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The series is big (850+ chapters) and unfortunately the author tends to ignore his own mechanics and go on complete stories arc that bypass all of these. If you like the mechanics, read the first two "tomes", and stop when he's summoned to another world. There's also The New World, which uses a...

There's a PBS episode on youtube that goes a bit deeper into that. The point is that light goes at the speed of causality rather than causality going at the speed of light (any massless interaction goes at the maximum speed possible, i.e. speed of causality, not just light). Our comprehesion of...

That one was great.

John Staat's WoW Diary mention it (and Scarlet Monastery). The biggest problem is that people hate starting a dungeon and not "finish it". With a non-instanced setup, it works, but since you know all of that dungeon is there for you, and only you, you feel bad when you don't do everything...

Makers of the Ryzom MMORPG. We started in 2000, but I left fall 2001 (for the rush to make Internet registars and sell domain names). The engine development was a mess, but the devs and I were all raiding on EQ (different servers tough), so we knew what we were talking about (we were pretty much...

C, the speed of causality, appears to be absolute. What Bell's Theorem states is that you cannot predict correctly every event in a local context only - you need access to knowledge of some states that are not within your light cone. Entanglement is the mechanism by which those external states...

They can probably reuse some of the content. Like, after Classic, the next expansion is... The Northern Wastes (Northrend). Reuses the Northrend map, rewrites the storyline (there is no Outland, and there's not even a Cavern of Time). You can level to 70, and Dwarves gain Shamanism from the Iron...

Back when I was at Nevrax, I tended to remind the devs "8% of your players will be colorblind". There's now a few tools that overlay a filter on your designs so you can see it "as they would", which helps to realize your beautiful UI is nearly unusable for 5-8% of your playerbase (depending on...

One of the things you could work with is the dual Path-Skill system underlying the Legend of Randidly Ghosthound litrpg webnovel. It's an hybrid classless/class system. You discover basic skills by doing stuff, like Cooking by cooking recipes, Running by... running, etc. You gain skill points...

MTGO has been around since 2002.

I think everyone agrees that the nostalgia pretty much ends with Cataclysm. The problems of LK was mostly the 4 times raiding (you raided 10 normal, 10 hard, 25 normal, 25 hard). But, given the sheer amount of raid, that makes it a very good point to let the server "slowly die".

They probably should prepare for the dynamics of the "post-standard" environment for Arena that comes this fall. But I don't think the game as the freemium model it has supports more than one set per quarter, or two sets in parallel. Three months to collect a "reasonable" amount of a set works...

Wasn't the original beta capped to 30 for some time (and Scarlet Monastery the only "high level" dungeon)? So they're not just emulating the retail game, they're emulating beta as well.

As an aside, Aleron Kong has a pretty bad reputation among litrpg fans for some shenanigans (including mod abuse on reddit). His current scheme seems to be trying to copyright the term "litrpg", which is why he tries to establish his reputation of "The Father of American LitRPG". That said, he...

Still classical sci-fi. This time, it's David Weber's (yes, that Weber) The Gordian Protocol Wonder of wonders: A SOLO David Weber! M. Weber is better known for his large series. Here, he's doing a collaboration on a stand-alone novel. It's a novel that is a bit too rich. It hints of a major...

Everyone who wants to play BFA can play BFA. Everyone who wants to check Classic... must wait until the gods of chance enable your beta access.

Won't happen. The big difference is that everyone knows about it and wants to play with it. So, rather than fix the problems "when it's discovered", they'll simply get it fixed beforehand.

If enough people play it, they might do BC and LK later: https://www.wowhead.com/news=291725/burning-crusade-and-wrath-legacy-servers-possibly-in-wows-future

Finally got in and started unlocking the starting decks. They are going to replace those when M20 releases this july, right? What happens to the people who have just got their decks and don't grind massively when the old starter decks become illegal in october? Oh, and I finally discovered what...

More pure sci-fi. Finished Neal Asher's The Warship. This second book in the Rise of the Jain trilogy starts where the previous one ended, and adds more background and lore to the Polity Universe and one of its most infamous Elder Races, the Jain. We've only seen the Jain so far thru the lenses...

I've said repeatedly, at this point Normal+Heroic has zero purpose. At best - at the very best - there should be only 3 difficulties. LFR to see the sight (and get your weekly kill quest, when there was any), "normal" for normal raiders, Mythic for hardcore. My guild when I was still playing...

Last post on the dev blog is May 9th (showing everything about their hyppogryph models...)

Just in case you didn't know (I also didn't until recently): that's the same person (Mira Grant is a pen name for different type of books).

Time to resurrect this thread. Just finished The Accidental War by Walter Jon Williams. He's one of the veterans of the genre... of all kind of genres (he does milfi, he does "real SF", he does fantasy. Everything and well). After a couple novellas that are not entirely necessary (but still...

You can pick The World of Warcraft Diary by John Staats for reference on the development process of a real game (bonus points for their first cinematic, where the "director" couldn't figure out who was piloting which character on screen since nameplates were turned off, so they were firing off...

I haven't read a book in French for at least 15 years or so. I'm highly anglophile (despite being French) and the only thing I read in French are internet news/newspapers.

Public transportation for the win. Gives me a minimum of 1h45 every day to read. Novels are usually quick reads; serious books take a few weeks or a month at least. I also tend to have 4 or 5 books "currently reading" at the same time. My goodreads challenge for this year is 130 books, and I'm...

You all have phones, right? https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/blizzcon-2019-tickets-revolve-around-invasive-poorly-reviewed-smartphone-app/

"The first female Captain Marvel", it says. And that's technically true. Carol "Captain Marvel" Danvers is last version, not early version.

And they have about six months to have a mostly showable demo for Blizzcon where they'll announce it. Producing episodic content is hard unless you have specifically organized your production pipeline around it. Asheron's Call did it, but they had a world designed for it. By now, retrofitting...

WoW succeeded (commercially) by applying a single player RPG over the MMO part. It still had to fill the parts beyond the RPG (when you've finished leveling and exhausted your quests), which it did more or less adequately. The big problem is that it applied a game paradigm to a different game...

I'm skipping the non-fiction, since it has less of a broad interest than SFF. Currently reading Arrian - The Campaigns of Alexander the Great and finishing When Baghdad ruled the Muslim World. Next is finally reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now!

And that's why I'm mostly against quests as a main mechanic for leveling/gearing. Fact is, it costs a lot to make interesting quests, so the quests become disguised mob grinding. Except you have a very specific amount to grind, not one more, not one less (ok, slightly variable when it's "bring...

That one's not the problem. The problem is that the quest has become the required path to advance. 1) The quests reward you a disproportionate amount of XP at every step 2) The game is balanced so that you have a minimum amount of gear at each level, and the main source of gear is quest...

Fixed for you.

Ahhh, the original eRepublik. Good times.

Good launch, and absolutely awesome infrared view of the landing. When you think they couldn't innovate in the "show", they drop that new one.

If I remember right from streams, there's a card that basically rewrites your creature into a 1/1 with no abilities. Then you kill it and it's gone.

I thought I could rate my various Dungeon Core series. There's a lot of them, meaning a lot of bleh/copycat/not too good ones, and a few good ones. (if you wonder what's Dungeon Core stories, it's stories where the main character is a Dungeon Keeper in the style of the old Bullfrog Game) -...

That was before I visited more of the litrpg genre. Then, you start to appreciate more some of the gems you have. Be very, very wary of russian stuff. Biggest litrpg saga so far I liked is Viridian Gate Online, by James Hunter. Setup is simple: asteroid coming and is going to wipe the entire...