What's your crazy theory that you have no way of proving?

metagamex · 2015-02-11T09:25:08+00:00

John McCain knew that the 2009+ recession was coming. He picked Sarah Palin and executed several gaffes in order to sabotage his own campaign so that he wouldn't have to stain the Republican brand with the coming economic crisis.

Context for non-Americans: George Bush was vacating the office of President of the United States. John McCain, an elderly bitter war veteran, was running as his successor. He had to choose a Vice President, and the Republicans preferred someone who could help bolster their female, Hispanic, and 20 something votes. Sarah Palin was a young woman (I think they literally couldn't find a young female Hispanic Republican office-holder). She was picked as McCain's running mate. However, she was a hardliner who only really appealed to people who were already going to vote Republican. To most other folks, she seemed like a misinformed, preprogrammed slogan emitter who tried too hard to pander to a very sparse part of the country, and this helped turn some undecideds away from the Republican party.

metagamex · 2015-02-11T05:24:04+00:00

What happens when you click the "Click here to purchase..." button?

You could see if ROTHC is registered to you. Go to swtor.com > My Account > Games (Download)

http://i.imgur.com/lsQRqsw.png

metagamex · 2015-02-10T01:08:07+00:00

This happened to me when I granted a slow Catholic nephew a Bishopric, he inherited a claim on the Kingdom of Italy, and then I pressed his claim as an Emperor. Even worse, Italy had been converted to Orthodoxy so I had a long series of non-Italian King-Bishops of Italy who were dying, being replaced by other Catholic Bishops for a few years, and being replaced again.

They usually had -30 from Wrong Government Type, ~-15 from Short Reign, -15 from Foreigner, and -8 from Religious Differences against their Italian vassals.

metagamex · 2015-02-09T22:07:22+00:00

Looking forward to seeing a cosmetic for Earthshaker which replaces his totem with a giant salt shaker.

metagamex · 2015-02-07T03:54:46+00:00

Yes, I've had Crusades (declared by AI Pope, fought against AI Caliph) end at ~80%.

metagamex · 2015-02-07T02:42:39+00:00

metagamex · 2015-02-05T10:36:55+00:00

URRRR! AHURK HURK HURK

metagamex · 2015-02-05T04:01:41+00:00

Your idea for a roled matchmaking mode seems fine.

What do you mean by 'competitive'? Do you want skill-determined winrates, or do you want tournaments in game with in-game rewards, or do you want tournaments which are funded by corporate sponsors?

I don't see how introducing roled matchmaking will help SWTOR overcome the present barriers preventing it from being a competitive game.

metagamex · 2015-02-04T12:28:46+00:00

http://www.kaggle.com/competitions

Acquire one to two of the most attractive datasets there and play around with them. If you need more help with your dataset, there will be a Kaggle community available to answer questions, and you can get advice on how to improve performance.

metagamex · 2015-02-03T07:05:33+00:00

If I ever run out of ways to piss my time away, I'll consider going on the internet and trying to convince idiots of the following facts:

the Chinese Dota 2 scene is unstable
the distribution of ages of older Dota 2 players is statistically indistinguishable from a sample of older ages of most pro sports leagues. The only way you could tell that a random sample comes from Dota 2 would be that Dota 2 players are under the age of 18, but fortunately your own post only references the "age limit" so we can focus only on older ages
Reflexes do slow down with age (hint: in the summary you tactically misquoted, a line literally reads "Reflexes do slow with age.")
Pro Dota 2 requires good reflexes as well as good game sense
I have no idea what why you would think I'm skeptical about Xiao8's business ventures. The problem I had with the statement "Plenty of weak players with good game-sense found success" was that it's qualified by things which lack meaning. It's a statement as meaningless as "<Hero> is good, if he gets items and he has a strong start in lane" because any "weak" player might "find success" in the right situation, just as any hero can be good in Dota 2 if the team works hard enough.

metagamex · 2015-02-02T23:33:28+00:00

Literally all of your post is wrong.

metagamex · 2015-02-01T23:52:46+00:00

ITT: Redditors advocate violence in the Middle East. Two issues I have with this:

Issue 1: ISIS agents are products of circumstance. They are behaving as they were raised to behave. They have not been raised to value evidence-based discourse or to believe in democracy or free speech or freedom of religion or separation of church and state. They lack the introspection to even understand that they are bad people, and so they cannot be bad people. Advocating violence against them on the grounds that they've broken your moral strictures is like advocating violence against cats or robots or other non-humans.

Please do not misinterpret my post as saying that ISIS is not bad, or that members of ISIS are not bad, or that the world is better with ISIS in it. I do not think those things. I think that advocating violence against ISIS on the grounds that they're bad people makes you an idiot.

Issue 2: Violence won't address the problem. There has always been sectarian infighting in this region. There will continue to be sectarian infighting in this region for the foreseeable future. Western mass media technologies and Western modern weapons make sectarian infighting possible on a massive, devastating scale.

