Xero wrote on Jun 17, 2013, 14:18:
I feel like DOTA's concept was Warcraft 3 for idiots. It lets you play and focus in on the hero aspect without all that micro control in between. I loved Warcraft 3 to death but honestly cannot find enough fun in controlling JUST a hero. Wc3 had the perfect balance of hero/unit/base building. Controlling just a hero is fun...once in a while.

It's the interactions between all the different heroes and the possible item builds you can use that make it interesting. Which heroes you should pick, which lane they should go in, which items you should get, and how your team should play all depend on a vast number of variables. It easily has just as if not more depth than an RTS like WC3.

Smellfinger wrote on Jun 17, 2013, 13:42:
MOBAs magnify horrific behavior by not allowing you to leave without being penalized. In Dota, you either play with assholes or you leave enough games and get put in a separate queue with even more assholes. The forced intimacy is what turns a lot of people off, myself included.

FWIW, DOTA2 has a tolerable community. Valve implemented a mute-ban feature so that anyone who gets reported can potentially get muted for anything from a day to a week or more. It vastly reduced the amount of toxic interactions and resulted in a tirade of terribly written, expletive laden tirades on the dev forum about how the poster had been unfairly muted.

There's literally ZERO story or motivation for doing anything

Um, what? There's text pretty much everywhere giving little nuggets of backstory throughout the world. It's in that weird language so you have to decode it, but it's there. It just makes you work to get the story.

Crustacean Soup wrote on May 12, 2013, 12:29:

Silicon Avatar wrote on May 12, 2013, 11:45:
His "exploit" requires you to have access to the console.

Wow. What a non-story. There are probably a million ways to make the game crash or otherwise screw up when you have access to the console.

A mod can also take advantage of the exploit, and crashing the game outright is just one possible outcome: a person could probably use this to run malicious code. I've never heard of someone delivering malware through a game mod and I'm sure Bethesda games aren't the only ones where modding opens you up to that, though...

Yea, this is the worry. A malicious mod author could use this to distribute code to users subscribed via Steam Workshop. If they combined it with a 0 day Windows local privilege escalation exploit they could own your machine. They'd have to have a legitimate mod, get subscribers, update the mod with the exploit, leave it up for a few hours, and then release another update to "fix" the crash. Mod updates that cause crashes are common enough to not cause suspicion.

It's a bit of a convoluted process, but it's definitely a serious vulnerability.

dj LiTh wrote on May 3, 2013, 17:54:
They could call Counterstrike an Action simulator but that doesnt mean its not a FPS and shouldnt be called a FPS. Once they actually create something themselves then they can name it whatever they want.

Well, some people claim that ARTS pre-dates MOBA and that MOBA was coined by Riot to describe LoL. I honestly have no idea; I only threw it in there cos I was being pernickety about whether it was the third or second international.

Actually, this is the third international. It's the second in Seattle; the first was in Europe.

While I'm at it, I think Valve uses the term Action-RTS (ARTS) instead of MOBA

Third person squad based tactical shooter makes it sound like Full Spectrum Warrior, which is one of my favourite ever TPS. If it's basically Full Spectrum Warrior in a 50s X-COM universe this might actually be good.

Panickd wrote on Feb 14, 2013, 15:48:
I'm going to need a link to back that up because that sounds like pretty much the polar opposite of what Stallman stands for and pretty much anything he's ever said.

That just goes to show how little you know about Stallman. He's long espoused a three tier form of copyright; he only thinks "tools" should be totally free. He's always been quite happy for entertainment to enjoy much stronger protection, except with much reduced terms.

Here's a speech from almost 11 years ago where he outlines his ideal copyright system: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html

Here's his view on Steam for Linux: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html

As you can see, he thinks Steam is a bad thing but he'd rather people used non-free software on a free operating system than non-free software on a non-free OS. That's been his view on people using non-free applications since forever.

At times it feels like RMS is as misrepresented as Marx.

I don't see why most people would need correction support. I mean I appreciate some conditions like astigmatism will need correction, but most people who wear corrective lenses will be fine without them while using the Rift. The Rift is going to be displaying an image about an inch from your eye, so you'd need an extreme level of refractive error to not be able to focus on that.

Just wish they would allow modding succession laws.

I've seen a mod that changes succession laws. I think it's an exe hack, but still. Here it is.

Rather, I would expect that the iPad would have a database of sectional charts, ILS approach charts, airport diagrams, etc., i.e. stuff that they'd carry around in paper form anyway.

