DiabloFans

I cook great meth!

Just kidding. But really!

On the serious note, marijuana just became legal in the state above me (Washington) and Oregon would have followed but the measure lost by a mere 5%. Colorado has legalized marijuana, and more and more people around the world are starting to open up to the ideas of non-medical use of drugs, aka street drugs. Amsterdam is notoriously known for having cannabis shops and clubs and having a very lenient policy of drugs (to those who have been there, you know what I'm talking about). In general, most developed countries are starting to open up to this issue and, especially with the internet, you can say that more people are starting to "not care" as much.

So now I am going to ask you guys. What do you think about this? Should commercial drugs be legalized? Should all drugs be legal? Should there be a place where you can do psychelics? Where do you draw the line? Is it an issue that if you legalize one thing you have to legalize everything? If we legalize marijuana and it comes that we legalize mushrooms, acid, DMT (pretty much all psychelics), would we have to legalize meth, heroin, and, dare I say it, even PCP to be fair?

My view? I grew up in Oregon. Here in the northwest, everyone grows up with drugs right next to them. Mushrooms grow like wheat in the northwest, Portland used to be the meth capital of the world, and pot is very lenient here. To be honest, I was shocked when marijuana legalization didn't pass because Portland (which to anyone who is from Oregon knows that Portland is pretty much Oregon) is known for being "weird" and this would be the perfect thing for them to do. I personally think it should be a personal choice, and we should have regulations of when it effects others.

This issue would be a lot easier if alcohol was illegal since out of almost most commercial drugs, it probably is the most harmful. It is extremely bad for your overall health, overdosing is extremely easy, it's EXTREMELY addictive (in fact it is one of the two substances in the world that withdrawal effects can kill you), and the effects of it usually cause damage and reckless behavior (I live in a fraternity, I know this). With this in mind, the line is drawn very far away for society, yet a lot of people grew up watching Intervention and the news, where meth heads and heroin addicts unfortunately make up a lot of the time so the ideas of "drugs" is very touchy and looked down upon.

How do we solve everything? Legalize everything. That's right. Everything. PCP included (but for the love of god make it extremely hard to get).

Now why do this?

1. Morally, we need to do it. If you don't like drugs, don't do them. If someone wants to do drugs, let them do it. How someone acts in their home is entirely up to them. If someone wants to shoot up on heroin, let them! Just because one person made a personal choice to not use commercial drugs does not mean everyone has to follow suit.

2. Practicing drugs will be a lot safer. Did you know that unsafe sex is not the number one way AIDS is transmitted? Heroin is actually the number one way AIDS is spread. That's right, one of the most feared drugs out there just got scarier. Do you know how many lives can be saved if the government can put out safer ways to make people achieve their highs? What if you can buy marijuana without being worried that the dealer can lace it with substances that make you chemically addicted? Or use the whole "crack" trick and increase the quantity of it by adding some random shit to it? What if we were actually able to study the drugs to make them safer to use? Which leads me to my next point...

3. Medicine and therapy! First off, the general public would be surprised what goes into your medicine. They use box jellyfish venom to fight wrinkles. Yeah that's right, you read that right. The most potent and poisonous venom in the WORLD (that's right, Box Jellyfish are ranked number one in the most poisonous animals list) is used to help 50 year old women fight their midlife crisis. Why? BECAUSE IT WORKS! Stop thinking of drugs as drugs for a second and imagine them as chemicals because that's what they really are. The active ingredient in marijuana is tetrahydrocannabinol, which is actually extremely useful when it comes to battling side-effects of diseases, and unfortunately, in some states it's illegal because people fear stoners. The most potent psychedelic known to humans is dimethyltyptamine (DMT) is scheduled as a class I drug under the law and the easiest place to find it is... YOUR BRAIN! That's right folks! That near death experience you had where you went out of your body? That was actually an insane trip you had that your body put you under because it thought you were gonna die but you lived. I hate to hate on religion here, but fundamentalist Christians who claim to have seen Jesus, Hell, Buddha, etc before they died were just tripping really really hard on drugs that they fight to exterminate from society. Mushrooms? Studies believe that they started religion and they played a huge role in the founding in Hinduism (mushrooms grow very well in cow dung). These are chemicals that play a role in your brain. Like all chemicals, they have an input-output effect that can be manipulated to be of some help. Look at morphine and laughing gas! Remember how awesome those were? Those are DRUGS (I'm not sure about laughing gas, but morphine is used commercially all the time). STUDY THEM AND USE THEIR PROPERTIES FOR THE BETTER OF MANKIND! Stop limiting yourself!

