Bay 12 Games Forum

In year of arbitrary time, war was beginning.

Since the old thread is pretty much dead, I figured I should start a new one.

If you've never played this game before, it's essentially a grand strategy game. You dick around, find ways to hilariously manipulate other players and generally try to fuck up everyone else's day using other players to get your way.

In the game I'm currently in, I'm trying to convince all the other players that the major threat to me (and the person that they all border) is basically a turd who'll happily landgrab wherever he can. It's technically true, but he's not that dangerous (probably weaker than me at the moment and with little to no chance for expansion). I'm hoping they'll clusterfuck onto him, destroy each other's fleets / capture each other's planets and start an intergalactic war whilst I can get to work on improving the stars I currently have.

It's more than likely this WILL happen because I'm in about three seperate alliances with all of them and I'm established as a newcomer, so therefore trustable!

The mechanics of the game are hilariously simple. Seriously, a child could work it all out. The difficulty is in playing the other players, whilst maintaining the illusion of being completely trustable. It's about knowing whether your opponent has a poker face on without being able to actually see him. It's everything I've ever wanted in a game AND MORE with hilarity thrown in.

If this sounds like your sort've game, CLICK HERE.

I hate user reviews.

Especially on products that a person can easily use poor.

Like this. There's quite a few glowing 5-star reviews and then... 3 star and 2 star. I'm guessing they used it incorrectly and are now bitching about it, but a part of me can't help but think "What if they're being truthful and it sucks?"

Anyone else hate user reviews?

Newgrounds Link

I'm playing this shitty little flash game.

And I'm thinking...

"If they made this into a full game, I would definitely pay for it."

Therefore, it is worthy of posting here.

I need two seperate flash drives, preferably with memory between 8gb and 32gb and with a price (per each) of upto about £30.

One needs to be Windows ReadyBoost compatible (I'm fairly certain all of them are, but they claim not to be), so I can beef up the RAM on the system I'm building without forking out for even more expensive RAM.

The other just needs to be fairly durable, as I'm going to be lugging it around.

Thanks in advance, ladies and gents.

( Does this even count as "Life Advice"? Oh, well. )

Yes, scientology is one of the most moronic money machines religions in the whole world and it's been beaten over and over again...

But, seriously, what the shit?

I'm looking over how many celebrities are scientologists and there are SO FUCKING MANY. Most of the major ones of my childhood, and a lot more from further back.

How can these people be so gullible and moronic to join a cult started under a hundred years ago that espouses a ridiculous philosophy that would cause more harm than good if it came out into the world?

I mean, I can understand Sarah Palin being a scientologist (and, yes, apparently she is, she just hides it very well), but there're some genuinely funny and intelligent people who still believe in this bullshit. :|

Is anyone here a scientologist and can explain this? Or is everyone on B12G more intelligent than "gullible moron"?

So, what do you guys feel are the "troubles" with game design, development and release, today? What really grinds your gears when you look at the industry and see it's flaws? What pisses you off the most?

For me, it's the hilariously shitty game designers. People who fairly obviously don't know how to design a varied, balanced and fun game experience in PvP are the major factor. Anyone can make a single-player game work, but it's in multiplayer the troubles start.

Let's take a look at World of Warcraft's PvP for an example. In the beginning (Vanilla), stuff was majorly unbalanced. Character builds and classes were absolutely crazy in terms of balance, and some classes were completely useless (hi warlocks). There were some minor balance patches, but they quite honestly did shit all. The irony of all this is the small fact that I can see that the game would've been far better balanced if they hadn't scrapped some of the plans from alpha  / early beta (thank you Tigole, you turd).

Going into The Burning Crusade, we see an emphasis on the usefulness of other talent trees and the start of the trend that I like to call "degestalisation". Classes and talent trees were still pretty distinct, but we began to get a lot of ability crossover and classes getting abilities that nullified the weaknesses that they started out with in Vanilla (like the hunter ability to escape snares for about ten seconds, every wonder why beastmastery was such a big thing?). This was not a good thing. It made classes slightly less distinct and blurred what their strengths and weaknesses were meant to be.

Now, in Wrath of the Lich King, classes are started to seem completely different to the concept of what they're meant to be, and are starting to sort've blur together. Sure, they have different abilities etc, but the degree of normalisation, standardisation and ability giving has led to classes not really having any particular weaknesses (or very minor ones) and only certain distinct strengths. Sure, you can snare a hunter, but then he'll just trinket out of it or be beastmaster and use his big red pet. How do you take down a hunter nowadays? I don't have a clue. Presumably just doing lots of damage to him instead of any real clever use of abilities.

It happened in Runescape, too. Mages started getting heavy armour with protection against melee and ranged damage (whilst they're meant to be glass cannons) and that got the ball rolling to completely fuck up balance. How is an archer meant to compete if he's frozen into an icy block? Oh, better damage arrows or protection against ice or etc etc... It completely fucked up PvP in Runescape, made it pretty much useless to be a high level in all things, since you'd just get frozen and murdered by people with a high level in magic and magic only.

It's sad that all the very good game designers are in board games / P&P gaming, and computer gaming seems to be stuck with the rejects and idiots who don't really know how to design games, but merely know a bit of coding to go along with it.

So, what do you think are the troubles with gaming today?

I just don't get why people prefer consoles over computers. I can build a computer, nowadays, that's quite capable of playing Crysis on medium-high settings for under £300 off vendors, not even whilst looking for deals. It'll probably be capable of playing Crysis 2 fairly well, too, assuming they don't completely bugger up the ports and end up with an entirely unoptimised piece of shit.

So, why do people prefer consoles? Is it because of the options to play Co-op? Most games don't even allow co-op on a single machine anymore except for the Wii, which may explain it's amazing sales. Is it because it's cheaper? Like I said, I could build a PC for about as much as an X-Box and only a bit more than a PS3. Is it just because PC games are considered nerdy? I don't get it.

So, yeah, does anyone know why people prefer consoles?