What to do while you're waiting for Vengeance

I keep waking up and it still isn't February.

Damn it.

So I thought it might be a good idea to attempt to distract each other from the waiting. So, who's got distractions?

Warehouse 13. Reading/listening to the Dresden Files. Leverage.

I play games... Lots and lots of games...

Explaining to the knee-jerkers why net neutrality wasnt murdered in cold blood yesterday in the US has taken quite a bit of my spare time haha. Court documents. Thrilling I know. It'll keep you busy though.

I chose January as the time to get back into Diablo 2, which I play for a month or two, maybe 2-3 times a year at the most.

Mrrr?

Never a bad choice sir!

Yarrr?

That was meant to be a sleepy, catlike expression of inquiry regarding the topic of "net neutrality" and yesterday's date.

Ooh, I have more Dresden on my Kindle that I haven't read yet. Not my favourite thing ever, but it's entertaining enough. Enjoyed the RPG too. 

Games are good! Minecraft's keeping me busy at the moment, but I'm totally up for suggestions for other games. 

I remember countless hours playing Diablo back in the day, taking my precious memory card to friends's houses so we could plow through another 10 levels (of course we never stopped at 10). For some reason 2 didn't hook me the same way despite me being really excited to get it when it came out, but I really should give it another try some time.

Yesterday in the case of Verizon v. FCC, the DC circuit court of appeals, one of the most important circuits in the country, ruled in favor of Verizon effectivly vacating some of the more key aspects of the "Open Internet Order", or more commonly, the net neutrality rule. In the short term, what this means is that ISP's can start giving preferential treatment to content providers who pay the ISP's a premium. Lets say you have Comcast internet and subscribe to Netflix (as an imaginary example). Comcast may now legaly intentionally slow down the end users connection to Netflix as a way to promote its own On Demand service (which would now come in lightning fast). That isn't happening right now, but thats the fear. Ever read Brave New World? You should.

Anyway, the ruling in the case is interesting for multiple reasons, and the knee jerk reactions that the sky is falling are just that. Basically the FCC was basically regulating ISP's similarly to "common carriers" without ever really labeling them as such, and it is that little detail the court found to be illegal which by defacto vacacted the ability of the FCC to keep enforcing its regulations. The FCC has options, the least of which is appealing the case to the Supreame Court (which would be its next stop if they even would agree to hear the case). Or, better yet, the FCC could do what it didnt have the balls to do in 2002 and classify ISP's as a utility (like the telecoms) and all that regulation would be back in place with no legal recourse of the ISPs to fight it.

We will see what happens.

Yeah.  People always jump on the courts for these rulings, but most of the time it is just the court telling someone else to get their stuff together the right way.  Our federal courts are pretty dang good.

Yeah, the FCC actually legally has the ability to keep doing what it's currently been doing about net neutrality, they basically have to just do a bunch of paperwork first.  The court in fact recommended that they do exactly that.  The ruling wasn't saying that net neutrality is bad or wrong or anything, just that the FCC was approaching the problem from the wrong angle.  So I'm not super-worried, personally.  The current head of the FCC is an old telecom lobbyist, though, so there is still SOME concern.

On topic, I've been reading Fullmetal Alchemist to pass the time, but I'm almost finished and Vengeance is still so far away!  Ugh!

There's been a lot more "real life" lately than I prefer, but I'm also trying to get a Traveller game started with the folks I've been gaming with for… a while. (Wrapped up two other RPG campaigns late last year and I've been itching to run a Traveller game for years! )

While this is true, there is still a question ultimately of whether that proverbial paperwork will ever see ink. The FCC specifically didn't classify ISPs as a utility in 2002 when they had the chance due in no small part to special interests and lobbying against all the regulation that comes with being a utility. The federal courts seem content with the level of "competition" in the ISP market (citing Google fiber's 3 measly markets as evidence), you have to wonder if the FCC chairman feels the same way. If so, he might be content to sit back and wait for the next move by Time Warner, Comcast et al. 

The audiobook editions are read by James Marsters (best known for playing Spike on Buffy: the Vampire Slayer), except for Ghost Story, which was read by John Glover due to a schedule conflict caused by having to bump the book back several months. Quite entertaining, especially the not-quite-British accent he uses for Bob the Skull.

