Sententia

Greenlight seems to me like an idea that won't work well unless it somehow ends up with it's own embedded user base. Steam could incentify being a Greenlight user through achievements/leveling/etc similar to how Newgrounds handles content upvoting/downvoting, but I don't know if that would work with such a large number of games to be judged.

Well now everything works again, I don't know what the problem was but it seems to have been specific to the idle thumbs channel because I could still watch SC2, and it's all back in working condition now.

Yeah it seems the same for me, I can watch parts 2 and 3 but not 1, or any of the other videos.

I tried to watch the DayZ vods on the Twitch channel, but none of the videos work any more. I watched the FTL ones last week and it worked then, are any of you guys having the same problem?

The social connections I've made through gaming tend to be online, but there are movements for specific games like Barcrafts that work well for making local-area friends.

The three podcasts I listen to are: Idle Thumbs, Giant Bomb, and State of the Game. You guys probably know all about the first two, SotG is about the StarCraft 2 scene, from balance to tournaments to everything else. I sometimes listen to slices of other podcasts when they're on about subjects I'm interested in, for example the episode of Three Moves Ahead with Slasher about esports and the one with Brendon Chung as a guest.

I don't think it's going to broadly affect the way developers make games, what I do think it'll do is function similarly to the Wii: a wave of different games will come out focused around it, some floundering because of unexplored design and some because the hardware doesn't function perfectly yet, but there will be some genuinely great ones. I think it will even work better than the Wii/Kinect/etc did on launch because it's making less of a jump in terms of functionality. If you don't care for the direction it's going that's fine, but I don't think it'll fail for what it is, and the people that are interested in it will probably wind up getting something out of it in time. It doesn't do anything to advance the areas of game design you're interested in exploring, but I don't think it does anything to detract from them either.

I disagree with Chris, I think it's incorrect to generalize VR as an unnecessary distraction, it may be near useless for most genres but it could have immense effects on First-Person games. Think about how much more terrifying Amnesia would be wrapped around your face, and if you couldn't jerk your head away from the screen, and how much more horrifying Spec Ops would be. The PC is more visually immersive than consoles simply because of the decreased distance from your eyes to the screen, and this could be a further step in that direction. Taking the movement away from the mouse and giving it to your head frees the movement of the mouse to be used for something else, maybe swinging your weapon around or something similarly tactile. The Rift appears to me as something that could be the launching pad for incredible First-Person experiences.

If you want some coaching or a practice partner, let's hop on skype sometime! I'm SententiaSC on skype, Sententia.180 NA side. I forgot my mouse today when I took the trip to my internet spot so I can't play, but tomorrow I'd be totally up for it.

Shammack that brings me to one of the things I really dislike about achievements: because they're almost always linked to some kind of points pool that peoples' base lizard-brains force them to want to grow, it creates the 'checking off a list' mentality for some people. I think Chris even described a similar thing with TF2 achievements way back when, except the driving motivation was getting sweet new guns for him. If there are achievements, for some people that means they feel pressured into playing in a way that is ultimately less enjoyable.

I don't see how those two examples are similar other than they're both attached to a number. Care to expand?

I agree with your point about developer time and locked content, although I do enjoy content that you can't get to without a show of skill I understand I'm in the minority. The example that comes to mind immediately is in Bastion, the first time you fall off the side of the world the narrator gives you a funny, clever little piece of dialogue, and he never says it again. That could easily have been a punny achievement name popup, but the developers had a better idea: to give the player an in-game piece of content. If developers don't want to spend the time creating content of some kind or other, then it's not important enough to slap an achievement there anyways.

Even when achievements are at their best, they're a lazy method for rewarding players for doing a difficult task. There are better ways to reward or acknowledge that effort. Most of the time achievements are not at their best and they're just awful, I echo Chris "fuck achievements" Remo.

The download links to Episode 66 D:

That link leads to an event that's already over, I had to search around the site to find the Next Tournament section only to find it's EU. If you're reading this thread and thinking about entering a tournament, there are online tournaments for all different leagues going on all the time. You can find them in the TeamLiquid SC2 Tournaments forum.