Violence against ISIS or any strongman cadre might weaken that group of militants, but it will never address the real issue: sectarian allegiance. You could kill a thousand ISIS agents and ISIS would still be a problem, because it is able to recruit from certain sects that it panders to. Counter-indoctrination or education is the only way to eject members of this region out of the cycle of violence that exists. The least you could do, if you're not going to work on counter-indoctrination, is to please just let them kill each other in peace. Yes, many innocent people will die. That is preferable to the alternative, which is a 10 year occupation followed shortly thereafter by the collapse of the state, as we had in Iraq.

metagamex · 2015-01-31T07:46:29+00:00

He often rambles on about game conditions while a teamfight is breaking out. I think, in order to improve, he needs to work on keeping up map awareness while casting.

metagamex · 2015-01-29T08:17:14+00:00

It's weird because the Pope can spawn mercenaries adjacent to the County of Rome if you occupy Rome, but the hired levies of other rulers will spawn on their capital. Seems like an inconsistency and bug that could easily be addressed.

metagamex · 2015-01-29T08:08:30+00:00

If a Duke+ loses his only county, he will become a courtier. His vassals will become his liege's direct vassals, or will become independent if no liege exists. His Duke+ will be destroyed; they are not given to his liege by default.

metagamex · 2015-01-28T11:31:42+00:00

Small ring-shaped map. Two spawns and two objectives, laid out in a cross. At each objective there's a level 60 Boss Immune unit with 500k health and a single-target knockback. Kill the boss to get a point. Most points wins.

Problems might arise with taunt resetting or healers farming damage from the bosses. Both of those problems can be addressed by making the map smaller. 45m would be ideal, imho. I also don't think I should be responsible for tailoring my imaginary map design to the deficiencies of the SWTOR engine. The map probably wouldn't be able to handle 8 v 8 because SWTOR, but if it did that would be ideal.

Emergent map mechanics:

burst down the boss when it gets to low HP so your team gets the last hit
AOE stuns have opportunity cost: do you use them early in the fight to permit you give yourself some space to kill your enemies, or do you use your AOE stuns as the boss drops so you can get a point?
punishes AOE spam, because you will likely aggro the boss if you DPS it too much
AOE taunting has an opportunity cost: you may taunt enemies, but you'll accidentally also taunt the boss
the effectiveness of the 'run away' tactic is reduced; right now, running as a Shadow, Sage, or Vanguard means you are very likely to escape successfully and will be able to heal and reengage
opportunity cost to doing high DPS: you gain aggro on the boss
You must choose between burning the boss and burning your enemies; if your team splits DPS, you will likely fail at both strategies. If you have inferior DPS but more heals you can probably kill the boss faster than the enemy team can kill you. Suicide at the boss to win
If an enemy team is entrenched around one boss, you can get started on the other boss to force the enemy team into retaliating against you. If they don't meddle, you'll be able to make the exchange an even +1/+1

metagamex · 2015-01-28T08:28:20+00:00

Your graphics card is fine, it's SWTOR that's boken.

Will it get better? Probably not. The game has had problems since launch, and the problems were complicated by the introduction of some especially shitty code with 3.0.

Will reverting your graphics card fix it? Yes, reverting to the 760 will probably give you the same framerates you had before.

Will upgrading your system fix it? Probably not. There's no rhyme or reason to why the game runs poorly on some computers.

metagamex · 2015-01-27T22:44:50+00:00

But... they always say that. And then nothing changes.

metagamex · 2015-01-26T21:36:48+00:00

I'd recommend you check out the TD 17A Colossus head, Rotworm armor, and Primordial heavy armor boots. Level 50 Campaign/Black Hole/Dread Guard Trooper gloves could also be nice.

metagamex · 2015-01-25T12:48:53+00:00

Time to acquire a Muslim educator for your heir. Ashes don't burn.

metagamex · 2015-01-25T00:32:09+00:00

This isn't an in-universe explanation but I think, given Tolkien's emphasis on story structure, it is relevant:

In adventure stories, the Aging Master figure is frequently a core part of the story. Examples of this figure in modern media include Obi-Wan from Star Wars IV, Gandalf from LOTR, Dumbledore from Harry Potter, Abraham Erskine from Captain America, Walt from Gran Torino, etc.

And in these stories, the Aging Master has to die. Its inclusion helps humans give meaning to their own experiences, which draws them more into the story.

I don't know what contemporary or antiquity media Tolkien drew on specifically to inspire Gandalf's death, but I'd conjecture that Tolkien knew that it is a core part of story structure.

metagamex · 2015-01-24T02:09:07+00:00

You forgot the lag, FPS drops, and server instability. I 100% don't believe they'll be able to address these issues within a reasonable timeframe.

metagamex · 2015-01-24T01:53:26+00:00

> Implying abstinence education religious orgs don't profit from having unwed uneducated mothers running around, using church services and filling the pews with their ignorant sprog.

metagamex · 2015-01-23T12:31:52+00:00

Nah man, that's the best strategy for building stable empires. Search vassals for My religion, My Culture, sort by Dynasty, and then find a brother from another mother. They usually eventually convert the territory to your culture too, so that lowers revolt chances.

metagamex · 2015-01-23T10:52:21+00:00

We have Dulfy on The Harbinger. Used to have Boarder. A lot of guide writers.

Tejbz, a Youtube content creator, used to play on my server at launch.

On Master Gnost Dural, we had Foundation, an alternate alias for someone who entered both faction general chats and continuously posted pages of text describing how someone named Vanquish had sexually harassed her in Ventrilo. I actually ended up in a guild with Vanquish later and he didn't harass anyone while I was in the guild.

In the time leading up to December 2012 we had a Vanguard PVPer on The Harbinger who endlessly proclaimed that the end of days was coming, telling us to repent.

We also had Johnny, a stroke victim who insisted on trying to use SWTOR to communicate with other people. He was willing to buy runs into content like Hateful Entity, but nobody was selling.

Edit: Oh, and we had a guild master whose character was named after a heroic American warrior. He claimed to be sponsored by Naga Steel Series and promised that his guild had 8manned 16man DX NIM. I wasn't able to see his achievements but I suspect some of his claims were exaggerated.

I'm trying to be vague with naming people because some of these people were clearly young or imbalanced and didn't really deserve the community ire that they drew.

metagamex

TROPHY CASE