Ah yes, I remember my friend saying about that (he's a big Dresden fan). Said there are a couple of amusing mis-readings too, like pronouncing spellslinger as "spells linger".

I never thought of Bob as British. That's really weird. 

He's at his best (in the Dresden readings) when he's doing an English character who is definitely not Spike but does sound damn close.

I climbed a mountain on Christmas because it was there. Mountain climbing face.

Other than that, I've been working out a lot in order to get in shape for my Tachyon costume. Gotta tone up the legs. And the rest of me, because why not?

I've gotten involved with at least three JRPGs–Xenoblade Chronicles, Shen Megami Tensei IV, and Tales of the Abyss. Those will keep me occupied for a while.

I've never played the original Diablo; from what I've heard, I would probably find the step backward painful, due to details such as gold taking up space in your backpack, and the limitation to just three characters, and so forth.  For that matter I'm not interested in Diablo 3, based on what I've heard about the changes to it.  While D2 is far from a perfect game, it seems to be about as close as I can expect from the industry.

Yep; re-read it quite recently, in fact.  Confirmed my opinion that as far as dystopias go, it isn't the worst one by a long shot.  Especially considering the ending…we're supposed to sympathize with this one character who more nearly resembles us than anyone else in the setting, but given that he is the only one who sees anything wrong with what's happening around him, what he ends up doing about it strikes me as, well, rather silly and pointless.  I would want to rescue the victim/hero of 1984 from the nightmarish circumstances he's trapped in, but if I applied the same level of omnipotence to BNW, I'd be more likely to lecture what's-his-name about making things harder on himself than necessary, and politely suggest how he can avoid the trouble he gets into, rather than actually getting him out of it…my attitude is pretty much that he brought it on himself, and ought to just lighten up a little.  By the main "villain's" own admission, there are plenty of alternatives, and his refusal to accept any of them doesn't come across to me as noble, just pigheaded.  The world certainly has enough problems that it deserves to have someone opposing it, but he doesn't pick anything resembling an effective method of doing so; his actions are entirely self-involved and counterproductive, and I don't sympathize much with him when he suffers the consequences of them.

Anyway, the ruling in the case is interesting for multiple reasons, and the knee jerk reactions that the sky is falling are just that.

I dunno, it does sound pretty grim, though not exactly novel…I remember the exact debate happening several years ago (along with some crazy chick in the Netherlands doing a hilarious publicity stunt, which my much younger and stupider self took way too seriously).  I think it'd be really nice, though, if someone besides me, someone with actual authority, would go "hey wait a minute, this is totally evil and BS and the answer is no, so knock it off".

Basically the FCC was basically regulating ISP's similarly to "common carriers" without ever really labeling them as such, and it is that little detail the court found to be illegal which by defacto vacacted the ability of the FCC to keep enforcing its regulations. The FCC has options, the least of which is appealing the case to the Supreame Court (which would be its next stop if they even would agree to hear the case). Or, better yet, the FCC could do what it didnt have the balls to do in 2002 and classify ISP's as a utility (like the telecoms) and all that regulation would be back in place with no legal recourse of the ISPs to fight it.We will see what happens.

Hm.  I don't entirely get the details of all this, but my tentative take on it is that "common carriers" does sound like a more correct description for ISPs than "utility", and that if there are regulations in place, it would be better to extend them beyond the bounds of "utility" than to reclassify things as "utility" in order to get them regulated.  My attitude is and has always been that the Internet is a public space, like the sidewalks in the real world, and that they need to be freely traffickable for the sake of the common good.  I don't approve of attempts to cordon off physical spaces so that only the elite are allowed to use them, and I likewise disapprove of doing this for a purely mental form of "space" such as telecommunications.

Got a custom SotM expansion I'll be playing soon with my gaming group, the art for it is pretty close to Adam's art. One of the main reasons I'm trying it out, plus it seems to have more thought put into it than most of the customs posted on BGG. Got the cards from Printer Studio in the mail today.

