Duckman

Yeah, I am very familiar with Warframe and because they did such a good job with PvP there I forget that it is even an option. (I played PC for a while but got tired of doing everything solo so I quit a while back.)

Not thinking Civ or Stellaris... Really kinda want an economic sim but have not been bit by anything lately. Diversity of Railroad Tycoon 2 but with a better underlying financial model maybe? City builder a la Sim City might work. Heck, even something like Rollercoaster Tycoon might scratch the itch if the price is right. (Rollercoaster Tycoon had very limited lifespan for me but was good for maybe 10-20 hours of amusement which would work right now.) Anyone got any recommendations in the genre in the last ~2 years that you can recommend?

Again, the question... Why do developers think that offering that choice is necessary or good? Why cater to the griefer? We make all sorts of efforts to control bullying in so many venues and yet in online gaming not only do we hold it up as a desirable choice, we make it impossible to avoid. I've gotten to the point that I really don't buy games where I cannot block PvP entirely to avoid griefers. I make the greener pastures choice but I still resent the people who own these properties and make the choice to feed mice to the griefers.

Fallout 76 has been in development for at least 3 years. If they knew what was going on in Fortnight, much less how popular it would be early enough to make it a fundamental part of Fallout 76 I think I would be looking into industrial espionage. More fundamentally, devs have been making these decisions for years. My complaints go back to 2007 at least and apply to the devs who made BIS pre-raid items in World of Warcraft come from arenas or the devs for DCUO who made lots of Skill Points depend on PvP achievements. I don't get why MMO has to mean PvP. There are plenty of examples of coop-only games and to be honest, they are becoming more and more popular in tabletop gaming as well. I don't object to PUBG or other games that are what they say on the tin. Of all the MMOs I can think of, DCUO does the best at preventing non-consensual PvP today but even then the devs have made it a requirement for PvE optimization. If you can think of an MMO that allows PvP but allows you to completely disable it and not require it for anything at all, I would love to hear it. The last one I am aware of was Everquest where you could completely avoid it if you wanted to.

Yerp. 20 years it hasn't been in and it shouldn't be in now, at least not without the ability to proactively prevent it. I don't begrudge people the option to PvP and I even participate. I just don't want anyone else to have the option to make me participate whether it is random or by design because I need to do it for gear, a buff, a recipe, a component, whatever. Mostly, I look at the extreme in these cases because whether it is 50% of the time or 1% of the time, eventually you find the extreme case. Then I wonder why the devs made a decision to make that possible in the first place...

