complexmath
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Posts posted by complexmath
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The command I used (ChangeClass) lets you pick a new character class and restarts their skill selection from level 1. You don't get to alter core attributes, but you can redo spell and talent selections, as well as points put into skills.
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Doesnt that disable achievements? What we really need is a savegame editor where you can completely edit your characters.
The IE Mod docs say that using IE Mod doesn't disable achievements, though simply using the console with "iroll20s" does. I know for sure that when I tried the "iroll20s" approach I was notified that achievements would be disabled, while I didn't get a notification when using IE Mod to respec.
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but here, asking women about stories of workplace harassment would provide a basically endless supply of anecdotes that would leave you despairing for humanity. Most of the time, only the most severe cases are ever reported, but there are countless more that people just bear because they don't want to deal with the trouble of complaining about.
Because women *never* do any kind of harassment at work. My mother was bullied for years in her workplace, where there are only women. I guess she was mobbed by dwarves, fairies or invisible male ghosts? And do you think men report bullying done to them? Nope, they don't - mostly because they're met with laughter - like my female collegue did to me once. Literally laughed in my face (I guess depression is a laughing matter!). No wonder men die by suicide almost 5 times as often as women.
Are men met with laughter or are they afraid they'll be met with laughter? Either way, I used sexual harassment of women as an example because it's pervasive, and so possibly easier to identify with. But people are absolutely harassed for all sorts of reasons, men and women alike. I definitely didn't mean to imply that that wasn't the case.
That said, as a victim of harassment yourself I'm sure you can identify with how someone might feel when encountering a joke like this. One that implies that sex with someone like them is so horrible, so shameful, that the only recourse for someone that discovers they've done this is suicide. But it's a joke so no harm done, just get over it right? And maybe it is just a joke, but it's also one more joke amid a sea of similar crap from a thousand different sources and damnit but this is a game it should be something you can enjoy and not be reminded of your daily struggle for acceptance. This is a complex issue, but ultimately, if someone finds out they've been a jerk to me, even unintentionally, one would hope I'd get an apology. It's core to the nature of living with people.
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I also think it's worth pointing out that if this had happened in an office setting, the author of the limerick would be on his way to mandatory sensitivity training at best, given his reaction to the incident. In short, it doesn't matter what you think about this and it has nothing to do with free speech.
Thank goodness I don't live in such a totalitarian country as you do. "Mandatory sensitivity training" for a joke? This reminds me of the wost communist times in Poland... If this is the depth of American PC craziness, you can keep it to yourself.
Edit: "at best" is genuinely scary. And what is the worst? Being fired immediately? Put in jail? Shot in the back of the head? Do you even realize how totalitarian your words sound? You don't advocate for the LGTB people this way - just the opposite in fact. This sounds crazier and less tolerant than the Catholic Church, and that's something to say in Poland where I come from.
Yes, termination is a possible consequence of harassment. It's important to note, however, that these laws exist for the victims. If someone doesn't care about the off-color jokes, coworkers watching porn, groping, or whatever else might be going on, then no reporting occurs and no action is taken. But they can be tremendously valuable in instances where people do feel victimized in the workplace. And perhaps Poland is a more enlightened place than the US, but here, asking women about stories of workplace harassment would provide a basically endless supply of anecdotes that would leave you despairing for humanity. Most of the time, only the most severe cases are ever reported, but there are countless more that people just bear because they don't want to deal with the trouble of complaining about.
Regarding my comment about sensitivity training, such things tend to occur when the alleged harasser responds in an unreasonable manner. If they agree to simply stop doing whatever, then that's typically the end of it. (note that I don't work in HR or have a legal background, so what I've said is just a result of exposure to the periodic training exercises regarding workplace harassment and the like in various businesses where I've worked)
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Don't you think that you're seeing evil where there was none? It's not like you're the only LGBT gamer here, you know.
If you're of working age then I'm sure you're aware that what constitutes harassment is up to the harassee (I know this isn't necessarily harassment, but it's related, and there's plenty of legal data concerning harassment to reference). So it's entirely legitimate that some people could have an issue with the limerick, and for that issue to be completely legitimate and actionable, while others of the same persuasion might be fine with it. Also, no one has a right to tell another that their offense is unwarranted. That's not how it works.
