kickahaota

As a Bombcast fan from way back, I just have to say that new format for the Game of the Year podcasts is my favorite change that you've ever made -- it was awesome enough to make me insta-renew my Premium subscription even though I already had almost a year on it.

The GOTY podcasts have always been a double-edged sword for me. I love the discussions of the year's games, but it makes me really sad to hear people I care about arguing, especially over something that seems inconsequential in the scheme of things. There have been a number of years where I've stopped listening to the deliberationcasts very early on because the flaring tempers made it too painful for me to listen to.

With the new format, I've gotten hours and hours of enjoyment from the Giant Bomb crew just talking about one interesting game after another -- occasionally with some strong differences of opinion (notably RDR2), but still expressed in a really interesting and positive way. I've learned a lot and picked up several games that I hadn't previously paid attention to but that sounded intriguing. And when I'm done listening to Day 3, I can cheerfully skip the episodes where you do the horsetrading and pick the final winners, and be happy that the people who enjoy that style of stronger debate can still enjoy it while I'm off trying to finish those last few levels of Exapunks.

Thank you so much!

I have to throw in a disclaimer here: I work for Microsoft, though not for the Xbox group. These opinions are my own and not those of Microsoft.

I'm quite enjoying the racing, and of course it's flarkin' gorgeous. I won't go into detail about the good parts, because obvious bias is obvious. Just keep in mind that I do strongly recommend the game.

That recommendation aside, here are the parts that have rubbed me the wrong way early on.

• This is a big game, and it takes a long time to install. Very early on in the install process, it will say "Ready to start!" If you are like me, you will say "Nice" and start playing. And the first three races of the single-player campaign -- where you're racing on predetermined tracks with predetermined cars -- worked fine. Then I got to the part where you actually get to start choosing things, and almost immediately ran into several very weird user-interface issues, followed by a crash. Needless to say, that wasn't good. But there was something about it that led me to say 'This is the way a user interface behaves when it doesn't have the resources it needs.' So I waited for the installation to complete before launching it again, and after that everything worked fine. Now of course this is a sample size of one and so is nearly meaningless; but if you run Forza 7 before the install completes and see bugginess, consider letting the install complete before continuing.
• I don't much like the way that loot boxes have been incorporated into the progression.
• The assist settings no longer affect the amount of credits you get per race, unless you've played a mod that locks in that setting. (The difficulty of the AI drivers still does affect the credit rewards.) I liked getting rewarded for playing on a harder difficulty, so I was semi-irked by this change.

This is the first time in ages that the terms of service of a game rubbed me the wrong way enough to get me to say "Never mind, uninstall."

I'm not allowed to "inconvenience" the company in the event of a billing dispute?

I'm not allowed to "publicly disclose or post details about a query to (the company) and the response thereto?"

All kinds of other weird stuff in there.

No thanks, Quirky Japanese Game.

@generalwalnut: It's always hard to tell what triggers motion sickness. (This is the first game in a long while that's given me the problem.) I think it has to do with the way the camera zooms around to different angles; I wish there were a pure-manual-camera-control option I could try.

I loved the Banjo games. I backed this immediately. It makes me violently motion-sick. Bummer.

This is how weird I am: In my closet, I have my shirts separated into two types -- "work okay" on the right (polos, etc.) and "theoretical social life" on the left (T-shirts with videogame references, etc.). There's a gap in the middle of the closet, between the two collections. All the shirts face the gap. When I need a shirt, I go to the gap, and grab the nearest shirt of the appropriate type. When I hang shirts, I hang them at the edges of the closet, and push the previously-hung shirts towards the middle. So basically, every shirt of each type gets worn in rotation.

And here's where it gets even weirder: When a shirt's turn comes up, if I don't feel like wearing it, I move it to the edge of the closet (the 'back of the line'), but I hang it facing away from the gap. When I don't feel like wearing a shirt that's already facing away from the gap, I donate it to charity. My shirts are not allowed to displease me twice in a row.

In summary: I am weird. And ambilateral. And weird.

And in the Pacific Northwest, I'm in the 'I've never seen a diner with a drive-thru' camp. Even the faster diners around here are 'come in, sit down, and there'll be a minimum of about ten minutes before your food arrives'.

@chaser324: Looks like Neverwinter from here, boss.

Seattle, WA, USA

Yep. MUDs were made of connected rooms populated with objects. In the very first MUDs, objects just sat and waited to be interacted with by players. Eventually, MUDs started supporting objects that could periodically perform programmed actions on their own initiative. One action an object could take was to move from room to room, so these became known as "mobile objects", quickly shortened to "mobs". And folks rapidly figured out that an entertaining thing for a mobile object to do was "attack the player and allow the player to attack back", so "mobs" became synonymous with "monsters".

Likewise, as others have said, "procs" were originally "procedures" that could be placed on objects. The most basic example is "use". Objects could be used on other objects -- USE SWORD ON DRAGON, USE KEY ON LOCK, etc. So when you created, say, the sword object, you could create a bit of code and attach it to the sword as its "when used" procedure. Then, when someone tried to USE SWORD ON THE DRAGON, the MUD would call this code and say "Okay, you've just been used, and the thing you've been used on is that dragon." And the code could say "Okay, that dragon appears to be something that has a 'when damaged' procedure, so I'll display a 'You slash the dragon!' message, and call that dragon object's 'when damaged' procedure and tell it that I've hit it for 3 points of damage." And the dragon object's "when damaged" procedure, in turn, could display a message about 'The dragon roars in pain!', and see that the sword object that damaged it is being held by a player object, and call more procedures designed to inflict terrible harm on that player, and so on and so on.

There was originally nothing random about procs -- if an object had a proc that applied to a particular situation, it would get called 100% of the time. But the procs themselves would often be used to implement exotic sort of effects that should only happen some of the time, so the proc itself would generate a random number and say "Okay, there's a 10% chance that I'll set the room I'm in on fire," or something like that. So "proc" gradually became associated with randomness as well as with weird things happening.