The socket colors are influenced by the stat requirements of the item. Higher dex requirements produce more green socket. Str for red, int for blue. This means that as you get higher level, if you're running pure evasion gear, getting anything but green sockets becomes progressively more difficult. You can use a couple of off-color gems, as getting other socket colors isn't impossible, but if you're planning a build almost exclusively around blue and red gems while building for evasion your life is going to be hell. This is one of the biggest benefits hybrid armors have: It's far easier to get the colors you want.

Long-term planning is pretty much the answer to all problems in PoE. The problem for new players is not even knowing WHAT they need to plan around long-term.

Sort-of close. 7 out of 100 tiles are some variant on Z in Polish Scrabble. I have no idea how important the distinction is between them, knowing nothing about Polish myself.

Spoken like a spoiled child, really. We've ALREADY had two new Megaman games (Megaman 9 and Megaman 10 -- not to be confused with Megaman X) in the vein of the originals in the last five years. Given that they seem to have sold well, odds are they're also working on Megaman 11.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4834923/iPad-pony-trap-as-Grace-6-runs-up-massive-900-bill-on-free-game-app.html

Microtransactions on mobile devices -- and especially marketed towards children -- can be extremely problematic.

Even microtransactions in online games are getting out of hand, and they're arguably one of the few places where the model excels.

The problem is nickel-and-dime related. When you're not spending much, you don't realize how fast you're actually spending money. This is the reason a lot of people carry cash instead of plastic; it's less abstract.

I'm a big gamer, and many games I play operate on microtransaction models. Over the years, I've spent over $1000 on one game, and over $300 on another. Both games were technically free. Altogether microtransactions have probably cost me close to $6k.

Handbrake at those speeds would either be useless, or suicidal. Even pulling the handbrake at lower speeds can be extremely dangerous.

You can access every game on your account from the guide, no need to fully drop to dashboard.

Because that could NEVER be abused ...

It will be interesting to see how it is handled. Xbox Live Arcade already functions via both methods -- the original Xbox AND the LIVE account both can access the game (though if you're accessing it via your LIVE account on an Xbox other than the one it was purchased on, you have to have an active connection to LIVE when you launch the application.

Personally, I think this is a boneheaded move on Microsoft's part. I guarantee that if the console is cracked, piracy will run more rampant than ever before.

Battle.net accounts are NOT as secure as they ought to be. Yes, two-factor authentication is good, but not everyone has access to it, and actual passwords are not case sensitive.

To a mild degree, I don't think the school's idea is a bad one. The problem is that it doesn't account for the difference between a student who fails to turn in 20% of assignments and a student who fails to turn in 80% of assignments. When I was in middle school, my home life was fucked by several deaths in the family and parental separation and divorce, and I frequently was completely unable to concentrate on school work. Prior, I had only ever gotten one grade that wasn't at least an A-.

It strongly affected my grades in a negative way. There were grade average requirements to participate in nearly anything, forcing the school to pull me out of extra-curricular activities that were actually keeping me sane because they got me away from the hell that was my home life. It was a death-spiral for my academic situation, and it led me to hating school, thus killing my motivation even further. I plummeted, the only classes I regularly did better than a C on were music classes -- things I could absorb myself in. My GPA averaged less than 1.5.

I never did get my shit together, and eventually dropped out of high school, getting a GED instead. There was certainly a lot of blame to be directed at myself, for my own inability to pull myself together and do the work -- but the effect of my home life, and the resultant attitudes and bad habits were a detriment to me for years. I believe that to some degree, they still affect me today.

Had my school had a policy like this in place -- even a limited one, allowing a pass on a percentage of work -- I think I'd be in a better place today.

The biggest problem with the IAS nerf (which, as you said, needed to happen) was the failure to compensate with a subsequent buff to on-hit effects. Especially Life on Hit. Like you, I was built for IAS and had spent tons of gold on IAS equipment, and when the nerf hit, the attack speed wasn't what killed me -- it was the approximately 40% reduction in Life over time from my old attack speed that did me in.

As another PoE beta-tester, I can assure you, the online-only component is the only strike against it. The only thing you can buy with micro-transactions that could theoretically give you an advantage is more stash space ... of which they are already VERY generous with in the first place. The things you can buy are purely cosmetic -- items that alter how your skills look so you can have a custom visual style, or items that cause enemies to explode with excessive amounts of gore.

That's because Tuesday is a label for a specific day, and Wednesday is not a label for the same day - it is an inaccurate label. The point is that it doesn't matter what we label something as long as we all know what is being discussed. And in such a situation, arguing semantics just makes you look like a tool.

Are you saying it should? That was one of the most ridiculous 'scandals'.

Wrong kind of buffer. He's referring to a buffer as in a safe-zone -- A buffer against performance hiccups. If your frame rate drops below 60 FPS even briefly, any system with VSYNC enabled instantly drops to 30 FPS to prevent screen-tearing until the FPS goes above 60 again.