Personally, I think Obsidian handled this issue rather badly, as the way things have progressed has let the author of the offending limerick effectively speak for the company. And while the new epitaph isn't internally objectionable, it was written in incredibly poor taste, and I think sends a terrible message to people who have been following this issue. I'm still enjoying the game, but I do hope that this isn't the end of the issue in terms of what we've heard from Obsidian. Ideally, I'd like to see further action, a policy clarification communicated to backers, and a follow-up interview with someplace like PC Gamer.
I also think it's worth pointing out that if this had happened in an office setting, the author of the limerick would be on his way to mandatory sensitivity training at best, given his reaction to the incident. In short, it doesn't matter what you think about this and it has nothing to do with free speech.
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For respeccing, install IE Mod and use the ChangeClass command. I've respecced my Cipher once already, so I can attest that it works.
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Doesn't google analytic's use your sign-in? By that your Google account, like gmail to phish for usage stats. The first party cookies as one of the ways they gather information seems to bear that out. https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsTrackingOverview
Huh, no idea. Though that would require the user to have a gmail/google+ account and have filled in their gender as well. And unlike the Nexus, I've given up trying to find the gender field in google+. It's got to be there somewhere, but I haven't had any luck so far.
Either way, my personal experience suggest the assertion that 95% of PoE players (or IE Mod users?) are male is completely wrong. Of the people I know playing PoE, roughly half are female, and a number of them are trans male and trans female as well. My experience may also be nontypical, but it's no less relevant than stats gathered based on a non-required field which defaults to male
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There's a gender field on Nexus? Where is it? I looked at my profile but don't see anything. For the record, I'm a woman, I use the IE mod, and I made a huge pile of mods for the first Witcher game.
Click on the arrow next to your username, then "user area", then "change email address", then "profile settings" and it's halfway down the page. It took me a full 5 minutes of looking to find it after reading this thread. I still don't know if others can view this field, but since someone upthread was quoting stats, I assume so. Maybe it's linked to download statistics somehow.
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It's worth noting that the Nexus gender field defaults to Male, and changing it means digging through profile settings. Until I saw this thread I wasn't even aware there was a way to specify my gender. I have a Nexus account so I can download stuff and my profile is completely empty, which I suspect is representative of most Nexus users. In short, there's no statistical significance to the gender field on the Nexus.
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Funny. My worst game experience ever was Counterstrike. The install had problems and when I uninstalled it it wiped out my entire games directory (CS was installed in a subfolder beneath that). I had a BG2 save literally right before the final boss encounter too. To this day, I've never played Counterstrike because of that.
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I experienced a fair share of crashes since I bought the game on release date, but for some reason since yesterday it has become a rule that the game will crash once either quicksaving or loading in a map transition on any map.
If this was a problem present since the beginning I would understand, but it got worse with time. I tried to look for a solution, but everyone seems to have a little bit of different issues.
Any Mac user experiencing the same issue?
My specs:
MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013)
2.4 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Intel Iris 1536 MB
I have a similar system (15 inch, GeForce 750M 2GB in addition to the Intel Iris--you probably have both as well), and haven't crashed yet.
[edit]
Oh, I did disable steam cloud saves for PoE, as I sync with my PC via Dropbox. That may be worth a shot.
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While there's a lot of things that can go wrong and I agree it's not easy to release a bug-free game, it is both possible and achievable to release a game where a number of serious bugs won't be found within the first week after release. Seriously.
Yep. And sorting this out is a tricky process. Like for the "double clicking to equip break stuff, but dragging to equip doesn't" issue, a dev would have to notify QA that the code paths for those two "equip the thing" flows is different and so they should be tested separately. And the "stats increase every time I save in the same area as a character I recruited" issue, someone would have to have thought to explicitly test save/reload in a relevant area, and to look for stat changes as an indication of failure.
Regarding crashes and such, it's much the same. Development points out the most likely trouble spots for focus testing, and QA also does their own coverage tests to find issues according to whatever criteria they've set. So there's some reliance on effective communication between development and QA, and then a *ton* of reliance on QA being superhuman monsters able to iterate at near relativistic speeds, because automated testing of games is difficult to impossible.
The other thing that can be done which might have caught some of these issues is unit testing. There, you actually could test save/reload a million times in every area in the game. Someone still has to code those tests though, which can be tremendously time consuming, and implementing them within Unity might be tricky as well (don't know anything about the engine). Ultimately, it's a cost/benefit issue. And we're talking about a kickstarted game.
