raidsoft

I wouldn't say trollish but rather pointless.

We can do this all day, you can keep saying "it's wrong it's wrong it's wrong" all you like and I can keep saying that just because it's wrong doesn't mean there are only negative things about it.

Yes, but just because it's wrong doesn't mean it's bad for the industry.

"But yes you are copying something you didn't pay for against their permission so you are doing something that is considered wrong." I thought that was pretty clear?

No you don't need it but the time directly after a release is usually extremely important for developers, not getting enough sales early enough (takes a while for games to drop to 50%) can break a developer for example and for me knowing if it's a game for me (and how much I think it's worth) as early as possible is important. I'm being realistic here, piracy isn't going away and it's just going to keep growing as more and more people are entering the "generation of piracy" so I'm using the situation to make sure I support the industry in the way I think it should be, giving the right developers my money and not getting screwed over by marketing. What I am trying to say is that yes piracy can cause very bad things but it's not ALWAYS bad, people can use it in a good way for the industry as long as they are aren't assholes. To TheUbiquitous, from a legal standpoint it's copyright infringement and not stealing though. But yes you are copying something you didn't pay for against their permission so you are doing something that is considered wrong. However let's take this situation as an example, you are selling something (say a car) and I think I'm interested in buying this car but I'm not sure, I then use a fancy technology and clone your car without your knowledge and no effect on your car, I then try out that car for a while and decide I like it so I go back to you and buy it, after I bought the car they both merge together into a single car again. Would you be unhappy with me in this case if you were the person selling the car? Now we can take this even further, same situation but after I copy the car I find out that the engine is completely busted and doesn't work after 2 hours so I then avoided buying this falsely marketed car, yes you would be pissed because I didn't fall for your little scheme but is it good that you have people falling for things like that in the car industry giving them a bad reputation as scammers?

So you are saying it's better for the developer that I wait for a sale if I am unsure about a purchase instead of me pirating it and buying it at full price at launch? That's interesting because that means less money in the pocket for the developer in that case... Also my friends share this opinion thus it means nobody takes the "first step" to inform each other if it's a good game or not, unless someone makes an uninformed purchase. Yes you can always wait but I would much rather know right away so I can play at launch (and pay launch price if the game is worth it) plus there is also the occasions where you are testing out a game in a new genre you are unsure of, just getting an opinion from someone else might not be enough to make you decide if you like it or not. Since I always buy games digitally now then used copies are never an option and they also deprive the developer of money because they don't gain anything from that copy at all thus you are hurting them more then if you were to just pirate it because you are out of money in your pocket (less to buy new games with) and that money didn't go to the developer.

Depends on the game, sure for a game that's been out a while you will probably be able to find enough info to make a good decision but what about a new release that mostly has reviews from big sites that got the game sent to them early because they have good contact with the developer/publisher? Only option then is either to wait and hope there will be information quickly from a reliable source or pirate it to decide for yourself right away. You can argue "it's wrong" all you want but for me it makes me better and faster able to decide where I place my money, if the developer doesn't like that I won't get fooled by their marketing then that's too bad for them, they should make better games then instead of spending millions and millions on marketing and fancy trailers trying to get people to make bad purchases. Note that basically none of this applies to just about any indie developer, they are usually very clear on everything they do and you don't have to second guess them as much.

What about if it's necessary for me to be able to make an informed decision about a purchase if there is not enough non-biased information available about the game? Or do you think that consumers making blind purchases based on completely irrelevant trailers and reviews by companies that are getting paid by the people they are reviewing is a good idea?

Possibly, there is no way we can be 100% sure that if all piracy just vanished (not like that could happen anyway) that the industry would just explode in income. I seriously doubt that it's as easy as that... There are just a gigantic amount of factors involved in this, it could very well be that the industry would become much healthier if we magically could make all piracy go away but we can't know that for sure. Since piracy is an inevitability in today's market then why shouldn't responsible people utilize it to become smarter consumers? If I choose not to pirate a game for example that doesn't do Anything to stop the jerks that refuse to pay for their software right? If on the other hand I can use piracy as a tool to make sure that I don't spend money where I don't think it belongs (creators of bad games) then that should be helpful to the industry since I will explore more game types that I normally wouldn't consider and possibly opening myself up to new markets instead of taking blind leaps of faith now and then and getting stung for it...

How am I hurting the industry if I have a finite amount of money I can put into it and I already spend as much as I can afford? If for example I am pirating games after I have spent as much as I can then they wouldn't have been able to get any money for that product anyway right? Well what if I really loved that game that I pirated and when I get more money next I pick that up first because I pirated it and liked it? This might mean that I try games I never would have thought to try because it didn't seem like a game for me but got surprised at how much I liked it and thus they end up getting my money they wouldn't have otherwise... Of course proving this type of scenario isn't really possible to prove or even find out how often it happens and there is no way to know if people that are jerks and just want free stuff (there will always be those, people that just want something for nothing and can't think beyond their own selfish desires but I really doubt they would have forked out money for it anyway in the first place) so we're back to hypothetical situations where we can't prove anything... I think that piracy can definitely hurt developers but it can also help, personally I can at least say that I have bought games only because I was bored and looking for something to do so I pirated a game and ended up spending money on it later on because it was good. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one in the world that this has happened to...

