Arathain

I haven't played the original FFT, but I did play FFT Advance, the Gameboy Advance sequel. I wanted to like it more than I did, because it so many neat ideas, but the interface made it too much of a chore. Not the battle interface, which was fine, but the menus for buying and equipping items. Job skills came from items, and if you earned enough JP with an item equipped you would learn that skill for good, so you spent a lot collecting dozens of items and swapping them out constantly. Ideally, then, you'd want an interface that clearly showed what skills your items were granting you, as well as stat bonus comparisons, so you could easily tell what you'd get out of an item, and thus if you should purchase or equip it. Instead, you had to switch between two or three different screens in these huge, difficult to sort item lists. Keeping track of all that stuff became a chore I ceased to enjoy. As an example, if I wanted to equip a specific character the item list would be my entire inventory, mostly consisting of items that character was unable to equip. I picked up Disgea also, since that has a DS version. I bounced off that one two, because it is, as described by hexgrid, a fractal rabbit hole. Good description. Interlocking systems piled on interlocking systems. When I came to understand that every single one of my items contained its own multi-layer dungeon my mind broke a little. It'd be a good desert island game.

I'm sort of tempted to, although I think I like the idea of it more than I would like actually doing it. Not least because I don't have the time to make it worthwhile. I do want an excuse to try Monk again, because unlike all the other classes I just totally bounce off Monk.

I think if you look at it as an optimisation problem it will be a very intimidating game. Certainly there's some learning to do before you can build up a pair of opposing functional settlements. However, from there you can very much take a sandbox view of it that is much more amenable. Things will happen. Try to respond as best you can. Experiment with myth units and god powers. Expect things to go downhill, and enjoy the bizarre show. If you're doing it this way it doesn't matter as much if you dip in and out rather than going for massive sessions.

Skyward Collapse is a very odd, unique game. If you own it and haven't tried it you should give it a go. it might really click with you. It also really might not. The ways you have of interacting with the world are mostly very indirect. Nothing you do feels amazing or godlike. Everything is very unpredictable and impossible to control. But... when you get going, and you think you're getting it all balanced out either some random event leaves you scrambling to adapt there's a delighful, sweary pleasure to it. Nicest touch: you need to earn points to successfully make it through each Age, mostly earned through things fighting. However, you have these powers you can call on that really muck with something. The ones that make balancing the factions harder (say, by superpowering one of their units) award you points when you use them. So when you feel like you have things under control, you start to notice all these neat buttons you could push, for which you will get points, and you start to wonder how bad can it be...

I completely believe this to be true, although I understand the frustration. I just played against a control Warrior that required me to play against, in succeeding turns, an enraged Hellscream, Ragnaros, Ysera and Baron Geddon. I actually managed it, although it took so much out of my hand that I would have lost to pretty much anything (in this case, Tazdingo and a Frothing Berserker). It'd be easy to blame the big cards, but on reflection, it was mostly just bad draw on my part. I hit a control Warrior deck and drew pretty much exclusively control cards myself, and so was not able to apply enough pressure in time.

There are ways to work around having Jaunt as a primary. Make sure you put some distance between you and your enemies at the end of your turn is the main one. In cover, for preference. Any ability with Jaunt as an upgrade can be used while charging up, so you could put it in something defensive like the one that converts enemies to your side (name escapes me). There are a couple of the passives that are defensive, so they'll help tank some damage. That said, I mostly ran with it as one of my four.

Yes! The decision to remove any sort of chat is so, so important to making the game as fun as it is. As the podcast mentions part of the pleasure is the relaxed mental level it operates at. I never have to worry about some moron screaming bigoted gibberish in chat, because it can't happen. I've had some quite pleasant exchanges with folk via the e-motes.