4. A drug experience isn't actually all that bad. THC functions by turning on receptors in your brain, meaning that you are literally feeling an intense unregulated brain overdrive where thinking and brain functions just go crazy, meaning that thinking becomes your main source of entertainment (and music ). A lot people who consider them philosophical have went on a psychelic trip to "broaden" their mind so they can think in a different way (this isn't a hippie belief). Psychelic experiences can be life changing on the way you view the world. Adderall is used across colleges around the world to help them study for finals and midterms. Meth is an extreme version of adderall. Heroin... I don't know anything about heroin really except that it's commonly injected through needles and you get AIDS, but I don't know anything about the high you achieve. Drug effects can have a positive on the human psych. Call me crazy, call me a dreamer, call me anything you want, but I believe that sometime in the future marijuana will be recommended by psychologists to relieve stress for their patients. Ponder this for a second. When was the last time you met a stressed out stoner? The stereotype for stoners is that they are chill and tell everyone to chill the hell out. We have resources to help people's minds. USE THEM!

Well these are my points summarized in a very short amount of time with very little proof reading because I have a midterm later this week and I want to start studying. Again, what are your guys' opinions. With some luck, I hope the mods see this thread as a discussion thread and don't close this thread because I think this is a huge issue that needs to be discussed without the taboo it has upon on it now. Also I KNOW THIS IS A GAME FORUM so don't post that here. But just because it is doesn't mean we can't talk about it.

LET'S TALK ABOUT DRUGS!

Quote from Xenocow

Mmmmm MULTIKILL !!!

Good. We need someone who played the previous games more to be in charge.

Diablo 3 is a perfectly fine game, yet I refuse to play it anymore. It's no longer a Diablo game, it's a WoW fanfic.

Quote from Xenocow

Quote from Irrational

The game is completely free as the developers do not believe in a "pay to play" philosophy.

The People who spend money insisted
You can take whatever Kickstarter Project you want, its everywhere the same.
Nobody wants Pay2win, diabolical DRM measures, or expensive DLC shit.

However, very well written... couldnt sum it up better myself.
Kudos to you!

It's an indie company in New Zealand. They make their money on donations. It's pretty cool actually.

And thank you! I'm glad that there are others who appreciated Diablo for what it was and not what it has become

Quote from Tsukishima

I disagree with this notion of "true fandom".

A true Diablo fan believes that he is the only true Diablo fan.

Quote from Chewzilla

You may feel free to speak for yourself when describing a 'true' Diablo fan and what they thought D3 would be.

Right you are! As it is my review, I am able to speak for myself!

Refreshing this idea. Anyone interested?

So I finally realized what the problem was with Diablo 3. It's a perfectly fine game. The gameplay is fun. The graphics are alright. However, it is not a Diablo game. It does not have the same magic as Diablo 2 and 1 had.

You see, Blizzard forgot who the target fanbase of Diablo games were. Diablo fans are NOT nerds. Those are World of Warcraft fans. If you want to find a typical WoW fan, google image "South Park WoW Guy". There you go, say hello to your stereotypical throwaway nerd, usually between the ages of 13-16 or 40-50. Diablo fans were different. They were your soul patch tattoo guy, who dreams of starting his own death metal band and studying philosophy if not for his weed and Diablo 2 addiction. The guy who would name his character "fuckst1ck" and enter chat rooms trolling "Fuck Canada! My uncle beats me!" and then join a PvP game while getting into arguments on d2jsp. I know there are a lot of WoW fans out there and I personally see why people like it but, generally, Diablo fans thought WoW was fucking gay! There was a famous quote done by someone at this forums whom I can't remember his name, but it went something like "Starcraft fans are Korean, Warcraft fans are nerds, Diablo fans are freaks." I miss this.

So here is where Blizzard made their biggest mistake. They had three franchises and their main attention was World of Warcraft (and for good reason, it was making them a fuck ton of money) and many thought they left the other two in the abyss. However, they recently decided to revive them. First there was Starcraft 2, which had a lot of improvements but I thought the campaign was too cartoonish and missed the original Starcraft feel to it, which was that dark futuristic feel that had a never ending war pessimism attached to it. I miss the cut scenes where there would be marines get assraped by Zerglings instead of Raynor bitching at the screen about Kerrigan for 75% of the time.

