nipsen

Mm. Sort of think Durance has been chugging mercury for a long while..

Sure - but since it's fantasy, I guess it would at least be possible to also imagine relationships that actually mean anything. And somehow, I don't think the problem is that people don't want to have something like that as background, or part of a story. That it's more how the characters are uninteresting almost by design - going back to how the dialogue is constructed over a linear path. How it seems the most effort goes into not letting your choices respond to the actual events playing out. I mean, if Bioware wrote out a response wrapper for a good story... say, Macbeth, it would be something like this: "-These deeds must not be thought After these ways; so, it will make us mad. 1. What? 2. I made a difficult choice. 3. They deserved it. 4. Give me food. -What do you mean? 1. I made a difficult choice. 2. They deserved it. 3. Give me food. -Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy thane, You do unbend your noble strength, to think So brainsickly of things. Go get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand. Why did you bring these daggers from the place? They must lie there: go carry them; and smear The sleepy grooms with blood. 1. Yes, I made a difficult choice, but I did it anyway. 2. What? 3. You want me to lie about it? 4. Give me food. -Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal; For it must seem their guilt. 1. What? 2. I'm sleepy. 3. Give me food. -My hands are of your colour; but I shame To wear a heart so white. Knocking within I hear a knocking At the south entry: retire we to our chamber; A little water clears us of this deed: How easy is it, then! Your constancy Hath left you unattended. Knocking within Hark! more knocking. Get on your nightgown, lest occasion call us, And show us to be watchers. Be not lost So poorly in your thoughts. 1. What? 2. I made a really difficult choice. 3. [say nothing]. 4. Finally, some food!

Beren and Luthien...? But yeah, it is nowadays. I mean, you know something is going on when Fast and Furious 19 has comparatively well developed relationships compared to most films.

^(thank you, overly graphic imagination. Whatever would I do without you). Good post. But why would you favor a pre-written background, for a character like that? Does it have something to do with having more distance to the subject-matter..? Fully agree that you would have to be extremely careful with this, though. That I would want to write something like this, for example, is because I know people who have experienced serious abuse, and know them well enough that I can describe the way they act and exaggerate the types of traits they've acquired afterwards, so it's easy to spot the consequences. That's also why I think it would work better to tempt a player with those options if they created their own story along the way, to make it more personal. But.. yes, not a very easy thing to do..

@luzarius: :D No. I can understand the temptation to create female characters that really are archtypical men in disguise. While reversing the roles in a relationship. Like the main female character in Masters of Sex, for example - in the series, she assumes the role of a "man" in a lot of the scenes, while the guy she's with is actually the female. To explore how you would react if "normal" or "hollywood normal" male and female behaviour was detached from gender. That's interesting. Frankly I know a lot of girls who say they dislike gender roles, but who rely on them like a monk worship prayer beads to get through any random day of the week. People say guys are simpler in that respect, but what if you explored how things would appear if you met guys who work in a completely unexpected way? Same with creating female characters that cut the legs off any kind of typical romantic approach - that would be interesting to write. But to simply create a caricature female in the same way we're often treated to caricature male characters in RPGs, that doesn't have any appeal to me at all. It's too much meta that relies too strongly on the "gamer" setting. As a joke, maybe. To kick annoying brats in their tiny balls. And there are better ways to emasculate both genders who envision that your sex is automatically going to assign specific behavior. In fact, creating female characters that really are men is easily drawn into perpetuating and justifying the gender roles, and the idiotic fancy that appearance and hormones give you specific traits, that create you involuntarily into the person you are, etc. Mm. That's a good point. I sort of feel that since it is fantasy, you're not necessarily going to have to justify everything you write in morally, though. That you could maybe get away with very serious abuse, even obvious crimes, if you create a setting around it that believably created the character into becoming the way they are, and followed up with creating consequences you can understand and observe afterwards. Suppose it goes back to how a lot of people would often like to see potential relationships that make sense in games, in the same way they would like to see dialogue in general that feels genuine. While adding a "romance" on top of a companion character, as a side-trail, without developing a relationship, really does appear as disgusting and silly in a game as it does in real life. Since simply abusing people for the sake of shocking the audience is typically how far things go in a typical movie-plot. It's not like people watch Brunel any more anyway. What I wondered about though, is if you developed a relationship that was believable, that wasn't constructed around picking the right responses to get over a certain limit on a "relationship progress counter" variable before you can **** - would people appreciate the opportunity to ... brutally and soul-crushingly dump their romantic interest at some point, if they were given the chance? For example, what if you discovered along the way that your love-interest was playing you? That he or she isn't actually interested in a deeper relationship, but goes along with your fantasy out of favoring the affection you give them? Or if they want and believe you're offering something you're not? Would a fantasy setting where you actually role-play this be a good setting to explore the type of fears and consequences you normally don't experience, or at least act out, in a real relationship? For example - let's say that your character develops an adventure crush for another character. Or a character develops a similar crush on your player character. And neither interest is reciprocated, before you reverse the situation again. If you develop a trail like that, and keep track of the interest, and eventually allow the relationship to happen. But then give the character an option to pay the other character back for the hurt they've caused the other, or to forgive completely, etc. If you end up in options like that, would people want to act out something similar to what they very, very likely wouldn't do in real life (....but perhaps feel strongly they should have for a short moment, in the quiet of their mind, at night, their head under their pillow)?

