Rhett wrote on Jan 31, 2022, 22:14:

Mr. Tact wrote on Jan 31, 2022, 21:53:
Was this a return to FF14 or were you starting from scratch? Is worth playing currently if you start with nothing and no previous experience?

I had tried it a year prior and wasn't invested enough, but this last bout of WoW really irritated me with their decisions so I was more inclined. The community is exceptionally nice all around. Dungeons are far more forgiving. I could count on one hand the number of toxic experiences I've had in any content whatsoever.

It's totally worth it, even more so if you can find someone to play and learn with - however, most people are more than willing to help you learn, and I've been given a considerable amount of gifts and money just for being new, even. The sheer amount of content in the game - much less, that almost everything stays relevant even through endgame, is quite amazing. There is a truly staggering amount of things to do or work on, and despite taking a lot slower of a time in consuming content, I feel no worse off than a hardcore player. And being able to play any "class" (job) on the same character, switching between them on a whim, is quite nice compared to WoW where you get locked in on one class.

You can try it for free, the entire vanilla game + first expansion, with no limits on progress except capping anything at level 60 (90 being the cap per class/job). I think there's some obvious communication limitations as well, but it's an immense amount of content that's available for free without any monthly payment or upfront cost.

I started playing around the start of 2020. I agree with everything above. Super nice community and fun dungeons. Where the game fell flat for someone starting fresh was the vanilla main story. It is incredibly dry and has a ton of long unskippable cutscenes. It is supposed to pick up in the expansions, but to get there you still have to play through all of the post launch patch content prior to the expansions. My wife and I unfortunately did not make it through that grind. We made it through the main story and halfway through the post launch patch content in about ~3 months of consistent play but just lost interest by that point. If skippable cutscenes were a thing, it'd make the journey more palatable. At that point other games were vying for our attention. I'm sure the game is lots of fun after that grind though.

PropheT wrote on Jan 20, 2022, 02:29:

The vast majority of his $390 million payout will come from the 3.95 million shares that he owns, according to securities filings. Since Kotick doesn’t own any unvested equities, he will not be entitled to a change of control payment.

So, correct me if I'm wrong here, but...isn't the headline complete bullshit made up to stir outrage clicks, then? He's not getting a payout as any part of this deal, he's exercising vested stock options that were part of his pay before the deal was made. At the current stock price 3.95 million shares is also about $324.5 million, not a $390 million that's based on a peak stock price from almost a year ago. There's a reason why the NY Post was once rated as the least credible news outlet in New York, I guess.

Just clarifying that the value of his stock would be based on the terms of the acquisition deal which is $95.00 per share. That's $375M which is still off from the $390M so your point still stands.

Quinn wrote on Jul 18, 2018, 11:14:
Any current WoW player here that can answet this question?

How is rerolling these days? Will it be lonely questing in empty areas and is all the player base endgame? Or is a fresh start very doable?

It's pretty dead. On occasion you might encounter a few people here or there, but it's mostly dead, particularly with the handouts of free level 90/100 (and soon to be 110) level up boosts packaged with the expansions. Thankfully though, you'll find it's pretty quick to level up through those initial levels. LFD is usually the quickest way to go about it.

The more recent expansion is more populated though so it doesn't feel completely barren like the classic zones and early xpacks. MoP, WoD and Legion areas are pretty well populated.

I've since quit Legion now though as it's gone back to the usual endgame grind. Not sure if I'll bother with BfA

wtf_man wrote on Jul 6, 2018, 12:55:

Keilun wrote on Jul 6, 2018, 11:59:
This post summarizes the thread pretty nicely.

Uh... so they both get fired for an extremely mild spat (disagreement) on Twitter? Am I reading that correctly?

I think it devolved when she insinuated gender into the thread on top of her less than professional response at which point Reddit blew up. There are a number of tweets not in that summary where she continues to berate Deroir. I'm pretty inept at browsing Twitter so I don't know how to source them directly. They can be found in that larger Reddit thread though.

Jagacademy wrote on Jul 6, 2018, 11:53:
Read both the Twitter thread and the Reddit post, and still can't piece together what happened. Are these formats completely out of order?

Can someone summarize what happened?

On a side note, a couple days ago I was actually curious about GW2, as it hasn't been in the gaming news in awhile. Any imminent plans for an expansion? New races/classes? Haven't seen a single new race since release, and only one new class.

This post summarizes the thread pretty nicely.

