Venture

Any mission that requires me to change difficulty is too hard.

A difficult mission should mean that I have to play less aggressively and/or use more inspirations than I'm used to or such. It should not mean that I have to send the character a mile or more out of his way to change settings and then do it again afterward to keep the rest of the game from being a snoozefest. If they'd get rid of the stupid NPCs and put difficult adjustment on the mission menu where it belongs I'd consider it, but under these circumstances I'm just going to drop the trash and move on.

Which is another reason why spiking the punch is a bad idea: people just don't have to put up with it, so they won't. The new DE aren't "making a statement" or anything, they just tell me which tips to dismiss.

The problem with this argument is that the 1-20 game was the only part that actually worked. Every other bracket in the game could stand to have its difficulty increased, but 1-20 was the point where in the general case the game hit the balance objectives. Add to the fact that new players are being shoved into Praetoria by default and the difficulty increase becomes an utterly boneheaded decision.

I've argued for years that the game needs to be harder. I'm not on board with this.

They were very obviously intended for the 40+ game and then arbitrarily scaled down to 1-20.

It didn't take him 5,000 years. (He also didn't invent it; he just made people think he did.)

Show your work. What is the current state of strong AI research? (Answer: moving the goalposts). What are the latest breakthroughs? (None.) Why should we believe that an AI would be impartial? Is it because computers are "logical" and not "emotional"? Why is logic impartial? (It isn't.) What is the true nature of emotion? (Unknown.) What is the role of emotion in consciousness and intelligence? (Unknown.) Is emotion an essential or emergent property of consciousness, i.e. is it even possible to create a consciousness that has no emotions? (Unknown.) How useful is formal logic in actually dealing with real-world problems? (Almost useless.) None of this is "trite nonsense", nor was it fed to me by anyone (my coursework in AI was directed at weak AI). And, in defense of my professors, while I did go to a public university it's one that's consistently been rated as one of the best in the country (Montclair State University, NJ).

As I said before, my intuition is that strong AI will eventually be built, because I do not believe in magic. The human brain, to the best of our available information, operates entirely according to natural laws. That means it should be possible in principle to reverse engineer and duplicate it. There is an entire host of shakey premises implicit in that argument, though; proof left as an exercise for the reader.

a) Show your work. Name them. Term of office must exceed 16 days.

b) The key words in the above are "short lived". Autocracy is unstable; this point was previously demonstrated.

Smersh did not even address the point, which is why I didn't bother to reply to him. Frankly, neither did you.

Not impressed by the source (gosh, an organization primarily run by socialists thinks socialism is the bee's knees), and the comparison is mainly apples and oranges (for one thing, the US has about a third more citizens than all of them put together), but even if the point is granted for debate purposes those countries are all democracies!

They thought that it could not be done
Some even said they knew it
But he dared to attempt what they said could not be done...
...AND HE COULDN'T BLOODY DO IT!

-- B. Hill

Why should we try to do something with a 5,000 year history of failure attached to it?

As a student of computer science and philosophy with an interest in AI, I would have to say this paragraph transcends all previously known limitations on the concept of COMPLETE EPIC FAILURE.

• We are no closer to strong AI now than we were when serious research began. If anything we are farther away as we now have a better understanding of just how difficult the problem is.
• There is no reason to believe strong AI is even possible; if it happens at all it will not be within the foreseeable future. (I think it will, but only on an intuitional level; if pressed I would have to admit tha the arguments in favor of the possibility will not bear close examination.)
• If achieved, a strong AI will be, as the name implies, artificial and thus non-human. AIs will not have a human understanding of the world around them and will reason in ways that will not make sense to humans. Leading to....
• The idea that an AI will be "impartial" is laughable in the extreme. No intelligence is impartial (scroll down to "Sussman attains enlightenment").
• If someone were to suddenly reveal a provable strong AI tomorrow and seriously advocate that we surrender sovereign authority to it, I would kill them without hesitation. I'd rouse the villagers and spring for the pitchforks and torches. The foreseeable dystopian outcomes of such a profoundly idiotic decision pale in comparison only to those outcomes that can't be foreseen.

Furthermore, neither I nor anyone I personally know has been "waiting for" a benevolent dictator. History, again, has demonstrated over and over that investing supreme authority in any single individual is an extremely bad idea.

Society only offers equality of opportunity, not outcome, and there is no shortage of examples of people in this society transcending the circumstances of their birth.

Actually it's not. As any garden-variety net.troll can tell you, it is not merely easy to get a lot of blood on the floor by invoking the right hot-button topics, but pathetically so.

