A tradesman with a great working knowledge and a willingness to be open with information is a rare and wonderful thing!

I hope in the next beta patch some of the gem quest rewards are fixed up. Starting as a melee Shadow it was pretty appaling, with only Viper Strike and Whirling Blades in the whole of act 1.

Act 4 is pretty nice so far, it continues the trend each act is more accomplished and stylish than the one before. Also the act soundtrack is the best yet, it immediately seems fresh compared to the existing stuff. Probably because I haven't heard it for hundreds of hours yet!

The new pack dynamics are interesting, packs of mobs now stay closer together than they did. Potentially you can AoE them down more cleanly but it also means they attack as a group more often. Act 4 has some outrageous physical projectile burst damage now! Even with the nerf to Ondar's Guile it's going to be seriously tempting still if things stay like this.

And yes, the introduction of lockstep is merely a week away! GGG must have some confidence that it will live up to what people expect because they have been backing it while knowing how rabid and furious the fanbase can be! Hopefully it will remove the outrageous desync moments the game has because it's the most glaring thing that puts people off, I'm sure.

Reddit highlights the best user review so far!

"Able to play on launch day. 10/10"

I've watched Day9 play some of it, it looks very promising. It has a really clear, modern presentation and all the overlays look great and are very communicative. Street level view is awesome if a little cartoony! It seems comprehensively featured, no idea yet as to how big an area you can command or what performance is like when you do so. He had a beginner town on the go and performance was flawless on whatever machine he was playing on. It seems very polished and doesn't seem overly gimmicky.

Some videos started appearing on YouTube. Could end up being fun but needs a bunch more time in the oven yet.

I hope that device plays the Family Guy "Full Blown AIDS" song when appropriate!

Did any of you guys ever play the Homeworld 2 Complex mod? I learned of its existence after I lost touch with the guys I might have played it with so I never tried it out other than playing with a couple of the ships in a skirmish. Seemed like it had a bunch of new ideas and lots of depth, anyone try it?

Interestingly, the 3912 warnings constituted just under 3.5% of the current player population. Chris Wilson confirmed on Reddit that "100/3.5% = 28.57*3912 = 111765 players" was accurate to the number of people logging in during their sample period. It's fascinating that an indie studio can operate and suppport a persistent online game with 111k players making voluntary / vanity mtx contributions.

I know it's a labour of love but I hope they are making some profit from their efforts: still love the game!

The new league starts then too, I can't wait. Better exercise a little restraint on the run up to Christmas though, otherwise it's gonna be a banner fucking year at the old MisterBenn family!

Due to evolution, it's a certainty that one day in a similar situation, the ringworms will emerge from a dying host's orifices and wounds and do a horrific shriek at whoever killed their host. While the attacker recoils in shock, the worms extend down to the ground and scuttle the host corpse somewhere safe!

Walls of BlizzCon painted green, money talking!

From England: "It's one of the detriments of living under a monarchy" !

Creston wrote on Aug 28, 2014, 17:34:
You say "Verily, such mirth of grand fashion! Guffaw!"

I was ready to reply with "Forsooth, I pronounce it the jape of the season!" but you beat me to it with almost exactly the same thing...

I'll join in and vouch for Distant Worlds as well! It's the Space 4X I play most these days. It's got by far the best "clockwork universe" in any 4X that I've played - all the star systems and space objects out there are simulated in real time, and everyone's ship movements and conflicts are resoved in real time alongside so the gameplay flows nicely. I like that the races are not precanned, individual empires are made from permutations of race type and government type. You don't just have "the science guys" empire, you could bump into more than one scientific faction but they might be benevelent, warmongering or isolationist etc. There are so many factors in the mix that exploring and seeing the galaxy develop is often very interesting.

It's definitely a heavyweight game, as usual there's a bit of a learning curve to getting started. On top of the usual game mechanics you have a swathe of empire automation options, macro controls and micro controls in front of you - and a lot of the learning up front is experimenting to find which combination will give you the level of control you want over your empire.

I missed out on GalCiv II back in the day, the games that I played for any decent length of time were Orion 2 => Space Empires V => Distant Worlds. I'll be keeping a close eye on this one, I definitely have room for a more streamlined 4X that can be played multiplayer to sit alongside Distant Worlds!

Those kinds of after effect aren't indicative of harm being caused. If you do anything intense/stressful/emotional for a while then take some quiet time, your brain will take the opportunity to process what you've been up to and archive it away. TV watching in general is too passive to encourage those kinds of effect but things an angry meeting at work or a big row with someone will produce the same phenomenon. When you take some time away from the stress, your brain will get working on whatever stressful events happened, and before you know it you'll find yourself going over that work conversation in your head again, or wondering if you'd said something different your girlfriend wouldn't have thrown her drink over you! The fact that games can encourage the same responses from the body demonstrates that they can be truly engaging and awesome!

I've had a few of those lingering effects, mainly many years ago. Here are the ones I can remember.

1) After playing Quake 1 DM as a student, getting ready to sleep and on my closed eyelids I can see Quake corridors pass by as I charged through them!

