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juhani.5361

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  1. So that's the secret to Kittenbot-- melee. Ranged, I was getting nuked by everything nonstop with endless AOE from those diamond stun bombs, the balls that had no clear pattern, and whatever other random thing that got tossed in. There was so much visual clutter and extraneous stuff through the entire chapter that it was hard to figure out what to do. I'd switched my ranger from her GS early on when I had to defend Braham and the cubs because the gap closer skill misfired then threw me over edge of the bridge and got me lost for half of that segment... Anyway, thanks :) The whole encounter just felt like nonsense all the way through, especially the part when the shamans turn you into a giant.
  2. This community and SWL's are the two best communities I've had the pleasure of encountering. Sure, there are a few not-so-pleasant people in-game, but for the most part the PvE community is very helpful and welcoming. It's also the only game whose map chat conversations I remember for good reasons <3 isn't that pretty standard now in game design... or for quite a few years rather? Yes and no. Kill sharing's pretty standard now, but this is the only game I've come across that has resource node sharing. In most cases here, you even have quest objective sharing. I've seen shared quest nodes a few times in ESO and one or two in SWTOR, but that's about it. Most games compensate by having the node on a short respawn timer. Other games have active node ruining mechanisms, above and beyond node competition. ESO, a player can refuse to gather junk in treasure chests or take fishing mats from resource nodes and keep the node from respawning elsewhere. I've run across that in SWTOR too, especially with crystal harvesting. A player or bot takes the weapon/armor craftable crystals and leaves the color ones behind. The half-harvested node remains persistent. Editing: said mechanisms aren't deliberately designed to be ruinous, but combined with other design decisions like limited inventory capacity, etc., create incentive for players to be selfish.
  3. Ugh, so it wasn't just me. I'd upgraded a bunch of drivers after installing the last major Win 10 update right before heading to Bitterfrost, so I thought my graphics settings had gone wonky-- the update changed settings on about half of my games. Nothing I did made it go away, though. The ring of flame's pretty awful too. You can't stand inside it without having your screen turn wobbly and orange. Who the heck thought the change was a good idea?
  4. I'm fine as long as they are turned into emotes. Would be awesome to see variations for the other races as well! But... I'm really in bringing those back since having them removed has a higher meaning than just being two idles. It doesn't make sense for them to be removed, because it means every single idle should have met the same fate. Well, thumbs up there ;) Personally, a lot of this comes down to the fact that I don't like the overall "human" fashion/theme in this game. I already don't make light armored female humans because I can't stand the whole skimpy/frilly aesthetic that cascades down to the cultural armor and town clothes. My female humans are either heavy or medium armor classes as a result. I tend to prefer function over form. I don't really RP or do the whole "fashion wars" thing, beyond making my toons look adequate to my eyes. I think if we had some kind of granular control over idles, etc., it might be fun to have more options. That's far behind my wish for a flash-bling "off" button or an option to turn off mount/player effort sounds though ;)
  5. Nope. How about some optional emotes using the animation instead? Like "sassyhips" or "longstretch." I don't mind the animations being optional, but since idles aren't this overall gets a "no" from me. I don't want my toons doing this without my personal choice or input.
  6. Not to mention FemShep in the Mass Effect series, Lyris Titanborn in ESO, Bastila Shan in KOTOR... I love her to bits, though Brandon Bales and Claudia Christian also do amazing work.
  7. Just hit me today on my third go-round. Chest in the Snowden Drifts was open. I've only been opening a single chest a day, so I should be in sync with any reset schedule. I always follow the sequence in the wiki.
  8. Necromancer and core ranger are my favorites. I love my AI beasties :) I enjoy core guardian a lot, but have abandoned mine since I partially unlocked firebrand. For some reason, I can't stand the elite spec. I don't like either of the ranger elite specs, so I ignore them on my 80. Pistol/pistol thief is fun, but deadeye isn't for some reason. I usually love sniping things, but something about it puts me off. Scourge is a lot of fun. I've never finished leveling a mesmer. There's something about it that's annoying, but I can't put my finger on it. I have one sitting unused at level 30. I used an insta-80 to try out holosmith and engineer before trying to start the personal story from scratch. Something about the playstyle drove me nuts, but I can't put my finger on what. Never tried a warrior beyond level 11 or so-- it didn't stick with me long enough to even finish a key run. Never finished an elementalist, either, and I'm not sure why.
  9. Gah, it kills me how much nicer the male Sneakthief set is than the female version. I need this on my female Sylvari ranger. Badly.
  10. Where's the, "I like repeatable hearts, but the vendors shouldn't be locked after the heart has been completed once" option? Because that's what I'd pick ;)
  11. I've been ignoring most of the LW content, but I'd play that episode on every alt =) Consider this a massive thumbs up!
  12. That mission's a pain in the kitten's hiney. Did it on a scourge and was pretty much vaguely ok until the end boss aggroed on me halfway across the map before I'd cleared the rest of the camp. Then it turned into utter agony. It's not something I'd want to try again. Ever.
  13. No real suggestions, but an enthusiastic thumbs up! I'm really looking forward to this :)
  14. Yes, please! I love a couple of PoF's early maps and Verdant Brink/Auric Basin have some stunning scenery, but so much of the rest is desolate and soul-crushing.