I've not played the first Diablo game, but I played the second a lot (and still go back to it on occasion). The Necromancer is my character of choice, using mainly Bone spells, the wonderful Corpse Explosion, and a golem, with the occasional Amp Damage thrown in for good measure :). Diablo III was okay (played a Witch Doctor), but I didn't really like the way the skills worked - rather than choosing between skill trees and deciding where to put your points and stuff as you levelled up, you were automatically given a specific skill whenever you reached a certain level - some levels would give you a new skill, while others would give you a new rune in a skill you already had (runes were basically modifications to the skill, changing the damage type, increasing the area of effect, making it last slightly longer, etc). So there was no choice regarding character builds beyond which skills (and which rune in each skill, if any) you wanted to have selected at that time. And you could only have four skills on hotkeys, plus one for each mouse button (and I think a skill had to be labelled as "Primary" or "Secondary" to be able to be assigned to a mouse button).

I really liked the way Titan Quest handled skills/classes - your starting character was a blank slate (all you can choose at character creation is your name, sex, and tunic colour), but when you levelled up for the first time, you could choose a Skill Mastery (from nine possible options…eight if you didn't have the expansion). Each Mastery had its own collection of skills which you could unlock as you levelled - you'd get three skill points whenever you levelled up, and would first have to put some into the sidebar of that skill - a vertical bar to the left of the Mastery window for that particular Mastery. Putting points into these increased your stats (Str, Int, Dex, Health, Energy) and unlocked the higher tiers of skills so you could start putting points into those (the sidebar maxed out at 32 points, at which point all tiers would be unlocked for that skill). When you hit level eight, you unlocked the ability to choose a second Mastery to go alongside your first one…but you didn't have to choose immediately - you could put it off for as long as you wanted. And different Masteries worked together in different ways - someone who chose Warfare and Defence would be very weapons-oriented, wearing big heavy armour and generally running around bashing stuff and/or hacking it to bits. Meanwhile someone who'd taken Storm and Nature would probably be casting ice and/or lightning spells at stuff, whilst buffing their own (and their allies') hitpoints and summoning various creatures to help out. Any Mastery would work okay with any other Mastery, but some worked better than others, eg a caster-oriented mastery like Storm worked better with another caster-oriented one like Spirit because both increased your Int and therefore your Energy (aka mana) and elemental damage, meaning the skills in both trees became more effective. Combining Storm with something like Warfare meant you'd get increases to your Int and your Str so you'd be a bit more "spread out" in that sense (equipment also had stat requirements in order to wear it, so you had to consider this as well), but you could certainly still succeed if you took skills from both Masteries that worked well together (such as taking the Warfare skill that lets you deal more damage the more times you hit stuff in a short space of time with the Storm one that makes your weapon deal lightning damage whenever you hit something). I still go back to Titan Quest every now and then as well - replayed it just a couple of months ago, in fact :). And I need to actually load up the Grim Dawn Alpha that I have (the remains of Iron Lore, the company that made TQ, are making a new game with the TQ engine) - it's like TQ but the setting is a sort of Victorian-esque sort of world (TQ was ancient mythology and had the monsters to match - Greece, Egypt, and the Orient…then back to Greece for the expansion, heading down into Hades).

At the moment, though, I'm mostly playing Borderlands 2 (at least when my partner is online). I'm not a fan of FPSs and I thought that was what this game was when I saw it advertised on Steam a year or two ago. But then I saw my dad and sister playing it together on the PS3 and realised it was co-op. That changed everything ;). Plus it's not so much an FPS as it is an ARPG that looks like an FPS, in a similar sort of way that the Portal games are puzzle games that look like FPSs (but are really, really not) :). I've also been popping into Minecraft on occasion. And doing a bunch of writing for stuff. And producing epic long posts about games I like on forums just because someone mentioned a game that I happen to have played ;).

Are you thinking of "Steed", or somebody else?

Ah, Portal. The game that got me to play computer games again for the first time in ~20 years. Love, love, love that game!

If it weren't for the fact my spouse would be a widow for a couple weeks, I'd play the sequel, also.

I am definitly getting Vengence when it comes out, I wasn't impressed by Rook City or Infernal Relics (though I did like Shattered Timelines) - but this expansion looks AWESOME.  I'm very excited about it.

So SOMETIME in February, huh?  My wife is having a baby in February AND I'll be ordering Vengence in February!  Who'd ever think that February, of all months, could be so awesome? 

I wonder if I'll be lucky enough to actually have it arrive in February or not?

You wouldn't exactly be wrong. Though the term "utility" infers a more focus on being for the public good, common carrier would be the more correct term. I do not think the FCC has the authority to declare internet access as a utility like water or electric (though there is a case to be made that they should), but certainly is within its power to give them common carrier status. The actual regulations in practice look very similar though.