I'll agree on the point that if you want to deprive EA of any gain from you then you shouldn't pirate their games either, really the only way is to just avoid them entirely and even that isn't really going to do much since they are such a gigantic behemoth but it's really the only thing you can do. Let me also add that anything that helps me choose better where to spend my money better and with less "mistakes" by being misled by developers/publishers is a good thing in my book, they don't get away with as much anymore because there are more ways of finding out about their game (piracy before buying being one of them) and if that's wrong but makes me a more informed consumer then that's fine with me. I only have a limited amount of money to inject into the gaming industry and making damn sure I spend it in the correct places is extremely important to me. I find it pretty interesting how dead set some people are regarding this though, "It's illegal so there can be nothing good about it and nobody should do it" but there's sooo many laws that people break multiple times a day but nobody really seem to care about. Parking illegally for example most people seem to be fine with and hope they avoid a ticket, same with speeding and this is extremely common things and something most people probably don't give a second thought to...

Except reviews are inherently very biased towards either the policy of the reviewer/company or the personality of the reviewer. It's VERY hard to find reviews that are seriously trustworthy in my opinion and I would NEVER base a purchase on reviews alone plus the whole review scoring system is just beyond messed up right now largely because of metacritic and it's terrible influence. If there is a good demo of the game that isn't super crippled then yes I'll agree with you but quite often there are no demos or they are not very representative of the final game so it's hard to get a good idea what it's actually like before taking the leap. Personally I spend a fair bit of time gathering information from as many sources as I can regarding any purchase I do (with exceptions) and there has been plenty of times that there just wasn't enough information that I felt I needed to make an informed purchase. I'm not saying that I think it's justified to pirate it in this case but they haven't really given people that want to be well informed much choice either. I think that AAA games are the worst regarding this because they shower you with ads and fancy trailers that are in absolutely no way representative of the game to skew your opinion on it into making a purchase before you are fully informed, indie devs are in general MUCH more open and directly interact with their crowd so you know more what to expect. This is especially true now with the whole alpha funding where you may jump on-board much earlier because you see what the specific dev is trying to do.

So what about all the people that started out their gaming "careers" pirating games and because of that they got to experience something they normally wouldn't have considered if it had cost them money? (money that they most likely didn't have at the time) People that then over time become more and more attached to gaming and realizing that it was important to them and thus start feeding money into the industry as they get more disposable income. If they couldn't have pirated the things in the start they wouldn't have gotten invested in the industry and their total money that they spend on games would have been MUCH less? I can definitely say that I am one of those people and I have multiple people I know that are exactly the same, growing up with very little or no money to spend and a small interest in games which then was fueled by getting my hands on many games I would never have been able to try otherwise, eventually growing into my largest hobby. I have no doubt that If I only had a very few number of games I would have occupied my time with other things and most likely not been such a massively invested gamer that I am today thus spending WAY less on games in total, there obviously are no hard numbers to know how many are in similar situations but among my friends I know several that grew up in very similar situations. And yet again it seems I must repeat that I am not saying that piracy is morally justifiable but it's also not a completely guaranteed bad thing for the gaming industry either, though it has definitely hurt specific games (which many were pretty terrible products, most people want to spend money on things they like if they can) but who knows how much it has boosted the gaming industry as a whole...

Again with people drawing straight comparisons between stealing and piracy, they are quite different things since stealing involves someone actually losing a physical product and thus they end up with negative money, for piracy at worst it means that the sale is lost but they are still stuck at 0 then which obviously sucks but it's still Very different. But as I said in my post, not saying piracy is morally justifiable (at best it's very much in the gray zone) but it sure as hell isn't stealing either so that comparison is just terrible. I definitely do think that creators of content should be paid for their work if people like what they create and just for the record I own 85+ games on steam and probably equally as many in retail copies or other digital services.

