Badfinger

Specifically for me, what turned me off from Titanfall, a game I put like 40+ hours into during the damn beta with 2 maps, was that the DLC (the map packs specifically) was paid. So it wasn't that the content was small, or late to be added, it was that the game already didn't have a huge community and the developers lopped off its head by splitting it into haves and have nots. If you're offering free stuff, people will come back. If you're offering paid stuff you can drive people away. That's not a hard and fast rule by any means. The people who made Titanfall basically created the season pass, because they're the Call of Duty team more or less. It clearly worked for them there! In a game that isn't literally selling consoles, having too little and making you pay makes it feel like you're being squeezed. Having enough but offering more splits the user base. How does the developer win, how does the player win? It's a hard question! In my mind, I don't think you can afford to make players pay for core content like that anymore. Titanfall conceptually is almost entirely its maps.

Same. I could be so much less diligent about stripping out podcasts and apps from my phone if I just deleted my dumb text messages from 2 years ago.

S A M I don't want to be an alarmist, but you may be obsessed with PJ. I watched the first 20 or so minutes of the run before I went to bed. Yeah, that run was already off the rails super hard. It's kind of exciting that it kept going.

Oh my goodness, the original sacrifice event in Vanilla WoW Zul'Farrak. It was so hard. It was incredibly overtuned for 5 people of almost any level. We (people in my guild, of my level and a little bit ahead of me) spent literal days attempting to complete that event. It was so memorable.

I think, and I am echoing some of what was said on the cast, it's because they are not hellbent on pixel-perfect translation of what a World Cup match looks like down to the seconds passing. It's because this is what you watching a World Cup match FEELS like. This is you, with 3 friends, kicking a soccer ball against a wall and creating your own personal adrenaline rush of the entirety of a professional soccer match by setting up what in your mind's eye is the sickest header. The additional bonus of you attempting to set up a bicycle kick, failing, laughing, and also not having the danger of sending yourself to the hospital for your failure is also present. It's 5 minutes of the distilled essence of an amazing game, rather than the faithful sterile recreation.

So I had the little windows thing in my taskbar. I clicked the upgrade button, and input my email address. The web page told me "Cool you're in the queue! We'll let you know when you're ready to upgrade. Good luck!" I did that about dinner time last night, went to bed hours and hours later, and this morning haven't seen an email. Is this how this is supposed to work?

Yeah, it's unfortunate. It's doubly unfortunate because some of the kids are so young, they have no idea they're saying things that are even remotely controversial. Someone says it on a stream they watched 6 months ago, and now they say it because that's what you say, stripped of all original meaning. It's like uncovering the origins of the word "gank", which is everywhere in games and game culture. Then you find out it's gang shootings and drivebys, and while apt, it's insane that rap culture got appropriated by the most dedicated gamer groups. Moving off unfortunate nomenclature, the didactic pedant in me really hates some of the more mundane vocabulary speed running uses. It's not a "strategy"! You probably don't even know you're using the word strategy, because everyone shortens it to "strat". It's not a strat, it's a tactic! Your strategy is to finish the game as fast as possible. Swordless is a strategy. Gaming the AI so you can kill three of them with one bomb is not a strategy. I'm not even a war gamer, but I have grognard rage over that. I also just don't really know what the usage of "tech" is.

Chris, you have Breckon'd your Vault so hard. It's Reader Mail! (It's Reader Mail! It's Reader Mail! It's Reader Mail!) Are you ready for the Breckoning? Episode 43, Jeff "Gone" Goldblum is peak Breckon. You should actually listen to the whole episode, because it has Bobby Kotick, miniature ninjas, firefighters, and a stunning twist on Batman. But this is the height of the age of Breckon.

I don't like tipping culture, but the way to change it isn't by taking it out on the people who depend on the tips. You can't put pressure on the people who are being squeezed. Ownership has already offloaded all the risk in the transaction. Thank god people who fall below get minimum wage! That's a livable sum, as we all know.

I still can't think of any single player levels that strike me in the way that those multiplayer levels do! I am dumbstruck by this fact.

Yes. I love deciphering through what pots were washed what everyone had for dinner.

Facing Worlds Strike at Karkand Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - Omaha Beach (Single Player/Multiplayer) Call of Duty - Carentan DayZ - Chernarus (THE MAP)

I am one of those people, and you're probably right. People absolutely can and should take pride in the thing their company does. I'm thinking more along the lines that many non-programming jobs are going to be functionally similar regardless of company output, rather than company identity and structure.

Really excited to hear the Ori run was well received, because it's one of the games I was most interested in seeing. I have not had time to watch basically anything. :[

You're making the assumption that everyone who works at Riot works on a video game. The amount of people whose job has a direct impact on the actual video game at Riot is a small fraction of their employer base. For Project Managers and HR and system admins etc etc etc it doesn't matter whether the software output is 1 product or 100 products or a commercial product or a game. I know part of the public stance is that they want your name to be who you are, because it lends to accountability. Mostly money though, I have no doubt. vvv League of Legends (and DOTA, and likely SMITE and the rest) has a gigantic player base, but many more individual personalities than most MMOs. Being who you say you are is somewhat of a big deal. Even though you're drawing from a huge pool overall, on a game by game basis I've totally been matched with complete strangers in back to back games who were just insufferable (or fine! but the insufferable people are the ones who stand out).

