Gyokuyoutama

At about the same time that you posted this the radio played Metallica's cover and I was thinking "man this version sucks." Here's another mashup that I think is legitimately quite a lot better than any of the component songs:

Games never leave beta, because then devs have an excuse for making radical changes or from when they mess up. Gwent has had several tournaments, but CD Projekt Red still insists that it's an open Beta. Or you might compare to TF2. Despite having both an actual closed beta as well as a separate beta program to test new developments, they still treated the game as if it were unfinished and still made radical changes to it. Effectively, it never really left beta.

I'm pretty okay with season passes in such situations. It gives you sort of the best of both worlds: if you don't want to pay, you can play for free, but if you are willing to pay you can get the amount of content you'd get in an actual game. If the pass is set up like it was in that one, where you get all future content as well, it can really add up over time. I was a bit on the fence about getting the pass for Talisman, but I've gotten at least 10 different expansions off of it and I don't know how many characters so it definitely feels like it was worth it. What I really hate is when they try to push you to pay money but don't give you a guaranteed chance of getting what you want. Shadowverse recently has been bad with this: getting new leaders (which only has a cosmetic effect) is now done through special card draws in packs, but the leader cards are rarer than the previous highest rarity by a good bit. You can literally get hundreds of packs without drawing a single leader (much less the leader you actually want), so that spending money on the endeavor is just hopeless gambling. It's actually quite a bit like unusual chasing, though with the fact that you can get packs for free taking some of the edge off. Still, I wish that they just let you buy them for real or in-game money like they did in the past. That being said increasingly high champion costs is exactly why I turned away from League of Legends so I can also see where the frustration comes from.

They added the loot boxes about a year after release, I think. If I recall correctly it started with dice skins. Since then they've added quite a lot more. I'm kind of curious if they ever changed the Steam version to allow you to change language without changing your system language. I got the GoG version for cheap on a sale, and you can't there, but they were way behind on patches even before they officially dropped support so that's not saying much.

Top worst implementation of lootboxes has to be the Armello team, who not did the usual poor implementations, but also decided to call all non-Steam versions of the game "Special DRM-Free editions" and drop support for them, just because it was impossible to add lootboxes to them. Thus not only did non-Steam players lose hope of every seeing promised technical fixes, but also missed out on new non-lootbox content like the new characters that had promised since lost. At first they still had the gall to continue to sell this gimped version, but it looks like they've stopped doing that. I imagine it wasn't good PR to have one of the worst reviewed games on GoG.

This one is worse for showing you how the algorithms work but better for pretending that you are receiving coded messages from your alien overlords:

Just imagine: if Troika hadn't died after Bloodlines, they probably would have gotten bought out by Bethesda and we'd be playing "Oblivion with Mad Scientist Guns" versions of Arcanum.

Best end of match message an opponent ever sent me was in Duels of the Planeswalker 2015: "I would have won if you knew how to play Magic, you faggot." Maybe that can be the new standard for polite messages to your opponent.

I saw a spooky ghost at a fast food place yesterday, so it's okay.

My regular octagon used nearly twice the goal number of operations because I kept creating new layers to see what I was doing and retracing the important stuff. I kind of wish that there was a version of the challenge where you'd get basic credit for just constructing an angle of the appropriate measure since if you can do that you can construct the rest, it's just tedious (especially for anything other than the square or triangle).

Here's something that may help everyone put things into perspective. The best example of the philosophy "we're going to working on it until its perfect, and since it's taking so long we're going to add features to justify the wait" is Star Citizen. That's the best case scenario of following this philosophy.

Gyoku's first law of technology: Technology will always develop in the most retarded way possible, because that's how the masses want it. I think I realized that when twitter really came into its own.

Would also like to know this. (If you just want to do a compass and straightedge construction then Cinderella is great, but it's not a game.)

Don't forget making modding more difficult in order to ensure that people can't wear hats that they don't own.

I wonder if the TF2 community would have reacted better if they didn't have experience with the TF2 comic to teach them that: Useful communication with Valve is very rare and when communication seems to be straightforward and useful, it's usually a bunch of lies.

