evensong

I'm more offended by the poor craftsmanship of your poem than its contents, to be honest. Don't write limericks unless you know what an anapest is, pls

If you read my post carefully you'll find that I'm actually just explaining why people are offended, I am not stating that their system of thought is unquestionably correct. I'm not asking you to dismantle it or prove it wrong. I am explaining that it exists and that people adhere to it, and that is why they are offended. You can't disagree with the fact that it exists - this is self-evident, as the products of it is the only reason we are talking about this in the first place! The adherents find the joke damaging for reasons they consider to be legitimate, and their reasons are very different from the conservative censorship (i.e. Tipper Gore/Dead Kennedys album cover, DH Lawrence/obscenity charges etc.) framework in which people are offended by dead babies or whatever. If you think they are the same, you don't understand the framework itself, which means you're arguing without knowing what you are talking about. That was my original point. I do happen to agree with these thoughts of social justice, though, hence my statement that I also want **** like this gone. I don't want people thrown in jail over it, but I do think people should think twice before casually making jokes that contribute to a culture of oppression.

Awesome argument, bro.

Hee's my take on it: Jokes undeniably help create cultural attitudes and cultural understanding, this one is a reflection and a product of a cultural understanding of trans* people. It falls in line with the long-standing trope of representing trans* people as "traps" (the only other variety found in popular media - until very recently - was the psychopath, think Jame Gumb in Silence of the Lambs). This is a harmful stereotype because it contributes to a culture of ignorance and transphobia, perpetually casting trans* people as weird and dangerous, defined essentially by their sheer perceived weirdness and their perceived goal of tricking straight people into ****ing them. This is part of the reason why transphobia is so common and certainly part of the reason why the attempted suicide rate for trans people is at a mind-blowing lifetime 41% (!). You can disagree with this, of course, but there is a logic to the "offendedness", whether you like it or not. I don't want jokes like these gone because I am personally offended, I want them gone because they has a real detrimental effect on the lives of real human beings.

What's funny to me is that a lot of the people complaining don't seem to understand why people found it offensive in the first place. There is a huge structural difference between taking offense because a game lets you kill a child and because a game makes fun of a severely maligned minority. If you don't understand that, you don't understand the issue.

Unless they also have an unusually high opinion of both PoE and young people, that seems unrealistic considering the last sentence?

Not just trolls! Like... I'm slightly ashamed to admit this but I would definitely not have been here if it hadn't been for that thing. But I am genuinely enjoying talking about the rest of the game as well, and would prefer if we just never talked about it again, so.

...recently meaning what? A bunch of people (myself included) ended up here after the game dropped, it would be very surprising to me if it didn't shift the tone and focus of the forum a lot. Recent days, I haven't really seen anything particularly aggravating or stupid, except for the situation surrounding The Limerick etc.

Jesus christ, okay, never mind me.

If nobody has volunteered by tomorrow I'll happily donate my files, if you promise not to laugh at the fact that I'm barely halfway through act two. (Am in bed and too lazy to get to my PC.)

Indeed. To be honest, this unhelpfulness and aggression makes me feel like we've entered some kind of new age on this forum. An age of dragons, perhaps? I certainly didn't expect this!

Sticky pls

Yeah I also have the load time issues, it takes a while, but they bother me far less than quicksave, which is anything but. My PC has an i5-4460 3.2GHz, Asus R9 270, 8GB RAM, 120 SSD, running Linux Mint. Not high end, but certainly not sluggish, and there has been a dramatic dropoff in performance specifically when loading/safing PoE areas. It's not about hardware. Then again, complaining about 10-12 sec load times as a major problem makes me think you should practice having your immersion broken by reading a novel in public or something. If you really think these load times are an issue that makes the game significantly less enjoyable, I suggest you take up Dzogchen meditation, or perhaps Stoicism. When I was a kid (like five years ago) we had our immersion broken constantly, and we liked it!

So what you're basically saying is that it's about ethics in video games journalism?