WoW doesn't and didn't encourage PvP. It supported it. Comparing PvP to the rest of the content in the game it is a tiny fraction of the content. And they claimed to support people who didn't want to PvP (see PvE servers) but then they forced people who were in those PvE servers to PvP if they wanted to gear up to do PvE raiding. In other words, they offered a false choice. This is bad. PUBG encourages PvP. Even Everquest did more to encourage PvP than WoW because at least there you could loot the person you killed thereby gaining something. It occurs because the developers force people to PvP whether they want to or not. They put required resources in PvP-only regions. They make weapons that are mandatory for non-PvP activity available only through PvP activity. They create open-world PvP and then say "after you get ganked you can put the person on a block list and he will never come back on a server with you". These are all false choices. And the people who use that as an excuse to hunt players who don't want to PvP are being bastards no different from bullies on the playground. These systems have *zero* penalty for them and they are getting their jollies by frustrating or ruining the experience for someone else. There are "honorable" PvPers who seek only people who are skilled opponents. They're just not common in an MMO environment. This is not viable. Have you ever seen an NPC explore the whole world in an MMO. If they are in a city do they ever leave the city? If they are in the wilderness do they ever leave a general area, much less the entire zone? It takes less than 10 seconds observation to determine whether or not a character is an NPC or a PC. NPCs don't harvest (imagine the rage if you got ninja'd by an NPC for that rare resource). NPCs don't stutter-step or turn, pause and turn some more while thinking. The best you could do is make me pause 30 seconds by adding a bunch of ambiguous behaviors for NPCs and by the end of 30 seconds unless a player is intentionally laying a trap you're going to have a very good idea whether or not something is an NPC or a PC. And this summarizes the problem extremely well and you just don't see it because you don't want to. Someone has an idea how they want to play the game and the game supports it. Now, the game also supports other ways of playing. Assume I knew exactly what the kids you cite were doing. If I were to come along and follow one of the people hiding and point him out all the time would that be nice of me? I made a specific choice to come along and keep them from doing what they are doing to have fun and the game supports it? Now replace hide-and-seek with any PvE activity. Why is PvP different? If we get in a boxing ring and you punch me, no problem. If you walk up to me on the street and punch me you rapidly come to understand the legal system and the term "assault". I don't care what you do to relax. The point is that designers feel the need to cater to people who want PvP and because they know that this is a minority they do everything that they can to coax (or outright force) people who don't want PvP into PvP. If everyone wanted to PvP it would not be a problem but back to the original topic of this thread, for 20 years this game has been one where you can do whatever you want and people cannot force you to change what you are doing. There have been no griefers. Now, because some dev thought it would be cool to try and compete for the Battle Royale crowd (who already played Fallout anyway when they wanted to) everyone is subject to the "well, I wasted an evening tonight because someone came along and made me stop farming my bottle caps and run away all night". All it takes is a switch that says "I don't want to play online" and this problem is solved. I'm not looking to change your behavior. I'm looking to avoid it because I don't like it. And if the devs cannot offer that then they clearly have an agenda to impose PvP whether they have thought about it or not. So you want to examine behavior and determine what is behind it? Ask why it is necessary to offer PvP at all and why, when it is offered, it becomes unavoidable. Because I don't mind PvP when I can avoid it completely and choose only to PvP when I want to. I mind PvP when it is forced on me at the whims of some jerk from the internet. I mind when the inherent assumption is that *I* want to PvP just because I have logged into your game. There are some games, like PUBG or Battlefield, where you know if I logged in I wanted to PvP. It is not a valid assumption if I log into any other MMO, not even something like DAoC where it was a core concept. And remember that DAoC and many of its spiritual successors have specifically advertised the need for non-PvPers to come craft or farm or whatever to be targets for their PvP audiences. When you can explain why that should be the case, *that's* the behavior I want to change.

Actually, most do not. Most simply provide a framework and the players decide to PvP all on their own. Take WoW. Fight over resource spawns. Fraction of PvP which involves a resource? Probably 5%. DAoC, Shadowbane, DCUO, SWtOR, Star Trek, City of Heroes, Champions Online, Elite Dangerous, The Division, the list goes on and on. All allowed PvP, some were even built around the concept. Most of the PvP occurred away from the place where PvP was "intended". In many cases even if PvP was rewarded the griefers don't bother to collect the rewards (see piracy in Elite or the Dark Zone in The Division as an example). Boredom/frustration is not an excuse to grief other players. A system designed to allow players to force other players to give up on their present goals to deal with the griefer is poorly designed. I'm not here to be content for you because you are bored. I am busy <pick one or more: leveling, questing, working on rep, harvesting mats, roleplaying> and a system that allows you to force me to do something else is designed to punish me. That includes making something required for non-PvP activity available only through PvP. Here's a hint. If the phrase "PvP is dead in this game" shows up it is because the majority of the players in the game don't want to PvP and designers who are forcing them to are doing a bad job. (See WoW and making the best pre-raid weapons come from arenas in TBC.) Pathing in games is one of the hardest things in the world to code. Even if you could come up with code that allows NPCs to wander "aimlessly" you would still have a problem with the fact that NPCs can't actually zone or move far from a specific location nor do they move with the purpose that a PC would. 5-10 seconds observation should *always* make it possible to distinguish unless the PC is actively "trying to look like an NPC". This is exacerbated in open-world where NPCs are few and far between and removing the leash on an NPC would make it impossible to find the NPC (and therefore make the NPC irrelevant) in most cases. Don't get me wrong. I play games with PvP. I do it by choice when *I* want to be involved in PvP. None of the games mentioned above allow you to ignore PvP completely and still achieve everything in the PvE portion of the game. WoW required PvP for weapons used in PvE. DCUO requires PvP for skill points used in PvE. For some reason, all game devs all feel the need to force cannon fodder into PvP so that a minority of the playerbase can be sadistic. If it was a majority of the playerbase there would be no need to force cannon fodder into the PvP genre... There would already be plenty of players.