It's just the "Recommended by Pocket" widget that will start showing ads which is easily disabled by the user via customization or about:config.

So if this development offends you, disable it. Pocket was already the first thing I disable in Firefox since it was recommending articles that I had no interest in already.

ItBurn wrote on Mar 26, 2018, 13:16:
The reviews on metacritic are all over the place. There's a 50% and a 100% and a lot of 60%s and a lot of 80%s. Reviews seem to say that the game is too similar to the previous entries and that people are burned out, but the game is still of a high quality and fun.

A good portion of those poor reviews' main criticisms are for wasting this opportunity to make a meaningful social commentary on the divisive topics boiling over in society today.

I'm perfectly fine with my games leaving the politicking at the door. Not all games need to spew political rhetoric just because they have the platform to do so. Certainly, I won't enjoy the game any less if they don't.

Cutter wrote on Nov 15, 2017, 19:16:
So I'm guessing their license expired and Marvel said something to the effect of 'We want 10x as much monies now!' To which Gazillion replied something like, 'Eff you. We're out.'

Their license was supposed to last until March 17, 2019. So there must have been some opt out that Disney/Marvel decided to exercise probably for lack of profitability.

Gaz has been trying to remake/modernize the game over the past 1.5 years with dwindling resources. Every community update seemed to be "sorry it's delayed again". So it's not at all surprising that Disney was losing interest. You can see the average concurrent players is <400.

http://steamcharts.com/search/?q=marvel+heroes+omega

One supposed insider rumor on their forums is that Disney offered to buy out the game assets but Gaz declined. Who knows how true that is, but either way game over.

Cram wrote on Sep 22, 2017, 22:05:
Sadly, despite their betas and stress tests, the server crashes have destroyed this launch. This is awful (not the content, the servers).

Their "beta/stress tests" were at awfully chosen hours. 2pm PST on a Thurs (Aug 31) and 10am PST on Thurs (Sep 7). I don't think middle of a workday is going to elicit any real stress at least not from the NA side. That's on top of whether or not people had the time or desire to bother helping test their servers.

That said, so far I haven't encountered any issues which is rather shocking given the number of people complaining of issues on the forums. I was able to enter the prologue story to claim my mount and then explore Crystal Desert without any hiccups. *fingers crossed*

MisterBenn wrote on Sep 13, 2017, 00:10:
And now the bad: to me this game has one of the weakest combat systems in a space 4x I've played. They've tried to do an abridged system like in Endless Space 1 but it's worse here. There's a weird system of lanes, engagement distances and combat orders that doesn't really let you control things the way you want. After you pick orders you watch the combat and it's really hard to actually tell what's happening. The cinematic looks great but tends to focus on one ship at a time so you get no situational awareness. From the design screen it's clear that long/medium/short range engagement matters, but I can't tell in combat what range the ships are. The arcs of movement are predetermined and tend to be gentle arcs that start at a distance, then you and the enemy fly close and parallel for a while. No specific way to tell the distance in real terms from what I can see. There is a plan view but that replaces the ship graphics with a collection of numberless, languageless symbols that are so abstract and esoteric that a team of cryptologists couldn't hope to understand them. I find myself just wanting a decent overhead view with health bars and a more achievable way of creating simple tactics around ranges and weapon types like in all of these games. Oh, and there's a command point system that makes your starmada engage in groups of say 6 ships at a time, which I hate because it's so gamey and arbitrary. These rules apply whether you watch the combat or not so you don't have the option of just simulating combat and just playing the game as an empire builder.

Apparently, the way the ranges are determined is based on the combination of cards that you and your opponent play. For instance, if you both play short ranges, then you will have 3 rounds of short range combat. If you select long and your opponent selects short, then you will have one round of long, one medium, one short. And so on. Basically, combat favors long range which is why everyone always favors missiles.

I haven't played in a couple patches so I don't know if this has been balanced yet. Certainly, they've done a poor job of explaining the process above, but that's how it was explained on their forums.

Those are some hefty nerfs.

- Rockbiter Weapon increased to 2 mana cost.
- Tuskarr Totemic now will only summon basic totems.
- Call of the Wild increased to 9 mana cost.
- Execute increased to 2 mana cost.
- Charge reduced to 1 mana cost, but minion cannot attack heroes that turn.
- Abusive Sergeant reduced to 1/1.
- Yogg's battlecry effect will now end if he silences, hexes or kills himself.

