Mea Tulpa

Originally Posted By: Andraste FATE is a Diablo clone, with some Rogue like elements. This is true, but Diablo itself is a clear Rogue derivative. A roguelikelike? Personally, I like the possibility of dying, as it gives me something to work to avoid. My favourite implementation of death is actually in Arcana (SNES): you lose the game if any PC dies.

It's not pirated, it's an alpha version. I know he's waiting impatiently for the omega...

Hmm. It sounds to me as if the writer is projecting his own preference for storytelling-and-atmosphere over tactics onto the current gaming world. In reality, I think those two poles continue to coexist, and games of all media continue to be developed between them. People have varying degrees of comfort with each pole. I think some of his specific complaints are out of context, too. To start with, the complex and obscure solution-finding he describes may be frustrating for one of two reasons: 1) It's pointless busywork. (Example: the item trading chain in Zelda: Link's Awakening.) Note that the same complaint applies to more common CRPG elements like gratuitous amounts of grinding. 2) It's not the kind of puzzle the players were expecting / looking for. In other words, those kind of think-out-of-the-box-riddles are expected and appreciated by text adventure players. They are not usually expected or appreciated by CRPG players. Thus the issue is not that difficulty of that sort is inherently bad, it's just not what many players want.

Every time God closes a door, he opens Windows.

Melee Damage Protection appears with a percentage attached in at least one Geneforge engine game (maybe A4 or A5?) so I think it's safe to assume it does something with 10% and not -10. Given the track record of other rarely occuring abilities in Geneforge (see: Regeneration in G3, Strikes Swiftly in G3, Vampiric Touch, Radiance) it's entirely possible it actually does nothing or almost nothing.

I like soy milk a lot -- wasn't expecting to -- and I find that I _really_ like chocolate soy milk, even more than regular chocolate milk.

Originally Posted By: Goldenking The issue that arise over all this talk of bad teachers, is that there is in fact a lack of teachers in general - bad or good. Not having an optimal number of teachers leads to overcrowded classes, which degrade the learning environment. This isn't really true. It's true that there isn't a huge surplus of teachers and that most teaching jobs are less competitive than comparable professional jobs (due to the combination of high workload and low pay). However, that isn't why teacher to student ratios are so low. The ratios are low because most schools don't have lots of money. Most schools could add numerous teaching positions and easily fill them with qualified teachers, if they had enough money to do so.

Recertification is pretty common in the US -- it varies by state, mostly. The problem is that both certification and recertification have varying degrees of relevance to teaching and to the material taught.

*falcon facepalm*

Hypno-- First of all, who the heck are the "Drop Outs"? Presumably, if they are in school bugging you, they haven't actually dropped out yet. I assume this is your fatalistic and somewhat demeaning label for kids who don't take school seriously? Quote: I will admit there are some Druggies that do want to learn but personally I think if you use drugs then you lose privaleges as they are illgal. The logical problems in this statement abound. Should anyone who uses illegal drugs be put at the bottom of the educational heap, or just those who use the drugs AND are part of this "Druggies" social subgroup? What about people who hang out with the "Druggies" and don't care about school, but don't use illegal drugs themselves? What about kids who break the law in other ways? If I commit theft, should it compromise my education? That would be counter-productive if you are at all interested in helping kids get back on track... Quote: Seregation is a hard thing to define as well. Techincally a company hiring Trained and Educated people is segregating its company from the less trained workforce. My idea is a type of segregation but only for those who won't learn otherwise. Thuryl kind of covered this, but to put it another way: the difference is that the company's purpose is not to hire every last worker. The purpose of a public education system is, however, to educate every last child. If what you're really advocating is that people get individually appropriate teaching strategies and learning assistance, that doesn't necessarily require separate schools... the main point of separate schools would be to split people up socially because one group isn't comfortable having another group around.

wikipedia.edu?

You may not like it, but the difference between a one-penalty party at 20-30% and a two-penalty party at 35-45% is pretty tiny, one or two levels over the course of the game. There's absolutely no strategic reason not to take them.

Originally Posted By: Preposterous Phlebotomist Imaginary category. People choose not to learn for a reason. Fix the reason and they'll learn. This.

it should end up fine. pity you let that mage be a human though.

Originally Posted By: Master1 Also, the wide variety of classes taught exist for a reason... to introduce you to a large number of fields in which you may work when you grow up. Except that a strikingly narrow portion of the job market encompasses this wide variety of fields. Take a look at this nifty old school table from the US government. Out of 145 million workers, there are approximately 3000 mathematicians. This doesn't line up with the amount of math kids take in school. Okay, that's a grossly unfair comparison, since most math is useful in many occupations, and even higher math leads to other occupations, like the 41,000 statisticians and 4.3 million architects/engineers/scientists. But if we combine all the occupations that seriously require use of math or science at or beyond a 12th grade level, the total is about 8 million -- out of 145 million jobs. And that covers HALF of the standard "core classes" high school focuses on (math, science, english, history). Were math and science classes useful for the other 137 million people, most of whom went through high school? Sure, but other classes would have been useful too. Is logical thinking useful for everybody? Sure, but you don't have to take biology or trigonometry to work on that. 8 million people work in food prep, as many as the math and science fields combined, but there are few classes taught on that. 9 million work in construction/extraction. The list goes on...