Question, though - if this was fleshed out a bit and made into a multiple choice variant, with more and less direct responses, a complete reversal of the roles, failure options, that sort of thing -- would having more abusive options that people can choose be a problem? Or will it become less of a problem, since you can pick a softer path as well?

Sexual assault trigger warning, if you please. Only in your dirty, dirty mind

..what sort of trigger would we be warning about?

Maybe? ...might be the stock-keeping lists are probably read from and into lists, and the resources are pilfered after the level-load completes. But if each of the level placeables are read, stuff is computed and so on, before another is read - then you get a process-diagram that looks like a half-finished arkanoid level. Lots of dead-time.

Sure. Movies and books have different qualities the other doesn't have. But you run into a problem if you want to make interactive stories in a movie, with actors - because a face is very expressive! In theory, not that this means much in videogames not made by Quantic Dream . But generally, the mood and the reactions end up having to be described with expressions. So different outcomes to a quest needs to be separate trails in the production. And you don't typically end up being more effective with each line to get the point across then, you just cut the extended content and cut the alternate takes instead. Because the opposite of cutting lines isn't just another production pass, the script needs to be more detailed, and the actors need to be better, and able to understand all kinds of different settings and motivations, different outlooks and so on. Add that to a role-playing game with a bunch of classes, and just the writing on it's own becomes excrutiating. So you just naturally end up expanding the exposition for the remaining paths. Look at Bioware - we can ridicule the fact that they've chosen to make movies instead of games as much as we want, but maintaining believable roles over different "takes" in a movie-like setting is extremely hard. Or if you actually took this seriously, and didn't just switch out a few models and add a few lines like Bioware does, you'd end up just blowing up the production like crazy. Would be awesome if that was done, with the care all the scenes needed, but the amount of work just the limited rethreads in Heavy Rain for example is huge. So you end up with less alternate paths, and more exposition in the movie-like segments between the critical sections. With writing, you have less of a problem like that, and it takes less effort to maintain the alternate routes, like I explained. Just imagine a scene where you're introduced to completely different parties with different classes. And where you're allowed to eventually place those generic characters into different roles depending on what sort of lines you pick - that then give hints to the writers what sort of responses you likely should give. You can do that with writing in a way you almost can't in a movie.

Maybe I could just substitute most of the text with an extravagantly homosexual gnoll? Bioware seems to pay for that sort of thing.

Oh, right, yes. Still.. the entire came to Candlekeep in Gorion's care in the middle of the night after a huge blood moon, eclipse and rain-showers of blood and goblins ravaging the countryside thing is sort of there, isn't it? So I suppose I always saw the relationship as being about a common fate instead of a romantic relationship. That you're almost given the impression that they came from a farmstead after losing their parents. And that she's a kind of mirror to the main character - at least that's my impression of what they tried going for. Then.. things start to struggle a bit, I guess. Probably why I thought she was so irritating - that they create a mirror for the main character that is a will-less ditz. Beyond that - isn't being a Bhaal-spawn more of a spiritual than a physical existence of sorts in the Forgotten Realms? And that children of two Bhaal-spawn would not necessarily be extraordinary in any way? Always sort of saw the conception of Bhaal-spawn as a stylized manifestation of someone's inner demons, more than a physical inheritance property from a particular demon. That Bhaal could likely use any vessel to incarnate in the Realms if they were conceived from sufficient amounts of torture and evil. That Gorion's entire experiment with turning demon-touched children into normal adventurers is a bit of a gamble, thanks to how prejudice actually manifests itself physically in the world he lives in, etc. Or is that actually completely wrong?

