Octopus Overlords

I used to play against El Guapo or redrun quite a bit with an online with an online host El Guapo introduced me to. I discovered that even virtual dice hate me. Sure they even out over the long haul but they favor me in only overkill situations where they are unnecessary punctuating the capture of a territory where one troop sits to keep tanks from blitzkrieging.

I just saw someone trying to sell their copy of Civ 5 deluxe at Amazon. It's already been registered on Steam with someone else.
Is there any other way to get that copy to work?
Just curious.

Sometimes I spend an hour a day just going thru ques at the Steam store. I have games I haven't even played yet and others that are way underplayed.
What the hell is wrong with me?

dbt1949 wrote:What the hell is wrong with me?

Absolutely nothing from my perspective.

dbt1949 wrote:I just saw someone trying to sell their copy of Civ 5 deluxe at Amazon. It's already been registered on Steam with someone else.
Is there any other way to get that copy to work?
Just curious.

Not that I can think of off hand. Even trying to run it (and Steam) in offline mode requires online Steam to look at it at least once.

trying out Infected: The Twin Vaccine, which is some hidden object/puzzle title i got in some bundle at some point. there was a puzzle that was causing me no end of frustration, to the point where i had to look at a walkthrough - and i was completely overthinking it. as it turns out, the solution didn't require much thought at all, as it really wasn't a puzzle to begin with. i haaaaaate that. maybe i shouldn't play these at 2AM...

dbt1949 wrote:I just saw someone trying to sell their copy of Civ 5 deluxe at Amazon. It's already been registered on Steam with someone else.
Is there any other way to get that copy to work?

Nope. Can't transfer Steam ownership.

I always love those moments when I'm gaming with the windows open in the spring or fall, and suddenly the weather outside perfectly matches the weather in-game. It just started raining outside at the same time it started raining in the Witcher 3.

The other day I was playing and there was a windstorm in-game at the same time the fall wind started blowing through the windows here. You see the trees start swaying in-game, and suddenly you feel the cold breeze and stuff on your desk starts fluttering.

i had a perfectly matching progression of time - virtual vs real world - when going through Dear Esther* tonight. also wish i had experienced this one years ago - i can see how it is influential now.

also completed some silly hidden-object game (Left in the Dark: No One on Board) from which i was denied getting all achievements (the "Complete game without using Hint button" one) due to the hint button looking like a lamp, and a lamp was an object to find in one of the very first puzzles. so i clicked on it.

* still not a game, since 2008.

Just saw that Call of Duty 37: Infinite Warfare has a 70GB footprint. Even if I was interested, I'd be out. Downloading 50GB was a 4+ day affair. When it creeps up to taking close to a week? Unpossible. Also, F Century Link DSL.

Too big to download? Go buy a physical copy. I hear they're selling them in spindles of 15 DVD's.

70GB for one game? I suppose in 5 years that'll be normal and trivial and we'll be complaining about 200GB games.

I don't remember the last time I purchased a physical copy of a game that didn't simply activate with a key from the box and then proceed to download the entire thing from STEAM. At some point I remember forcing the DVD to install resulted in STEAM downloading gigantic patches or re-downloading the entire game regardless.

Yeah, that whole thing is part of the reason I copied my entire Steam install directory over when I built my new computer, and why I keep every game I own installed. It sounds absurd, but when I get in the mood for a game I don't want to wait 5 minutes to 2 hours to start playing. I imagine I'd be okay with a 70GB download, but I'd certainly be playing something else while that happened.

A few nights back I got a 3.2GB "patch" from Ark, and ended up spending the night playing Crimsonland instead.

As someone that just transferred to a new PC in August, I tried doing the same thing - just copying the files over and allowing STEAM to find and re-associate. I have ~95 games installed and it worked for about 1/2 of them. For reasons I don't understand, some games needed to verify the installation by re-downloading the games from the STEAM servers. And yes, a few of them were 30GB+ titles which sucked.

That's odd. I carried over about 200 titles and haven't run into a single one that refuses to work. I had to rebuild the desktop icons so they weren't all blank white shortcut images, but that was it. I would think that if it worked for half of them, it should have worked for the rest.

Paingod wrote:Yeah, that whole thing is part of the reason I copied my entire Steam install directory over when I built my new computer, and why I keep every game I own installed. It sounds absurd, but when I get in the mood for a game I don't want to wait 5 minutes to 2 hours to start playing. I imagine I'd be okay with a 70GB download, but I'd certainly be playing something else while that happened.

A few nights back I got a 3.2GB "patch" from Ark, and ended up spending the night playing Crimsonland instead.