You are not alone my dear sweet boy. Imagine that you are driving down the highway, and whoever owns and manages that road decides to block off all otherwise legal traffic for poops and grins. Lets also assume that this happens to be the fastest road to get to your sick grandmother. You could use one another route to get there, but it would turn a 20 min drive into a 4 hour marathon. That is the fear here.

We have grown up with the concept that the internet is the ultimate peer to peer tool. That there is a direct connection between the content provider and the content consumer. The ISP's are hellbent on being able to charge both consumer and content creators to use their roads. Drawn out to the extreme conclusion, we are talking the potential death of user created content as only the companies with the deepest pockets would be able to compete for bandwidth contracts. Bidding wars for bandwidth could destroy incentive to expand broadband services, since keeping bandwidth artificially scarce would drive up the prices content creators would pay. Disney. Disney as far as the internet eye can see. Think Youtube (or similar services) will stay free to upload/stream content in that market? How would new inovative upcomming companies ever break into that kind of market without the capitol to pay to reach consumers? A very real fear to be sure.

However, that will not happen overnight, and I wouldn't be surprised if some smaller content providers (hopfully led by Netflix should they decide to not play ball) filed a class action lawsuit, especially if the estimated anual costs for Netflix falls around the 80-100 million dollar range. 

The other big issue to keep in mind is that the current chair of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, is a good old boy who is a staunch defender of deregulation and the free market. He publicly agrees that ISPs should be able to charge edge providers, which is why I am pretty sure the FCC will not move with any kind of haste to re-imagine it's net nuetrality laws without the Common Carrier trappings, opting instead to see what the ISPs do first and then react accordingly. 

One thing is for sure though. This will be a legal battle fought in courts for many years to come as we try and quickly redefine our rapidly growing technology. 

I went through today and looked over the decks that are ready to print, and aside from some simple Errata it looks good, I'm going to get it.  There are a lot of less well done customs on BGG  (including mine, cause I'm lazy and hate playtesting) , but at least the community there is going strong which is great.

What's the quality like on those? I'm sorely tempted to buy them, but I probably shouldn't…

I downloaded a bunch of tosx's heroes and have printed and played with two (The Stranger, Vanish).  They were good but felt a little off somehow.  The concepts are great (Stranger is a mystical treeman who puts glyphs all over the place which have various efects, and Vanish is a teleport-strike-teleport-strike type like Nightcrawler), but the decks don't flow in as polished a way as we have come to expect from official SotM decks.  Feels like they just need a little more playtesting.

I've made a couple of changes myself but have yet to see if my changes make things better or worse.

EDIT: I forgot, we also printed and played with one of tosx's villians -- Tiamat, a three-headed dragon.  It's a great concept - each head is a mini-villain, so you take the dragon out one head at a time, and the art of the three heads matches together to form a single picture (and when you flip one or more heads to their chopped-off side, those fit into the picture as well).  Unfortunately, I didn't think the cards were as interesting as I hoped -- they were mostly just direct damage with a few exceptions, so each villain turn ended up feeling the same.  I plan on trying to make some changes when I get a chance because, like I said, the idea of fighting a beautiful three-headed dragon villain is top-notch.

Amen

I have tons and tons of Diablo 2 characters; I like to try out every possible build, save all the cool equipment I get, and just have this huge wardrobe of game states to browse through whenever I get back into playing.  My highest-level character at the moment is an Amazon in Nightmare difficulty, who I just leveled from 54 to 56 while killing Diablo and moving on to act 5.  My favorite character, who I unfortunately have to avoid playing much, is a level 38 Necromancer who has high enough strength to wear some kind of plate armor, who dropped the Unique Maul "Bonesnap" twice, turning the second one into an Iron Golem which I am now trying desperately not to ever let get killed (hence the avoiding playing - that and I think the save file is glitched, his map erased itself once mid-game, and I'm worried about letting it happen again).  Mostly I end up playing Barbarians and Paladins, though; I just sort of instinctively treat it as a melee game.  Whatever my class, I tend to play against type a lot…I have an Amazon who entirely avoids using pointy weapons, an Assassin who won't wear claws, a Necromancer who refuses to raise skeletons, a Barbarian who's terrible at combat because he's entirely specked around Find Item, and so forth.  Of course, those characters exist as alternatives to the usual ones, not replacements for them; since they are obviously hobbled, I play them less often than their firing-on-all-cylinders equivalents.