Sacrifex wrote on Sep 26, 2016, 15:48:
Odd - I own Shadow Warrior (2013), but, it does not come up as an eligible title. It did find a few others, so I'm guessing it's just buggy.

Yeah it didn't find my Hotline Miami nor AI War titles. I sent in a ticket and I got a prompt response indicating that they're aware of the issue but fixing it requires addressing the accounts individually so it would take 1-2 days to complete.

They said that if it's still not showing as eligible in 2 days, file another ticket.

Tipsy McStagger wrote on Aug 15, 2016, 11:04:
So I never watched Firefly but everyone talks about how its probably one of the best sci-fi shows ever but was cancelled after 1 season?

SO whats the story behind this? another "Star Trek (1967)"? Not that popular at showing but gained popularity and cult following after cancellation?

Fox aired the episodes out of order and I think they even wound up moving its timeslot around which resulted in poor ratings. Obviously Fox could never be at fault for poor scheduling, so it must be the show that needs to be cancelled. This is the sort of show that needs to be watched in order (DVD order) to really appreciate it.

If you enjoy sci-fi, hell even if you don't, watch it. I had recommended this show to some of my friends who abhor sci-fi and it wound up being one of their favorite shows as well.

runnerct32 wrote on Aug 15, 2016, 10:22:
I tried to watch Firefly and i could not take it and stopped at episode 3. I thought it was very bad.

Blasphemy!

By chance were you watching in the order in which they were aired by Fox? I recall following it on Fox and was put off by it. Like boneheads, they put the Train Heist first and I think they reordered one of the later episodes as well. If you watch it in the DVD order as it was intended, it makes for a much better experience.

It's easily one of my favorite shows.

Yeah my experience was the same during the 10 pre-ranking matches. Really hit or miss.

In one match on El Dorado offense, when we had pushed the cart all the way to the final point, we were having a tough time with the final push and I felt like we were shorthanded somehow. I checked the player list and nope it was full. So I looked around for my team and one of our players was all the way at the start of the match jerking around and he continued that for the rest of the match. For a 5v6, it was really close, but we lost.

We wound up going 4-6 in those 10 matches and I'd probably say 3 of those 6 losses were due to 1-2 really terrible players. Now I'm pretty sure I'm not an amazing player, but having people at least try on a consistent basis would be most welcome.

MacLeod wrote on Jul 22, 2016, 11:42:
Can someone actually explain the Titan to me? I don't get it.

According to videocardbenchmark, the TitanX has a lower G3D Mark score than the 980ti, but is over 3x the cost.

Nvidia is reusing the name TitanX to make things confusing. The one you're looking at is probably TitanX card based on the Maxwell architecture (9xx series).

This one is the TitanX card based on the Pascal architecture (10xx series).

This is the post about CA's future plans for the game including multiplayer:

http://stardewvalley.net/post-launch-progress-update-version-1-1-and-more/

Not a whole lot of info in terms of how it's going to be implemented though.

To be fair, he has stated in his update post that multiplayer and platform ports were being handled by Chucklefish to allow him to focus more on 1.1 content updates. So multiplayer isn't exactly taking all of his focus away from the base game.

I'm excited for multiplayer, but I'm pretty sure it'll be a ways out.

jdreyer wrote on Jun 21, 2016, 13:54:
Clash of Clans Dev Acquired by League of Legends Owner for $8.6 Billion…

Jesus H. Christ on a stick. I don't know which one is more mindboggling: that Clash of Clans is worth 8 billion, or that LoL just happened to have $8B laying around. And I thought the Minecraft deal was ridiculous...

It's the owner of Riot (Tencent) not Riot themselves that bought them. I'm pretty sure Tencent is the top games company in the world by annual revenue and profit. They're a Chinese gaming company and IIRC their flagship QQ racing game (released only in China & Korea) was earning $1.2B a year a few years ago before they bought Riot. They also have a minority stake in Epic Games.

It doesn't say for sure but I imagine it's not all cash, but yeah either way, it's quite the valuation for a mobile gamemaker.

Unless they fix the neutered multiplayer implementation that they had in V, I won't be touching this game. As far as MP went, V was a monumental step back from IV. And their excuse for that implementation in V was simply that less than 5% (? or maybe 10?) of their player base plays multiplayer so it wasn't a focus - which doesn't bode well for VI.

Of course, it's a chicken and egg problem... of course no one will play MP if the MP is poor.