Problem Machine

I would recommend finding alternate means to acquire it regardless if only because the actual devs of the game will never see a dime of that Steam money. Just saying.

Too much of a stretch? Impossible.

Aw nuts. Fuck poverty.

Hey I feel like kind of a weenie for asking but are there The Last Of Us spoilers in this? It's one I'd like to play at some point if I can see my way towards getting a copy and a PS3.

Yeah, I think it's good to be more open, you know, as a person. I think we should all give ourselves a moment, every now and then, to just open ourselves to the world and really take it all in. Being that open might be scary, and sometimes it can be weird and messy, and I know it can be uncomfortable to be judged the way people sometimes judge this kind of 'radical' behavior: But sometimes, by allowing ourselves to really open up, we can be touched, in a special way, deep down inside, in a place and in a way which nothing has ever quite touched us before.

Wow Jeff Goldblum looks kind of like Obama there... Wait, have they ever been seen in the same room together? OH MY GOD.

Hey man, you never know. Some people have gaping holes in their knowledge. And some people don't.

*nsfw

IIRC some of the paintings in Anor Londo in Dark Souls were plot relevant. I suppose it's handy that for games it's super easy to repurpose production concept art as diegetic portraiture.

I still really disagree that this is a more interesting decision to make. Trying to decide, for instance, whether it's worth using your 5/5 to destroy their 3/3, when this means you can't do 5 damage to them this turn, when this means your 5/5 becomes a 5/2 and is more vulnerable to removal, when this means they might drop a 9/5 after the removal that you will no longer have an answer to: All of this is way more interesting than them knowing that they can't attack with the 3/3 because it will just die to a 5/5 meat wall, so they may as well sacrifice it to prevent 5 damage. Admittedly, that's also because Hearthstone has sustained damage, which is actually a really big deal and another thing that makes the game a lot more interesting IMO. If that weren't the case then, yeah, it might not be that interesting.

I've actually been pondering a design for a game that maintains the strict turn boundaries of Hearthstone but allows for the play/counterplay antics of Magic. Unfortunately I probably won't ever have the presence to drive the adoption of such a game if I made it, and there's really not a lot of point to games like this if you can't get a certain critical mass of people playing it, so I don't know if it's worth pursuing -- especially in the litigious quagmire that Wizards have made of the CCG genre.

Well, technically it just takes in-game gold to get into arena, and you can win that back/get more from quests as you go, so if you're a strong enough arena player you wouldn't need to pay to play it. I don't know if I'm that good, but I'm looking forward to seeing how long I can go without paying. My first (free) arena set went well enough to pay for a second go, at least.

I think looking at it as "Magic The Gathering But" is a problem. Honestly, the individual attacking makes a huge difference, and makes it in a lot of ways a completely different game. Paying attention to cards in hand is still important for the same reason it is in Magic: It's important to know whether your opponent is likely to have an answer for the big minion you want to drop now or whether they're going to have to top-deck something. In practice, most of the out-of-turn decisions in Magic really weren't all that interesting, and while I won't say I don't miss that aspect of Magic sometimes when playing Hearthstone, I think it's totally worth it to have a game that is still tactically and strategically interesting but happens over the course of 8-10 minutes rather than 20-30. There are also a number of other ideas in Hearthstone which Magic doesn't have. For instance, the placement of your minions on the battlefield is sometimes important: Certain attacks hit adjacent minions and certain minions buff those adjacent to them. There are weapons, which allow your hero to engage minions directly and gain board control in exchange for health. There are also certain random effect spells which would be cumbersome and tedious to calculate in an actual card game. There's a lot going on which is not immediately obvious.

I think that a game of well balanced and nuanced facets is more interesting than one that just adds needless complexity. In order to actually properly play Magic, each player needs to wait after every single action undertaken to see if their opponent has a response, and exactly how those effects can be resolved can be extremely arcane -- not to mention that you have to choose from a pool of more than 10,000 cards to construct a deck now. It is extremely easy to make a game more complex, and IMO more of a sign of an amateurish designer than anything else. Making a game's mechanics simple doesn't mean that its tactics are simple. If it were, Go wouldn't still be played 2,000 years after its invention -- not that I am in any way comparing Hearthstone to Go in depth or complexity, but Go is the best illustration of that principle, of complex play emerging from simple design, at work.