You can block people but I find that a useless tool. World of Warcraft thought that was a good plan for LFG/LFR but the problem is that you cannot communicate with every player when someone needs to be banned. In the old world, you could shout to everyone and everyone actually cared so people got blacklisted for being ninjas and such. Now with a community of any size there is no way to reach everyone to make someone a pariah if they need to be.

ELEX - ouch... The writing is so bad that you almost wonder whether the bad voice acting is a result of intent, not just bad acting. From "Magalan, world of millions" to the conversational dialog which reads like 2 8 year-olds on a playground. So maybe the guy I am talking to is an idiot, but I'm supposed to be a leading general of a faction that threatens the entire known world. Wow. Controls are not great and inventory management sucks. Not much good to say about this one other than it's a good idea that really needed some help. 1/5

To be fair, you have the option to attack anyone or anything you want to and there seems to be no substantial benefit to attacking another player. It seems, in fact, to be less beneficial unless you are the sick bastard who gets off on trolling others. Now, why am I concerned about that? Because I have been playing MMOs for 20 years and there is not a game in the world that doesn't have that person although some are worse than others. I like the idea of not being able to tell humans from NPCs but that would take better AI than anyone in gaming has written even without the additional interface options.

Who is the publisher on that and is it available on Steam?

I looked at it before I went to Mexico (so 18+ months ago).... It may be done before I die. It will probably be done before Star Citizen but not much before.

PvP is not consensual. A player can grief you whether you like it or not. Their damage may be minimized if you do not return fire (I am unclear on that) but they can kill you if you don't fight back or run. You can then put them on your ignore list which will keep them from loading to your server in the future. I'm not sure I get what they are doing here. You log out and your settlement logs out with you? You get a random server draw so maybe you show up and someone else already has a settlement where yours was and so yours packs up and can be deployed elsewhere? This sounds hideously anti-immersion. I'm actually ok with the idea that you see different people each time you log in since that kinda fits my personal idea of the wasteland but the mechanics around it seem really silly. And of course, since free time is really the limiting factor in my gaming I am really against non-consensual PvP or otherwise allowing someone to dictate how I spend my gaming time (by forcing me to flee an area, etc.). I have a really hard time relating this title to Fallout. I get the impression that the flavor and intent of the game-play is really very different from prior Fallout games (although the setting seems to be very true to Fallout 3). (Gah, I agree with almost everything Pax said above... I need to have my head checked.)

I thought that it was cancelled. Did it get picked up?

I'm holding my breath regarding American Gods as well. The second act, with Puppy hiding out in a small apartment in Minnesota or wherever it is is not going to play well on TV but I really love the way it reads and the characters involved in that portion in particular. I was also *not* impressed, for example, with the addition of Vulcan in the first season.

I'm torn between joy and trepidation. They're using a Queen song in the teaser which is promising attention to detail. I like the casting (Tennant and Sheen although I don't know the kids at all). I don't know that I like the format (I would have thought it fit better as a movie or possibly a miniseries instead of a series although being only 6 episodes, maybe this is a miniseries)... I'm also concerned that it is following Crowley and Aziraphale more than Adam (and only Brian instead of the "Them") and Anathema (at least in the trailer). To the good, Gaiman has the writing credits for all 6 episodes so hopefully it is true to his vision, if not to mine...

What is your definition of medication? Pain relievers exist as chemical compounds occurring both naturally and man-made. Pain enhancers are often less carefully designed because if you are enhancing pain you generally don't care about also causing damage to other systems. Figuring out what those compounds are called is left as an exercise to the rhetorical question.

Notably, even on that scale (like almost all others) modern techno has been becoming more and more light-weight. As a fan of old-school anthem trance, this depresses me.

