Opinions WC Trestkon's convo with Phas?

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DDL
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Re: Opinions WC Trestkon's convo with Phas?

Post by DDL »

Oh christ...armageddon?

I think that movie was succinctly summed up during a scene immediately following some big asteroid-quake, when the crew are looking around wondering if anyone died..."Oh shit..we lost Gruber."

I shit you not: the entire cinema audience promptly asked "who the fuck was Gruber??" and then burst out laughing.


Honestly, if I had to choose between a game that was presented like contact and a game that was presented like armageddon...it'd be contact AAALL the way.

(Well...actually, I'd simply ignore both until they were in a bargain bin then snap em up on a two for one deal, but after playing both, it'd be the contact-esque one I played AGAIN.)



Anyway, just in case: please don't take any of this arguing as aggressive: we tend to debate things to quite ludicrous extents around here sometimes. And you're of course entirely entitled to your own views, but like CtC said, something of this level of significance would certainly have been mentioned in the in-game text (of which there is a SHITLOAD). And don't criticise him for using fucking NUMBERS, because that's a dumb argument. Numbers are quoted when they add to the argument, and they make a hell of a lot of sense.

"Statistically people shot in the face with a cannon tend to die 100% of the time."

"PPPFFFFT, numbers. Whatever. Shoot me already. We'll see who's laughing."
chris the cynic
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Re: Opinions WC Trestkon's convo with Phas?

Post by chris the cynic »

DXNathan wrote:The first time I misspoke and stated your intention (the correct angle would have been to say "it seems like your reason is" as opposed to just the last three words) I said that your reason was based on statistics. You denied it... and then you go and drop a bunch more numbers.
Ok, I'm going to mention Nazis. Don't get scared away. To equate numbers with statistics is like equating people with Nazis. Nazis are in the form of people, statistics are (usually) in the form of numbers. A number does not a statistic make. Similarly, though I believe you to be a person I do not believe you to be a Nazi.

I can do it without numbers, I just figured that you'd want to know where I was getting my info from and using numbers lets you see that. Here is the same thing without numbers:

For what you said to be true a fuckton of people would need to be infected. If we rule out the use of magic the vast majority would need to be infected. Even though the Gray Death kills people rather quickly the vast majority of living people would have needed to be infected for years. This poses problems. First, we know it isn't true. Deus Ex rather explicitly tells us that the vast majority are not infected, and that while the ever increasing number who are infected are taxing the medical establishment they are in fact in a distinct minority.

Second, if the vast majority of the population was infected with a very lethal disease (and the only treatment is reserved for a select few) the vast majority of the population would die off. Your theory requires that after that happens the vast majority of the survivors themselves get infected, which means that the vast majority of the survivors would likewise die off, at which point your theory requires that the vast majority of the ones who survived that get infected ... and so on. The population would be decreasing quite fast.

I said I wouldn't used numbers, and I won't, but I will say that if you started with today's population, you counted the times the population went through that on your fingers, you wouldn't quite run out of people before you ran out fingers (assuming you have the usual complement of fingers) but you'd come close. Close enough that the existence of polydactyly means that some would run out of people before fingers

Of course, the actual decrease in population would be even faster than that lets on because it wouldn't go in stages. Continuously compounding death as it were.
See, you're like the Carl Sagan or Michael Crichton, you want... ah... you seem to want to quantify everything.
I just wanted you to know where it was coming from. If I had just said vast majority you might not have known where I was coming from. The numbers provide a link directly from what you said to vast majority.

The 22%, 44%, and 88% are a way to show the effects of magic or the lack there of:
We can say it isn't the vast majority but instead a very significant minority (its just 22%) if we assume the Gray Death is magical and (in spite of canon) men don't get infected. If we make only one of those assumptions it jumps to nearly half (44%) and if we make neither it is in vast majority territory. The numbers make it so you can see the effects of stuff, rather than taking my word for it.
Now which sci-fi film was more successful, Contact or Armageddon (Sagan's most recognized film and a Michael Bay film from around the same time)? Both were good, but only one was really fun. And if your entertainment's not fun, what's the point?
I'm not convinced either was good, but if I were to agree with you that both were good, wouldn't that just mean you had already answered the question of "what's the point?"

If there is no satisfactory answer to, "what's the point?" that means it isn't good. You said a movie that wasn't really fun was good. So there must be an answer to, "if your entertainment's not fun, what's the point?" and that answer must be satisfactory.

As for what that answer is, no idea, but if you are right about Contact being good it must exist.
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Dark Reality
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Re: Opinions WC Trestkon's convo with Phas?

Post by Dark Reality »

chris the cynic wrote: Ok, I'm going to...
*falls asleep*
chris the cynic wrote: ...it must exist.
*alarm buzzes*

What?
DDL wrote:Anyway, just in case: please don't take any of this arguing as aggressive: we tend to debate things to quite ludicrous extents around here sometimes.
I see. I am intrigued as ever to find intellectual conversation online, but I honestly can't continue a debate about a plot hole. Chris is right, when you look into it as deeply as he has, my explanation doesn't really hold water. But it's not going to stop me from attempting one. Like I said back on page 2, I never claimed to be sane.
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Arnaud G. Vasquez
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Re: Opinions WC Trestkon's convo with Phas?