If romances existed in PoE, they would be like this: -The sky bursts above, fraying rifts at the edges until the world disappears to nothing, leaving only her naked spirit facing you in the void. You reach for the back of her neck with an ethereal hand and draw her close. She cannot escape: and as she cowers from your soul's touch, you sense her entire being as fully as she senses yours. For a moment she is only puzzled by your soul's touch, before she stares into you with horror, silently screaming her throat asunder as she vainly tries to escape. You laugh, an unstoppable laughter aside you that slowly takes force from within. Is that all there is? You stare through her soul as it withers from the void, forcing one last thought to stay with her as long as her soul is bound to the planes: "I know you". ^...ah, yes, that's what makes her so annoying. And making her at least have one thought in her head that isn't directly shaped by or clenched around the main character is a huge improvement, imo. ..anyway - isn't she your sister in the game? And don't you sort of know that from the beginning..? Or did I just miss something essential about this entire thing.. that also unfortunately says something about the bioware writers and BG fans that I didn't want to know...?

Not that it really pays off with the rules in the game now. But another thing was that if you had a weapon with broader damage range (huge sword) vs a weapon with a narrower and lower damage range but with dr or accuracy+ (a dagger, or something like that), a character with high accuracy might end up with beating the damage reduction fairly often with the dagger (the critical hits). While a character with high might could end up beating the DR without needing critical hits, given that the dodge of the target was low enough. And since the heavy DR enemies (heavy armor, monster troll, etc) often have low dodge, the high might type build might end up hitting the troll often. So if you buffed that attack, or added fire to it, this would be doing steady and very high damage. But on the other hand, since the high accuracy character would beat the dodge with a good margin, you could be looking at converting normal hits to critical hits fairly often, and converting grazes to normal hits. So you could gamble on that striking home while engaging the troll, if you could buff that character's defense high enough to avoid critical damage, for example. So you would more or less decide whether to go for wounding and crippling strikes, to trigger more abilities and nearby spells and so on. Or run for overpowering one particular enemy with raw force. Or for example weaken one character's dodge for a short time to let a matched high dodge duel suddenly be decided. While in the game now, it seems you should basically give your fighter the weapon with high accuracy bonus and dr bypass, no matter how puny the weapon is. While the low accuracy classes should probably get the biggest weapons they can get their hands on, unless they have status or spell effects on the side. Since dr bypass always beats raw damage, and accuracy is a class variable. My guess is the most dangerous fighters in the game now are high-level rogues with broadswords. *shrug*

I know the IE mod lets you reduce the autosaves, but any workaround for #2 (i.e. replacing the images or something)? It doesn't have too much to do with that. Their scripts tend to fetch one resource at a time, and complete the process before fetching another one. Linear, synchronous operations. Will take a lot of time eventually.

