Bjorn

At least we already know what a bad Jurassic Park movie with Goldblum looks like though, so I can't imagine it gets MORE disappointing.

I really don't understand music licensing in games. I just don't see the sense from the music industry side on what kind of possible advantage a 5 or 7 year limited license for soundtrack or background songs are.

OMG, congrats jennegatron!

Imma pimp this again in this thread, because I like it so much. Renowned Explorers is back on sale, because a new expansion is out for it. Also, @Gormongous if you were looking for any excuse to dip back in, they're doing a special challenge for it, trying to get the community as a whole to collect a certain number of treasures in 80 hours. I liked the weekly challenges when I was playing regularly, just because they encouraged playing team I otherwise not might use. It's a shame they never found a way to fully integrate and track the challenges into the game proper and it was just a forum thing.

I'll add you once I'm on! The AR added was the X5 Ghost, which has a funny and odd history. It's new and clearly graphically differently looking AR from previous rifles that featured repeatedly in pre-release advertising, and even shows up in game in some cutscenes. Initial assumption was that it might be the "iconic" weapon of Andromeda. And then, on release, it was no where to be seen. BW mumbled something about how it was just a model they'd made, but now it's shown up as a usable weapon in both SP and MP.

Haha, perfect to be all excited about changes, then sit out a wave The Operator is the ONLY class that I don't have now. All my rare/uncommon classes are maxed, but only a few guns are. Seems that the packs favor dropping character cards over weapon cards, which I'm fine with. Oh, and there's a new Turian and a new AR available as well with this patch. Are we friends on Origin? I plan on being on tonight, first match out will probably be KroEngi with Crusader.

Yeah, I saw those earlier and was about to post them! It's a massive set of changes. There are a handful of 200+ percent buffs to things, quite a few 100+ percent changes and then the rest are in the 20-50 percent range. It shows just how poorly a bunch of things were performing. Smart Choke for shotguns has also reportedly been fixed, and their aim overall improved, which should help them a lot. Your intuition was dead on about them being the poorest of all weapon choices in almost all situations. The original poor aim plus the inability to improve aim due to bugged mods just pushed them further into the garbage bin. The Crusader's aim still isn't pinpoint. FFS. But it has been improved, and with the massive damage buff, it's likely at least pretty good now. Early reports on the BSN are that combos are godly against basic units now, even on Gold (at least with the power kits that have good buffs/debuffs for powers and combos, like the KroEngi). Also of note, is that the patch notes are incomplete. People on the BSN are working on figuring out what didn't get documented, but at least a number of powers got cooldown reductions (stuff like going from 10 seconds to 8 seconds) that are in the list. Also, I got a free extra Deluxe Edition pack for some reason (maybe an apology/thank you?), and I got the the Krogan Gladiator! Whooooooo! I was only missing 2 characters, and she was one of them. As she's the only kit right now with the Krogan Hammer as a melee weapon, I was sorely missing having her.

Well, they've confirmed that the patch is coming out tomorrow morning. Hopefully it addresses the scope of changes they described in their stream last week.

Hahahaha, nice catch!

A buddy of mine out there was posting pictures of hail stones lined up next to his golf balls to show the comparison. It was scary looking as fuck.