I enjoyed the discussion. I really like Hearthstone, because it fills a very nice niche in my life. I only really have time for gaming of any sort in short bursts, so to have a game that is polished, tactically satisfying and competitive that I can play in fifteen minutes is a real blessing. Actually, I feel like I get more out of it than I might if I had more time- since I like to play mostly Arena, as long as I pick my Arena class to complete a quest or two I can basically sustain myself in Arena runs nearly indefinitely, barring the odd dip into Constructed if I get a card I want to experiment with. My initial reaction was to scoff a tad at your lack of in-depth knowledge, but I found that your perspectives were insightful and interesting. It's nice to hear experienced strategy gamers give essentially a casual perspective. I think you underestimate the legs the game has, as well as its strategic depth over the long term. While the game can sometimes seem to play out in an obvious way based on your hand, the huge distinction in achievement between the highest level players and the merely good ones suggest a level of decision making not apparent to most. A few of the really good streamers have taken fresh accounts to Legend rank without spending any money, meaning they are doing so without many of the cards considered the best. That said, net-decking is a big deal, and the meta generally focuses around a handful of decks at any given time, just like the Magic tournaments you described. These do shift slowly over time as counter-decks are discovered, and refinements bring older decks back into play. That this happens even with a small card pool bodes well for future card releases. The first expansion is coming within a month or two, and the new cards are mostly themed around Deathrattles. The new cards look like they offer new possibilities for sure.

I love the idea of enmity tokens. A really nice abstraction. As long as the smackdown you get from sufficient enmity has enough of a wallop it should act as a natural brake to excessive antagonism. It should encourage aggressive players to spread their attentions around their opponents, to make sure no-one gets too big a hammer to hit back with. That means there's a tradeoff, though, since then all the other players will hold a grudge. It seems like, for a builder, being able to build effective passive defenses should appeal. Like, if you build a fort that limits your losses from raids. If the losses are limited to what the builder's naturally strong economy can readily soak up, and the raider is getting a poorer return for their own investment... then you can encourage interesting decisions and counter-play.

I don't think it's worthless to have some decent AI in an FPS where the player can take a few hits. Games, and FPSs more than most, are about creating a convincing illusion that you can lose yourself in effectively. Shooting-gallery grunts who pop up obviously from behind cover so you can head-shot them are an illusion breaker in themselves. I want covering fire and flanking in situations where it doesn't do the AI all that much good because it creates the illusion of determined, believable adversaries and a sense of constant threat. Half-Life's marines definitely lobbed grenades in after you if you hid. That was one of those great moments in early FPS AI design, and quite a shock the first time it happened. That you could reverse the maneuver to real effect was wonderful icing.

I a pleasantly hard time working out where to put Pierce. Used as a primary with Spark it becomes a really good up close blast, kind of like a shotgun. Used in a passive slot you get a generous amount of extra time in Turn. Used in Jaunt you slice through anything you speed through like an anime samurai. My head says passive, but my heart says Jaunt. It's my vote for most stylish finisher in the game.

It was a surprise to hear Dave talking about the Northern Ireland marching season and the Garvaghy Road nonsense. I grew up about 6 miles away from that delightful little incident (and its yearly sequels), and I sympathise with the sensation of being unable to move around because of idiocy. There are worse places to be stuck than Portrush, I suppose. I'm delighted with the concept of coping with frustration by turning it into a game. That's delightfully playful and productive.

Thanks, this was good. Some genuinely great stuff on the importance of being allowed to fail. The concept of player-centered design makes a lot of sense, and I can see how this informs a lot of the design of XCOM and other Firaxis titles. There's a sense I get from Mr Solomon from interviews he's done in the past couple of years, including this one, that he's quite self-critical over some of the design of XCOM. This is healthy up to a point, and true up to a point. Certainly, there are some flaws to the design of the game, some of which might be able to be corrected, and some of them are simply products of the decisions that were made. I would like him to keep in mind that the design of the game is excellent. Really great. There's so much tense decision making at every level. I wonder if some of it comes from those gamers who play games like this for 200 hours, uncover some optimal play strategies, and declare the game broken, loudly and critically, on every thread about the game they can find. I'm not really sure that's ever the primary audience you should be listening to, or even trying to design for.

