Am I the only one who's pro-tipping? I feel the need to apologize for making people do work. If you told me I wasn't allowed to tip I'd be leaving cash on the counter and running off.
I used to work in a polling call center and this was a big problem. Not only did almost nobody pick up, but everyone who picked up was very on guard, and had to first be convinced that no, I'm not trying to sell anything, and no, I don't want any of your personally identifiable information, and no, I'm not trying to trick you into sending someone money...
I'm certain it badly skewed the polling results. Obviously I don't have, like, real data about the personalities of the people I spoke to, but based on my interactions with them I would bet that only people who rate unusually high on openness and agreeableness actually complete polls.
My friend in college had a copy of Demon's Souls around the time of its release, and I was really impressed with it. It was one of the first games I picked up when I got a PS3 shortly thereafter.
I'm going to be honest, the number one way to get a good rating from me is to put a giant monster in your movie and have it fight other giant monsters OR a giant robot.
My number one complaint about movies with kaiju and/or mecha, which can prevent them from getting five stars, is that there are usually too many scenes with people talking and advancing the plot, and not enough scenes of wanton destruction where the kaiju/mecha are brawling.
If you can't discuss "topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity" are they also planning to eliminate psychology, anthropology, sociology...? It seems difficult to engage in any discipline that studies humans without talking about those things.
It's a mess of systems that don't mesh well together.
It's a 3v3 hero shooter where the objective is to capture a sword, carry it to the enemy base, and use it to initiate a base assault phase where the attacking team tries to sabotage gizmos while the defending team tries to stop them. This basic gameplay is more or less fine; I have some quibbles with time to kill, ability balance, weapon variety, etc. but they're not the important part. The important part is that there are a bunch of things that don't support this core idea, such as:
The map is way too big for 6 players, and everyone gets a mount to move around the map faster. Why not make the map a reasonable size and scrap the mount mechanic? Presumably to sell mount cosmetics, and to provide space for all the treasure chests that make up point 2.
Despite being basically an arena shooter, it for some reason has the open-chests-for-random-loot mechanic from games like Fortnite and Apex. In those games, the purpose of tiered loot is to give you an incentive to keep opening chests throughout the early and middle game, which drives teams into the same areas and encourages them to fight for resources instead of turtling. In this game, you're always in competition with the other team over the objective, so this is totally unnecessary. The game actually starts with like two minutes of enforced looting time to make sure that everyone opens chests to gear up instead of rushing the objective. Why not just put weapon spawns in strategic locations on the map like in Quake, UT, Halo, etc. and cut the entire looting phase?
Speaking of loot, to get currency to buy armor and extra gear, you have to mine ore during the match. Clicking rocks is not the kind of exciting gameplay you really want to see in a fast paced 3v3 shooter. Shopping is probably not a thing that should be in a fast paced 3v3 shooter.
It overall creates a muddled impression of scale: the map is big, the sword summons a giant siege engine, the looting and shopping mechanics feel like they belong in a game with high player counts and long matches. The game feels like it's designed to evoke a feeling that this is a huge battle. But there are only six players in the map. It ought to feel tight and focused and hectic, and during the base assault phase it does! But they've made a bunch of design decisions that work against the the game mode they implemented.
And it's the only game mode, so if you think that it would be better with bigger teams, or if the objective was different, or you just want to play deathmatch, you can't do any of that.
That makes sense. I figured they were worried that an alternate OS would be more likely to exploit their encryption somehow, but if it's all using industry standard hardware then it really ought to be open.
According to the linked article it prevents the use of Samsung Pay and access to the Secure Folder (an extra layer of security you can enable that requires a second PIN to be input before you can access certain apps and files). This seems pretty reasonable, the goal is clearly to prevent access to especially sensitive data if someone has stolen the phone.
Well, this is what the linked article says about it:
Prior to September 2005, comparative bullet-lead analysis was performed on bullets found at a scene that were too destroyed for striation comparison. The technique would attempt to determine the unique elemental breakdown of the bullet and compare it to seized bullets possessed by a suspect.[47] Review of the method found that the breakdown of elements found in bullets could be significantly different enough to potentially allow for two bullets from separate sources to be correlated to each other. However, there are not enough differences to definitely match a bullet from a crime scene to one taken from a suspect's possession.[48] An additional report in 2004 from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found that the testimony given regarding comparative bullet-lead analysis was overstated and potentially "misleading under the federal rules of evidence".[47] In 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation indicated that they would no longer be performing comparative bullet-lead analysis.[49]
And it doesn't answer the question. Examination of the bullet can tell you something about what kind of gun barrel it was fired from. It cannot tell you that the ammunition itself is "Israeli military grade" unless Israel is doing something unusual with the composition of their bullets. As that page says (under the Criticisms section), comparative bullet lead analysis is not necessarily a reliable indicator of where the bullet was manufactured.
I sort of think that staring at bullet striations is basically tea leaf reading, but even if you think it's perfectly reliable, without a suspect weapon to compare to it can only tell you what kinds of gun barrels could have fired the shot.
Don't recall discovering anything, but maybe I did and then forgot it because my memory is terrible. I think I mostly just liked having someone to talk to.
AD&D 2e has, primarily, a presentation problem. The rules are best suited for a gritty game about the minutiae of exploring uncharted wilderness and delving into the dungeons you find there—one where you keep a watchful eye on your dwindling supplies of lamp oil and arrows as you calculate how to bring as much loot out of the dungeon as possible before getting killed by running into a particularly lucky orc. The rules are very similar to AD&D 1e, which is presented this way.
At some point, someone at TSR must have decided that heroic adventure sells better, because all of the 2e fluff and art makes it look like you play as heroic badasses who stare down dragons, which if you start at level 1 and play by the XP rules, will take you many months of weekly play to achieve.
It lies in your favor, though. On difficulties below the highest, the modern games have hidden modifiers that affect the hit chance that you can't see, but all of them are cheating for you. IIRC your hit chance secretly increases when you have missed shots recently, when you have dead soldiers, when you are outnumbered, and maybe some other things.
I kind of thought the "no women space marines" thing was part of the Imperium being a repressive patriarchal hellhole. I don't know how to feel about "the Imperium (who are still definitely space Nazis) are actually inclusive when recruiting their elite fascist supersoldiers."
I guess overall it's good if people feel included, even if it makes the satire less effective.
I also guess that the people complaining thought the Imperium was "cool," so like... satire is kind of dead anyway.
I think re-explaining things that happened in previous seasons is a different issue. They're worried that you don't remember what happened because it has been so long.
And that's fair. I know I watched Season 2 (and it definitely had my full attention, because I'm incapable of doing two things at once), but the only thing I can actually remember about it is the episode where El went to Chicago and met some shadowrunners. And something about tunnels. Everything else is a blur.
Am I the only one who's pro-tipping? I feel the need to apologize for making people do work. If you told me I wasn't allowed to tip I'd be leaving cash on the counter and running off.