If you're playing with Random groups, the thing right now is that there isn't much reason to not being playing Golds, since you never really know what the full match difficulty settings are because of the host SP bug. You can be getting Gold level armor on a Silver. Enemy HP values, spawn rates and damage values seem to be appropriate to MP difficulty, but that's about it. As far as Gold worthy kits/weapons go: The Vanquisher is king of all weapons. The Lanat is a very good, though higher skilled, sniper. Thokin is really solid. Equalizer, Hurricane and Talon are all good pistols. For kits, the HVanguard and KroGuard are melee gods. And melee is the only attack in the game that comes close to rivaling the Vanquisher in terms of DPS and effectiveness (that's how broken the Vanquisher is). Any of the kits with the Barrier passive (Hguards, Hadepts, AA, and a couple of others) are all Gold worthy once Barrier is maxed with the Saving Barrier perk. Testing has also found that the store is not in fact all that random, they actually added in a pity or poor luck check. For Expert packs, you will never go more than 10 packs without a UR dropping. There's something similar for Rare drops from Advanced packs, though I don't know the exact number on it. The actual droprate for URs seems to be in the 4 percent range for any one pack, because the pity check guarantees an average of like 1 per 9 packs over the long haul. The general consensus on the best way to spend your credits right now is on Expert packs. Uncommons will drop in them, and you get the best bang for the buck in terms of accumulating boosters and UR chance. The Premium packs might have a very slight edge on URs, but at the sacrifice of getting far, far far fewer consumables. Also, another thing they've now tied to the SP settings is the speed that Sharpshooters aim and fire. Up to 5 seconds on Narrative and down to 1 second on Insanity. I've barely played MP for the last week and a half, maybe 10-12 matches total. I will probably jump back in to check out the changes in the patch, but given what a clusterfuck of bugs and design choices this game has been, I just don't have a lot of faith on the team to be able to deliver an experience that is anywhere near what ME3MP delivered. There's very little evidence that serious testing was done before release (the scale of some bugs is so mind boggling that it's hard to believe that professional testers wouldn't have found them). The balance is non-existent. Some Common and Uncommon weapons outperform UR weapons by better than 2-1 in achievable DPS. And for nearly two months what the community heard was "We had a design philosophy that we followed and while it's different than what players expected, we think it succeeded." Only once the community started putting hard facts and numbers behind how ridiculously bonked this game is did that message change. Hence my lack of faith.

If any of you are still playing MP, you might find some of the recent community testing to be interesting (and embarrassing for Bioware). MP is pretty badly broken right now. There's some error that's causing multiple variables to be set based on the host's single player difficulty rather than the MP chosen difficulty. So far, this includes: Combo Damage (higher SP difficulty, more damaging combos) - Combo damage is so low as to be almost a joke anyways, even when the damage is maxed Enemy armor damage reduction (lower SP difficulty, less damage reduction, down to 0 if set to Narrative) Player Shieldgate invulnerability window (the period of invulnerability for players when their shield breaks, ranges from 0.5 to 0.1 second) Things suspected by be influenced by SP difficulty, but unconfirmed: Player Healthgate Enemy Shieldgate (if this isn't affected by SP difficulty, something is badly broken about it because shotguns don't get any damage passthrough and should) Some weapons appear to be performing differently depending on SP settings. There's one big thread on the uBSN that's tracking all the tests players are doing, and several threads on the MEcoop subreddit tracking various tests. This goes a long way towards explaining why the community has had mixed results testing, and why matches can feel pretty different from one match to another, since it's the host's settings that matter. There is supposed to be a big patch coming this week or maybe next, but it's not clear that Bioware was aware of this issue before submitting the patch to cert, as the community just discovered it this weekend and it wasn't mentioned in any of the fixes or changes discussed by Bioware in a stream on Friday morning. I've barely been playing MP for most of the last two weeks. Between this discovery, other bugs, the terrible balance the game has in terms of powers and weapons, elements of the core design, locking skill points behind character cards (very frustrating for Ultra Rare characters), it just hasn't been as much fun as it should have been. It was rushed out and it is getting a fraction of the support that ME3MP got. Pushing 7 weeks from release, ME3MP had already had hundreds of individual balance changes (released weekly) and its first expansion. MEAMP has had one set of a couple of dozen balance changes and no expansion in sight, with a second set of balance changes and patch to be released soon™.

I did Harvarl, and there's at least a couple of quests left on it that I can do, including what looks like a pretty substantial side quest. Companion wise, I've had Drack, Jaal, Vetra and Peebee with me for the most amount of time so far, but Drack without a doubt earned his perma spot by my side with a few comments ("Well, that might not be the dumbest idea I hear today, but it's in the running.") Cora just seems boring af. Liam's fiiiiiiiiiiine (also kinda boring). I like Vetra a lot in the ship, but in squad she hasn't said a lot so far that's amused me.

