mkenyon

Stolen from GAF: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=872357

Shame indeed! Sorry

I thought about this guy during the recent episode that had a discussion about Destiny and the Moon Wizard. I'm surprised I never mentioned him before, because he personifies Idle Thumbs. Esoteric, crazy music, Wizard garb, and general wackiness. His name is a combination of Moon and (Big)Dog. I mean, look at this guy. From Wiki: Please mock if I'm LTTP on this, but I had to share.

Dat white guilt

I look at it like this. In Dota (or any competitive game outside of basic TDM type stuff), you need to communicate. That skill is equally important as last hitting, or knowing what character to pick based on team comp. If you purposefully choose to play in a region where you know you won't be able to communicate, you are screwing over your team from being able to play well. Spanish, I can accept as there's at least some cross knowledge and understanding of languages in the social zeitgeist. But Portugese, Russian, Ukranian, Malaysian, etc? C'mon.

I feel ya, and I don't think you are incorrect. I think it's just too early to know for sure. Heck, will any of the initial games even be built on new engines? I, for one, can not wait for the release of whatever UE4 game comes out, just so it can start to answer questions of what to recommend people!

This is way off topic, but it's rather disingenuous to say that you have the answers, base them on speculation, and then deride people who have empirical evidence to back it up. I get what you're saying, as things may change, but I find the conclusions a bit simplistic at best. "Those CPU's have 8 cores, therefore having more cores is good!". When the total power of said CPUs is more in the realm of a single Intel Sandy/Ivy/Haswell core, it feels like jumping to conclusions. I know it's hard to say, but "I don't know" is the only real recommendation we can give at this point

Maybe. Any evidence we have right now is still saying no. It's not definite though. Scott Wasson, from TechReport on the subject:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=600246 For something that is at home next to a TV: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=65541586&postcount=3 This would probably be really great advice in the past, but this time around things are really different. The CPUs in the xbone and PS4 are more in line with the new iPhone CPU's (kid you not) than they are desktop processors. Even assuming 100% scaling on the 8 cores, it puts the total power just over a single core of a Sandy/Ivy/Haswell i5. Graphics, again, you can have all the VRAM in the world, but you need the ability to render said data. The APU that's in the consoles isn't anything to really write home about. This isn't like when the PS3 or 360 came out when they were challenging the best of the best PC's at the time. That's just on a hardware level. Once you start to look at the possibilities of where SteamOS can go, it's a really exciting future.

Video RAM is, of right now, very overblown. Some comparative testing of Kepler cards between the 2GB and 4GB variants are showing no difference in performance, even when the VRAM is loaded up to the max. They've only been able to do this by cranking AA levels and/or downsampling though. Low powered APU in ITX form factor being served up by a proper tower in a closet seems like the ultra-nerd way of the future.

It works fairly well with the Shield as well, even over wireless. In non twitch type games, the input lag isn't even noticeable. I know that Valve is working to build the OS around minimizing input lag as well, which is great to see.

Excuse me, I mean server in the loosest sense of the word. As in, your main gaming machine which is doing the workload and serving video to the client. From: http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/8/3852144/gabe-newell-interview-steam-box-future-of-gaming This kind of theory seems implied with the marketing information as well.

They confirmed this at CES earlier this year, IIRC. Maybe it was the year before. I'm *really* interested in how the server side of the streaming service handles workflow. With so many games being as CPU dependent as they are, how is this all going to play out if you were streaming multiple games at once?

Here you go: http://www.modmic.com/ Personally, I really dislike all of the USB microphones. They have a little whine and pop to them that sounds very digitized. The ModMic is the only one I've found that can compare to the mic on my old Sennheiser PC-350s.

