous mentioned one, can then be traded in together with the other currency for optimised gear (with set bonuses where appropriate). Upgrade process is similar if wanting to upgrade lower tier token gear. Much, much simpler way to gear up, yes?

I only browsed a few pages back, so not sure if mentioned already. Love it or hate it, Mass Effect 2 is available for free (doesn't get much cheaper than that) on Origin (the 'On the house' deals)

As Infinitron said. If I remember correctly, Knights of the Old Republic 2 used to be "Project Delaware"? Edit to add: Which in the past lead to many funny suggestions what to do when running out of US States. Annexing Canada was one option

Etymology of weed smoking... from the old tradition of smoking wheat

'a' is the first letter in the word 'announcement'...

Yeah, I'm such an idiot. Good thing I'm not a politician, I would probably never be able to keep a promise. Did unsub, enjoyed not having the game around for a while and then got "suckered" into re-subbing again by my friends. Downed my first ever NiM Boss last week (or "Master" as they call it now because... yeah, makes perfect sense, right?). Writhing Horror bit the dust in Terror From Beyond and started on the Dread Warriors (Ciphas, Kel'Sara and Heirad). Heirad bit the dust and Ciphas was close, but no cigar. Several problems. My complete lack of skill, practise and gear for one. 220 gear might have been good for HM in 4.0, but for NiM in 5.0 it's just not good enough. Need to find some time to work on the gear once they change the gearing system. Not fair to the healers that I take so much damage as tank and the dps have to work overtime to compensate for my lack of decent dps. Told the Boss he needs to put me on the 'b' team for a while until geared up. Oh yeah, having fun too with our "guest" dps. 3 guys who agreed to help us out. The top parsing sniper on Harbinger at the moment on the parsley leaderboard and friends. Holding aggro against those guys is a challenge all on it's own Seriously Bioware, the command point system adds as much entertainment to the game as having a root canal done.

Good thing I already finished my coffee!

From the 'weird world' category I suppose (and because I don't feel like creating a new politics thread) Worlds largest communist economy argues for free trade, worlds largest capitalist country wants to tear up free trade agreements

That has to be a trick question... It has to be so long that you feel the time and money invested in it was worth it. Trying to put a number on it is as pointless as trying to give a game a "score".

Who says they are evil? Star Wars shows its age. Back then people would be cheering for terrorist organisations blowing up government property

Nostalgia corner... music from when Gorth was a young teenager: http://youtu.be/d1dP6H2_Gak

One of several games on my to-do list. Made 3 half hearted attempts since buying it, but I don't think I made it out of the "tutorial" bit even once Promised myself to not even install Witcher 3 until I've worked my way through Pillars of Eternity (and expansions) as well as Tyranny. At least I've made some headway on Pillars

Not sure how, but somehow I managed to miss the new posts from November onwards Awesome work Buttercheese

BruceVC... I would recommend looking up "Echelon". BBC has some good articles on it. Unless of course you believe no western country would ever spy on another country. Raise hands all those who thinks western intelligence services would never try to 'help' leaders to power that might be more favourable to them? It's not that many doubt the Russians tried to meddle in things, it's just that I suspect most expect everyone to do it and only pointing fingers at one participant in that particular game of realpolitik seems a bit odd.