Regarding development in general, someone mentioned earlier that the quality of software has declined. I think the opposite is true. Software development is still a very new field. New to the point that, unlike other engineering practices, there is no established way to do anything yet. We're still solidly in the "blacksmithing" era of software development, where this is all still much closer to art than science. Someday there will be agreed upon development practices, standards requirements, and automated validation tools, but that still seems pretty far off. For now, every team is learning new lessons on every project and continually refining their practices to produce better, more reliable software for the same effort invested.
First project maybe everyone ends up in "crunch mode" for six months and have spouses threatening to walk out because they're never home and the product released is still barely functional. By the fourth or fifth, people are working relatively normal hours and the final product is also far better than that first project they spent six times the effort on. And the following one will be better still. Onwards and upwards.
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First, I suggest sneaking when exploring new areas. Certainly when not in outdoor maps anyway. Then when you see the bear you have the option of leaving before combat begins rather than trying to run away once it's kicking your ass. As for getting out of combat in general, it depends on the class. You either need to use some ability to disengage safely (Fighter has this, for example), or to stun/confuse/whatever the enemy so you can get away.
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What are you talking about? Clearly they just need to ensure better science.
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I kind of agree with OPs wish list, excluding ToB. Epic levels is where most games fail, ToB certainly felt like crap to me. Even if I've played BG2 more than a few times, I couldn't force myselft to complete the mess that ToB was more than once.
My biggest issue with ToB is the setting. You're in Faerun and yet random bandit encounters include spellcasters with the ability to cast timestop. Once a D&D game hits epic levels, you really have to leave the Prime Material in order to provide a plausible challenge in a party-based adventure game. Watcher's Keep has its moments though.
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Map notes would be nice. For example, I encountered a cave while exploring that I absolutely wasn't ready for, but I wanted to make sure that I remembered to go back later. It would have been nice to tag the cave on the map with a note to this effect. The game does have a quest log where you can type in whatever though, which is a passable alternative.
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No one wants to ship a buggy game. It sucks to spend months or years of your life on something, only to have people encounter problems when they play it. I had heard that Obsidian retooled their development / QA process for this game (not sure if this is true, though a postmortem on Gamasutra would be an interesting read), and providing backers with alpha builds should have helped tremendously in sorting out any gameplay or game design issues. Seems everyone missed a few important things anyway, which given the realities of product development and testing, isn't at all surprising. Onwards and upwards.
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6. Go crazy with it and make a game like Tomb of Elemental Evil. It had the best turn based combat ever but sadly the story was lacking. Also skills were pretty useless since there was nothing to interact with in the game. No npc's, no treasure chests to pick, nothing outside of the dungeon which is a shame. Make a game like that with the POE universe and make the combat turn based. There's just so much room to make a better game than the much loved while simultaneously hated TOEE.
I'd love to throw out the idea to make a sequel to Vampire Bloodlines but that's a whole different property lol. Anyway I would literally love to take the whole trip down memory lane and add to all my fond memories of playing all of the classic IE games. Why not make that whole trip? Or at least part of it anyway. At the very least I really hope that there will be an expansion as well as a sequel for POE and anything after that would just be icing on the cake.
ToEE was mechanically the best CRPG I've ever played. It provided an incredibly authentic tabletop experience. As for the story... it is an implementation of a classic pen and paper dungeon, so there's not much to say there. Bloodlines was a bit the opposite in that the writing was fantastic but the mechanics were really just passable. I guess Arcanum bears mentioning here as well, though that game never really grabbed me for some reason.
Given the success of PoE, I suspect that this isn't the last we'll see of the property. Which I find very encouraging as well. I really like the writing so far, and it's soooooo nice to be playing in a world that isn't the core D&D campaign setting for once. Between this and Numenera, it's a good time to be a fan of classic CRPGs. I've got to say that I'd also like something that isn't about saving the universe (and PoE may not be, though the "chosen one" vibe is already definitely in effect). Dragon Age 2 was a refreshing change for this reason, for example.
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Ya know, there are WAYYYY too many people giving Obsidian the benefit of the doubt around here. If even ONE of these SERIOUS bugs were in a Bioware game, there would be a forum chock full of hate, how ea doesn't care and they just want money and blah blah blah. Dragon Age Inquisition had far less critical bugs, and people were going bonkers. Threatening to sue. But no, It's Obsidian guys, let's just give them a pass because....because.