Grr. One approach to this is saying that one of the biggest challenges when crafting narratives with multiple paths is to make the reader, or the player, unaware of the abstraction layer you are writing the story over. And most of the time, voice-acting basically mandates that you create very few alternate paths, so you don't waste resources on something people won't listen to anyway. You also want to limit the amount of talking as much as possible, to not end up with too many lines. So that obviously force the authors to be concise. And it can, could possibly, encourage writers to be creative when initiating the quest - it's perfectly possible to write dialogue that appears completely different to you with different preconditions. Perhaps you're a priest sent to save the survivors from a burning monastery. Perhaps you're a mercenary sent to make sure they're all dead. So that you can reuse the lines, but just change the lines spoken by the protagonist (some of the Mass Effect writers had control on that one). But it typically just encourages them to end up cutting alternate lines, and letting you choose a different approach towards the end of the quest. And that's how most stories end up being written, whether you have large amounts of dialogue (Planescape Torment) or if you just have a few voiced lines (like in Mass Effect). Because it's not.. on it's own.. the length of the dialogue that adds options and room for interpretation in Planescape Torment. It's that first of all, you're initially coming to the story completely ignorant of what the protagonist has done before. So that justifies how people may be trying to deceive you, or if they believe you're testing them by pretending you don't know them, or that you're giving them a second chance, etc. And you can add that as a wrapper for the text when you write it, to make sure you're not strictly breaking any of the options you should have along the way, even if you're actually hinting to another layer all the time. Since as long as you're not strictly breaking the possible interpretations, a player can maintain the point of view they have. To the point where, in Planescape Torment, you have players who pick up on the subplot early, you have people who pick up on the sub-plot halfway, and you have people who adopt the "current" story towards the end as a separate thread, based on the player perspective. That they actually treat the sub-plot as an attempt to deceive the player and change their perception of what really happened. And that's the kind of narrative you always want to tell when having alternative paths. That the player completely adopts their own interpretation and maintains it on their own. So if you can achieve that with very little dialogue and few choices - that's a good job. But most of the time, if you don't allow many choices and alternative spins, you just maintain a single thread, and the choices are fake and not very involving. And that's easy for a player to pick up on. And you have the same problem with quests that resolve in thousand different ways - if they still follow the same path. Because you spot as a player that you're really just choosing the colour of the dialogue, and that it doesn't really relate to the quest, which you just complete in the same way no matter what. The temple of Eothas quest at the beginning of PoE is a kind of horror-example of how you should avoid this. You're given a quest, and can say all kinds of different things. But you're still given the quest in the same way. And when it resolves, you are given the answer to what really happened in the treasury before you get back. So no matter what you're doing, you only have the choice between confronting the character or not. In other words, you're either a burglar in the temple who is given a clue to where the treasure is. Or you're a semi-devoted priest looking to still the souls of the dead (perhaps just for your own benefit, since you can see the dead spirits). And then reverse those along the way perhaps. Maybe you set out to steal everything left in the ruins, but became soft and wanted to revenge the priests. But you don't have any different initial wrapping for the quest. And you can't maintain it throughout the quest, since the lies you're told early on are explained halfway. And afterwards, your choices don't truly matter much for you, at least at the time, because they don't seem to give you any benefits when confronting Raedric later, or when dealing with the villagers. You might want to just generally do good things and gain standing in Gilded Vale, but there's no pressing reason to deal with the burglar in one way or the other based on anything but your alignment. You basically choose what you want, but the plot doesn't try to challenge why you're making the choices, or trying to demonstrate how you might benefit greatly from dropping your burglar ethics or your priesthood creed at the time you're making the choices. So instead of having an initial setting you can choose, and a main thread that survives the initial wrapping. Before creating a reveal and a turnaround, and giving you a choice to make meaningful moral judgements with specific costs and benefits. Instead, you just get to follow along with the quest, and make your comment on it towards the end. But the actual structure of the quest could be almost identical, and the amount of dialogue could be nearly the same, if you were given those surviving alternative paths from the beginning. And having the clues be ambiguous enough (the spirit doesn't actually explain enough to make you trust that their feeling of betrayal is realistic, for example) that the reveal comes from player initiative, if they choose to pursue it (perhaps at huge risk - maybe the character you're talking to is a powerful figure, maybe he'll report to Raedric, etc). So it's not as simple as that shorter amounts of text immediately makes a quest better. Even if I'll easily admit that a lot of text is simply wasted, if it's not used to create those persistently believable alternate paths.

If Freud were alive today, he'd kill himself. It's an interesting game, but kind of think the random amount of trekking without any events (along with how easily you can miss quests) will force you to either replay the game, or go along a walkthrough. It's the kind of game that you have to have played already to get the most out of.. That's why people will suggest playing BG2 - it's more story-oriented, specially from about halfway. Imo, people should try Icewind Dale 2. The main quests all go in a straight line, but you can piece together things and figure out subplots and get alternative solutions for many of the quests. So while it's not as open-ended as Baldur's Gate, it's not as narrow narratively as for example Dragon Age, or Mass Effect, that sort of thing. I think it's gotten a bad wrap in many ways because it was developed in such a short time, and is technically much smaller than Baldur's Gate, etc. - since people assume this means it's kind of brief. And that you end up with a lot of battles that are stretched out with pointless repetitive spawns, and so on. But what you actually get in IWD2 is a bunch of structured battles that have a narrative wrapping, while the writing that's actually in the game is.. unusually satisfying for a game. So it's often not as pointless (and not as randomly balanced) as the random spawns in the BG games.. Also, Peter Stormare voice-acts the demon