Number rating systems are ****ing dumb in general, in my opinion. A number requirement forces the reviewer to dumb down all their emotional response, thoughts on the game's internal logic and how the game relates to the genre and real life and so on - into a number that is poorly suited to reflect any opinion or thought on its own, let alone several combined. Imagine this system for any other kind of review. "I read H.D. Thoreau's Walden, it was exciting when he lost the axe head in the pond and fished it out again, but I'll have to subtract points for his sub-par bean growing skills. 3/10, try harder next time!"

This sort of claim gets made in pretty much every thread like this in every forum ever, but doesn't seem to have a lot of basis in reality. Very few games achieve a metacritic average of over 90. It seems there are only 108 PC games that satisfy this, and this includes some expansions and re-releases. If you look at RPGs, there are only about 15 with higher Metacritic scores than 90. On the other hand, only 14% of the games currently on the first two pages of the Gamespot review section dip below 5/10, and those that do are relatively unknown, except for Sid Meier's Starships. I think the scale shift is real for games with relatively large budgets, though definitely not to such an extent that only 9 and 10 are used.

Not a bad idea! I kinda miss the BG style wire bound manuals, but at the same time, I really don't. The PoE manual explains a lot of the mechanics while keeping it short and neat.

Yeah, you can change the autopause options in combat if you don't like them. I've only left it on when I discover a trap, because I found myself unpausing by accident every time combat started, on account of my habit of pausing as soon as combat starts in Baldur's Gate. I think a good beginner's tip is not to play it like Baldur's Gate. Despite the many similarities, the combat mechanisms are very different.

Yeah I actually found this ridiculous. Richard Dawkins taught me souls don't even exist, yet there they are! That's just lazy game design!

This would be akin to asking a book reviewer to keep the content of a novel out of his final assessment of the book, expecting their score to reflect only how well stitched the pages are. (Also, low-res textures is very obviously not an objective standard at all, considering the enormous success of Minecraft, Terraria and similar low-res games. Performance is worth mentioning, I guess.) The purpose of a review is to give some indication whether a game, book, movie, album, whatever - is more complicated than simply making a rundown of the "objective" values of the item. It's trying to answer whether the item worth acquiring for the person reading the review overall. For this purpose, an indication of the subjective quality is far more important. I think most people would play a great game that runs imperfectly to a dull game that runs perfectly - we are talking on the Pillars of Eternity forum, after all. If game performance should reflect a large part of the final score, shouldn't PoE score lower? It has a considerable amount of bugs and performance issues.

Obviously, I only buy things I can use. Do I -need- to enchant all my party members' armour to have +2 to stats? No, I'll survive without it, but it definitely helps boost my team. So I buy those diamonds. Do I -need- to give everybody 2 rings, boots, cloaks, etc? Again, I can make do without those extra spells for Aloth or that extra resistance against corrosion damage, but I certainly like having that stuff. If you have to prioritise how to spend your money, but can get by both while choosing to spend it generously or choosing to be stingier and be able to more easily afford keep upgrades etc., that seems pretty well balanced to me?

I think it varies? I had Leaden Key Agents attacking, I certainly hope they didn't come from Od Nua... Overall the keep has been pretty disappointing. It tries to do too many things and ends up doing most of them pretty poorly. On my next playthrough I don't think I'm gonna bother with it, to be honest.

Of course their preference is reflected in the review, that's literally all a review is - a subjective opinion about a thing. Conversely, your opinion about the game is no more valid than theirs (->who are you to deem their review "too subjective"?), and popularity/sales is a poor measure of quality. If you have discovered a way of objectively assessing the quality of a cultural item, you should probably let someone know, you'd be a superstar in academic humanities. The only reviewers worth paying attention to are the ones you find yourself in agreement with relatively often.

I was really relying on gamespot to validate my opinion of this game, and they totally let me down. I rate their review 1/10, let's see how they like it.

I dunno man, I prefer universes where I start off as a completely normal dude that turns out to be special in some way. You just never know where those end up! Will I be humble and return to my farming/blacksmithing roots, or become a benevolent king? Maybe I'll even win The Hunger Games? The choices are virtually endless.