So I've hit a point where the game opens up, I had to pick between two planets (Havarl and Voeld), and after finishing one planet, now I have a bunch of options on places to go. Are there any broken quests, or weirdness, or landmines people ran into here? My inclination is to knock out most of the side quests before continuing on to the next big story thing. I'm still spending most of my time in MP though. For as much time as I've put into it, I'm oddly still somewhat split on what I think of it. There's good fun in here, and some of the characters have some interesting things that can be done with them (the HSent is easily one of my favorite characters, because Barricade is that good, and I cared for very few of the Sentinels in 3). But the balance and testing that went into the release of Andromeda in general, and MP specifically, is just ridiculously disappointing. There's no cohesive throughline or plan that's visible in how weapons or powers are balanced. DPS is just all over the board, regardless of rarity, with at least one UR weapon being among the 5 weakest weapons in the game. Even weapons with good theoretical DPS end up trash because their base accuracy is so poor that they're only usable at close range. It's been four weeks since the soft launch, and there has been one balance change (fingers crossed we get one this week, but no one knows for sure). ME3MP managed weekly balance changes, and the AMP team so far is being incredibly secretive about what they are considering and when or if any changes will be released. The 3 team ended up recruiting a number of the most respected regular players and including them in on at least some of the balance discussions and having a dedicated outlet to hear the view of the community at large. Warframe has its Design Council, a similar group that rotates members monthly to give a couple of dozen regular players a direct communication channel with the devs. More open communication with a player base of an on going co-op game is hardly revolutionary in 2017, and the vagueness and lack of communication really just reinforces the community's concerns about the game and its state. There are laughably bad bugs, like Krogans apparently can't shoot a sniper rifle straight (shots are consistently low and to the left, the leading theory is that they have the largest character model and this wasn't accounted for). The "events" have just been pale shadows of ME3MP. 3 included individual and community goals that each rewarded an N7 weapon. AMP's only events, so far, have been an extra Bronze APEX mission each weekend with some flavor text and the default APEX rewards (slightly extra xp/credits and 10 Mission Funds). They've gated content behind the APEX system, including a new map, a map variant of an existing map, a new enemy unit, and new objective, explicitly to make these additions feel "special". Which bugs me, the APEX mission system is really one of the best and coolest additions to the game, it's unnecessary to lock some content to it to make it feel more special. And yet, I'm still playing pretty much daily and having a jolly time murdering aliens and robots and leveling up characters, in spite of the many flaws and issues going on.

Over the last few years, I've spent almost no time in gaming communities besides the Thumbs, and I had actually forgot how ugly and toxic they can be on just an hourly basis. But Mass Effect has got me visiting another forum for news and stuff (because god forbid Bioware have any organization or plan about communicating with players, it's all scattered about). And the frequency that there's "jokes" about diversity, BLM, autism, gays, feminism, etc., is almost ever present. So anyways, good reminder that y'all are awesome and there's a damned good reason a lot of us settled in here.

A friend got me this book for my birthday this year.

Holy shit, congrats Roderick!

I'm warming up to SP finally, have spent some of each of the last two nights in it. The patch definitely improved the faces during conversations, at the very least the eye animations are much better and they aren't rotating all willy-nilly anymore, staring off into space while talking to someone in front of them. Also, I know a lot of people have criticized the writing in this, and while it is intermittent in quality, I think they've done a good job with Ryder nailing the tone of someone who is young, had leadership/responsibility thrust on them, is taking it seriously, but didn't have the training or experience for it. Also, getting the pilot to say, "Kill me now" as he had to listen to Suvi and I flirt is easily one of the funniest things in a conversation in ME that I've seen. In terms of combat, MEA is feeling a lot like how I felt about ME3, which is that once you've spent a bunch of time in MP, combat in SP just has no weight or feeling to it. The encounters individually just aren't big or long enough. Maybe that improves, but I'd doubt it. But since I've begun enjoying the talky-talk parts, that's fine, that's what SP is for. Edited to add: Oh yea, and I have tried tweeting my complaints about the Crusader to some of the MP dev team now. I'm not generally one to do that, but the Crusader being crap has me that disappointed.

I've never been able to run any of the fast rof semi-auto weapons for longer than a match, makes my fingers/hands end up aching too much. The lady can't even do it for a match, but she has some repetitive stress damage in her hands. I unlocked the Crusader last night in MP! My fav gun! And they fucked it up, fucked it up bad The Crusader was a pretty unique weapon in multiple ways. Innate piercing, single slug shotgun, crazy accurate (the highest accuracy outside of SRs, afaik). They took away innate piercing from all guns that had it, so that's gone. But on top of that, they gave the Crusader shotgun spread in Andromeda. So, it's basically pointless outside of close range, because the slug can land anywhere in the reticle (which appears to be the normal shotgun reticle), which just means landing any kind of a distance shot is pure luck, and forget being able to land headshot/weak point shots at all. At least with other shotguns, you can land some pellets at midrange. The Crusader has a fair chance to just whiff completely. It really fundamentally breaks the design/role that the Crusader was intended to have.