After 5,000 years of recorded history, I think we can stick a fork in this one. It is as proven as anything is going to get in the real world outside of a math or philosophy (formal logic) class.

Even if the mythical "benevolent dictator" comes along, eventually the old man kicks off and someone else comes in. Think you can hit that bullseye twice in a row? Three? More likely the successor will be the worst double-dealing low-down backstabbing rat in the nest. (N.b. that Tyrant not aging is no guarantee of eternal rule. "No king rules forever, my son." -- T. Menethil)

Freedom is the ability to engage in the pursuit of happiness; happiness, as JMS paraphrased Aristotle, is "the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope". In what meaningful way are contemporary Americans not therefore free? Show your work.

False. The Romans had not had a dictator in over a century until Sulla took the position by force, about forty years prior to Caesar. Sulla thought he was demonstrating to the people of Rome why autocracy was bad; instead, because he got away with it (he retired and died in bed) he inspired Caesar.

Moreover, the Roman position of dictator was more complicated than the modern connotations of the word, originally came with a limited term of office (six months) and ultimately proved to be unstable and destroyed the republic.

I.e., it was a bad idea.

I'm not going around the mulberry bush again on the rest; tired of trying to debate with people who got their education in moral philosophy from Wikipedia.

She does, according to "The Scroll of Tielekku". "The Origins of Power" was written by a new dev who Did Not Do The Research (badly, with Critical Research Failures in the Reichsmann TFs) and whom is no longer with the company. It's just plain wrong, should be ignored and should probably be removed.

Yes, actually, it would.

Informed Ability.

Saying a character or, in this case, object (or is it a character?), does or does not have an attribute does not make it true, especially if you then go on to write it in a way that shows it does not or does have said attribute.

Yes, it is: in more of the hamhanded railroading we've been getting lately, Ramiel presents the player's ascension to Incarnate-hood as a not-quite Stable Time Loop. He's here to get you Incarnate powers because Future You needs them to fight the Coming Macguffin (sic). Ultimately it comes off as you going off and making a Faustian bargain because some guy who says he's from the future told you to. (We have no way of knowing if Ramiel is actually from the future, if what he showed you was actually in any way representative of any future events, or if Ouroboros in its entirety is legit, etc.)

They can write whatever they like; that doesn't make it so. The Well behaves like magic.

Nope. The "incarnate" stuff didn't come along until they started ramping up for CoV and The Web of Arachnos.

False. Statesman was originally described in Natural terms, having "unlocked the hidden potential of the human will" or such. The Well of the Furies was a retcon. When people balked at the sudden change, the party line was that Statesman had lied about his origins, to which many of use just said "what?".

That, at least, was only statements made by NPCs. They could be wrong, and very likely are seeing as how one is a crackpot scientist and the other's qualifications can only be measured in cup size.

As for the Well: it's magic. Looks like a duck, etc. It's just horrible. It's another intrusion by the Statesman/Recluse mythos, which I think the vast majority of players despise, and it's more of the (for want of a better term) sadistic GMing that's cropped up here and there since the start (e.g. Mission Architect's backstory). It basically casts our characters as Bender: "Well, if sticking my head in a sentient energy field with known malevolent tendencies will make some guy who says he's from the future think I'm cool...I'LL DO IT!" *splorch* Aside from being a clear violation of Rule 22:

...it casts the character as being willing to do anything to get more power. The negative implications and resultant conceptual problems are left as an exercise for the reader.

Yep.

The Incarnate felderkarb officially marks the point where you should really start treating all game text as if it only said "click here to fight mobs".

If they're working, sure. They're not going to be if you're autoleveled below 45. That means the only content you're going to be using them on is endgame content, so I say again: who cares?

We also don't know how many Incarnate abilities are going to grant level shifts (my bet is they won't go past +4).

The issue here was whether or not soloists have any expectation of being able to get top-end Incarnate abilities (they can already get up to an Uncommon Alpha). My thesis is if Incarnate content is intended for teams of minimum size X then a team of that size must be capable of obtaining Incarnate abilities. As long as X > 1 it doesn't matter if soloists can get Incarnate abilities and it's probably for the best if they can't. Soloists will never actually need them and will be overpowered (in content that allows for Incarnate ability use) if they get them.

They'll be disabled whenever you're autoleveled below 50. Close enough, I think.

*raises hand* I went for the Accuracy branch to get the Defense enhancement. I need a small push to hit the soft cap.

Of course, Accuracy is about the least useful thing an Incarnate ability could enhance. I guess it would have been too obvious if they made it Intangibility.

The problem is you can have a fun, exciting plot where you can be a superhero without also invoking stupid cliches, Fridge Logic and Wall Bangers.

Easily.