Then came Diablo 3. Diablo fans have been waiting patiently for a long time for a game that could be an improvement on Diablo 2, bring a similar dark feeling the first two had and make it on a grand scale. Like how could you fail at this task? You have the Lords of Sin and Lies as your main villains with a hint of the return of Diablo himself (not to mention everyone's favorite boss from Diablo 1). I'll tell you how. You use your most successful game as your inspiration, not the prequels of the game you are trying to make. I don't care if the auction house is flawed, Diablo 2 sucked way more ass at its release but you played it because it had that magic to it. That dark fantasy gore feeling that no one other game had. What other game do you remember had your main character turn into the villain at the end of the game? What other game had you finish the whole game thinking you accomplished something when really the guy telling the story was tricked by a demon lord? Diablo 3 had none of this. It felt like someone took the Warcraft template and tried to make a Diablo 3 game out of it. It was cartoonish, bright, bland, and boring. After all these years of patiently waiting, the Diablo stoners were left empty.

However, I now give you the return of what made Diablo 1 and 2 amazing. The same dark fantasy feeling that made it fun to kill skeletons in dungeons. The same dark music that allowed you to space out to a feeling of taking on pure evil itself.

Meet Path of Exile:




I was chilling over winter break when my brother texted me about this game. He, like me, was a devout fan of Diablo 1 and 2 and the old dark fantasy feeling it had. He said it was nothing like he has ever played. So, hearing it was free, I gave it a go.

So before I get into a review, let me tell you the back story of this game. The developers, Grinding Gear Games, are a small company in New Zealand that were veterans to games like D1 and 2. Missing this, they decided to make a new game based on D2. Using an almost identical ideas such as town portals, towns, identifying, the tetris inventory, etc, a new game was born that is much more of a sequel than Diablo 3 ever will be. The game is completely free as the developers do not believe in a "pay to play" philosophy. If you wish to skip my review and play the game, do it. Don't waste time in reading the useless jabbering on how great PoE is and get it yourself and play. If you want continue reading on like the useless shit you are, go ahead and read my review.

This is a screen shot of PoE pretty early on in the game:



Now there shouldn't be any explanation on why I brought this picture out. Any true Diablo fans knows exactly what every other DFan is thinking and that's "I used to stare at shit like this 24/7". Ultimate sense of awesome enters your head. THIS IS WHAT DIABLO SHOULD BE!

The game takes play on the continent Wraeclast, a harsh dark continent where your character is washed up on after being exiled by his ship. You start on the shores where you eventually find a small encampment founded by other exiles. There is where you start your journey.

Now while this sounds like a typical gay ass fantasy game, the gameplay is what keeps you in it. The combat is similar to Diablo 3 that you have a potions belt and a skill belt, but the way your skills work is pretty sweet. In PoE, you socket your items with gems that give you skills, and each time you level up, you gain a passive skill within a passive skill tree that in its entirety looks like this :



You get one little button per level and the level cap is 100, so the character diversity is just massive in this game. As you level up and your skills get better, you will encounter crazy monsters that would put the D1 catacombs to shame. Light radius actually plays a role in this game as most of the game you are in a dark dungeon crawling with monsters and demons. It brought back the old magic of killing demons and not giving a fuck.

The graphics are something else. It took the claymation-esque style that Diablo 1 and 2 were based on and literally just improved the shit out of it. Night is finally night, which is something that Blizzard just had a hard time doing. Honestly, it doesn't take a genius to find out that lack of light makes things black, not a bluish herpes color that puts Blue Waffle to shame (look that up I dare you). The world is gigantic and the landscaping is beautiful, which I think they call textures in programming but I honestly don't fucking now. Like its spiritual prequels, the maps are randomized and the map no longer feels linear and small.

Now onto the monsters themselves. From strange octopus/man hybrids to classic walking zombies, PoE has them all. You can definitely tell that they used their imagination in this game when it came to the enemies as I honestly am excited when I enter a new area just so I can see the new challenges I am going to face. The spiders actually look freaky in this game and the bad ass undead knights just look like Hellish badassery. Being the freak (not nerd) that I am, I would buy a sculpture of those weird crab things you see in the beginning of the game, as they are absolutely creepy.

Now onto the multiplayer. This is honestly why most people would play the game. The game operates in a sense that you have to have internet connection to play, kind of like WoW and Diablo 3. Yet there is no chat room or anything. You have your character select screen and when you pick a character you are thrust into the game. How do they make up for the chat room? By probably the most ingenious idea of multiplayer communication of all time.

