Dantius

Originally Posted By: Arch-Mage Solberg Originally Posted By: Artemis~ This is probably 100% rumor, but i've heard around that meats actually took away from your life span. I saw on my local NBC news a few months ago that some Vegan guy was promoting his views by saying that that was how it was first done in the Bible. Before the Flood, people ate only fruits and vegetables and lived for hundreds of years. It wasn't until after the Flood that God allowed humans to kill animals for meat and subsequently the lifespan of man shortened to just a few decades over the next 1,000 years. This was what the Vegan guy said anyway. Post # 451 Oh great, he's vegan and a fundamentalist Christan. Sheesh, just throw in a PETA membership and you've got more crazy than the human body can hold...

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Two can join you at one time, but Jeff has stated you will "need to" (his words) play with all four classes in each game[...] Heh, all I can see that leading to is people daring one another to play though the entire game with only one class and the joinable NPC of that same class...

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES There are three characters that can join your group in any given game, presumably out of a total of four since all four classes will be represented. Two can join you, since the third would presumably be yourself. So that's four possibly joinable for four classes, minimum. He might also divide the joinables into levels, so there'd be a powerful joinable Shadowalker, a not-so-powerful shadowalker, a medium powerful Shadowalker, etc. There could be up to eight, twelve, sixteen joinable NPC's!

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba SCIENCE!!!! Stand back, he's going to try SCIENCE! Click to reveal..

Originally Posted By: Lilith it's hard to say lifecrafters lack flexibility when the few real weaknesses they have are almost never actually exploited by enemies To paraphrase: Originally Posted By: Jeff Vogel I code my AI's in fifteen minutes, late at night, and usually while drunk. In other words, I put twice as much work in as anybody else You can't expect the enemy AI to be able to exploit precise strategic weaknesses when not even a panel of intelligent humans can agree on those weaknesses.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Aaaaaaand the Shock Trooper? The Shock Trooper was a horrible class. On my G4 runthrough, I never had enough Blessing or Mental magic, so I just pumped combat stats and muddled through the game having no fun at all. I thus developed a lifelong hatred of the Shock Trooper. Serviles were awesome though. And unisex! What a wonderful compromise!

Originally Posted By: Lilith and perhaps more importantly for jeff's bottom line, i bet there are also male players who would like to play as a spellcaster and don't want to have to play as a female character to do so! *raises hand* But the Sorceress in G5 was pretty much clad in long, concealing robes (A dress is somewhat like a robe!), so you could just pretend you were some sort of regular cliche mage in robes with a staff.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES I also think it's a really bad business decision. There are people who will take one look at those enforced gender roles and be HUGELY turned off. Whether or not you agree with them or even with my reaction, this will happen. Graphics are expensive. Most people do not obsessively analyze gender roles in every aspect of their lives (Quick! Who served you your coffee at Starbucks today? Was it a woman? Why is she enforcing the gender roles of being a submissive cook! Protest against Starbucks for reinforcing gender roles!), and the people that do will still probably buy the games. And the vanishingly small Dworkin-esque minority that boycotts or pirates instead will probably generate so little money that it would be more trouble and expense for Jeff than it would be worth. Twice the animations, twice the character image sheets, twice the time coding, etc. Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Addendum: I understand the whole saving-money-on-graphics thing, but it is TOTALLY RIDICULOUS to have the two physically-oriented classes always be male, while the two magically-oriented classes are always female. Masculine guardians and feminine agents were one thing, but this is a little bit insulting. Last time I checked, women still aren't allowed to be front line combat troops int he US Army. Enforced gender roles courtesy Uncle Sam? A faint possibility. But (this is the bit where I get crucified), there are a hell of a lot more men than women in physical jobs, more men doing manual labor, and more men in active combat roles rather than in support roles. So I don't think it's "enforced gender roles" so much as it is that, well, Avadon won't be that much different than the real world. Aside form the magic, of course.

Quote: 4. How Difficult Will the Game Be? The opinions of my fans has been nearly unanimous on this point. Spiderweb games have gotten too hard. I am completely revamping game balance with this in mind. The normal, default difficulty will not be tough. Unless you go picking fights with dragons, Avadon will be far less tough that previous games. At the same time, I will make sure that the higher difficulty levels push back at you. What? Spiderweb games have not gotten to hard. They've gotten much, much easier. The early Avernum games, G1, G2, they were unforgiving. You died, often. You had to reload. I think I died three times in A5, and all on the optional superboss areas like Khorya-Vyss. My only deaths in G5 were trying to get the $@$& @*^$ @(&$ $@(& Infiltrator's Charm of running into Unbound when I first hit the Mera-Tev. The games are getting easier, not harder.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: The Mystic And nobody has to tell me that video games can be addicting; several years ago (when Super Mario Bros. 3 was still fairly new, in fact), I found out the hard way by coming very close to playing all night. playing a game for most of one night? oh, you dangerous rebel, you After he finished the game, he ate cookies and didn't tell anyone!

Originally Posted By: Master1 Chess has a limited number of possible permutations with no luck involved. In theory, it bores me. Um, all board games have a finite number of possible permutations. Granted, most are obscenely large, but they are still finite.

