Verno wrote on Mar 5, 2013, 10:52:

InBlack wrote on Mar 5, 2013, 10:47:
I guess I just got baited into overkill, but fuck it if everything I said isnt true.

You didn't get baited, you launched straight into hysterics. It is ok if other people don't care about online DRM as much as you, life moves on. It sounds like the game has many legitimately bad qualities, no need to sit there calling people cunts and bringing Diablo 3 into it.

briktal wrote on Mar 5, 2013, 10:28:

InBlack wrote on Mar 5, 2013, 10:02:
Error 37: The EA way!

Seriously, for all of those that preordered this game AND got burned by Diablo3....you are stupid cunts who get what they deserve! Next time have some fucking sense.

For all those who did not experience the clusterfuck of D3 and still preordered this game (or bought it at release) I seriously hope this game is as good as the "glowing" (pre)reviews are touting it. Somehow Im having doubts about that. I really do hope its a worthy successor, but Im going to wait and see. Or rather wait and hear word-of-mouth.

What clusterfuck? An online game had some login issues day one? Let's fucking boycott everything!

When we all first heard about new "six strikes" plans being used by ISPs to identify copyright infringers, we all agreed it seemed like a perfect and foolproof system, but it seems our optimism may have been unfounded

Verno wrote on Mar 5, 2013, 09:51:
I know indies paved the way for this but I am really iffy about alpha stuff being on Steam, it just doesn't seem like a good precedent to set even with all of their other efforts at curation.

Wolfen wrote on Mar 5, 2013, 08:30:
Personally, I suspect A:CM is Timegates fault.

Warskull wrote on Mar 5, 2013, 01:28:

wtf_man wrote on Mar 4, 2013, 20:32:

saying this was because a publishing deal fell through.

Gee, ya think?

After the Colonial Marines mess, who would hire this studio?
(Not that Gearbox doesn't significantly share the blame)

To be fair, the whole A:CM may have not been their fault. It sounds like they got a worthless shamble of assets and an impossible deadline. The responsibility in the end should be mostly on Gearbox. They are the ones who kept delaying the game and created a situation where they needed to crap out a terrible game as fast as possible.

Creston wrote on Mar 3, 2013, 22:40:

mag wrote on Mar 3, 2013, 18:35:
Anyway. Lots of solutions. Fire a(n extremely) powerful laser at it for a few years.

A laser that we

A) Don't have
B) Can only aim at the asteroid for about half an hour a day
C) Wouldn't work on anything except the kind of mega-brittle asteroid that we wouldn't necessarily have to worry about anyway.

Land a bunch of super-efficient ion drives on it and slowly nudge it away.

Ion drives which we

A) Don't have (unless you're counting the drives that power Voyagers 1 and 2?)
B) can't get there

Put a large object near it and let gravity tug it.

A large object that we

A) Don't have
B) Can't get there
C) Could never get to match the asteroid's speed.

With enough time, it just takes a very tiny nudge.

But the problem with the "enough time" variable is that it also vastly reduces our chance to detect it, and vastly reduces our chance to even really do anything about it. It's a nice idea to launch ion drives, put them on the asteroid, and let them burn for 17 years to alter the course of the asteroid, but that also means that we have to have some way to get those ion drives out to about Jupiter, somehow then match the speed of the asteroid going the other way (good luck with that), land on it, and attach the drives on it, and all done so through pre-scripted automation since any commands we try to give take way too long to get there.

Edit: But something really big that's going to hit us tomorrow? We are SOL. That's why it's important to put more money into our sky surveys. I'm kind of horrified at the level of ignorance about are current capabilities. People were claiming that we had mapped every large-ish rock that might come by Earth some day. No. No. NO.

No, we don't. We watch nowhere near enough of the "sky" for that. There are fairly sizable gaps in coverage which could let something slip through. But again, even if we watched 100% of the sky all the time, and saw something coming ten years out, with our current technology we can't do shit.

At least if we saw it coming we could give the "put people in caves" plan a chance, I guess. Not that that would really work...

I read an estimate from a scientist that actually works on that kinda thing, and he said that we had maybe 90% of the really really big rocks. And that doesn't get into the ones that could crush a city, or the ones that fly in from further out in the solar system.

I think he's being pretty optimistic. Research from a few years back said we knew about maybe 10-15% of the big asteroids out there. Though I guess it's possible we've detected more since then.

Creston

killer_roach wrote on Mar 3, 2013, 22:59:
I'd argue that, on balance, developers don't hate gamers. Furthermore, they're actually giving the vast majority of them what they want.

...and giving it to them good and hard, but I digress.