Qwinn´s Ultimate DAO Fixpack v3 (no longer beta!)

[AdenYeshua]

As I said, this is important to my next post, which should be titled "How Not To Spectacularly Undermine Your Own Arguments On The Internet, And Piss Qwinn Off In The Process".

 

While I'm sure 2/3rds of that post is going to be directed at me, I think you are the least qualified person here to make that assessment.

 

I disagree with this. The Chantry's caring and interest in the Urn is *extreme* at all times... the only thing that changes between the beginning and the end of the game (where they repeatedly throw themselves at a dragon for it) is that more information about where it is comes to light.

 

It is disingenuous to represent their effort this way, in fact, there are no talks of losses at all. Your just making it up. Your reading comprehension skills have to level up man this is crazy. It reads as follows

 

Epilogue: "Some years later, the Chantry announced that the resting place of Andraste's Ashes had indeed been found. They were located, however, in ruins that were also the lair of a high dragon, thus proving too dangerous to approach. Many made demands to secure the Ashes so that followers could undertake pilgrimages to partake of their healing powers. Following numerous failed attempts to deal with the dragon, the beast finally flew off to find another haven... but leaving the mountaintop sanctum in ruins. An excavation found no traces of the Urn."

 

It says attempts, the answer can easily be found just looking at the Chantry itself. If they wanted the dragon dead, it is dead, period. Sending Cassandra alone could secure the Urn. I don't read "thousands throwing themselves at the dragon" or anything related to the sort, could have very well made many attempts to steal the Urn for all we know.

 

At the risk of keep pointing out the obvious, this is yet ANOTHER person who believes the Chantry didn't put its best effort in. The numbers keep coming in. Though your colorful description might satisfy you, as I said nobody (not even you) initially thought this. I've seen your debate style once or twice before, it's terrible that one such encounter has to be on Qwinn.

 

where they repeatedly throw themselves at a dragon for it

 

When the debate starts shifting in not your direction just embellish the facts this whole excerpt is just plain made up, as are others. At *no* point is the player left with a worthwhile effort.

 

You read that epilogue an entirely different direction. It could go either way, we don't know the surrounding information. What if their many "attempts" were to hire bandits for a single copper to steal the Urn? Or just plain negotiation? Brother Genativi was paid in corn husks? The point is we don't know, it looks like a lackluster effort, plain and simple, there is nothing you can say that will make ANYONE even yourself believe this was an extreme effort. The Chantry has proven it can slay Dragons if the need arises. You ignore this completely, and repeatedly. As you will the number of people that keep piling in with questions to further your argument that doesn't exist at all.

Edited June 16, 2017 by AdenYeshua

[Bronzeness]

I definitely agree that they're always interested, but I guess it's more active vs passive interest? So not so much "they are vaguely interested at the moment" as "they have been enthusiastically awaiting further developments for 900 years." At the time of DAO, we know that countries are claiming to be birthplace of Andraste left and right, and all records of the temple have been lost. So any new information and yeah, the Chantry will be all over that. And if their best scholar is on the case and is spreading word that he might be onto something (hence the knights knowing to check in with him), they're absolutely gonna be super eager for that final report. And if he needs a templar escort for his archaeology expedition, heck yeah they'll send him one. I just don't think there was time for that whole request to be made. It sounds like Genitivi just had the word out that he was on the urn project and had some promising ideas for where to start, and that much had been pretty well circulated through the Ferelden chantries, but the knights were still going to him first, not straight to Haven, so clearly there wasn't too much concrete data in the system, such as it was. So again, it's not that the Chantry isn't interested, but there's just way too much to parse through and the person best suited to do that was already doing that, so as a whole they just had to more or less sit back and wait. Interest is vague because the facts are vague. That changes to active, focused interest at one of two points, both totally plausible:

 

1. Hero of Ferelden performs a highly publicized miracle healing, and we get confirmation of temple's existence from multiple sources.

2. Local arlessa sponsors any local knights who want to try their hand at this awesome holy quest, oh and also scholars say we might be on the verge of proving it's existence any time now.

 

I'm sure if Harrith had written to Val Royeaux, they'd have enthusiastically given his templars leave to go urn-hunting. I think maybe he jumped the gun, and didn't wait for approval to abandon the usual DAO templar job of Standing Outside Chantry Doors Forever/Getting Slaughtered by Two Dozen Level 5-10 Mages. If he had waited, the templars would all be there for the zombie attack, but as you've said, we see just enough evidence of a templar presence in Redcliffe to suspect that maybe they weren't as present as usual.

