Lurker > Monopoman

I generally ended up playing PoE mostly SSF (informally), just because I wasn't a fan of trading (and, specifically, the fact that gaining currency mostly required farming *and* the effort of pricing/selling the loot from that farming), and it's a perfectly functional and enjoyable game in that format, but the ever-present sense of missing out on a ton of really interesting builds because I hadn't obtained the rare gear needed to enable them really put a damper on the experience. That's not necessarily the wrong way to approach loot and builds, but I personally found it kind of frustrating at times.

That said, GGG really needs to get off the fence as far as trading goes (at least, they did the last time I played, though that was a few years ago and it may have changed). They've said outright that they don't want to do anything more efficient or accessible than PoETrade for trading because they don't want to ruin the game by making rare uniques too easy to get, but they're still designing the game around the assumption that players will trade for those uniques as needed and just not caring that the trading system is incredibly cumbersome and inconvenient. Either the game should be designed around trading and have a proper trading system/auction house in place, or it should be designed around playing mostly self-found and treating trading as a supplement to that. Trying to occupy some kind of middle ground between those two philosophies is just awkward.

Of course, I say this, but I still put a solid 500 hours in before drifting away. It's a great game, just held back by a loot philosophy that I feel puts too much emphasis on playing the economy instead of playing the game.

Personally, I think I like Grim Dawn's loot philosophy better than PoE or Diablo 3's. With PoE, the lack of targeted farming and the preponderance of build-defining Uniques pretty much requires players to trade in order to be able to use many builds, which is a cumbersome system that ultimately limits build flexibility a lot in a game that has such massive potential for variety. Diablo 3 avoided that issue by having build-defining legendaries drop often enough that pretty much any build was accessible, but the sheer quantity of skill-specific bonuses offered by those legendaries (and particularly by set bonuses) pigeonholed those skills into being used in certain ways and ended up really only allowing a fairly limited number of different builds. Those builds also came together so quickly that there was rarely any room to farm for more meaningful upgrades than getting the same legendary with better stats, which is kind of boring.

Grim Dawn, on the other hand, has relatively few items that would be considered build-defining/enabling, and the majority of those are target farmable. That means there's a ton of build variety available just from guaranteed drops, but even so, there's still enough room to improve on those budget builds and/or enable more gear-dependent ones to make farming feel worthwhile. Some of those builds end up feeling a bit samey (often just different elemental flavours of similar skills, or sometimes even the same skill) after trying out enough of them, but ultimately, I think it's my favourite approach to loot of the three.

Of course, the other approach is to just eschew the idea of build-defining gear pieces in general so that's never an issue, but I'm less keen on that. Finding a piece of build-defining gear is exciting because it meaningfully changes the way you play. There's a fine line between offering that excitement and making it mandatory to get those drops in order to function (which D3 crosses), but when it's done right, I find it to be a much more interesting philosophy than having every gear piece just make the numbers get bigger.

just two more weeks until they unveil the republican plan for healthcare

But he's a registered democrat who leans left, remember

Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, it's not about "erasing legacies" or any similar pointless attribution of glory to basic government work, and instead about doing good/bad things to the country? Nobody cares about those specific aspects of Obama's legacy for the sake of preserving a legacy, they care about it because they feel those were good changes and that undoing them is a step backwards. Similarly, reversing harmful Trump-era policies is felt to be a good thing, and the complete worthlessness of the concept of "Trump's legacy" means that legacy's preservation doesn't even factor into that value judgement.

It only looks hypocritical if you treat politics like cheering for your favourite football team. Pay any attention at all to the practical reality of the matter, and that impression falls apart immediately.

I wanted to like POE but the inventory is just a scam.

Isnt destiny just one long loot grind?

Oh... so is like spiral knights system.

I thought path of exile was an mmo. They usually are looters by default.

Geniuses and artists are often eccentric in some way. Strange hobbies, strange interests, strange collections, strange habits about greeting people, etc. To a certain extent, it's even expected.

Then some people are intelligent or talented but just shitty people

I've played the SNES one, the PS1 one, and the N64 one. the SNES one is probably the best, the PS1 one was kind of good, and the N64 one was not that great IIRC.

It's actually similar to teachers on that regard, in that they typically take on much more than they're qualified for or are officially responsible for. But where police are often worshipped, teachers normally get very little respect.

A lot of reform is needed. We shouldn't be putting so much on police OR teachers.

Cant unsee it now.

Fuck you.

Soldiers knew they were signing up to kill, and I'm not enough of a sick disgusting freak to tell them it was so they could have better sex rather than for the sake of the security of their country.

There's no way we have the actual tech for flying cars yet.