Right, they have to have that stuff on paper because the law says they do. They'll also have stuff inside their computer too. There's no reason for them to use an iPad; if there's an error and it came down to the pilots trusting information from an iPad then everyone involved in putting iPads in the cockpit would get a stern telling off!

The idea that pilots will use them in the cockpit is bollocks. Consumer navigation equipment is classified as "for information only", which means you shouldn't trust it. Certified GPS / navigation equipment costs an arm and a leg, but BA planes will have it anyway.

Having said that iPads can make a lot of sense for organisations of about 3,000 employees. There's a small UK government department, the DCLG, that decided they could potentially save money on printing costs by getting rid of printers and giving staff an iPad. BA must think they can save money by getting rid of lots of paper too!

But at least you'd have been PAID for those two weeks over the holidays.

If they were given redundancy, they were paid. They also said they provided redundancy in excess of the minimum. In UK law that's one week pay for every year of work with two years needed to qualify. Decent firms that go beyond the minimum usually go for something like something between two to four weeks for every year with one year or six months minimum.

So it's shit but not that shit.

Kitkoan wrote on Oct 30, 2012, 00:43:
Reading this gave me the belief that the BSD that it was similar enough to merit my statement.

Well, read the actual BSD license. Go on, it's only three paragraphs and two clauses. The reason why it's GPL compatible is because it places no restrictions on the use of the code beyond asserting the identity of the original author and a standard warranty disclaimer. That's compatible with anything.

The GPL, on the other hand, has seventeen sections detailing all the possible ways that you can distribute source and binaries. It's been designed to close up all the possible ways that people might take free code and make it non-free.

Kitkoan wrote on Oct 30, 2012, 00:43:
As I said, last I knew, not it is this. From what I read it was, this is why Darwin code its available but why it can't be compiled into a working OS because only what its needed to be open sourced is.

Now, instead of acting like a little bitch, could you stop swearing at me and explain the differences and why Darwin is open sourced but not complete? Or do you have no idea? I took a quick look at the BSD license before my last response and from what I read, it works pretty much the same as GPL.

You deserve to get heat for not even bothering to look on Wikipedia.

You can compile the Darwin code to a working OS, but that OS is not MacOS. It's the plumbing that's underneath MacOS. Any POSIX compliant code should compile and run on the Darwin that Apple releases. As the code has a BSD heritage, Apple is under no obligation to release the code. That's why they've relicensed it as Apple Public Source License, which is a FSF approved but GPL incompatible license.

By saying you think the BSD and GPL licenses are similar, it sounds like you're trolling. The BSD says "here's the code, do whatever you want with it" whereas the GPL says "here's the code, if you distribute modifications you must also distribute the source code for those modifications".

Valve needs to remember they don't release games in a vacuum- whatever features/mechanics they innovate for their next game their competitors are fast on their heels. If they're too long in getting to market then all the great ideas they've had will have already been played out by others.

I think Valve is very much aware of that. The original design for TF2 was for it to be a realistic military shooter, but then Battlefield came out.

That's the same Jane Jenson who was responsible for the death of adventure games, right?

Deus Ex. In DX, you had three endings: control the world by joining the Illuminati, destroy all technology and bring the world back to the dark age or merge with an omniscient AI and become a hybrid god.

Actually, it's starting to look like that's not what really happened. There is an explanation that resolves all the plot holes and the crazy ending: Shepherd was being indoctrinated and the final ten minutes - everything after being hit by Harbinger's beam - was in his mind. There's actually subtle indications at certain points in the game that he's being brought under the influence of the Reapers.

So they didn't just steal the ending from DX, they stole it from Neon Genesis Evangelion too!

Short explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ7bsIpEKIg
Longer one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ythY_GkEBck

If that turns out to be the correct explanation, it turns Bioware from assholes in a bad way to assholes in a good way.

No, I'm playing right now with a character that I've done 1 & 2 with and I've lost my face.

I'm playing with the default now and not too bothered about it, because the Shepard I came up with was pretty ugly TBH.

Did you forget some of that (especially DLC) is tied to an account?

I'm fairly certain you can get pirated DLC. I have no idea if it works mind, as I pay for my games & wouldn't want to risk my account for the sake of trying it.

In any case, if it's being pirated now then most likely there are people now who are hoarding it. I think every single PS2 game only takes up a few terabytes compressed; I'm pretty certain it's not much over ten terabytes at most. That's well within the range of an enthusiast RAID to store it all!

As for the issues with games that do weird things, those problems will eventually be solved with emulation. It might take a long while, but it'll get there eventually.