Ask Raindog about that. I think you'll be surprised by his answer. Also, remember that a Grand Jury is civilians, not a court. If a Grand Jury comes back with a decision not to indict an officer that is far different from a court giving an officer a pass. I'm not saying that there are not bad cops. Don't get me wrong. What I am saying is that if an officer follows his training, training which has been reviewed and approved by civilians in almost all cases, then you are welcome to take issue with the training but it is absurd to blame the police as a whole for their methods or blame a specific officer for following his training. (The double standard I was referring to above.)

How's it for supporting large groups? I know D&D aims at groups of 4-6 and it is really better at 4-5. 7 breaks it completely. I'd be interested in hearing more in regards to how combat scales for large groups.

You have in-person encounters with them a lot and you don't think about it. We have Raindog and others right here. It's easy to go into a grocery or fast-food joint and strike up a conversation with an officer and odds are if you are at all out-going you've talked casually with one or more officers without knowing it. I live out in the country so when I move (not very often) I make a point of finding a local officer and striking up a conversation with them about how enforcement works locally, what numbers I should call, who (as in which department) is going to respond, etc. Never had a bad experience with that and in one case actually wound up talking to my next door neighbor's nephew. You can also figure out a whole lot by comparing Raindog's blog to what you see on TV. Raindog talks consistently about how he evaluates a situation and handles people he runs into while working and then compare that to what you see on TV about police training and police complaints. It's not hard to identify the double-standard that is being applied by society (often through the media). I would not look to recreational TV as indicative of anything because reality always takes a backseat to TV writing to one degree or another. Talk to officers and look at the news.

Perhaps I am naive (and I'd love @Raindog to weigh in on that) but I suspect he was pulling you over because your license plate light was out and hoping not to get shot by the guy he pulled over. Cops have a job and demonizing them for doing their job or even thinking worse about them for it is one of the reasons there is a battle being waged in our streets. I would never want to be a cop. Talk about conflicting instructions.... Maintain control of the situation for your own safety. Don't infringe on their rights or hurt them. Keep them from shooting you. Practice hard control of potentially hostile civilians for your own protection. Draw but don't shoot unless you are absolutely certain that your life is in danger. I'm sorry... We train cops to protect themselves and protect the public and then we judge them based on their ability to be psychic about what a person intends or is carrying. Ain't no way for them to get a fair shake for just trying to do what they are trained to do. (And yes, there are people who are out there abusing their badges but it's no easier to spot them than it is to spot the guys carrying the concealed gun when you make a traffic stop.)

I actually don't have access to RoC intentionally. Sorry. That discussion will have to be left as an exercise for the student. 😉

As you said. Very exacting language defining specific persons as 1, 3/5ths or 0 persons in the eyes of the law for very specific purposes (and only those purposes). Only in law and theoretical math can you see 1 == 0.6 written so clearly. As I recall, there were other laws that then referred to this for other purposes in the day as well. I won't claim to be a Constitutional Scholar or anything but there a number of neat little bits of trivia that turn out to be kinda scary if you look at what they mean in a legal sense. See the proposed "Right to Vote" Amendment (2013) as a prime example.

You should be being polite and following the golden rule. First, that should eliminate any real possibility of injury and, as Raindog will probably tell you, if you are following rule one most police will tell you what the real laws are and let you off because it is clear that you are trying to be conscientious (at least as a white male, they will). As you demonstrated with the discussion of handicapped people with mobility assistance, the legal definition of vehicle is ambiguous and generally stupid. This is not uncommon since laws and language are intended to serve different purposes and so you'll see it in lots of places (e.g. the legal definition of person not including a black man or a woman or being 3/5ths of a person for a black man for years). Personally, I tend to reserve the term "vehicle" for "motor vehicle" and then look for context, otherwise you get into literal interpretation which allows you to define a hand-truck or dolly as a vehicle which is accurate but confusing in most contexts... (If you call the police and say "My vehicle was stolen" and then explain that you were talking about your dolly when they get there you are going to get some interesting looks.)