Forbin

Be very careful with that sand generator. Until blocks start auto grouping on the ground it's going to lag the server like crazy if unattended. Atebit, what do you think about using a dispenser + wooden pressure plate failsafe so that it auto terminates after 5 mins?

I wish I still knew how to play this game. I feel like it was all muscle memory and rhythm I stole from watching replays.

I don't think WoW has been down for maintenance (barring an absolutely massive content patch) for years. They really have an impressive server setup there. Diablo is still new, and probably needs a few more kinks worked out.

lol zombie players with your skin would be epic. But make it pretty difficult to reclaim your loot. Villagers do however have an effect on zombie spawn rates. There was a recent full blown zombie invasion in the town square. We need to keep tracking down dark spots, though the iron golems should be able to take care of most of them.

I think this is a game I'm comfortable not playing, though I really like the idea of it.

If they keep doing that, we may have to do some population control and leave them in a fenced in area.

They seem to have got stuck in my basement, so i made a route for them to pathfind a bit better and they have returned to the surface.

Agreed. Also 30 million customers and 1 server guy seems a bit off.

So we've run some villagers through to the town square and set up some breeding space. Unfortunately we needed some room for a breeding center and had to sacrifice Murdoc's plot (sorry). Twig, we've run the track through your circle, but it was a one time use thing, so feel free to destroy it if we don't clean it up before you get around to that section.

I started writing some stuff, then decided to read through Heckers article as well, and found my post in an string of nonsense. Basically, I think what these guys are looking for was never really a good fit for game jams. Building a game in a couple days is about building a game in a couple days, not furthering game design (as Hecker put it). I've definitely seen some amazing game concepts come out of jams, but to me they've always been about celebrating games as an applied field. They're about getting over paralysis and just building something. Trying out ideas, rather than dismissing them. While Depth Jam sounds like an amazing thing to participate in, I really enjoy the current trajectory game jams are on. I want bigger, crazier, and more people discovering that they can make something fun.

What's going to be our policy on Enderchests? Seems like they could get crowded quick. Also this: http://imgur.com/a/AIhOv

Anything that makes it easier to get Bane of Athropods is a welcome improvement.

Keylogging had cracked the authenticator seeds in the past. It's part of the reason that blizzard trusts your machine for a limited time after entering a valid key. If you're constantly entering an auth key and it's logged, then the hackers can accumulate all those keys and the time stamp they were entered on, and attempt to crack the seed. It takes a long time and basically shouldn't happen since auth entries are far less common now, but it has happened.

Yeah, but we still need to move at least 2 of them all the way from the east. It should be a simple as building a bunch of pillars and then placing and removing doors to chain them along. We won't need any track. But I've scouted it out, and it's not a fun trek.

Ok, so next patch is villager centric, so maybe we should work together on fixing our villager problem. We need to get them from the far village over to a closer center. And maybe I'll siphon off a few dozen to start iron production.

Died from lag in hardcore mode. Went from full to dead with no warning. Honestly, I think that's it for me. Shortest amount of time I've spent on a blizzard product ever.

After playing through some of Act 1 again on hardcore, I have to say Leah's scepticism is incredibly out of place. I don't understand when that ever made sense. Could there ever have been a prologue where you weren't immediately surrounded by hell spawn?

I think its an artifact of the CD-ROM era. Blizzard and others spent a huge amount of time and money creating CGI cut scenes. I didn't have huge problems with th SC2 story. But in a way I still consider it developer writing.

Isn't there something now where you can write messages in books? We could send ender-mail

Regarding projects. I suggest either make a game or make a website. If it's a game, then just pick something super simple and re-make it. If you're learning Python, you could use PyGame and follow a tutorial.

But where will we get the ender pearls to make ender chests????

Wait, I realize that you mean that all level 60 Wizards are the same other than gear. Which I agree is true, but I also think is not a bad thing. Respec'ing is not something that is staying around as a tough penalty in modern RPGs. It's a bit masochistic to ask a developer to force you to grind a character all the way back to cap because they've found a new build. You can lessen the penalties, but then doing so you get faced with the question about why the penalties exist at all. I don't buy the "make choices more meaningful" argument anymore. Designers should be focused on creating more meaningful decisions for the players to make, rather than rely on a grind. If the most meaningful thing you can do in a game is allocate stat points, or pick a talent in a tree, then it's not really deep. If a game's going to do that, I think it should be a really short time investment to reroll.

I'm not going to say they did a great job with the class progression, but that's completely not true. Gear is just stats and minor effects, and maybe later in the game that's more important, but the game is designed for you to care about the spells and runes you unlock. They put skills behind level gates, they put runes behind level gates, they put skill slots behind level gates, they put difficulty modes behind level gates. The game is not purely about gear.Maybe it's different at end-game, but in my 1-30 grind I haven't cared that much about gear at all. And if we are talking about end-game, then it's a bit strange to say it's about progression. Though I think Gwardiens comment about WoW is unfair. I haven't followed what they've been doing for Pandaria, but the talent trees have always been able to support multiple viable PvE, PvP and leveling builds. And while people complain about face roll builds or boring rotations, they're often being incredibly reductive ignoring the rediculous amout of spells, abilities and items they have to manage. Diablo 3's character design feels incredibly shallow compared to that. Again, I've only played it through on Normal so far, but I've basically got 6 abilities I can use at any time 2 of which are typically buffs or cooldowns.

Also, if you draw a line from it, to current spawn, you'll go almost directly through the stronghold.

It no doubt has to do with some balance changes they've made. Design is typically done in Excell, and then iterated on in development tools. Sometimes the big picture pieces aren't properly integrated into the tools, so doing something like making a certain level a little bit easier by reducing enemies, doesn't raise a red flag that you no longer have enough XP to get to a desired level. It's hard enough that players can pick up and play other players games and get XP off the critical path of their game, but there's also the variable of repeating your own runs, or more likely wearing bonus XP gear. The level lock is almost certainly there for balance reasons. They don't want to widen the bracket of that difficulty setting. But it's a bit messy that they put such a giant grind wall up in front of people playing the game properly.