It helped me to think of Hearthstone as a game about resources. You have three: mana, cards (specifically, cards in your hand) and health. At the start of a game, mana is the most important, since you don't have a lot. As you get into the mid-game cards become more important, since you need options to create threats and deal with your opponent's threats. At the end-game health matters most, as you try to stay alive and get the damage to finish them off. So you need to win on efficiency. To be mana efficient, kill a minion using a cheaper spell or minion- a 1 mana 2/1 can kill a 4 mana Cult Master. To be card efficient try to have your cards deal with more than one of their cards- the Chillwind Yeti is so good because it's hard to kill without spending at least 2 cards. Battlecry minions are often strong because you get benefit from the card immediately even if the minion is taken out. Health is an interesting one. Classes with weapons (Warriors, Paladins, Hunters, Rogues, Shaman) and the Druid can attack directly, trading damage for health. This is usually a very good deal, particularly early on. Fiery War Axe can get rid of 2 3 health minions, for one card and two mana. That's worth some health. In general, obsessing about the health of either player before the end game is not useful. Beware the lure of cards that heal your hero or hurt the opposing hero- if they have weaker stats than you'd expect for their cost to make up for the heal then you're just losing slower. Priestess of Elune is not a good card, and neither is Nightblade Assassin. In this vein, Sinister Strike in one the worst cards in the game- you spend a card and the board state is totally unchanged. Looking at it in this light, the difference between agro (high damage, cheap minions go for the hero for a quick win) and control (keep the board clear until you can bring out some nasty late game combo) is that control tries to spend cards and mana efficiently, and agro tries to force their opponent to spend inefficiently just to stay alive.

That's a neat build. I, as a newly 70 Demon Hunter, and that being my highest level character, never found a good use for Cluster Arrow because of the cost. You seem to base your build on getting back Discipline through Night Stalker and funneling it into Hatred through Punishment (cheaper because of Perfectionist), as well as the extra Hatred you get from your Entangling Shot. Smart! Also, there's no particular reason I can't try that. Is there level of crit chance you need to make it work?

I've been having a lot of fun ever since the 2.0 patch. D3 was always a good game, and this moves it closer to being a great one. Looking forward to Adventure Mode.

I'm playing quite a bit of Hearthstone (for me- I suspect it would count as dabbling for folk with more free time). The ways in which players can and cannot communicate is something that really interests me, as it is clear Blizzard spent a lot of time thinking about it. The absence of any sort of a regular chat function is an enormous, unexpected benefit. I'm sure many of my opponents are the regular breed of gamer-twits that infest competitive games in particular, but I shall never know, and I shall enjoy my games with them as much as against anyone else. It cuts out so, so much stress. You're right about zero communication being eerie. It'd be more like playing an AI. But there's actually loads of communication in Hearthstone. The six emotes are neat, and can add a pleasant level of formality to the proceedings. It's nice to be able to say 'oops' when you screw up. There's more, though. Every card or minion your opponent hovers his mouse over is highlighted, and every card they pick out of their hand hovers over the board, even if they don't play it and put it back. You can read a lot of personality from this. Hesitancy becomes visualised, as does confidence. I like to play my turns fast once I figure out what I'm doing, once cards and attacks coming in a rapid succession. Clever stuff. Very deliberate design. I'm enjoying the game a lot. There's plenty of meat there. It's quite generous to freeloaders like me (mostly- I bought a couple of packs because I got a shiny for spending money in the beta). I get enough cards to feel satisfied and to make some decks I'm pretty happy with. Current favourite deck- I only have one Legendary rarity card. It's a card with decent stats that essentially replaces itself once when it dies. There's a card called Faceless Manipulator, which becomes a copy of any other minion on the board when played. There's a Shaman card that replaces a minion once if it dies. The combined effect, if all played together, is that my one really good card goes a very long way indeed- the legendary dies, spawns t replacement, then is replaced with the ability to spawn yet another replacement. And I have two of those.

Specifically when we talk about privilege in contexts like these it refers to the numerous perks and advantages, that I, for example, enjoy because I am variously white, male and straight. The key thing about the way privilege works is that it is almost entirely invisible to the privileged, because that's just how things are and how they have always been. It's normal. Important: being privileged is not an indication of bad character at all. It just is. I was born this way. What matters, all that matters, is how I behave once I discover the ways in which I have benefited from my status in ways that others cannot. Two key things about the way discussions centered around privilege inevitably go, noting that almost all discussions about discrimination center around it in some form: 1. People get uncomfortable fast. Really fast. It's why these sorts of discussions are so difficult. Common results include defensiveness, denial, hostility, and forum threads exploding to ten pages in a day. People will go to great lengths before they'll admit to being advantaged. Learning to deal with your own privilege is painful and takes time. It shouldn't have to be this way, but apparently our brains are just wired like that. 2. Those with privilege underestimate its impact on those without. Women should be fine with representation in gaming because you have Samus and Lara Croft and April Ryan and lots of characters, right? People being systematically harassed on the Internet should just grow a thicker skin, because it's the Internet. Women sick of catcalling should learn to take it as a compliment. These are real things that are visibly deeply hurtful to a lot of people, not to mention symptomatic of very broad and serious cultural issue, yet large numbers of men sprout out of the woodwork to post in discussions about how it isn't that big a deal, and there's a big fuss being made out of nothing.