I cant do that. I own about 450 Steam games and my new SSD is only 500 gig. I already have to watch what I install.

Paingod wrote:I would think that if it worked for half of them, it should have worked for the rest.

That's what was confusing. I had the games split on two different drives for the old PC but put them on a single drive for the new one. I'm not sure how or why that would have mattered, but that was the only pattern I could discern.

Daehawk wrote:I cant do that. I own about 450 Steam games and my new SSD is only 500 gig. I already have to watch what I install.

My collection came over well, but I did plan ahead. I bought 2 1TB SSD's for my new computer and hooked them up in a RAID0. I still have about 800GB of room left. It also helps with performance. In ARK: Survival, people say Primitive+ takes many minutes to load. My load times are like 45-60 seconds.

Smoove_B wrote:

Paingod wrote:I would think that if it worked for half of them, it should have worked for the rest.

That's what was confusing. I had the games split on two different drives for the old PC but put them on a single drive for the new one. I'm not sure how or why that would have mattered, but that was the only pattern I could discern.

Weird. When I built my computer, I pulled my games from 4 different Steam folders I had scattered across 4 different hard drives. I stuffed them all into one common folder and everything kept working.

Smoove_B wrote:Just saw that Call of Duty 37: Infinite Warfare has a 70GB footprint. Even if I was interested, I'd be out. Downloading 50GB was a 4+ day affair. When it creeps up to taking close to a week? Unpossible. Also, F Century Link DSL.

That would probably take me 30 minutes. Maybe 45. Thanks fiber internet!

Smoove_B wrote: That's what was confusing. I had the games split on two different drives for the old PC but put them on a single drive for the new one. I'm not sure how or why that would have mattered, but that was the only pattern I could discern.

There's some acf files that have to copied, I think. In either case, if they're there, when you tell steam to install it'll detect the old files and download only what's changed.

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/bethesda- ... D=22851637

Well that sucks: "Skyrim Publisher Gives Up on Game Reviews—and It Won’t Be the Only One"

Ugh: "But then, this highlights the corner that publishers have painted themselves into. They’ve created a world in which nothing can be allowed to imperil the successful launch of their blockbuster titles."

For me personally, I couldn't care less about pre-ordering, pre-loading, or buying a game early to get gold horseshoes instead of the normal iron colored ones, but the trend (if it becomes one) seems unhealthy for the industry as a whole.

When you're racking 400k+ preorders, the last thing you want to do is let some reviewer cause a dip in your $24M opening day.

It was only a matter of time. Like the article says, reviews offer no benefit. I've seen a couple of different studies of this, and the conclusion was always that good reviews don't meaningfully increase sales, but bad reviews do have a negative impact on sales. Putting out review copies means that you're risking much to gain nothing. There is no smart reason for publishers to allow pre-release reviews.

Hopefully the pendulum will swing back from consumers as well, and they'll decrease pre-order and early-release sales. I know my pre-release purchases are down drasitcally from where they were 10 years ago.

The markets always seem to have a way of balancing themselves out, but gamers seem to be more patient or willing to let it steamroll them.

For some reason, in gaming more than in most places, the informed consumer represents a tiny, tiny fraction of the market.

Paingod wrote:Hopefully the pendulum will swing back from consumers as well, and they'll decrease pre-order and early-release sales. I know my pre-release purchases are down drasitcally from where they were 10 years ago.

The markets always seem to have a way of balancing themselves out, but gamers seem to be more patient or willing to let it steamroll them.

I'm still a day one guy on a bunch of games. The money isn't enough for me to care and I don't want to wait! Part of it is that I don't care about the money, but also I tend to get enjoyment out of games that are largely panned... as long as it is my kind of game. The new Thief being the only exception I can think of from the past decade.

I'm rarely a day one customer anymore - maybe 5% of my purchases. The rest are like 80% on sale, and 15% "Day 14" after a couple patches and the reviews hit. If I buy into a "65%" rated game, it's knowingly and with my eyes open. I have found a lot of fun there, but avoided a lot of wasted money and time, too. It's not even about the money, either. $50 or $10 - my thing is that I enjoy the game. A $50 price tag only bothers me if the game is 5 hours long.

I suppose I'm no longer in the target demographic. This must be why statistics tend to show groups like "18 to 35" in one category, and then everyone else. The impulse is all but dead and patience is easy.

The one thing I took away from that article is that I need to hurry up and pre-order dishonored 2 so I can play a day early!

Paingod wrote:I suppose I'm no longer in the target demographic. This must be why statistics tend to show groups like "18 to 35" in one category, and then everyone else. The impulse is all but dead and patience is easy.