And here come the strawmen! First, "my own party" is the Democrats, if you're looking at party affiliations. If you're not looking at party affiliations, then that's even fucking stupider. Second, most Republicans don't even know what the fuck Qanon is, which makes your stupid belief that it's somehow a mainstream belief among Republicans even more ignorant. Third, you've apparently confused senators and congresspeople, which is unsurprising given your seeming political illiteracy. I imagine you're referring to Marjorie Taylor Greene (who came to blows with my state's crackpot congressperson) and Lauren Boebert. However, that's fucking congress, you get a lot of kooks in there (AOC being a great example). That's not necessarily indicative of anything. And that's not even touching on the broader issue that even if everything you claimed was actually true -- instead of NONE of it being true -- that STILL wouldn't be an excuse.

Calling a ridiculous conspiracy theory a ridiculous conspiracy theory is what people should do when they see a ridiculous conspiracy theory. And when it's easy to point out the flaws in that theory, you should do so.



But yeah, blatant misuse of the pot-kettle analogy on pretty much every level, even if you worked a dozen strawmen into that.

Meanwhile Gamefaqs pretends to be against conspiracy theories -_- Honestly, if they were to fake something like that, it would look a fuck ton better than that. And they would have had the attacker keep the mask on. The fact that it looks like shit and the cops seems disorganized skews heavily towards it being real. If it was something they'd planned, you wouldn't have that shit.

there is a game called Hacknet that is better that most representations.

I imagine a realistic game would be boring

Do you think we don't have hover-cars because our technology hasn't advanced enough? Because that's not remotely true. Tech-wise, we could absolutely have them, but because they provide very little benefit, introduce too many infrastructure and logistical challenges, and would be thoroughly impractical to operate due to the energy costs, there isn't enough demand to drive the necessary R&D.

Technology is absolutely advancing fast enough. Society hasn't adapted to that point, no, but that's why people like Yang are pushing for policies that will help society adapt. If they don't, when that transition comes, people are going to suffer because corporations pushed forward before society was ready for it.

The fact of the matter is that corporations will replace people with robots as soon as it's cheaper to do so than to pay a person. This is not speculation. This is why Detroit is Detroit now. There are two options to prevent this unstoppable reality from ruining more lives than it already has:

* Pass laws, tariffs, and other such regulations to make it unattractive or outright illegal to replace human workers
* Pass laws to redistribute the profits from automated labour to sustain those laid off by it
The first option is generally very unattractive because it stifles innovation and ultimately keeps humanity from moving forward. Commercially, the US will be left in the dust if it refuses to let domestic companies automate labour, as countries that do move forward become more productive, more efficient, and produce better-quality products (not that any company with the option to leave would stay in the US as such restrictions grew tighter and tighter to fight advances in technology). The second option means billionaires become less billionaire-y, everyone's quality of life improves (or stays the same, in the case of said billionaires), and the country has an incentive to innovate and remain competitive.

Those are really the only two options. Refusing to choose just turns the whole country into Detroit. Humans will be commercially obsolete in the not-so-distant future, such that the only jobs they'll be doing are ones they choose to do for fun. You can either prepare for that, or you can try to pretend it's not coming.

LOL, put down those science fiction rags and pick up a real book. The people pushing that spiel today were the same kind of people in the 1950s who thought we'd have hover-cars today. Yes, technology is advancing, but it's not advancing nearly fast enough nor has society adapted to the point where you could expect that widescale of an implementation.

Scifi novels and movies might be exciting but, as we learned from Disney's Tomorrowland, the real tomorrow is never as big or exciting as the one in our heads.

You can pretty much run anybody against Andrew Yang and it would be an improvement. Andrew Yang needs to sit things out a few hundred years until technology catches up with the nonsense he's preaching.

It's like Speed 2 but on a train!

Yea all you jackasses who don't tip to try to "change the system" just straight up suck. Tips are good, it encourages people to actually be good at their fucking job.

And I have only not tipped once, it was this lady who NEVER gave us refills, let all of our food sit out in the window and get cold, and just straight up didn't do her job, all with literally only 2 other tables in the restaurant who weren't getting served either. I literally watched her just stand around and bullshit with some other employees.

Doesn't chuck e cheese(or however it's spelled) have a strict no adult without a kid policy?

I hadn't heard of this one, but a western/martial arts fusion sounds cool, so I'll probably check it out at some point.

The thing is, even some democrats and liberals are that stupid. I had a friend that was both a liberal and wanted to join the police force. He argued that even though doctors stated that a person can be choking and still talk, since he has 8 years of college education on Criminal Justice(it took him 8 years to get his associates btw, it's not like he has a masters or anything) that he knew more than the doctors and that no way George Floyd was choked to death. He also said a bunch of dumbass things about how the American Justice system isn't corrupt, that it's just "nuanced", that everyone killed by the police were justified, etc...