Assigning creatures to block, as a concept, has been replaced with the 'taunt' special ability: As long as creatures with taunt are out on the field, your opponent can't choose to target attacks at anything without taunt. Rather than simpifying, I think this primarily streamlines the game by maintaining an absolute border between players' turns that doesn't allow any out of turn actions which could kill the pacing of the game and make it more difficult to intuit. On the same basis that you can declare that not being able to block is, uh, a 'lesser' mechanic, I could also argue that not being able to directly attack creatures, as you can't in Magic, is somehow a 'lesser' mechanic. That is to say, basically no basis at all except that it's something you can do in one game and not in the other. In Hearthstone you gain usable mana at the rate of one per turn rather than having to draw resource cards as in Magic. This alone tends to drastically reduce the instance rate of seriously bad draws, as does the fact that decks are half the size as in Magic, thus you tend to more consistently get the cards you need. That said, you can still get screwed by bad draws, just far less frequently than in Magic and, unlike in Magic, it doesn't completely paralyze you so much as constrain your range of possible plays.

I guess that depends on why you hate MtG?

Blizzard is known to have pretty good matchmaking, so you'll probably start hitting 50/50 pretty quick once the system figures out where to place you. Basically, the way the F2P stuff works is that you normally get gold at 10 per 3 wins or 40 or so if you do a quest, which reset sporadically and are mostly conditioned on winning as one class or another. 100 gold will buy you a pack of 5 cards, 150 will buy you an entry into the arena. The arena is a set of games where you draft a deck out of a set of random cards, where one-by-one it presents you with three and you pick whichever you want until your deck is complete: In arena, you (as far as I can tell) always win at least a pack of cards, so the marginal cost is just 50 in-game gold. You can win up to 9 games and lose up to 3 before your arena run ends, and your prize gets better the more games you win. If you win 7, you're guaranteed to get enough gold to pay for another arena entry. If you run out of gold and don't feel like playing enough to collect more before buying boosters/entries, you can pay for them, at I think $2/pack or $3/arena... so about $1/50 gold. Personally I don't intend to pay, since I always like seeing how well I can do without dicking with any premium stuff in games like this, and from that perspective I don't find its presence particularly onerous. Oh, and regarding no trading/selling, there is actually a crafting system: If you have more than two of a given card (the max you can have in a deck), you can destroy the spares to create an all-purpose crafting material to make other cards you might want. That way you don't end up having to grind packs for an eternity just to get that one card you need.

So you're saying it's F2P, except it's not... free... to... play? Okay, I guess that kind of makes sense despite being completely nonsense. It is actually entirely possible to build decks in Hearthstone without putting in any money at all, though -- though, definitely, putting money in will get you a stronger deck faster, with a little bit of patience and cleverness you can make do with the starting cards. Similar to TF2, where if you want stuff the easy way you can throw money down, but patience will get you what you want eventually. One particularly interesting point: You cannot sell or trade cards. Perhaps once-burned-twice-shy in Blizzard's case?

I dunno if they've said yet. They seem to be going for the DOTA2-style long beta / soft rollout strategy that seems to be all the rage nowadays, so it probably won't be a big change when it happens.

Oh god I don't, I already spend too much time watching bullshit on youtube and twitch

Any time you try to boil down a living, breathing human being into a set of game mechanics you're doing something inherently offensive. Even if they're a dead, presumably no-longer-breathing human being it can be a huge issue. As Jenn pointed out, it doesn't seem bad to them because they're just picking out a couple of traits from people they consider friends and compatriots to make little jokes about: However, the moment they put it out there for general consumption, it becomes A Problem. Aside from that blanket problem, I still think "fan girl" is a tremendously problematic card. IIRC, it was 1 white 1 colorless for a 1/1 with a tap ability which tapped any non-female creature. Just... making a creature who has no purpose other than what is strongly implied to be sex, and identifying her as generically as "fan girl", i.e. presumably any fan who is a girl, rather than "game groupie" or "developer fuckmachine 1000 model F".... How did that fucking happen?

In which he holds a full-sized human arm, which he demands people shake at parties. ... Also, since we're talking about Let's Players, I just wanted to mention that my favorite is Northernlion. He's generally witty and fun to listen to, and though he often makes off-color jokes he seems to make an effort to make sure they aren't at anyone's expense.

I really should check out her games, I follow her on twitter because she's an amazing twitter-lord, but I have not gotten around to it.

I feel like this should be integrated into the background assets of a game. Just put the picture in a frame and put it in a room somewhere. ... a horror game probably.