You mentioned that for long term players of EVE the meta game is the big draw. This seems to have reached a fairly extreme state. There was a AMA on Reddit recently from a person who ran a major EVE alliance. I haven't read the whole thing, but even skimming it is fascinating. Relevant to the point, someone at this level of the game rarely has time or need to actually log in and fly a spaceship around. Managing their executive team (they actually have an HR department!), using managing in the business sense, takes up all of their time. The other thing I liked: the most dangerous and stressful job in the galaxy is courier/trucker. Most of them burn out pretty fast. http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1weo82/i_used_to_run_the_largest_alliance_in_eve_online/

It seems to me the problem with Sean losing it with the Dazzle in question, and similar events in a great many games of Dota and like games could be solved by suitable application of monocles. Think about it: if you'd been wearing a monocle while playing the exchange would have gone very differently. "I say," you would have said, "that unfortunate little scuffle was rather closer than it appeared. Why, dear Dazzle, had you made use of your heal but twice I do feel that we would have carried the day." "My deepest apologies," the Dazzle would inevitably have replied. "The moment quite overtook me, and I acted without due thought. Next time I shall apply myself appropriately." "Why, think nothing of it!" you would have exclaimed. "I find myself eager for the next scrap. We'll trounce those rotters and win the day!" And so on and so forth. I remember reading some research that Riot (I think) had done on instances of unpleasant behaviour. They expected to find most incidents being perpetrated by a minority of players- trolls and jerks who took spiteful pleasure from taunting their own team. Instead they found that most of it came from otherwise normal, decent players who just had the occasional game where they lost their temper. Tense games, these ones.

I'm glad to hear that Clockwork Empires is getting some attention. I been reading the dev blogs on and off, and it is sounding really excellent. I will hold out on purchasing until a few trustworthy folk have played it, though. I loved Dungeons of Dredmor, but this this game is not like that one, and it's several orders of magnitude more complex. I think I agree that for the moment the traditional RTS is dead as a mainstream genre. Great companies like Eugen and crowd-funded ventures will ensure that fans can still get a decent one once in a while, but they'll remain a niche product. Perhaps that's not a bad thing. It'll give them a bit more freedom to develop and evolve. In general I'm a little bit bothered that Wargame: AB failed to garner much critical attention. It seemed to pass a lot of people by, which is a shame. Strategy gamers have been banging on for years about wanting more interesting campaigns in RTSs, and when one shows up everyone's like "oh interesting, maybe I'll look at that later" and then never do. I've been trying to get into Civ V with the expansion on and off over the past couple of months, but my games all go about the same way. I'm off in a part of the map doing my own thing. I'm choosing civic and religious perks, building trade routes and the occasional unit so I can beat up some pesky barbarians. There are some other civs off over there presumably doing the same thing. I say presumably because we barely interact. We can't have enough cities to have border conflicts. They never seem to set up trade routes with me. They rarely want to make any diplomatic trades. They're militarily totally passive- they don't seem to want to bother me and with the happiness mechanic I don't see that taking them on would be all that worthwhile, what with the huge time and resource commitment required for an invasion force. I get to somewhere in the Middle Ages and give up out of boredom. Does it get more interesting after that? Should I push on? Do I really need to be the aggressor?

Not that I know much about the science of aging, but it seems like mid-twenties is a little bit early, aware as I am of the intense nature of play. The only other sport I can think of with such hard limits is American Football, and that's due to the repeated hard impacts.

Could I ask a quick aside question on the eSports topic? Why do players age out so fast? Rob joked about aging out at 24, which is clearly not far from the truth.