Sean was talking about highly polished competitive games on the ruination cast, so I thought I would create a thread about some titles that I've played in this vein. My group of buddies primarily plays competitive games, been this way for 10+ years starting with Tribes and Q3A. One of the things that has always been the difficult part about getting into these games is that dropping in a random public server leads to inherently unbalanced gameplay. Between stacked teams, players dropping in and out constantly, and a system that is designed for a smaller amount of players in comp (5v5 CS for example) is filled with 15+ players. Adding in the ELO/ranking system for matchmaking really helped bring competitive play to folks that otherwise wouldn't organize with a group of players to play set matches. This one characteristic is what makes Lords Managements so successful, in my opinion. Every game you step into is a scrim, which is pretty awesome. That rush, that excitement, that huge play that changed the tide of the game is what makes comp play so exciting. When you jump into a 16 man game of CoD, CS, or whatever, that never really exists because of the chaotic nature of it. As much as CoD gets crapped on by the Idle Thumbs community, I am truly excited for the inclusion of an ELO/ranking system in BLOPS 2. Really, is the core gameplay any good in Lords Management? Would you consider jumping into a random public game that is 10v9, then 8v10, and 9v9 throughout the game? Are the mechanics and system of interaction good enough to make that enjoyable? Of course not. The joy of playing those games is entirely about the competition. Even the system of interacting with the game world and your 'Lord' is extremely obtuse; it's something that you're always fighting against. So, just throwing out my recent favorites in terms of competitive games that are in this vein. Tribes: Ascend QuakeLive (of course) Warsow Smite (Lords Management with nothing but skill shots, love it just on that premise alone - this is the one you need to try out Sean) Firefall (if they follow through on the matchmaking/ranking promises) Dota 2 CS:GO APB Reloaded I was also quite into Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2. The fact that SC2 came out and crapped all over the communities of both of those games is a travesty. They were such an advancement in RTS design. DoW2 was almost like Dota meets Company of Heroes. Pretty rad game. *edit* Totally posted this in the wrong forum. I'm ashamed. Can a mod move it? Also, #ESPORTS

Why would you say this without knowing what the system entails?

You can communicate in a reasonable manner. The VGS system is incredibly comprehensive.

Dota/HoN/Dota 2 did that for PC! (as did the 360) I think ultimately, when you have a group of players come together, and their level of fun is entirely dependent upon the group of guys that they are playing with, you're going to get assholes and emotional flaring. Competition just brings that out of people, definitely a double edged sword. Smite made one of the most brilliant choices I've seen. There is no ability to chat to your team in game. You can use a very comprehensive global chat menu born out of the Tribes VGS system to alert players to what is going on and organize. As a result, there's not a ton of hate. The most you can do is ping spam.

Love the 'Lords Management' edits.

Knock some freaking wood now, before it's too late!

As in, don't store anything that isn't immediately disposable on the SSD, or if you do, make sure it's being automatically backed up. Keep around exe's of downloaded games, and backup your Steamapps folder. That allows you to just drag and drop it. When you start to store things everywhere, the task of reformatting becomes not only a dreadful act, but incredibly time intensive. I think my time from reformating to having my computer all perfectly the way I want it is like an hour at this point.

Yeah, but dealing with customer service and RMA's can be a headache. Generally you're going to be fine, but there are a *lot* of horror stories about OCZ in particular. Just because they're legally held to it doesn't mean that they will do anything in a timely manner.

Most comprehensive build guide on the net. Updated monthly, buy the 'Excellent' or 'Enhanced' on there. Also, truth about SSDs. But Intel's newest stuff is pretty bad. 320 is the most reliable, but slower than current gen SSD's. There's no reason to buy anything other than the Samsung 830 or Crucial M4. SSD + RAID/Fileserver/NAS. Have the backup solution in place to protect the SSD. Get smart about usage and then you'll even find it easy as pie to reformat when you need to update video drivers. Anecdotal, but I've not had a single SSD fail, even out of the ones I put in the office workstations. That's a total of ~21 SSDs between home and work, not a single failure. I've stuck to Samsung 830s for work, Crucial M4s and Corsair Force GT's on my home workstations. My media center and custom router are running off of Vertex 2's that have been going strong for almost 2.5 years now.

Hardware and PC building is a hobby and partial occupation (do custom builds and some sponsored stuff). The guides put out by the big sites always seem to be a bit lagging or hastily put together for some clicks. www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=493301 This thread has the most amazing and comprehensive information you could ever need when considering building a PC. Hazaro and myself spend hours making sure that each part listed is the best possible buy for the money. It's a project of love since neither one of us get paid for it, so there's nothing but real talk.

Anyone been playing? Looking at my Steam profile, I've sunk 30 hours into this game in the past two weeks, which is huge for a person that averages 10-15. I've barely dipped into the multiplayer. However, the additions to the single player campaign, although fairly simple, have made it a richer experience. There's now marriage, politics, and a slightly changed early game that makes it much more approachable. You can even start your own Kingdom now. To me, this game really encapsulates what is so great about PC games. It doesn't have to cater to a broad audience through profit motive, and it doesn't need to be absolutely polished to have people enjoy the mechanics and overall game. Furthermore, it's a completely open and emergent world. Being able to create your own experience is a trait that seems unique to the video game medium. I love it.