  15. If you mean "Do I have scientific studies on hand specifically to prove to these things" evidence? No. I don't catalogue everything I see in life. But if you want evidence, just look at the poll results. I can go dig for them, though, as these are not uncommon sentiments that I am echoing. I am partly paraphrasing a section of Malcom Gladwells Outliers: The Story of Success, particularly the portion that goes over how 14 of the 75 wealthiest people were born between 1831 and 1840. The reason why is because in the 1870s there was massive economic restructuring in the United States, and everyone who was born before that period weren't capable of handling the paradigm shift. To make a comparison, I'm going to take Yu-gi-oh as an example. It is a card game that was popularized when 4kids translated and adopted over a related television show in 2001. The card game itself was released in 2002, following the success of the important cartoon during the Saturday Morning block. To want to play the game you had to have passing familiarity with the show, which would put you squarely in its young boys and teenager demographic. The exact range is unknown, but I'm going to estimate that it is between 8 and 16, as younger kids would have trouble understanding what is going on, and juniors in highschool were "too old for it" to garner interest. In 2002, there wasn't that much alternative media out there. We were in the Playstation 2 era of gaming and most of the internet looked like privately owned geocities pages. Having pieces of cardboard with pictures of dragons on them was still a "thing". But, from beyond that date, several things happened. In 2003, Call of Duty and similar games revolutionized the online gaming scene. In 2004 World of Warcraft hit, essentially creating its own market. In 2005, Youtube was launched.In 2007 the I-phone was dropped. The Saturday morning cartoon block vanished completely. Easily streamed shows meant that production companies no longer had absolute control over what cartoons to import. 4kids went belly up, and aside from a few dubs most people just stream whatever show they want to watch. Action cartoons and cartoons with long running plots lost popularity, replaced by short run episodic quips (I.E. Teen Titans -> Teen Titans GO!, Ben 10 -> Ben 10 2016, etc). Every single thing that was in place to make Yu-gi-oh a successful business venture is gone now. Either you were in the age range where you watched the show and became interested in the card game, or you weren't and you missed the boat. Of course there are going to be exceptions, such as parents who watched the show with their kids, or gaming store owners who got into it, or imports from older games. But the general trend is pretty obvious as a whole. If you look too hard at the exception, you'll miss the forest for the trees. Any tree in a forest is going to have its own tale, but there's still a forest all around it. The aging hobbies issue is not something that I see in one place. It is something I see in every place. In CCGs, Yu-gi-oh, Magic: The Gathering, Cardfight! Vanguard, all are suffering from the same issue of low sales due to an aging playerbase. Even the gaming juggernaut of WoW is facing a similar problem. There's even fears that the console gaming market might die off, though evidence for it is inconclusive due to wide market movements. Do you like comic books? Well, that medium is dying off, in spite of all the success that their IPs have in other departments. Contrary to popular opinion, it isn't just because Marvel's comic division was taken over by far-left extremists. When it comes to MMOs in general, there is some debate out there on what the normal values should be, since there is no true MMO market. Each game creates its own market. But, it is hard to debate the fact that numbers aren't nearly as high as they were in the past. These are all consumption hobbies that I am familiar with, as I am 1/8th couch potato by blood. But it hurts production hobbies, too. But are there as many domestic gardens? Seamstresses? Model makers? Bee Keepers? Mike Rowe talks about The Skills Gap a lot, referencing a change in values of western civilization away from tradesmithing and towards entertainment and academics. I don't have much personal experience on these things, as I am naturally averse to motion, but growing up I noticed a distinct lack of interest in any of these topics among my peers. Hard to imagine, but there was a time when people used to make clothes for fun. The concept is really simple to grasp overall. I'm surprised I am getting so much resistance to the notion. As much of a nerd I am, I can't help but have those tiny moments of clarity where I look down from above at all this and see how silly everything is. When I watched the Inhumans premier, there was a moment where I legit felt like a bad person for bothering to even care about the show. Everything in the Inhumans lore is so discordant and stupid that I had a "what the hell am I doing here?" moment while watching it. I'll have to disagree with C.S. Lewis here, and say that self-analysis is a critical part of maturation. Being unaware is a characteristic of youth, and not a good characteristic at that. You know, I don't think I've seen that Player One blog before (reference to Ready, Player One? Just wondering-- loved that book). I'll have to give it a closer look. Most of my MMO news these days comes from Massively. I'm wondering if there are other causes to MMO population shifts. The market, if anything, seems to be saturated now with a billion new games either in development or early testing. Not to mention, the mobile market might well be chipping away at traditional MMOs. I've played a couple of them-- games like Lineage 2 are close to full-featured on Android. BDO, Blade & Soul, and a few others seem to be taking up a lot of slack from aging Western MMOs. It doesn't help that MMOs keep adopting increasingly predatory monetization practices-- part of the reason I'm here now instead of playing SWTOR ;) I don't think the market has collapsed, exactly, but probably has dispersed among the many options out there. MOBAs and Battle Royale games are chipping away at the audience too. Anyway, you've given me a few thoughts for future research. I love following demographic trends :) And I'm dying to know the truth. I don't think you're wrong on an overall conceptual level. I think your particulars might be off a bit, however, about gaming or the age of the overall demographic. Gaming in general has a lot of room for expansion: female gamers are a growing demographic. Unfortunately, the industry as a whole seems to be going out of its way to alienate us. Anyway, FWIW, enjoy what you enjoy. Don't let anything stop you, especially those "what the hell am I doing here?" thoughts. Sometimes you need your Inhumans or your Bollywood or your K-pop or K-dramas <---sorry, personal add there.
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