2) Lying on a beach in Greece, chilling out and sunbathing and images of exploring tombs in Morrowind wouldn't go away on the first day there!

3) Queueing at the tube for work in the morning, I was in the entrance to the station. I was thinking "just imagine if a car sped off the road and crashed down the steps here and a police car followed and crashed on top of it". Then I snapped out of it and realised that this was real life and that was very unlikely That was when eiter GTAIII or Vice City was the big thing, I can't remember now.

I think you'd be surprised how watchable it is for some friends to just be enjoying a game and sharing their natural banter. Like was mentioned yesterday, things like that are entertaining to watch and unwind. It's definitely not required to be experts at anything you play, but it can be frustrating to watch people play when they don't know the basics of a game at all.

Most important of all in my opinion would be to use a setup that is as low maintenance as possible if you choose to have a go. Probably just capture the one screen and the voices at the beginning, and just use some software to cut broad chunks out of your footage if after a session you think certain sequences or matches are not worth putting out there.

My opinion with this stuff is that low key is best. YouTube is already saturated with people screaming and trying to force epic things to happen every moment. Natural friendship dynamics and in-game rivalry are already enough to entertain. Pop culture references don't hinder at all! I'd keep the presentation style as low key as possible, with the aim of not disrupting the natural flow of how you all behave when you play. You don't need to invite self-imposed pressure to entertain and you definitely don't want your shared gaming time ending up feeling like work!

You have a bit of a help up front due to Bluesnews too, you already have a place to announce any uploads you make. Since you have an existing relationsip with your community you can be assured that some people will watch and will care enough to give some good feedback.

Man do I love Path of Exile! I'm probably up to about 1500 hours over the past couple of years, it's easily the most fun I've had with an action RPG game. Diablo 2 rocked my world back in the day, introducing me to the magic of the genre (and it was a really sociable experience with RL friends via LAN back then) but PoE is far and away the online game that I immersed myself in the most. Incredibly I never played WoW but with a few levelling buddies in this game, with the persistent economy and hunt for XP and loot, I feel like this game has given me a similar feeling of magic to what people talked about WoW being when it was at its peak. The character build customisation in this game is unrivalled by any other game that I've ever seen; the modular skill system and the freeform passive skill tree combined with build enabling unique items gives you genuine scope to come up with a build that noone else has ever done before.

Having said all that - man, the combination of hardcore permadeath and networking death bullshit is incredibly frustrating! I've kept a rough count since I started playing and I've lost roughly 350 levels' worth of characters to networking bullshit, mostly desync in the earlier times when I played and mostly disconnect more recently. The worst was equipping a character at about level 60 with four 20 quality skill gems that took roughly a month of levelling to produce with my previous build. I equipped them and within literally 2 minutes I disconnected the moment I came face to face with Tailslinger the invader. It's generally pretty hard to die to Tailslinger if you play regularly but if you disconnect and in effect don't touch the controls it turns out you can die easily! In an instant, all that gear and time investment lost forever - that was a real sickener.

So I've had my fair share of losing shit in hardcore leagues and I'll be playing in the non hardcore league this time round. This new announcement is way better than I expected, there's way more new content included in the league resets than I thought would we'd get. The new stuff like the Masters' item crafting also sounds well integrated into the existing hunt for better loot that players have to do. Can't wait for the new leagues to start!

Final comment: this may come as no surprise but the forums are pretty damn toxic! In game it's easy to join public groups and you bump into happy, uncomplicated people all the time (along with some dicks of course). The forums are overwhelmed by people who will complain at literally every alteration ever made to the game. It's a shitstorm of complaining, entitled demands and personal attacks - and I'd hate to think people would go there and make a judgement about what the average PoE player in game is like!

Assuming the breakdown is accurate, the most interesting part is what gets discussed in the comments underneath that article. $150k was handed back to the Yogscast to complete physical rewards and hire a programmer to try and do something more with the game. The original budget for physical rewards was $50k and they are planning to offer an alternative game rather than work on Yogventures any more. What happens with that remaining $100k? Can they bin a project, be immune from reimbursing backers and keep unspent funds?

On another topic, I didn't mention it before but I'm launching a kickstarter game of my own. It's called "Fundmaker II: The Gouging" and it's a abstract tycoon game with some roguelike elements, and an amazing twist at the end that you won't believe! Anyone who backs at the $10,000 level earns the right to take me out to lunch.

I haven't yet seen a way to play as the preconstructed decks in a custom match, you always have to select your deck from your profile screen. I've also heard you can't get access to some of the best cards you encounter even via unlocking although I haven't confirmed that myself. No 2HG, Planechase or Archenemy modes this year either, it's just 2-3-4 player FFA. It is cut down this year in exchange for the deck building element - I've bought every title in this series to date but I'm holding off on this one for the moment.

The modders over at slightlymagic.net are great at getting the most out of the game each year; they are poring over this right now to see what can be unlocked and freed up. They've already confirmed that a new swathe of card abilities are supported this year again. If they come up with ways to play any deck you like and to add more into the game with mods then I will then make the purchase.

I didn't realise it until now, but I really need to find out what a combat expert can do with a rake.