I think that only one thing seems overlooked, people that can't afford games but pirate it will become part of the gaming community which they might not have been otherwise, thus getting them self more invested in gaming as a whole and generally people tend to grow out of feeling like they want to pirate things (or get a good income so it doesn't actually kill their wallet) and thus you have a new person spending much more money on the industry as a whole compared to if he had never pirated. Of course everything regarding this is really just speculation and guesswork since there is no hard data on conversion rates of pirates to buying consumers so we can't know if it does more good then harm but the people that pirate the most are young people without a reliable and steady income but that want to be involved in the gaming community because that's what all their friends do. This then becomes their hobby and something they spend money on more and more as they mature. I can definitely say that this is the case for me, as I was growing up I pirated things a lot and this made me very much into a gamer, if I didn't have access to all these awesome games (without piracy I wouldn't be able to afford it) I seriously doubt I would be such a massive fan of games that I am today. Nowadays I Always buy games that I feel is worth their price and when I want to support what the developer is doing and as I said before, I seriously doubt I would be as much into gaming now if I couldn't pirate games when I was younger. But again this is guesswork and nothing that can be proven with hard facts, note that I am not trying to say that piracy is morally justifiable, it's obviously wrong but it also doesn't absolutely mean that piracy in all cases hurt the industry either, do you all seriously think that the gaming industry would be as big as it is today and constantly growing if there was absolutely 0 piracy? I doubt it personally. Last thing, I am in all shapes and forms against the kind of piracy that involves people selling pirated copy's of someone's work for their own profit, that is just outright despicable.

Once you accept that you will lose soldiers and take it as an inevitability you will start enjoying the game more, same with actually losing a play through. If you are constantly saving and reloading to get a "perfect" game you will quickly become bored because it will just become frustrating and annoying to keep doing that it will take any sense of danger out of the game as well, you can just charge ahead blindly and once your soldiers get shot and killed you reload the game and you then know where the enemy is. I used to be that kind of player that were saving every single turn and redoing it in X-Com and other similar games and I was getting tired of it, then I saw someone else play completely differently and Never reloading a game unless something bugged out beyond the game's intended design. I started doing the same thing and I enjoyed the game SOOO much more and feel stupid for reloading saves as I did before that.

I'd say use your judgement but every build is probably too much, once there is significant progress enough that it's clearly different and stable enough to play then I'd say go for it. That's my thoughts at least

I posted this in the other double posted thread before I saw there was 2 of them but I'm guessing that one is going to get deleted because this seems to be the main one so excuse the double post: Just wondering, is there going to be a set number of pre-generated maps you can end up on or will you be randomly generating maps on the fly? Even if you do make a LOT of maps manually to get variety, it can't compete with a good random generation system since it will take less space and have much more variety, of course this assumes the generation code is good too otherwise you end up with really strange levels that suck.

The question was if I wanted the option, not if I wanted other people to have the option... Also there's the question of development time and if there's other features you could spend that time on that more people will benefit from and then there's the question if the feature fits the game or not..

Probably depends on the engine but yes that's a common thing to do, basically large archive files that doesn't use compression so it doesn't slow game loading down. Think .pak files from quake based engines if you know what I'm talking about

Well first of all you should tweak your audio settings, some of the game audio was quite loud compared to you (it's important that you do test videos first and double check before you do the real recording) and it's better that the game is a bit too low then it being a bit too loud, nothing is more obnoxious then having to struggle to hear what you are saying. Another thing you should probably point out now and then if you run into bugs/issues is just to mention again that the game is still under development and it's expected that there are going to be bugs etc. (of course we know that but a random person stumbling upon the video might not) Your commentary is pretty good for being very new to making LP's and you should keep it up! Something you should consider is doing a bit of editing, sure it adds a bit more work but it will show through as well, for example the long loading screens you can just cut out, there's plenty of free software you can use to do this but it might be some learning for you but this will definitely be useful for the future anyway so if you are going to be at least semi-serious about making videos it's well worth it. edit: noticed that the volume in ep2 is much better compared to ep1

.50 Cal Armor Piercing rounds ftw!

I agree, screw size of the game, sure people may whine about it but if the game experience is enhanced for it people won't really care in the end. Though it's weird, why would they be So huge? are they higher resolution then they need to be or is it just that at the res they need to be they'll take up that much space? I mean look at x-com, that was a sprite based game too wasn't it? Sure resolution was waaay smaller but the entire game is what, 20 MB? I'm not that knowledgeable about this but is there no way of splicing sprites together? say you have a char model with a "holding gun" position, you then splice the gun model onto it that way you wouldn't have a gazillion new sprites for every single model? As I said I don't have that much in-depth knowledge about this so I may just be talking crap here, feel free to inform me

I know that you can just use a system that will rng the same on each resolve but that doesn't solve people for example saving, using auto-resolve and if they get a good result they keep it, if they don't they reload and do it themself.. But I guess it still comes down to allowing people to play the way they want, just something I personally would never do (I never even reload my games if stuff goes bad) but I can't speak for other people, just my opinion

I wouldn't use it so I would say no, I can just see people basically saving just before attacking a site, doing auto-battle and reloading the game until they get a good RNG and nobody dies etc. granted you could argue that if that's how they want to play then who am I to tell them they can't but you could say that about anything. Voted no because I wouldn't use it and I think it doesn't really seem fitting for the game (imo) if you don't want to do a battle then something else is wrong, the combat should be compelling enough that you should never feel it's a chore to do in the first place thus not needing autoresolve.