ARPG?  What's the A stand for?

Standby for Action! (Which is what A stands for) They are called Action RPGs because there's really no RP to the RPG portion, it's all about the Action (killing).

I have absolutely no idea. I am not a fan of Dresden.

I read the first book and was not impressed but various peoples I know kept going on about it so one week I sat down and listened to every Dresden book out at the time (which might be all of them). By the end of it I was still not impressed so I wont be listening to anymore that come out. Had it not been James Marsters reading it I wouldn't have even attempted this feat.

What I will be doing while waiting for Vengeance is seething with jealousy over those who can attend the party.

We can have a seething jealousy party!

I think I should probably attend the party. I'd hate to be THAT GUY who COULD have attended, but doesn't.

After the last update it seems like I'm gonna be spending a lot more time than initally expected waiting to get hold of Vengeance (as mine is being shipped with GSF), aawwww lol.

If you can't make it to the party, I'll do a live stream of the event from a GoPro that I can attach to my shoulder and then broadcast to Google+.

Just kidding. I don't own a GoPro. Wouldn't that be wonderful though?

If you were to go attaching things to your shoulder then you would have to go as Omnitron-X and his Electro Deployment Unit.

I'd love to see O-X in a tux.

I'd rather see him in his Omni-trunks.

... I'll see myself out.

"OK Glass, upload EVERYTHING."

I work in a camera shop. But I'm not "borrowing" a GoPro for the weekend.

Unrelated, the coolest thing about working in a camera shop is flying a camera drone around.

I thought that the coolest thing might be NOT working at a pet shop.

With the updated news on Vengeance shipping out in a few weeks, that means I have a few weeks to replay each Sentinels villain at least once before Vengeance arrives.  Overall that's 22 villains (with the promos); assuming I'll get my copy in 4 weeksish (hopefully earlier), that's around 6 games a week; one game every night.  Maybe more if I marathon a few over the weekend.

So that's my itinery.  I should record my wins/losses, for funsies.

You should add your games to the stats project. 

Here's a link to the form:

And a link to the thread that discusses it:

https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/sentinels-statistics-project-2893

Oh cool.  I will do just that, thanks!

Ha. That is a temporary coolest thing.

Okay, after reading your posts, I went out and looked at the Tiamat villain.

I really wish I knew someone (who was available) who could create art for decks like that. It's really pretty cool, and I don't like how my decks have actual photos - it just doesn't fit with the rest of the game. The three heads as character cards, lined up just perfectly, is hilarious and thematically awesome! But yeah, not sure if it would play as an interesting challenge with interesting decisions. I might have to print it out sometime - once we're done beating on Vengeance for a while.

tosx made another villain I've printed and plan on checking out this weekend - Anathema.  He's a John Carpeter's The Thing/Venom type.  Its deck is full of head, arm, and body cards which do different things.  You start the game by laying out one of each, and throughout the fight, if you pull out a new limb, you replace the old one, so the villain changes configurations as you fight him, gaining whiplash tails and heavy carapaces and enhanced senses.  If you manage to blow off all of his limbs, you flip him to the gooey pseudopod-festooned mutant blob under the cracked armor.  It's another really great concept and I can't wait to see how it plays.

We played against tosx's Anathema custom villain tonight and had a great time.  The villain kept morphing throughout the fight, making for a dynamic game.  We've only played the one game, but we enjoyed it enough to slip this custom villain into our regular rotation.

The only thing we're thinking about changing is his HP.  He has 45, which seems low (it's only as much as the Operative).  We're thinking about trying out Hx15 for his hp.  That would give him 45hp for a 3-hero game, but 60 for 4 and 75 for 5.  Plus, having variable hp fits a morphing alien/escaped lab experiment thematically.

That reminds me of an idea I had for a villain pair based on (completely copied from) the Ornstein and Smough boss fight from Dark Souls. Since the bosses in dark souls get additional HP if you summon other players to help, their HP would change based on the number of players.

And of course, once you beat Ornstein, Smough smashes him with a hammer and becomes Super Smough; don't forget to tie that into the game

Of course. That's their flip mechanic; whichever is killed first is removed from the game, and they each have the trigger "when (the other) is destroyed, flip this card."