Badfinger

It's funny you should mention that! I started listening to Lexicon Valley last week and one of the episodes I downloaded deals precisely with "try and" vs "try to". Very enlightening. Lexicon Valley - And Infinitum

My coworker knows I hate selfies, so here is a selfie she took of us.

my recommendation is grab the Trackmania 2 Stadium demo off steam and then if you are feeling it, pay the $10 bucks for it.

Where did this Rocket League game come from? I'd never heard of it, and now it feels like it's all over the place.

Congrats Vasari! Nice kilt. Nice sporran. Cestus, don't be concerned with posting on here! This thread is for talking about your life. Definitely don't be concerned that you're overstating the way you feel. You know what it feels like, and that's certainly not lying! I am glad you were able to tell your mom, and it sounds like she had an even-headed reaction.

United is good! I should mention that Trackmania 2 Stadium has a free demo on Steam right now in anticipation of Trackmania - Whatever the Next Crazy Thing Is, and that appears to be what people are playing right now.

The shot at 2:40 hit me really hard. It's not even a film shot, it's just a bunch of people standing around. But it's a bunch of people in rebellion flight suits milling around a ship at sunset, and it's so good.

I haven't watched either movie being discussed, but I really just want to put something in spoiler text so I can be part of the thread.

Part of me would agree objectively that PoE is "good" and part of me wants to argue about it. When I wanted to Diable and didn't want to spend any money I tried it, and I bounced off of it pretty hard. The skill thingie makes my eyes cross.

The expansion was very good. Great, even. I'm not saying you should spend the money, I'm saying it's worth the money I spent and even justified the money I spent on the original game.

Oh, I would actually really be interested in trying out NS2! Is there something I can offer you in return?

Diablo's a really good game. Who wants to play Diablo this weekend, everyone?

Hi old guy. You assigned tank and mage targets to Majordomo Executus' adds, and when the stoner mages who didn't pay attention got the raid wiped you FUCKING HOLLERED at them because you were an angry young asshole who was going through rough shit and used World of Warcraft to escape. That was February of 2005. You're old. That wasn't even angry yelling. It's just at a certain point, there's no reason we should have died to things we died doing. With that said, what an ass I was.

We definitely referred to the encounters between bosses in Molten Core as "trash pulls", but the first time our raid managed to get that first set of Molten Giants down and we didn't wipe, if a guild member was in the same room with me I would have high-fived the shit out of them. 6 weeks later if we wiped it was a lot of angry ventrilo, because even blasting through Molten Core took like 4 fucking hours. Same monsters, referred to the same way at different times, different perspectives. I believe we referred to that as "farm status". It's not a worthless encounter, but it has been mastered (or at least beaten).

The point wasn't that there aren't skills that are more challenging to master. The point was that you can successfully argue all your way down to the granular level what takes or is a "skill" and what isn't, such that the term as defined isn't a concrete solution to answer the question. A hot dog is not a sandwich.

www.strava.com is a website that's similar to chains.gg except it's specifically for running and cycling, where you join up in a group to set goals for yourself. They are having a Tour de France challenge, where over the course of the Tour you challenge yourself to cycle half the distance of the Tour (about 1600 km). https://www.strava.com/challenges/letour The person currently leading the challenge is Thibaut Pinot, a podium finisher in last year's Tour. He signed up, and it's hilarious.

That's how I like my Fridays.

Hitting the 1 key on cooldown is a skill. Setting up your party so they're all using the correct attacks is a skill, etc. You can go all the way down on this until literally everything is trash or nothing is. I think we might have to agree that it's a broad and subjective definition that can change from genre to genre, game to game, and possibly even level to level. Like I said before, the first monster in Dark Souls after you've been playing for 10 hours is DEFINITELY a trash mob to me. Yet at the same time, I totally agreed with the argument put forth that it wasn't. Christmas Duck is a trash mob.

Maybe we can redefine what we're talking about with "trash mobs"? You could conceivably look at it from the perspective of what you get from them rather than what you do? So if you're getting vendor trash, they're trash mobs? If you're seriously thinking about trying it again my suggestion would be to move or rename your entire addon folder and go in completely vanilla. As you find yourself wanting or needing addons, reference your folder and grab the updated version. It has the added benefit of if you don't actually want an addon or its functionality is now duplicated in the standard client, you haven't wasted time hunting around to update it.

I think the game in question matters in the context of using "meta". This is more a "random thought" post, but in this case, is the goal of No Man's Sky actually to reach the center of the galaxy? That is to say, if you reach the center of the (galaxy/universe), do you win? Or to approach it from the other angle, if you do not reach the center of the galaxy, do you not win? Is there another way to win? In this context, the meta game of getting to the center of the galaxy is HOW it's done. Just jump to the next closest planet as fast as you can, vs upgrading and taking large jumps, etc. I'm probably too tired to be coherent.

SHOULD LEGOS TALK?! It's interesting that World of Warcraft was used as the example of "an MMO would never upgrade its engine like DOTA going from Source 1 to Source 2", because World of Warcraft has totally revamped nearly everything about the game, engine-wise. They didn't come out and say it's WoW 2, but Cataclysm and Warlords of Draenor were both very large visual bumps and the game requirements jumped a bit too as far as I know.

It's interesting that we seem to be in agreement that both the Souls monsters and LoMa creeps are not "trash mobs", but the Souls monsters decrease in value as the game unfolds (the first mob in the first area is always worth the same number of souls forever, but that number becomes less valuable in proportion to your level) while creeps (In League at least, the game with which I'm most familiar) increase in gold value over the course of the game.

I humbly disagree that Souls does a good job, but that's personal preference. I would also suggest that Souls absolutely has the same trash mobs that every other game does. In fact, the Souls games glorify and revel in their trash mobs. They just present the scenario for clearing it differently. I don't think I've ever even seen 101 so I can't comment, but Bayonetta feels like a completely different game than what's being discussed to me. It's a character action game rather than an ARPG or RPG, and you get paid in score rather than in loot. So you level up Bayonetta, but you'll never find a +2 Hair, and every enemy you kill of the same type gives you the same reward rather than having a loot table.

I think it's because most RPGs and ARPGs with that sort of loot system can trace their way back to tabletop roleplaying (and probably specifically D&D). The mechanics are the same, but a dungeon with 15 enemies in it in a D&D game could possibly take hours to get through, and a room with only two skeletons that pose no challenge could take 10 minutes to get through because you have to try and pickpocket the skeletons, try to talk to the skeletons search for traps, search for hidden doors, get pizza, wait for the DM to come back from the bathroom, etc. Having a computer handle all the heavy lifting of the mechanical aspects of combat (hits, misses, damage, experience gained, tracking inventory, status, magic, etc) means you can vastly speed up the process of cremating two skeletons but you don't get the fun roleplaying experience of being disappointed with 4 gold pieces (WHERE DO THE SKELETONS KEEP IT?!) because you're instantly vaporizing 5 more skeletons. The other question is what's the alternative that's actually fun and keeps people engaged?

Do you mean literally from blowing up the nests, or from the monsters that spawn from the nests? I can say with certainty that I have picked hearts off of dead nekkers. Hot tip: the bartender in Oxenfurt ALWAYS has at least 1 of the components for white gull every time you enter into a dialogue with him.