Backup Grimoire? Like a mini-grimoire in the inside suit pocket ...what would it take to get people to want to use this, though? Would it be enough to eventually introduce new spells later in the game, so you would end up with a second grimoire as full as the first one - or would it work better to always offer at least one similar but specialized cast every time you gain a new spell? From the beginning of the game. Or would it work to encourage people to create one "green" grimoire and a "black" one, for example. Would it work to have this as a quest? That it's part of wizard lore to craft your own book? Because a bit of the problem with having too many spells is that you might tend to choose a selection of the spells you have in the grimoire. And then rotate with other spells in that grimoire, while ignoring spells you don't have or can't get into that first grimoire. Or, that you end up with two spellbooks with an equally random selection of spells.. So I'm wondering if there's a more intuitive way to get around this. Well, I don't need or want help like that. But, if I want to derail a discussion by having people scream their opinions at each other while holding for their ears, I'll be sure to ask.

Mm. But they're so difficult to explain into some sort of background lore Do the wizards scribble in extra cheat-spells in the bindings of the book or something like that..? Fold out pages..? Meter long chinese rolling scrolls? Enchantments prepared on beforehand that break once they're cast? An idea I heard from someone I played with for a while was to let the wizards use magical spells that could be based on intuitive abilties - like detect magic, or levitation, hypnosis - as a recharging ability pool, once they level high enough. We never got that far in the game, but we sort of thought that you could only do that if you specialized in one specific domain. That you would sacrifice spells from the opposite domain (evocation and force projection is opposed to illusion and charms, or similar), but gain lower level spells as more frequent abilities. I liked that because it could explain away the need for a spellbook. That once you become advanced enough, the wizard can learn to hold spells and create complex spells without incantations or assistance from a book. But it'd only be in a type of spells the wizard casts intuitively on beforehand, at the cost of other types of spells, and so on. Looked a lot like the "favored domain/weapon/stick" perks as well - but wasn't a flat bonus, so that it would make a real difference when you chose it. A threat as well, now. So entertaining. And no, you're not a giver - you're a servant. Your purpose as a mod is to encourage free flowing debate for everyone else. Whether you do that in one way or another is not the problem, the result of the way you do it is. So unless the idea was to demonstrate by example how not to behave, what it amounts to is that you're abusing your moderator privileges at other people's expense.

Btw, anyone have an opinion on how having one defensive support-caster (instead of an offensive damage dealer), along with a priest and a cipher, or something like that, affects how long you can go without resting? Or, do situational spells encourage you to save spells in a somewhat natural way? And that maybe the offensive spells might last longer if they were possible to cast against characters with specific weaknesses against the spells, that sort of thing? I mean, if you imagine a pnp setting - would that make sense, to be able to switch out basic spells to learn more specialized spells that gain double bonuses or severe status chances (and do less damage against defensive strengths) - would that be enough to encourage saving the spells for special occasions? Instead of just making the spells do more flat damage to compensate, which kind of encourages you to use them as much as possible anyway..? ...So to disprove my point about how you seem to prefer insulting people randomly when they disagree with you to discussing anything - you again randomly insult me and throw a childish quip about how I'm imagining a "co-conspirator" inside Obsidian with inside information, etc. When what I referred to was a producer guy who processed the refund. The source of the other information is none of your business, but you can obviously confirm it's correct. And frankly, so can everyone else based on when the craziest "fixes" stopped happening, as well as that this coincided with when Paradox Q&A "thanked" the community for all it's invaluable feedback. Before things belatedly started moving on to picking up that endless backlog of actually needed fixes from the beta reports, that some of us provided Obs. for free. Other than that I made a few fairly obvious observations about how Obsidian Q&A seems to operate, based on how very strange and badly thought through suggestions, on this forum, turned into equally strange and badly thought through implemented updates. And how the weirdness of that was not helped by for example how the moderator team is hostile to discussing views and explaining where opinions actually come from. Even to the point where they insult people with opinions they don't like. If you wanted to meet any of that criticism in some way, you could obviously do that. But in the meantime, you're not adding anything to the topic, you're harassing people, and derailing the thread by flatly lying people up in their face. So why are you here? Really, why are you a mod?