This is why it would have to be good if it released in 2016 or early 2017. Now on top of that it has to be good enough to justify the wait. If it's just something which carves out a couple of new niches for the pyro which are interesting and balanced, but which don't change the game much, it will be appreciated but not really worth waiting over a year for. It will also destroy any possible hype for the heavy update, since people will just expect to wait at least another year (really, probably two years since Valve has a tendency to have each release come out with an even greater wait than the last) just to get a bunch of small changes that don't affect the game too much. At that point it's almost the same as not getting any updates at all, so what is there to be excited about? Wait I think that Valve should have done was to take the best changes that they had in Q1 2017 and release them, even if they fell short of what they wanted. I'm not saying to rush out content, but instead that say if they were planning on shipping 6 items and they only had 2 working, then ship those 2. They then ask for community feedback to continue tweaking the update and to get data on how the remaining items should be fixed, while simultaneously starting work on the Heavy update. Sure, fans would be somewhat disappointed in not getting all that they wanted, but let's be honest: it's very unlikely that we'll get an update that completely fixes the issues with Pyro, even if Valve works on it for another 9 years. In terms of keeping the fans invested, it would have been far better to release a functional-but-less-than-complete update rather than continually delaying it to make things perfect. Because now we do expect it to be perfect. I alluded to Half-Life 2's episodes because the same thing happened there. Episode 1 was well-received, Episode 2 was liked even more. Therefore Valve knew there were high expectations for Episode 3. While a lot of the development on Episode 3 isn't clearly known, from what we have seen it looks like Valve tried to implement all sorts of new and innovative ideas, only for many of them to not work. This delayed production, and every delayed only drove fan expectations higher. At some point (maybe about three years after episode 2?) they got so high that fans weren't looking for an expansion anymore, they wanted a full Half-Life 3 game. At that point it was pretty much impossible for Valve to meet expectations, and to make matters worse most of the team had lost interest in the project and started working on other things. And we all know how the story ended up: eventually Valve decided internally that they weren't going to do Episode 3, though they didn't admit it at the time, and now years later we know with as much certainty that we can that there isn't going to be an episode 3, and likely there isn't going to be another Half-Life of any variety. If the TF2 team is working with the same philosophy as the Episode 3 team did, we're likely to end in the same place. In fact, I'd argue that the TF2 team is even more likely to fail because at least the Episode 3 team started out with a decent amount of resources.

Enjoying Episode 3? What about the people who thought it would release sometime in Q1-Q3 of 2017?

It's been over a year since we voted to have a Pyro update (before there would be a Heavy update). Since that point we haven't had a real Halloween update (just a reactivation of previous updates with some new community items). The Christmas update was more of the same, but since Christmas updates have primarily been about cosmetics in the past I guess that's not as big of letdown. This was also the first year without a major summer update. Theoretically the reason for all of these missed updates is that they are working really hard on the Pyro update, and maybe the later Heavy update. I mean, why would they make us vote on which update would come first if they didn't plan on doing any updates at all? Surely Valve wouldn't commit themselves to a project and then just drop it entirely when they got bored/distracted/found it harder than expected! So sarcasm aside, I'm not sure if people are really expecting an update at this point, since we're all aware of how much Valve has let us down. But Valve certainly promised an update (in fact, they promised two updates).

Everything that happened in Dragonball after Lunch stopped showing up is non-canon.

Started reading A Centaur's Life again in honor of the anime. I wonder if the anime is going to include the part about Holocaust concentration camps. EDIT: Upon looking at reviews, the actually did it. The madmen.

Capcom should just sell their IPs to Monolift Soft. The _____ X _____ games have done more to develop most of Capcom's properties than Capcom itself has done in the last ten years.

Between the original trouble with the budget, the revival following belated fan interest, the extreme merchandising following that revival and the involvement of Mine Yoshizaki, this was already almost a Gundam production. But it's not truly a Gundam production until the director either gets into drama with the producers and/or just generally goes off the deep end.

There was a mandatory IT today meeting to unveil a new web app and offer training for it. When they asked us to login, about the third of people there got a blank page. Someone asked "are there browser compatibility issues with this?" The response: "Oh no, it works fine with everything. It's just that some things don't display properly with Internet Explorer, and sometimes pages don't display at all if you use Firefox or its offshots. But we've seen very few errors when you load it in Chrome." (Once I finally saw it the usability and general design of the site were shit too.)

There's a message board that I've posted on for a very long time, though now it's entirely out of morbid curiosity. It used to be pretty good, but the moderators have become more and more idiotic as time goes on. Usually when this happens it's because the mods go all in for one ideology or another (even if that ideology is something inconsequential like "XBOX is the best console" or "flat is justice") and abuse their moderator powers to ban everyone not in lockstep with them, and then recruit new moderators who do the same thing. But that doesn't seem to be what is happening on that forum. Rather, the moderators seem to be under the impression that flame wars would just stop if they ban enough terms people are using, so they can't be mean to each other. Of course, as anyone with any experience on the internet would expect all this leads to is people using new and creative insults off the forbidden lists, but the mods have a solution for that too: if people are still in toxic debates, add more words to the forbidden lists. This does seem to be done with the intent of being even handed. For example, in the political forums you can not only get infractions for saying SJW, commie, leftard, moonbat, leftist, or progressive, but also for saying cuck,servative zealot, teabagger, Trumptard, regressive, rightest or conservative. (I realize that some of these might not sound like insults, but when you ban the obvious insults people will start using basic descriptive terms as insults, and so they end up being infraction-worthy). They also have the bizarre policy of very rarely handing out permabans, preferring one-month bans instead. This leads to a sort of anti-mutually assured destruction situation in debates, since you know that your opponents are going to report you for trivial reasons (usually because you just came off a temp ban where that happened) and that if they manage to get you banned they will take advantage of your absence to push their position hard. Because of this, you don't really have a choice but to report them as well. I imagine that this is part of why the mods got so crazy, I can't even imagine how many reports they have to go through. But the reports still work and as such the situation perpetuates itself. Anyway, I just got tempban for posting a smiley face. The message I got literally just says that I posted a smiley face and that the mods determined after careful review of my post that this was against the rules. Going through the rules (which is difficult because they are spread out among announcements in many subforums) it does turn out that they made an explicit rule saying that posting a smiley face can lead to an infraction at the discretion of the moderators.