legend

The new abilities should absolutely be included too, no disagreement there. But stat upgrades are not as meaningless as you make it sound if it's done right. In a good system where there are non-linear interactions between your set of abilities and their strength, it affords a huge strategy space with very different outcomes. Diablo 2 excelled at this, both in its skill and equipment. My friend and I played for a really long time because we had a lot of fun coming up with very novel character builds and seeing the consequences (especially in PvP for D2). The way our final version of a Sorceress played was radically different than other players at the time, and it was incredibly satisfying to crush people with a very different play style than they were used to. The difference is these effects usually take a while to manifest. A single upgrade point won't do a lot to change your play, no. But by the time you've invested a bunch, it can make a huge satisfying difference. Again, if it's a we'll done system.

I think the core gameplay still holds up and I think other than the graphics and other polish-like details is better than D3. Plenty of modern RPGs also still have ability upgrades and are still enjoyable. When done right, this kind of mechanic affords a lot of character strategy.

So, you're not a fan of Diablo 2?

Agreed I think the treatment of women it shows would be adopted by a non-negligible minority of our own country if they could get away with it; it is not far off from how women are treated in other cultures; and wasn't that far off from mankind historically. In short, the culture in their society is completely monstrous, but also a believable possibility within the scope of human nature.

Apparently the original book author has been heavily involved in both seasons, helped craft the story to the second season, and is going to write a proper book sequel. I've been loving it, although it's easily the most terrifying TV show I've ever watched. Maybe because it hits a bit too close to home.

Those are some very promising quotes!

I do not. My company is distributed and we all use video chat a lot. Not sure VR would be especially convenient at this time, and right now, I think the medium of video is better. But that could change. In general, I'm pretty excited to see how VR infiltrates the way we work and do things.

Fucking Christ, man! Get a lawyer! As for myself, no. But I did work in academia for a number of years, so it's kind of similar except I agreed to it. EDIT: Just saw your latter reply. If they still end up dragging their feet, get back on that lawyer plan

What annoyed me about the philosophy part is I had great answers for all the questions, but they were never options In that way, it's a lot like too many modern philosophers who haven't kept up with what we learned in math since the 50s.

It literally was not the same puzzle mechanic from beginning to end. Not only are you being reductive, you're also wrong!

So in RL, you have an agent. It doesn't know how to behave, so it takes an action and observes what happens. If that action was bad, too bad. If you want to know how something else would have turned out if you behaved differently, too bad. You don't get to magically reset to where you were. You'll have to somehow work your way back to that scenario (or something similar where similar is something you also have to learn) to see what else could have been. The agent is forced to deal with the consequences of what it did. Because of how challenging that scenario is, a seriously important concept in RL is how the agent balances exploration vs exploitation. Is the current state a good state to try something new? Or should the agent instead try to exploit what it's learned at this point? This balance, and even how you choose to explore, are huge challenging topics, for which we by and large don't have good answers. So what are people doing now instead? They've given the agent the ability to clone itself, or versions of itself, at huge scales so that in effect, any single decision isn't all that important and the agents don't have to worry so much about careful and useful exploration. The way these huge numbers of actors learn is also often not merely equivalent to learning longer because of how the sequence of learning updates work. But that might require a bit more mathematical discussion to explain. As I said, I think that they were explicitly looking at the evolution of reward functions is interesting and you have to investigate learning across a population to do that. So I'm less down on it here for the interest in that. But other stuff lately has been especially abusive IMO.

Psh. The Talos Principle is one of the best puzzle games out there.

This is cool work. Using evolutionary algorithms to learn the reward function is an idea that's been explored in literature before (as well work in which I was involved), but not on this scale. Their reports of learning time are a bit unclear and potentially misleading. I'll have to look at this paper, but I think it's 500,000 games for each member of the population (which is huge). It actually might not do as well as you'd think. Correlated experience, which is common if you only have one agent learning with its own experience, can really fuck with learning and make it behave badly. Increasingly, you're seeing papers that do these huge distributed learning spaces to try and avoid that issue. That may not have been the motivation for lots of maps here, but there is a reasonable chance. It's also a direction that grinds my gears a bit. The reinforcement-learning problem is at its heart about learning when you have to suffer your consequences. This direction of huge numbers of parallel actors is side stepping that issue and isn't practice for many real world scenarios. I do like that they're looking at the evolution angle though because I've always found the interaction of evolution with internal reward functions interesting. For that reason, I'll cut them some slack in this case Its just looking at the image and deciding when, but they do say its reaction time and aiming is a result for some of its excellent performance, so in the further challenges they artificially added some random inaccuracy and it still did well.