Chess >> Every other board game ever. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Australia uses the British system of academic ranks, in which only the most senior grade of university faculty are called professors. Doctor is a more easily obtained unisex title, but Lilith isn't officially there yet, either. I think she should go for it, though. It's a silly paper credential, sure, but it might go a little way toward correcting stupid expectations of low intelligence. And grad school is a good place to let part of your life go slow and recover while focusing on other parts. That whistling sound was an X-men joke flying above your head at several times the speed of light.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Master1 Shame, you seemed, from what the internet told me, to be a good one. I mean, heck, you play video games! i don't really relish the thought of explaining to a room full of 15-year-olds why Mr. X is now Ms. X You could just use a unisex title like "Professor X" as opposed to Mr. X or Ms. X.

Originally Posted By: Lime Pickle Wonder if the World Crime League is hiring any evil masterminds/chefs... Or at the very least some minions... I need a job already... Sorry, recruiting for higher level positions is closed. You're welcome to join the Legions of Terror, if you wish.

Originally Posted By: nikki. There's plenty of room for improvement. You didn't even say that the crack team of assassins were thrown into the portal for crimes they did not commit, nor mention how they were soldiers of fortune. Nonono, they have to be reluctant badasses with a tormented past, possibly involving an overly simplistic backstory where the Empire killed their father/son/daughter/spouse. Sheesh, get your tropes right!

Since it hasn't been explicitly and unequivocally stated yet to Faithful, it's quite possible to have the register once and done system you wanted. The Preferences file controls all aspects of registration. Just copy that file over to a flash drive or SD card, and then you can register and activate the game as many times on as many computers as you want, no charge, no strings attached. You can even redownload the game if your system is wiped and then just use your copy of the preferences file to activate it and register it for free. It seems to me that that's exactly what you are looking for.

Originally Posted By: nikki. Originally Posted By: Lilith actually that image doesn't work, i think it's got an anti-hotlinking thingy Ohhhhh. Goat-sea. Now I get it! Gah, I feel stupid now.

Just picked up Science Under Siege, a great collection of essays demolishing psuedoscience in all forms ranging from repressed memories to UFO's to AIDS denialism to Intelligent Design. It's awesome- I fell in love by the first page.

Well, depending on your view of"great", a great product could simply be a product that sells well. So Farmville could very well be one of the greatest achievements of humanity. Oh god. What have we done?

Originally Posted By: The Silent Assassin To Rome, just to watch it burn. Ah, but would you bring a fiddle with you? That's the real question.

Part of my job involves dealing with laborers and more importantly unions of laborers. It suuuuuuuuucks. But, to quote a good friend of mine, that's why they pay me the big bucks!

Originally Posted By: Faithful If it is that trivial then simply do away with it altogether. You will not be any worse off, and Jeff would gain potentially more customers. Seems like a win-win situation to me. Here's the way I see things. [egotism] I am a smart person. I'm well-educated and I like to think of myself as tech-savvy[/egotism]. However, had you approached me when I (re)discovered Jeff's games about two years ago, I would have had no idea ow to get the games free online. I wouldn't have been able to find a .torrent or a keymaker to save my life. So I simply (and possibly naively) reached into my wallet and entered a few numbers into a few boxes. Later that month, I signed a piece of paper and a few numbers on another piece of paper got incrementally smaller. But, more importantly, I now had access to four new games! It was awesome. However, I'm also quite positive that, given the opportunity to get the game for free (and no, piracy is not "free", there's guilt and risk, if the game is offered free it's no risk or guilt), some part of my brain would have said "Screw this, I like having a number incrementally larger on that slip of paper I get every month", and taken the game for free and never looked back. Now while I might not be totally representative of every Spiderweb customer, I can absolutely, positively, guarantee you that Jeff would lose many times more money to people like me who said screw it, than he would gain to the handful of anti-DRM crusaders like you who would now buy his product. It is, at its core, a business decision. And like the free market dictates, if you don't like it, you patronize somewhere else. But quite clearly many people think that Jeff is doing the right thing, otherwise he'd be out of business and we'd be out of a forum.

Depending on your definition of DRM, Jeff's games don't even have it at all. For instance, they don't require anything to play the game. No CD in the drive, no Internet connection, no personal representative from EA to stand behind you at all times when you play, no nothing. All you need is a one-off registration key if you want to buy the full version. And honestly, the free demo, which has no DRM at all, is much longer than many games I have played. So perhaps you could think of "obnoxious" in the "No obnoxious DRM" comment as mean "no DRM whatsoever, since DRM is obnoxious", as opposed to "Some DRM, but it's not obnoxious", which seems to be what you're interpreting it as. Furthermore, I find that people like you (I'm stereotyping here, please beat me with a trout if I'm wrong) who complain about how DRM drives away paying customers, don't exactly put their money where their mouth is. If Jeff distributed all his games for free, with an addendum saying "Send in money if you liked it", would you cut Jeff a check for $1000? Or $100? Or even $28, which is what I believe the current price of the games are? Please don't respond to this observation in oh-so-holy righteous indignation, it's just meant to be something to think about. How could Jeff make a living if people didn't pay for his games? I believe he pulls in about 120k a year from game sales, and I find it hard- no, wait. It's impossible to pull in that much money on a no-strings-attached donation policy, simply because people are greedy and selfish.

Originally Posted By: nikki. I'm flattered. Have some goatse. Ummm... thank... you?