Xhieron

The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can’t be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.

Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. “Being unkillable” or “controlling this space” can’t be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you’re now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that’s a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.

Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you’d interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can’t punish a playstyle because playstyles aren’t that well defined, and you can’t create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There’s also no energy denial in GW2, and you can’t give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1’s mesmer–like a lot of things that were better in GW1.

If you ask me, we don’t need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs–stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have–and we need the elites to be “de-elited” so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they’ve taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.

Windows 10 LTSC 2021 ends support in 2027 (although it doesn’t matter quite as much). And it’s likely that the Win 11 LTSC later this year will necessarily be free from much of 11’s bullshit. Linux is still the right call, but for those of us who need to run a Windows machine for whatever reason, there are alternatives, so, you know… yarr.

That was the point… Did you reply to the wrong comment?

That’s flattering, but I was actually just expecting a press release. So where is it?

She sure can’t. Sounds like all OpenAI has to do is produce the voice actor they used.

So where is she? …

Right.

AI = Absent Indians

Christmas.

Thank you for this. That was a fantastic survey of some non-materialistic perspectives on consciousness. I have no idea what future research might reveal, but it’s refreshing to see that there are people who are both very interested in the questions and also committed to the scientific method.

SO close. Just another five or ten seconds to finish the whole license. I would love to see someone cover this thing and tie it off.

Lawyer here, and generally no. At best, the judgment could be persuasive to other courts in the First Circuit–and of course that’s what Nintendo wants, hence the effort to craft language that could be easily ported to other sympathetic courts–but the legal theory is absolutely not binding on other parties until/unless the finding/rationale is adopted by a higher court.

Narrator: It didn’t.

Your solution to rampant economic inequality is … campaign and vote downballot.

I mean, sure, that’s a great idea, but your argument essentially boils down to combating apathy (which isn’t a new or unique problem), and I guess attacking a hypothetical Sanders administration that never happened because–I dunno, you just wanted to get a jab in at voters who were actually motivated about a candidate for once in a lifetime? Well, good news for you; all the Sanders supporters are back to voting defensively until their kids grow up, if they vote at all. Does that feel like a win to you?

People aren’t “taking the easy way out” by not voting the entire ballot. In fact, split-ticket voting is down historically, at least as of 2020, across both parties. Blaming people for not devoting their lives to political activism is akin to blaming minimum wage workers for not walking out: Yeah, maybe things would be better if they did, but people have to survive. Choosing to use what little spare time one has with family instead of participating in local politics isn’t a moral failure, and it’s not the easy way out. It’s just rational. People have limited time and limited means, and there are more important things than who gets to be the constable next year.

Nope. You’re still wrong, but it’s not worth the trouble. I hope you never have to learn the hard way. Take it easy.

None of these are (speaking generally) legal requirements of an agreement in the US.

Source: Am lawyer who writes EULAs for a living.

There are plenty of good arguments for why a particular EULA might be legally problematic, but “no signature, no contract!” isn’t one.