Actually, there were numerous nephil fortresses in both games. At least 2 in X2 off the top of my head, and at least 2 or 3 in X1.

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith The schooling enviroment is not suited for a lot of children, especially young boys, who learn a lot more through exploration, or so I've read. This is true of people in general. There have been plenty of studies done to show that people retain knowledge best when they learn it through PLAY. This is pretty obvious when you think about it; if you can play with something and explore its connections to other things you are going to learn a lot more about it, especially about why it's interesting, than if you just hear about it. This is no less applicable when you get to more specialized subject matter, though it is harder to apply. Most 8th graders won't accidentally stumble on how to do polynomial division if you let them play with polynomials for a while, but that's something worth learning.

I haven't read the review, but perhaps the reviewer just got annoyed at having to wade through pages and pages of townspeople giving the irrelevant details of their daily lives. some people like that, some don't. personally I found it much more engaging in the trilogy than in A4-5, not sure why.

4 is high on my list, and is certainly one of the most elegantly constructed NES games of all time. but it loses to 2 for me simply due to the perfect game balance 2 presented -- one of the few RPGs I have ever played that it is impossible to 'break' in some way, but which still presents interesting and varied combat. that said, I think 8 is actually my favourite now.

Looking at this from the outside, I would really suggest that you adopt some kind of guideline to avoid at least TM's review. TM's review contains an insult but no actual content. Reading that review would probably make me less likely to explore BoA at all, if I were new to it, just based on what it says about the community it comes from.

Marak: props for mentioning DW2 specifically. That was a gem.

Originally Posted By: Master1 (Note, I am the weird exception who actually likes learning) And there's the rub. Kids who are self-motivated to learn require VASTLY fewer resources from teachers and schools to sustain their education. Education reform (on this level) won't really benefit them, since they will learn one way or another. (Once we get to the point of teaching number sense rather than numerical operations, and so on, that will benefit them.)

Originally Posted By: Excalibur Originally Posted By: Thuryl Because most of us are not okay with letting people grow up to be unemployable? I don't think it makes sense to not attend school either, but I think that's my choice to make and not other people's. On a certain level I agree with you. However, if school really became optional, there would need to be some serious incentive systems in place to prevent a whole lot of other problems from coming up. Our school system has lots of problems, but if half the teenagers in the country stopped attending entirely, there would be more competition for lower-requisite jobs, resulting in higher unemployment; and there would be massive numbers of bored, unsupervised teenagers around, resulting in greatly increased gang activity (that's how it is, like it or not); and both of those in turn would feed into a big cycle of poverty and ignorance. Originally Posted By: Excalibur Belgium, for example, lacks our system in which students are assigned to public schools based on where they live. We end up having schools whose students are mostly poor, or mostly upper-class, etc. Letting parents decide what public school their child attends forces schools to compete for students (and funding, consequently). Potentially, yes. Boston actually employs this system on a limited scale -- within the city parents can request that their kid go to any public school, and people who don't make requests are not usually assigned by geography. This (very expensive, thanks to school bus costs) program was actually put into place to try and sever links between gang activity and schools. It was pretty successful on that front. I don't know if it's improved school quality at all, but I do know that the transportation costs now make up an ENORMOUS part of the budget that would otherwise go to, you know, educating the kids.

I agree that ten extra days isn't going to solve anything, but it certainly isn't going to make anything worse. (In Boston, I know the reaction it would get: "that's two extra weeks when they aren't on the streets!") There are always ways to expand the boundaries of what you teach, or just to teach something better, given more time. Always, always. I will say that this is at least a more constructive effort at improving the education system than we have seen from a president in -- since before Reagan at any rate. The problem is that our education system has taken so many missteps that it really needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. We have a lot of successful components that can be kept, but the basic organization needs to change. A few major criticisms I would suggest need correcting most: 1) Tenure, originally intended to buffer teachers from undue influence of the politically influential, is clearly irrelevant to that purpose. Instead it contributes to complacency and lack of innovation, especially among teachers in higher paid public school settings. 2) One size fits all educational standards make sense in younger grades, but by the time you get to high school, they're ridiculous. Practically all of Europe splits teenagers up depending on whether their inclinations are more academic, or more towards technical or trade studies. I don't know why we don't do that. It's an obvious economic boon, and it lessens problems with truancy among students forced into taking classes that they aren't interested in. Number sense and numerical operations are useful for everyone; algebra isn't, much as I hate to say so. Likewise, reading is useful for everyone; forcing people to read Shakespeare is counterproductive, much as I hate to say that, too. 3) In most parts of the country (and No Child Left Behind definitely made this one worse) teaching standards -- and testing standards -- emphasize procedural knowledge over understanding, especially in the younger grades when it should really be the reverse. This becomes obvious in math when kids can do operations but have a flimsy understanding of place value, or can't translate intuitively between area and multiplation.

Legitimate intelligent, friendly undead: - Prince Hrothar, Avernite mage-warrior turned into a lich by Tower of Magi folks to guard Grah-Hoth's imprisoning bottle, seen in A1 That said, I hope you are right. Would make for a fitting piece of the finale. Bonus points if you can only kill Solberg by Minddueling, but that will never happen