Forbin

I enjoyed the rant during the break. I could tell you what it was about, but then I'd be busting a 'bargo.

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ GIVE DOTATODAY I just wanted an excuse to post that guy. Jake's fake rant in the latest thumbs episode on diretide was good stuff. I feel like I started to care about DOTA just when everyone else got burnt out.

Yeah I used Cubedhost for a bit at work after we shut down the last epoch. They've got a pretty good admin panel, and helped me setup a custom mod pack. Maybe next time we're looking at doing it we should do a pseudo kickstarter, where people pledge an amount to go towards hosting fees. More important than keeping the upkeep of the server down, it'll help gauge how serious people are.

You earn more than enough gold through daily quests to play the arena without paying. The reward for the worst performance in the arena is roughly equivalent to buying a card pack. 150 gold = an arena pass = a card pack, + some gold + some enchant essence for a shitty arena performance vs 100 gold = a card pack

If anyone is running their own box for minecraft they're probably paying more for electricity than some of those cheaper packages, and the performance would be pretty terrible.

I feel like the game is driven pretty hard by luck, but I guess you can counter-act that by building your own decks. But I'm too lazy for that. I do enjoy the arena though. Takes away the F2P nature of the balance, and lets you play with good cards in balanced games.

https://cubedhost.org/minecraft#purchase between 8 and 16 bucks a month depending on how much ram you want. The lower tiers are pretty much unplayable.

Right, that is familiar. I think he was on the bombcast at E3 saying similar. But "does not prevent" still leaves some room. It may be worth focusing on a single platform for launch. I really want to play this with a VR headset.

What's the exclusivity window on PS4 again? Is it a "console exclusive" or will PC be severely delayed?

After talking about recommending games to people who don't play them, I was reminded of this series:

I'm nowhere near experienced enough for these patch notes to seem that scary to me, but I hope people give them the benefit of the doubt. Reading through them it doesn't seem like they intended to nerf things outright, but balance the heroes in relation to other changes they were making to XP and gold. There were a few things like IO's change that looked like direct nerfs, but the rest probably were just in reaction to the other changes.

I swear, this and cookie clicker are just a front for bit coin mining. http://www.bitcoinplus.com/miner/embeddable

So i've crossed the threshold of being afraid of messing up someone elses game, to being frustrated about people messing up my game. Last round had Argentinians farming their lanes all day ignoring pings, voice and text to group together. What's frustrating is that I seem to be doing alright with my early game, often getting multiple kills against my fellow mid Lord and scoring most of the last hits. The round before that we had 3 people abandon. I was using Viper and was completely stacked, we only really needed 4 to win. Then when the match was completely over i started micro-ing 4 lords at a time. I managed to take out their entire group the first time because they weren't expecting it. Once I get through this tutorial 10 random matchmaking task, I'm probably going to try to exclusively group with pre-mades from idlethumbs and giantbomb.

I just don't see developers putting in the extra work to support the steam controller as well as they do with the Xbox controller. When you've got a 360 controller plugged in, most games that have been developed for the XBox will change the button prompts, and have a button layout specifically considered. They promise the controller will be open to hacking, so I'm sure people will come up with some nice configurations to compensate for direct developer support, but I doubt it'll be as good an experience. Also:

Carmack also mentioned that Abrash had built a VR prototype using Samsung(?) OLED screens from two phones, and it had shown him that some element of those screens was important. I don't think it was refresh rate, but I think I remember him mentioning something about persistence. Anyways, it sounded like they were getting more serious working through some of the VR problems. edit: i think it was judder http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/down-the-vr-rabbit-hole-fixing-judder/

I'm most of the way through training, I think it's done pretty well. The mid-lane practice has given me a stripped down way to practice new lords. I'm liking Viper, but since he's labelled as a Cary I feel a bit bad taking him. I'm not too bad with early game, but I don't feel like I level effectively enough to deliver on that promise. He's just so good at scoring last hits and surprising people with the damage ramp-up he has on low life enemies. I also like the sniper, but almost every match I've been in he's taken, and the person using him ends up being on the top of the kill list by a huge margin.

hmm interesting.... Based on Carmack's last keynote, Abrash has been working on a pair of glasses other than the Occulus Rift.

My theory: O + O = Steam streaming between peers Based on the new family sharing options recently, I think what they're going to do is allow you to use the same API that streams on your LAN between your Desktop and the box, to possibly stream your friends games. I have a feeling they're going to try to replicate the way Sony and Microsoft are offering instant play of games while the content is downloaded in the background. I can't imagine how that would be anything but the slowest thing in the world, unless Valve started running an incredibly expensive array of server farms. Never mind that's crazy.

I think it's funny that Canadians are so heavily involved in the Go America anti-terrorism fiction mentioned in this cast. Toronto and Montreal are both very left-wing cities, especially compared to American politics. Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer) is also Canadian, and his grandfather was responsible for our universal health care system.

This really turned into a GoT intervention.

I backed it. A guy I work with knows these guys. Knights of Pen and Paper was good fun.

I agree, and also wonder if that's a business decision that doesn't make sense. Fans will buy licensed games with almost no consideration for what other people have said about it's quality. I think that the same could be true for complexity as well. If it's a game with an up front conversion point, and distribution channels that overpower any word of mouth, why spend the time streamlining the design? Or rather, why is it less acceptable to ship a complex game, than it is to ship a broken game in the world of licensed products? The topic of 90s Star Wars games brings up a huge volume of games that even by 90s standards were a bit on the complex end. I think I prefer the carpet bombing approach, where they just slap their branding on anything, and see what people enjoy without overthinking the demographic. Dark Forces, X-Wing and Pit Droids probably wouldn't make it past modern investors. Why not just take the low hanging fruit and push a re-skin on existing technology. The production cost of a total conversion of CK2 to GoT was low enough for modders to tackle, it probably wouldn't be that expensive to do officially. Also, I think the AoE Star Wars game Galactic Battlegrounds is under rated.

Am I the only one that thinks that gameplay video looks incredibly dated? I can't wait until we're completely out of the era of Weekend at Bernies uncanny puppet show cut scenes. I wish they had waited another year and developed it targeting new hardware.

With their show coming out at 2+ hours every week, and my commute only lasting about half a hour, I feel like I've been listening to Ryan every morning for the past 5 years. Everyone at Giant Bomb is always so open and honest, I feel like I knew him even though we'd never met. This mush be so hard for everyone that knew him personally, I wish them the best.

We're livestreaming all weekend: http://www.twitch.tv/team/molyjam/