 

Edited to add: I think the chantry's interest in any particular thing is always kinda obscured by the fact that the templar order is run by and populated with brainwashed drug addicts and the other side is tied down in all the bureaucracy you'd expect with an organization that size. Taking a couple years to mount a real expedition and publish any kind of announcement is par for the course when everybody has to go everywhere on foot. We all know the chantry sucks in a lot of ways, but that doesn't mean that they aren't interested in stuff, or that individual members wouldn't want to do exciting things like find legendary lost relics.

Edited June 16, 2017 by Bronzeness

[Qwinn]

For the record, this is my last post directly addressing this particular issue. I am only posting it because I am sure there will be other contentious fixes that I am asked to perform in the future, and I'd like to inform anyone who may want to convince me of the rightness of their cause in the future of what will work and what will NOT work. And I cannot even conceive of a better case study for that than this argument.

 

"How Not To Spectacularly Undermine Your Own Arguments On The Internet, And Piss Qwinn Off In The Process".

 

I see an argument as a table. Every fact you deploy in an attempt to support your argument is a leg of that table. You have enough legs to keep the tabletop in the air without it tipping over, you've won the argument. Lose enough legs, the "table" tips over, and you've lost.

 

Every time you attempt to add a leg to the table, a fact to support your argument, you are not just adding the fact. You are also implicitly arguing for the *relevance* of the fact. As a wild random example, someone claims that the Templars would never join the Search because "the king is dead! Civil war is at hand! Darkspawn are on the move!". Attempting to add this as a leg to the table does not just add the "fact", the "answer", that external threats are everywhere, it also adds that the *question* of whether or not there are external threats *is relevant*, *is important to the argument*. Well, it turns out that he had the timeline backwards, and the answer to the important and relevant question is that Redcliffe's security was actually quite high when the decision was made, and the only threat on the horizon was to the Arl, and the Search was the only means of addressing that single threat. But just because the fact changed doesn't mean the relevance changed. dgm22 argued that whether or not there were external threats was relevant, and no one disputes that, and therefore by the terms of the debate *it is still relevant*. dgm22 claimed he "conceded" everything I said about the timeline, but he really conceded nothing, because he actually *doubled down* on Redcliffe's security as an argument. Since he himself argued that a King being dead and darkspawn everywhere and a civil war *helped* his argument, then, inevitably, a living King winning every single battle against the Darkspawn and no inkling of civil war *hurts* his argument. He doesn't get to wish away that he argued for a question's relevance just because the answer is no longer convenient. By insisting on how much Redcliffe's security matters, and Redcliffe's security is actually *as high as ever* in terms of external and even internal threats (aside from the Arl), he just continues to weaken his argument further. The leg he was trying to add instead becomes a large weight on the corner of the table where he was trying to add it.

 

Similarly, AdenYeshua tries to argue that "no one in the Chantry cares about the Urn". Dozens of times. By insisting so ferociously on this, he also implicitly and ferociously insisted that how much the Chantry cared about the Urn *was extremely relevant to the debate*. Well, turns out the Chantry "cares" so much that they're willing to throw themselves against the most impossible obstacle in the Dragon Age universe over and over again enduring massive loss of life for it. But just because the fact is now inconvenient doesn't mean the relevance that was argued so strenously for is no longer operative. The in-game content is monolithic in its depiction of the Chantry as utterly obsessed with the Urn once they are convinced it exists. Another big ass weight on the corner of the table where he tried to add a leg.

 

So, what other arguments were advanced, and do they become legs or weights?

 

dgm22 argues at length that the lowest rank of Templars are not considered knights. By doing so, he implicitly acknowledges that whether or not the lowest rank are knights *is relevant*. Turns out they ARE knights. Another weight on the table.

 

AdenYeshua: "Even after the Dragon is slain, the location was known, Genitivi study and all obstacles removed the Chantry still has no interest in retrieving the artifact, it's never heard from again." Therefore implicitly arguing that the question of whether or not the Urn is ever heard from again *is very relevant to the debate*. Turns out the answer is that the Urn is ALWAYS heard from again. He'd like to move on to another leg now. NO. You thought the question of whether or not the Urn being heard about again was important, and when the answer is that it is ALWAYS heard from again (and the Chantry will stop at nothing to get to it), the answer is STILL EVERY BIT AS IMPORTANT AS IT WAS WHEN YOU THOUGHT THE ANSWER HELPED YOU. It doesn't just mean that you failed to prop up the leg. You actively undermined your own argument by insisting on that answer's relevance, and it is another big ass weight on the table.