I am nearly a decade past that category, but that just means I have the means to buy what they are selling. What's the point in having money if you aren't willing to spend it?

Oh, I spend it all right. Just not on a lot of games.

Blackhawk wrote:It was only a matter of time. Like the article says, reviews offer no benefit. I've seen a couple of different studies of this, and the conclusion was always that good reviews don't meaningfully increase sales, but bad reviews do have a negative impact on sales. Putting out review copies means that you're risking much to gain nothing. There is no smart reason for publishers to allow pre-release reviews.

There will still be day one reviews published. But they will be based on the vaguest of first impressions, without the benefit of having any technical issues addressed previously. If they are looking for bad press, this is how you get it.

I don't even buy the game in the year it came out, most times.

Hell, waiting a week will give you plenty of opinions to sift through.

coopasonic wrote:I'm still a day one guy on a bunch of games. The money isn't enough for me to care and I don't want to wait! Part of it is that I don't care about the money, but also I tend to get enjoyment out of games that are largely panned... as long as it is my kind of game.

Interesting, I'm on the other side of that. Money is not the issue, but gaming time well spent is. Since my gaming time is a fraction of what it used to be, I have to be pretty discerning, so really nothing much under an 75% Metacritic score for me. Which works out well since I've never found a game I enjoyed playing that was much below that (certainly not one that required time to learn).

From my perspective, there is only upside in waiting on the ultimately better gaming experience, either from add-ons, patches, and/or mods. So many games out there have been made so much better just within a few months of release, that I am also hesitant to buy for that reason. If based on history, I can assume that patches will make the game better, why not wait? If money were an issue, even more of a reason.

But maybe more importantly, my backlog is filled with AAA titles that have been patched, remastered, modded, stabilized, etc. with a full host of reviews confirming the game's awesomeness, that I have not touched. If that were not the case, and I had nothing better to play, I might see myself buying games on release day.

Money is an issue for me, but I rarely buy any game at release that isn't within a few very narrow categories. I'll buy a new Bethesda RPG. I'll buy a new multiplayer shooter if I need one (right now I've still got Overwatch.) I might buy a new Dragon Age or Mass Effect if it happened to coincide with a holiday where I could justify spending it.

In practice, that comes out to maybe two new games per year.

coopasonic wrote:The one thing I took away from that article is that I need to hurry up and pre-order dishonored 2 so I can play a day early!

Paingod wrote:I suppose I'm no longer in the target demographic. This must be why statistics tend to show groups like "18 to 35" in one category, and then everyone else. The impulse is all but dead and patience is easy.

I am nearly a decade past that category, but that just means I have the means to buy what they are selling. What's the point in having money if you aren't willing to spend it?

Smoove_B wrote:I don't remember the last time I purchased a physical copy of a game that didn't simply activate with a key from the box and then proceed to download the entire thing from STEAM. At some point I remember forcing the DVD to install resulted in STEAM downloading gigantic patches or re-downloading the entire game regardless.

Last December Shadow of Mordor (PC) was on Physical sale from Amazon. For a 35GB game, it took longer to install from the 4 (or 5?) DVDs than it would have to download.

Smoove_B wrote:Just saw that Call of Duty 37: Infinite Warfare has a 70GB footprint. Even if I was interested, I'd be out. Downloading 50GB was a 4+ day affair. When it creeps up to taking close to a week? Unpossible. Also, F Century Link DSL.

The IW pre-load is a 54.6GB download, and MWR is 36.6GB.

Even better -- you can't play multiplayer between copies purchased on STEAM and Win10 store. Microsoft is saying it was a decision made by Activision, not them.

Smoove_B wrote:Microsoft is saying it was a decision made by Activision, not them.

Maybe. Microsoft is specifically saying, "We support cross-play between devices and platforms for partners who want to enable it." The phrasing makes me wonder if perhaps enabling it involves various conditions and compromises that make it unappealing to 'want to enable it.'

Yeah. I highly doubt they're just standing there holding the door open and smiling. It's more likely there's a couple tendrils of smoke drifting up from the contract you need to sign to walk through that door, and a small pin you need to stick your thumb with in order to place a drop of blood on the line...

We've gotten a semi new Baulder's Gate in POE. I have played Wasteland 2 and looking forward to 3. Legend of Grimrock was so much like Dungeon Masters I may have wept a little. There's a new Elite game. I've been playing a Road Rash clone on PC that rocks. Even adventure games have even made a heullva comeback. I have been patient enough. Please take my wallet, you can go ahead and make my Autoduel sequel.