I assume what the huge amount of overfunding means is they'll be hiring contract work to temporarily grow the studio for the production of this game, making it much more ambitious. It's a weird thing that happens with Kickstarter occaisonally, when a studio produces a game and then sells it they take the profits and use it to fund whatever they do next, but with kickstarter each person is donating to an individual project. Of course the thing about kickstarter is that the people are not investors they are donators, so really as long as every promise in the kickstarter has been fulfilled they don't have grounds to complain. Overfunding is a weird thing, usually not a problem except in extreme cases.

Check out Playing to Win by David Sirlin if you're into the esports shtick.

I have asthma and that doesn't sound like it, asthma triggers much less frequently and with harsher effects.

I have no medical experience so this is an amateur opinion, but this sounds like symptoms of an allergic reaction. If you didn't know, it's possible to be allergic to just about anything; there are several common allergies like peanuts, dairy, etc, but you could also be allergic to anything at all that you come into contact with or ingest. My advice is to document every time you get hives/breathing problems. As far as I know allergic reactions don't have delayed triggers, so it'll be something you touched or ate within a few hours or minutes.

The thread didn't go very far off-topic; the original post was tangentially about language and who it offends/why, and language use as a discussion point is heating up all over the internet, at least all the places I go. When insults get thrown around it's unfortunate, but it's also indicative of a strong belief behind an opinion.

I'm glad it did, but I wish people with dissenting opinions wouldn't bow out when confronted by a larger number of opposing opinions. Regardless of who's right the discourse is useful as an educational experience, and it's something I think needs to happen much more in general. With contentious topics it's good to drag your arguments through some hot debating to see whether they hold up, and if you even still agree with them in the end.

I don't mean to imply that 'words is words' denotes a lack of empathy, but I really do believe it comes from a position of ignorance. To be completely blunt, it's what happens when someone who's never been in a position of serious emotional trauma doesn't have the experience to compare it to serious physical trauma. To say the former is less significant than the latter seems ridiculous to me, when time and again it's been shown that emotional damage often has deeper effects than physical damage. As a disclaimer I come from a position of never having a broken bone or endured other serious physical trauma, but having come from a background that included a lot of emotional stress, both from growing up in detroit and with a very affected bipolar mother. Maybe I'm coming at it with opposite biases.

Words that attach negative connotation to anything else tend to be detrimental to that other thing in very real ways. 'words are just words' as an argument has always seemed uninformed to me, it's clear when you look at history that bad things happening to people and bad words correlate strongly. The first thing we learn in statistics is correlation does not equal causation, but it's clearly related.

Sweet! Blizzard has so much money, when they host a tournament it's awesome. I'm really happy that blizzard has gotten into supporting the esport scene in SC2, they pretty much ignored it in SC1 and that scene grew huge despite that.

There are tons of online services for chess that have completely fine matchmaking, but I just don't enjoy it when I don't have physical pieces to move in front of me. If you want to do it go for it, but I can't until they come out with hologram services, or some sort of set that connects to a computer and translates the physical pieces moving into actions in the game. I wonder if they have that already... edit: I'm also just not very excited about chess any more, once I got to a sufficient skill level to really understand how the game has been completely figured out for optimal moves, and the implications of that in gameplay, I lost interest. I could look below me and see how much I'd improved in interesting ways, and look above me and see that the only way to improve is to continue being able to predict more and more moves into the future. With RTS games in general and particularly starcraft 1 and 2, execution plays so vital a role that I can improve in a ton of different ways, and the real-time movement brings such a huge weight of tactical nuance. To put it another way, in Chess I was a competitive runner sprinting through the same course over and over, and I could see that if I kept practicing more and more I could bump my mile speed down to 3 minutes. It's not that it wouldn't be rewarding to put in that effort and reach that goal, or that it's a meaningless task, but I just wasn't enjoying it any more. In starcraft 2 I'm an ant climbing up a skyscraper; I can look up and see a hundred paths to keep climbing, and the top is obscured by clouds (and korean men inside onions).