When you start the game you are in a sense playing single player. You have no connection to the outside world except for your chat window which has the option of going global (which counts as the chat room) and/or local (which is in your current party). Now how do you join parties? Well before I get into that, let me tell you about the town. Outside of town, you are by yourself against Wraeclast's monsters, however when you're in town, everyone who is town in your league (a sub level of realms), can be seen in town. You can trade with them, talk to them, or just ignore them if you want. This is how you mostly meet other players. You can imagine it being a webbed tree where outside of town everyone is by themselves but everyone meets together when they're inside. This is a very good way to meet other players and I honestly think the system is amazing. To join parties, you put up your social window where you can join other public parties (which are in a sense separate games in D2) or private parties with your friends.

There is also PvP, which I have no yet experienced, but everyone who has fought in PvP told me it's amazing, but I won't review anything I won't do.

To finish my review, I'll talk about character classes. There are six character classes all of which I am not going to name because I don't remember and I don't want to take the time to check. Yet the way they are made is actually pretty simple. The game is based on three attributes: Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence. The way the class system works is very similar to the six dot color wheel, which means you have three classes that work purely on one attribute, and three other classes that work via hybridization, meaning there is a Strength-Dex class, a Intelligence-Strength class, etc. Each class starts at a different place on the Passive Skill Tree where their passive skills match more of their class. This does not mean you are stuck to one attribute forever. It means that your class works best under one but as you level up more and more you can actually merge some passive skills of other classes, which just adds to the diversity. So the moral of the story is that it's confusing but makes sense when you start playing.

As a conclusion, the game is amazing and it's only in closed beta. The developers know what they are doing and I am glad to call myself a fan of the game. On the Irrational scale I give it ten 4chan memes of out ten. GET IT!

Now to the true Diablo fans out there, here is a link to their website for you to start a new adventure:

Website: http://www.pathofexile.com/

If you aren't, then read this list of what a true Diablo fan is and take follow:


A true Diablo fan thinks WoW is gay.

A true Diablo fan knows how to deal with trolls.

A true Diablo fan played Diablo 1 before it was cool.

A true Diablo fan isn't fat or skinny, he just doesn't give a fuck.

A true Diablo fan tells 11 year old ragers to kill themselves and laughs about it.

A true Diablo fan read the Diablo 1 manual on the toilet.

A true Diablo fan watches porn while D2 is minimized.

A true Diablo fan lives with his mom because he doesn't care, not because he wants to.

A true Diablo fan wishes he could go to an Opeth concert, but can't afford it.

A true Diablo fan reads d2jsp arguments for fun.

A true Diablo fan makes jokes that his uncle mollests them... to strangers.

A true Diablo fan knows why Blizz made sojs the way to open up D-Clone.

A true Diablo fan looked up "effects of shrooms" at least four times in his life.

A true Diablo fan watches the D2 cinematics on Youtube.

A true Diablo fan considered firing Jay Wilson and replacing him as themself.

A true Diablo fan thought Leah was only positive from Diablo 3.

A true Diablo fan made racist jokes when he saw that Tyreal was black.

A true Diablo fan believes in white power because he thinks it's funny.

A true Diablo fan starts religious flame wars for fun.

A true Diablo fan knows how to change the world but is too lazy to do it.

A true Diablo fan knows why the D3 Butcher was gay.

A true Diablo fan hated Leah-Diablo.

A true Diablo fan isn't a hipster, he just doesn't give a fuck.

A true Diablo fan cannot be a woman (just kidding, don't ban me).

A true Diablo fan has made at least 10 hammerdins in his time.

Ehhh how do I delete posts? My computer is being really strange right now.

Okay can someone close this thread? I am probably too used to d2jsp. -___-

This was more a rage attack on the fact that I was getting anal from a mob in Act 4. This wasn't supposed to be serious. Oops

Get rid of Reflects Damage. Any char that does 100k DPS is fucked.

Thank you!

- Everyone on Battle.net

Quote from Whitetroll

I'm guessing it's because you haven't progressed that far in the storyline. You can't skip a step by joining a public game, just because your level is suffecient. Join where you can and progress from there - as you reach the next quest-steps, they will open up so you can join games starting from that point.

I'm in act 2 dude.

Quote from Ankhesenisis

Big leap or D3 acting weird.

Make your own game starting from that quest ... open to public, problem solved

Question: Is it A or B?

Answer: It's A or B

Thanks man