I think my answer has to be Xbox. It was the first time a console started to bridge the gap between PC-style games and console-style games, with (eventually) high quality online gaming. But more than anything, because it had Halo. Xbox with Halo released my senior year of high school, and myself and my friends took a day off school to get it from a preorder I had and played it all that day. But where it really took off for me was college the following year. Halo was the medium by which myself and my best friends from college bonded. We played 4 player split screen on my then tiny 20" TV all the time and got really good. Then we bought a dedicated PC that we sat next to the Xbox just for running Xbox Connect so we could play Halo online against others. So many good memories, and so many noise passes taken.

Alright, good to know. Thanks.

For me I guess it's the DS (or 3DS, but I never owned one). I was never a big handheld gamer because handheld games just didn't work for me most of the time for whatever reason. But DS did have some games that I enjoyed quite a bit. Fuck those corners and super small form though. Jesus Christ it would hurt my hand after awhile. Otherwise, the answer I can't give would win it for me by a landslide Switch is an example of why consoles can offer something beyond PC. Otherwise, I'd prefer all games to just be on PC.

Fuck. I'm waffling on this so much. If this were a steam game the decision would be easy: wait for a sale. But does Nintendo eshop have much in the ways of sales? If so, I haven't seen them yet.

If I was actively looking to read about retro specifically, then I surely would at least click on it. But most of the time I'm not looking for topics that specific and just casually look at topics to see what interests me. Consequently, slow moving boards tend not to be visited. Furthermore, if I wanted to post something about retro, there is a good chance I wouldn't do it on the retro board because it might get more attention elsewhere. Back when R&P was a thing and GI was more active, on a number of occasions I would still posting something in GI instead of R&P precisely for that same reason. Why does that annoy you? As far as I can tell, no one has tried to seriously push it. Both Nokra and I rather quickly deferred to the subcommunity's preference, even if we don't understand the reasoning. I'm an engineer. Thinking about how to optimize things is what I do (to the point that my work is about optimizing how software can optimize!) and it's never done out of malice or intentional disregard for others. EDIT: to be more clear, I'm sorry if it came off as if I was try to attack your community. I honestly just thought it would be better for everyone involved. If you guys feel differently, so be it.

On various occasions in various boards I've not responded in threads because I realized just before going to type something up that it's actually quite a bit older by that point. I've also observed it happening in the reverse direction (same thread getting more attention on a different board, both on this site and others). In the past, I've often thought subboards would be better if they just acted as a filter and otherwise had the content appear in the main board and even have done some searching before to see if IP boards could be configured that way. I don't know why you refuse to believe I'm being genuine about my motivations or why you think this phenomenon is so uncommon.

I was looking forward to Mario Tennis, but I was disappointed that the SP is apparently so short. Is it only worth it if you plan to play online, or do you think it's still worth a buy regardless. I'll probably cave and get it anyway for something relaxing to play before bed, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

I'm speaking abstractly, not that tags are actually implemented. That is there are numerous subtopics that Newsroom spans, and it makes sense to have one giant glob for that. And that is paired with the activity level for that glob and all of games being large enough that separating by those globs is common enough warrant a board. But we could also us entertainment for another example that does also have its already created.

I explained why I cared (and so did Nokra) but I think we both have stated that while we do have a preference, neither of us care "so much" and are completely willing to defer to your guys preference Also, that we haven't really joined in on the discussions is kind of the point. The nature of the setup makes it less likely for us to participate, whereas we would be more likely to participate in it via a tag because we would see it. As for why not a single board, it's because to my knowledge there is no such thing as hierarchical tags, and dealing with such tags would become messy. For example, there are many subcategories to video games, and many for CEB/Newsroom. Given that, it is convenient to be able to filter based on that meta category, and that's precisely what a separate board does. Whether something with clear subcategories warrants its own board would be a function of activity over those subcategories.

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Apparently most games I've played this year came out earlier or were released on Switch on this year but came out earlier. Excluding those: Pillars of Eternity 2 Far Cry 5 Shit, I guess that's it or just about!