Post by Arnaud G. Vasquez »

^- DarkReality, why do you post here if your mindset is to blow off the other users who wish to challenge or discuss your points?

It is rude and very likely hypocritical of me to butt in on this spat, but I am supremely agitated by that attitude you displayed toward Chris. Who do I think I am to jump in? Oh, I'm merely a typical user like anybody else here. I am *not* anyone special, but I cannot believe you have brought your egregious "debate" style here and amplified it. I am quite sorry to have helped you in the past.
I'm pretty confident in everything from the neck up.
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Andy.G
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Re: Opinions WC Trestkon's convo with Phas?

Post by Andy.G »

My my how philosophical we are becoming. You'd better watch out Jonas before we begin picking apart the world that you created (as in the storyline) finding every last bit of meaning we can gather for our analyticaly obsessed minds. So it's it's time I got cracking!

In my view, all players actions or the factions they represent are judged as evil or good by the morals in which they base their reasons for doing so.
Scara and World Corp are viewed as the evil faction because they have little or no morals that dictate their actions. Nearly everyone in that faction is extremely self centred and ambitious. They want total power and they won't stop until they have attained it. This view is also a reflection of our society and how different it is from this model, if I was brought up with the teachings that only the strong survive I may view World Corp as the best faction because they are in a position of power and only look out for themselves.
PDX on the other hand would be viewed as the weaker faction because they allow themsleves to be caught up looking after the little people around them and are made weaker by it (Phas talks about how the PDX forces are stretched thin trying to curb the violence occuring). They would be seen as the worse faction because of this.

But then again, I played with the World Corp faction because I wanted to win the biggest dickhead competition (if there ever was one). I killed heaps of people in cold blood simply because if my character wanted to win that comp, he'd be doing this right now. And thus we come to the point where I am no longer playing out a character in a video game, I had become that character; Using his mentality to make decisions, "what would MY Trestkon say?", and acted accordingly.
In this state of total freedom the rules of the REAL world are wiped away, allowing us the players to make our own decisions by our new set of morals which we have created for this game. This is where I believe TMN surpasses Deus Ex, in it's ability to give the player some awesome paths of freedom.
JC in my mind was much link a robot, merely asking questions with little or no feeling. There were a few places were you could make him into an extremely ignorant and powerful character (like putting down Agent Nevara for sitting back while you did all the work) and they were awesome. But TMN just allows for much more of this type of freedom and that's what I really like about this game. It makes me care when I act in a way that my character wouldn't, and I reload a save and try again just to make it right.

Now by doing all this, we the players are inherently creating new characters, and that is what I believe forum planet is. It is a world where different forum characters (which can be created on a forum because everyone is anonymos) play out their stories, interacting with one another and developing as time goes on. They need little or no human interaction as we have already created everything they need to continue. If one of them dies because of the protagonist or another character, that character's story ends and they become unable to directly influence the world, much like Gwog in DXI. His entire story existed in this place, bu not on the planet itself which is why he cannot venture up there often. He is history that belongs to the world of DXI, not Forum Planet.
Therefore one can conlcude that Forum Planet is more like a virtual simulation, where human players create characters with their own set of morals to follow and set them free to cause havoc amongst each other.

Now to get back on topic, I too thought that this conversation between Trestkon and Phasmatis lacked somewhat. This is because Trestkon explanation gave no satisfaction as to WHY he would turn on his good friend after previous conversations. It was like he'd been brainwashed and so couldn't turn back on what he said, if there had been some mention of trouble in the past, like there was with Kylie, then it would have felt more natural and unforced.
But then again, being brainwashed might not have been so bad after all......

NOTE: All the above is a direct reply to the philosophical discussion ocuring in the first page of this thread, not the two other pages of heated debate over why there are so few females (or at least young ones) in Deus Ex which is because those damn coders were lazey and wanted to save time.
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Dark Reality
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Re: Opinions WC Trestkon's convo with Phas?

Post by Dark Reality »

Arnaud G. Vasquez wrote:^- DarkReality, why do you post here if your mindset is to blow off the other users who wish to challenge or discuss your points?
I didn't blow him off. I conceded the debate. I was rude about it, I admit that - and I am sorry, Chris, if you were offended by that. I was kind of trying to wind the debate down a little while back, and he came back with a longer post. The point of the "falling asleep" skit wasn't to say he was wrong or anything, but rather, that it just didn't need to continue. At which point I formally conceded.

I feel like we've lost track of the original discussion, and many thanks to Andy.G for returning the conversation to that topic. I hardly remember the conversation between Trestkon and Phas now, but I agree, Trestkon did seem brainwashed. And maybe he was. It's Phas who calls you back, so you come into the world of FC with presumably good intentions, and then you get caught up with the 'wrong crowd'. When Phas calls you on it, Trestkon just pulls this whiny angle, and it didn't seem in character. Maybe he's just getting really corrupt.

Anyway, I've messed up both of my save games now, so I'm going to start with 1.0.2 on a PDX run. Hopefully I complete it this time... ;)
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