Not really. In Dragon Age: Inquisition I ran into the gender bug, which I didn't even make sense of until Cassie turned down my male inquisitor for being female (so mid-late game). Also, the voice screwup when customizing Hawke's face, the missing banter bug, companion quests breaking permanently, and a few others where the result of quest progressions at endgame had no bearing on what I actually did during the game. All bugs that notably affected my experience of the game story, and all which "should have been found during testing." And only one of these (the gender bug) was actually fixed before I completed the game.
Whether or not people go bonkers over something is really more about their personality than the importance of the thing in question. It's entirely fair for people to be upset regardless of whether someone else considers the bug the be significant. Being upset won't change how quickly things are fixed however, though enough vitriol may make it more difficult for devs to filter useful information out of the noise. What *will* help to fix things more quickly is a detailed description of the problem, ideally verified beforehad as reproducible, and then any follow up questions asked by anyone in a position to help answered promptly, again with sufficient detail that people can act on the information. Then it's a matter of waiting for the next patch which, aside from a bug that has substantial impact (deleting or corrupting non-game data on the owner's hard drive, for instance), will be released on a set schedule that really can't be changed much, as required time is built in for all sorts of things beyond simply debugging and fixing some code.
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I think I got a different game from a lot of other people. I'm probably half way through the game and the only bugs I've noticed have been extremely minor. Mostly misaligned text a couple of scripts triggering oddly, but ultimately work out fine.
I guess I should be glad I got a different version of the game than all you folks that are having an alleged bug-fest. Thanks for hooking me up, Obsidian!
Most of the bugs people are talking about aren't actually game-breaking so much as experience-breaking. Stats being increased or reduced from their intended level. Also, these bugs all seem to trigger based on certain ways of interacting with the game (double-clicking to equip, saving a ton in an area where a companion was recruited, etc). But so far I've seen very few reports of actual blockers--crashes and the like. This release is really pretty solid.
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I keep seeing threads about this but i got no content of reference about it, because i haven't gotten to play the game yet. -Just another gamer stuck in character creation stage
It's a joke in one of the backer epitaphs. Which, being backer content, I imagine can't be removed without backer consent. Fortunately, it sounds like that conversation has already happened, so perhaps this will change in the next patch. And for those saying the devs have better things to spend their time on, making this change would take literally 2 minutes. There wouldn't be any impact on bug fixes.
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But still : some game breaking bugs here are pretty obvious and any careful game tester would have been able to check them : stats changing, loading time going up, items disappearing, black screens...
It's too bad that no one got a pre-release copy of this game to help test and submit feedback. If they had, someone would have found these issues for sure! Thanks, Obsidian!
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The first level spell that removes an ally from combat and applies a heal over time effect is really handy as well, say when a Shadow jumps from your tank to your mage. Hit the mage with it and the Shadow will look for a new target, plus your mage won't die. Overall, I find Durance's abilities to be very useful in the more difficult battles. Plenty of beneficial auras, some crowd control, and a few "oh sh*t" spells. And with a reach weapon, he's a decent asset in damage dealing as well. I'm sure some people go for "the best defense is a good offense" approach, but having some solid support characters makes for a less polarized combat experience.
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He starts with a reach weapon and can stand directly behind your tank to attack.
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Fatal Error in GC
in Backer Beta Bugs and Support
Posted
That is a very weird error. For GetThreadContext to fail, the thread in question would have to be not suspended, which suggests a logic error in the garbage collector (something definitely built into Unity or even whatever .NET code Unity is built upon rather than in PoE application code).
In short, for garbage collection to work, the GC suspends all running threads (via SuspendThread), then calls GetThreadContext on each to figure out what memory regions to scan for references. It almost sounds like this is timing-related. Maybe something in Unity spawns a thread in a way where it isn't atomically added to whatever internal thread list is used for GC scanning, so it misses the suspend sweep on a GC cycle but makes it into the list before scanning begins.
So for this problem to have increased in this patch, it could be because PoE is now creating threads it didn't used to before and so there are more opportunities for this to happen, or it could simply be a matter of GC timing being changed because allocations are occurring in places where they didn't before. I don't know Unity, but understanding the problem in general I don't know that there's anything the PoE devs can do in their own code to fix this. And now I'm curious if the Unity source code is available to look at...