There's an APEX mission you can run yourself that's on a new map, Paradox (the mission is These Beautiful Killer Bots). Hopefully the new map gets put in the regular rotation soon, because it seems pretty cool and we really could use more maps. Even if you already sent a Strike Team on it, you can still replay missions by manually selecting them from the Custom match settings and searching. I got my Asari Adept up high enough to do Golds last night, and I like her very much. The 6th evolution that makes unshielded/unarmored enemies float inside the field is hilarious and wonderful.

Haha, yeah, I laughed quite a bit at that. I think Bioware greatly overestimates people's ability to hit and sustain the theoretical DPS on the high rof semi-automatic weapons, unless they're using a mouse macro. For people playing with controllers, it's virtually impossible to hit, let alone maintain and accurately fire.

Once I maxxed commons, I'm just doing a mix of the upper 3 packs now. I generally save up 250-300K, then buy one double rare pack, two single rare packs and the rest in uncommon packs, mostly wanting to get the ranks up on the Asari Adept. I don't know if it's the most efficient strategy, but I have picked up several URs. The first batch of MP balance changes have happened! And....it's a pretty mixed bag, tbh. Some stuff got buffed that badly needed buffed (mostly semi-auto ARs, a couple of SRs and a bunch of pistols). But melee got a nerf, which is a very frustrating change. The only reason that melee is dominating Gold right now is because we don't have close quarters weapons that do shit. Buff a couple of shotguns to damage that equals a punch, and you'll see punching decrease a bunch. Hydra's actually sync kill now too. Thankfully the Remnant Observer's got a nerf though. Those fucking little flying bastards are the single biggest threat the Remnant have.

Courtesy of elvaq in slack chat. A "Let's Play" of the exciting new iOS game, New Firewatch.

Oh, an update on stuff dropped this morning. Also, patch notes. That update honestly reads like a list of shit that should have been finished before the game shipped. Like, this is exactly the kind of thing that the last couple of months of polish are intended to address. But, on a positive note, sounds like the first MP event is going to start on Thursday. Yah! Also, the patch notes say that the devices bug in MP is getting fixed, where off-host players have to try and use a device multiple times in order to finish it. And assorted balance changes that aren't detailed yet. I'd be shocked if the Vanquisher doesn't get nerfed, but hopefully that comes with some buffs to about a dozen weapons. Edited to add: I really, really, really hope that event rewards are guaranteed URs again. I desperately want my Crusader more than anything else in MP, therefore RNG logic dictates it will be the last UR I unlock

Yeah, I've had similar experiences going from Krogans to Humans and Asari. The difference in speed in all types of movement is just huge. I honestly feel like I have more survivability with with Humans than I do Krogans because I'm being hit less. I think the Human Adept will be the next class I take to Gold once I finish leveling up my Infiltrator. Speaking of Infiltrators, my god, the Vanquisher is silly good. Like, best gun in game, no questions asked good. Once I switched to it from a single shot, my level 11 Infiltrator had no problem running a couple of Gold matches. I did just unlock the Naralden (sp?), a UR SR that fires explosive rounds last night. I took it for a spin on Bronze, and it also seems very good. My biggest disappointment in kits right now is the Human Soldier. She just feels off, in a large part because of a lack of defense options. Human vanguards and adepts get the Fitness evolution to auto-recharge shields at low health, plus punching recharges shields. Human engineers get a Fitness evo that recharges their shields when they use a power every 10 secs. Human Sents get Energy Drain to recharge shields, and a Fitness evo that makes shields recharge faster after taking damage. The HSol in ME3 at launch was the only class with a shield regenerating power that didn't require targeting an enemy, and it made a huge difference for the class. Replacing AdRush with Turbocharge feels like a very poor substitute, because the HSol just can't take the same kind of punishment. And it's doubly weird when almost every other Human kit can take more punishment than the basic soldier can.