Knew that was going to get asked. It's Italian Ice, which is a frozen dessert, but people in the Philadelphia region are weird and need their own words for things (water ice, hoagies). It's a consistency somewhere between shaved ice and sorbet, and traditionally is fruit flavored (when I think of default/basic Italian Ice it's lemon). http://www.ritasice.com/ is the best place to go. They have good frozen custard, too (which their website tells me they won't be serving anymore because of eggs or something).

Life has been happening so hard the last two weeks or so. I've traded all of my money and all of my time for a new apartment and a girlfriend. There were a lot of really expected tribulations and expenses, and some unexpected ones. The bed frame I bought was hot garbage, so wrangling a new one and sending the old one back was a pain. About two days after moving in, I discovered a pest problem, which thankfully seems to have been taken care of. The desk that I inherited for free is like 20" high. Not really ergonomically correct, to be honest. That'll be addressed when the new one comes tomorrow. The lady was complete serendipity. She told me she messaged me out of the blue, we exchanged phone numbers, we met for water ice with my car completely full of moving boxes. She basically demanded to help me move, so a woman I'd met for the first time saw my ramshackle apartment the first night I slept there. We've only not seen each other two days since then, and I'm seeing her at least 3 more days for sure through the end of the week. It is insane. Everything is happening in fast forward, but none of it is bad. I'm nervous and excited. Some really good stress happening at the moment.

Yes. The reason you are supposed to do that is you have entered into a social contract to do that by eating in a waitered restaurant in a society where that's how those employees get paid. If you were in a place where the waitstaff was paid a living wage and you were not tipping, would you complain that they didn't earn their pay if the food was bad? Would you ask the manager to dock their pay for spilling a drink? As for under reporting, 1) yo these people are all getting tax refunds, they may actually be cheating themselves in the long run, I know this is a lame thing to say but it's true and 2) the vast majority of my received tips were on credit card. They were auto-claimed, same as any auto-gratuity was claimed. Even though we were taking home cash every day, basically everything was reported because the restaurant was paying out cash individually for credit received.

By "downside" I believe you mean "additional bonus"?

Pizza and beer, let's do it.

Just make a new account with the right name! Good luck to your friend, from what I understand they generally do right by their employees. I was super nervous and excited back when I applied (and failed to get a job).

My anger at the "bad at math" line is that it's a bullshit excuse for not tipping properly. So we're coming at this from very different directions, Jen!

Austin Walker is basically me but an upgraded model. Late July birthday, Leos are the best (we might be the same age?), born in New Jersey but escaped, Phillies and Eagles fan, video games. But then on top of that he's smart and cool?! He and Alex put up a podcast on what used to be the Dump Truck (Now Giant Bomb Presents) where they talk about Pixels but don't just elbow drop it. Interesting discussion. And I'm pretty sure that's not premium so anyone can listen.

"At least 15-20%" grates at my soul. You are doing the bare minimum to support someone's livelihood at 15%. I severely disliked working for tips. I worked with some people who absolutely loved it. They would also be hammy as fuck, bring up tips, and stop just short of begging for money. My idea that busting your ass, being a good server, being knowledgeable and awesome would carry me through and reward me with a better payout was almost always shot down. Their idea was that if servers were actually paid a livable wage they would be lazy and complacent. Well guess what, servers don't make any money right now and they're still lazy and complacent. My thought was that if you knew you were always leaving with a reasonable (or at least agreed upon!) paycheck for the time you worked, you could do things like focus on improving and learning about what you were serving rather than focusing on trying to squeeze quarters out of your customers. Crazy, I know! I never had enough money, and I felt constantly that if you looked at what I was taking in as revenue compared to what I was being tipped, I always felt undertipped overall. It sucked. It was such a desperate time of my life, and I wasn't working shitty chain restaurants. I was at a really good gastropub that catered casually to business clientele. It seemed like a place where you assume all the servers are making a pretty good living, and you'd be wrong. The only people making out on tips were the bartenders, and for no reason whatsoever they never put me behind the bar. I don't like tipping culture, but while it exists the only thing you're doing by skimping on tipping is fucking over the labor that's been put in a position where they depend on every interaction to make rent. e: sorry if this seems directed at you Zeus, or anyone else in particular. It's a still-recent hot button subject for me.

As appallingly low as the national minimum wage is, the server tipped minimum is even lower. It's not half, it's a third (about $2.50/hr (just checked, it's $2.13)). Receiving 10% on a full meal, busting your ass is beyond disheartening. Even getting 15% can be such a morale destroyer when you killed it for a table.