No, you're actually mentioned by nickname in the build notes Josh posted.. as late as in December or something like that. I remembered it because it said something about "diminishing returns" next to it. After changing the core system didn't end up with the expected "thank you for doing what we asked for", I guess. Of course, they still kept the changes. Because branches on the project are for wimps, I guess.. And the rest of the variables that affected interrupts in engagement, that now are class variables you can't change? What about how they removed the chance that anything except a "natural 20" would cause serious damage, when they flattened out and normalized every class in the game, when keeping the same number of attacks as before? How this makes a nominal interrupt-build useless - just like all the other accuracy, perception and dexterity based builds? How causing injuries with high accuracy vs. deflection challenges are out of the game, and leaves only the flat "wear down my HP" might-builds as an unchangeable default, etc.? What about the rest of the shuffling of the variables to accommodate the other changes? See, here's my problem with this. You really don't get that a small change that affects the scope of the ruleset - still affects the scope of the ruleset. Mm, no. They didn't kneefall and hire people in as consultants. They did everything else up to that point, and "fans" still didn't appreciate it.

Mhm. Josh just mentions you by name in the dev stream when it comes to all other gameflow tweaks because he likes the sound of it. At some point when I pressed Obsidian folks on where this so-called "user feedback" they were steering after actually came from. They happened to let on that they were moving away from taking on board user feedback, and that one of the guys in question had now decided to go full effort on modding instead, as he was still unhappy with the results. Really, who could they have been talking about? There's like, hundreds of people to choose from. But I'll give you that -- you really didn't think your min/maxed might build feedback had anything to do with the character ability system, did you? "Ohnoes, I created a build I don't understand what does and which doesn't act the way I wish it did! Trap Build!!! Evidenced by the way I ignore all directions and feedback from the game and are able to trap myself! Aaargh, arrgh! Pillars of Eternity is borken! Turn perception into attack and all will be well!! What am I even saying!". Same with the paper - if you wanted to implement a coin-flip system for attack rolls, this has implications for how the attack rolls are done, and accuracy needed to be done away with more or less. Which they eventually did by reducing the effect it had on the attack rolls. That was the whole result of that waste of paper, and no one else wanted that. But I also agree that a huge part of the blame for this lies with Obsidian, in actually making fundamental changes to the game based on or derived from user-feedback. Hopefully Obsidian folks will learn from that. Then again, on the other hand, I asked you all ahead of the beta that since Obsidian had obviously set out the red carpet for this kind of user-feedback, and asked specifically for it - that we should not abuse that channel. That people should be respectful, and explain their point of view carefully, rather than make vast sweeping generalisations about design direction based on one tiny slice of the game. Remember that? How people pointed out that since this was a kickstarter, user-feedback would likely have to be treated with a bit more attention than normal. So when you abuse that, and when they do respond and give you what you ask for - what they did still wasn't good enough. And here you are now, probably with all kinds of suggestions for specific incremental changes, that if implemented exactly like you envision them, would make the game perfect. Really, there's this weird moral lesson to be learned here, but I simply can't grasp it with my extremely small, closed and egotistical brain, Sensuki! Aaargh, arrgh!

And I really don't mean that sarcastically. The entire "ooh, but this guy loves the chaotic message scroll, the fifteen extra clicks for micromanagement in battles to hit the right moments between the preset pause options - and writes pages on pages about the beauty of the mathematical linearity in PoE - so it's obviously really great and doesn't need a tweak" thing in the beta was a bit painful to watch..

..I suppose we could at least try to avoid the worst non-sequiturs..? That would go a long way.

Mm. Have wondered about whether that could work in some way in pnp - let the spell pool recharge up to a point when time passes. A bit like the fatigue rules in PoE, just the other way around. That you'd get one level 3 spell back toward the end of the dungeon, after an hour, that sort of thing, instead of adding per-encounter abilities. Maybe add perks to decrease the time it takes..? Could put that together with resilience and constitution, to get a governing ability it could scale over, so you could make a weaker but more resilient caster.. No, I was a backer, until I was so unhappy with the changes Obsidian made towards autumn last year after the beta launched, that I requested them to simply cancel the "order", and take my money for free, or donate it away. Brandon didn't want to do that, so he returned me the money. Which I donated away on Obsidian's behalf, to the nearest autism foundation. With concerned respect for Obsidian's new exclusive core target audience. And that you end an argument by abusing your moderator privileges, and dumping a childish quip on someone isn't new, and isn't going to shock anyone. Try harder.