 

AdenYeshua: "Now the fallout that I warned you about ensues. It opens up so much and leaves the Chantry an organization the Bioware has spent three games illustrating that should never be crossed and throws it in an opposite light. They look incompetent and weak, three people and a dog managed to do what they couldn't." - thereby arguing that if Templars look weak (and if they made *any* effort to find the Urn and failed, that is weakness), this is contrary to the lore, and that is important. He utterly fails to realize that his suggested fix would require that every single Redcliffe Templar except for Harrith would die in the first wave of attacks on Redcliffe, because there is no other sane explanation for their absence. Which do you think makes the Templars look weaker, that the only person on the Search who got a solid lead on the Urn was a Templar, or that they were all slaughtered by zombies on their own home turf when even a handful of arl's knights can take out a swarm of them without any help from the player (at least on easy difficulty)? I disagree completely with the premise that their being weak in THIS game is contrary to lore, I don't think in THIS game they had all that much power in Ferelden (if it is, why do we need to recruit elves and dwarves and redcliffe at all, if the Templars could eat the archdemon for lunch?), but I wasn't the one who argued it. Aden was. By his OWN metrics, *weakness matters* and his proposed solution makes them look *weaker* than the vanilla game. Another big weight on the table.

 

AdenYeshua: "Don't you think the writers would have put a better effort showing the Chantry wanted in on that action besides one measely guy? Bioware is no slouch even in DAII in presentation." - Therefore agreeing that how much effort Bioware put into depicting how much the Chantry wanted in on the Urn action *is relevant*. Turns out they put a LOT more effort into it than one measly guy. They put 8 different outcomes of the Urn's fate in the epilogue, and tons of dialogue and codex entries for Genitivi and Leliana, every single one of them involving the Chantry. When Aden thought it was only one measly guy, and in his words "simply and absolutly no evidence of this throughout the game" regarding the Chantry's interest, the amount of effort the writers put into depicting this part of the plot was HUGELY IMPORTANT. Now that he finds out Bioware put in a LOT of effort, let's move on. NO. Boulder on the corner.

 

I could literally go on for another 4 or 5 arguments. Seriously! I've already spotted them, and all but one puts another weight on the table (the one doesn't add a weight, but doesn't add a leg either). You get my point. At this point, the table is sialivi's floating chessboard in the Circle Tower, only with 300 pounds of boulders on it, floating in mid air without a single leg.

 

This is how you spectacularly undermine your own argument in a debate, and piss Qwinn off in the process.

 

Oh, and one more thing? Don't claim to agree with where the burden of proof lies, and then, hilariously, completely reverse it to the point of gibbering lunatic insanity.

 

AdenYeshua, Regarding Genitivi's expedition: "I know you believe in Genarivi without guards or any real help outside of some unknown amount of funding. What if it was a single copper? Would you stick to your story? The thing is you don't know. You're making it up."

 

Get it? If I don't DEFAULT to operating under the assumption that the Chantry funded his expedition with ONE SINGLE COPPER AND NO GUARDS, then I am "making it up". I'm the one making things up in this! Now the burden of proof is hilariously supposed to be on *me* to "prove" that the Chantry expended a rational amount into the expedition, rather than on Aden to prove that it was only one copper and no guards. And if I don't *default*, against all reason and common sense and plausability, to minimizing the expedition as much as humanly possible (literally! one copper, no guards! How do you minimize it further?) in service of HIS argument, than I am a fantasist, just rewriting things to my liking. It is no longer the case that I just need to prove that something in game is plausible, which everyone involved agreed was the proper bar, I now HAVE to make the most ridiculous and inherently implausible assumptions (one copper! no guards!) or I am in the wrong, and "making it up". This is the kind of absolute crap I've wasted two days on, and it stops here. From now on, when someone pulls this kind of crap in arguing for a fix, I'm just going to cut and paste this wall of text, and you guys can figure out how it applies. Will save me a lot of grief going forward.

 

The End.

 

EDIT: ROFL, and before hitting post, he now claims that I have to DEFAULT to the Chantry losing no lives at all when repeatedly FAILING to kill a dragon. (He lyingly throws in a claim of "thousands" too, when what I actually said was "dozens if not hundreds"). My reckless assumption that people die in repeated failed attempts to kill a dragon is A BRIDGE TOO FAR! Because God knows Bioware never invested a SECOND in depicting dragons as extremely dangerous and able to wipe out armies single handedly, oh no. This is the kind of ridiculous insane bulls*** that made me stop modding 7 years ago, and why you all had to wait this long for this Fixpack.

Edited June 16, 2017 by Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Pinjama: "Qwinn, how important are the changes you've made to core_en-us.tlk? There's a compatibility issue with "More Detailed Tooltips" and I'd prefer not to give that up. Do I actually need to manually migrate all the changes you've made?"

 

Go ahead and delete it altogether. I will do so in my next update. I don't think it's needed at all, I just hit export on it because I thought it'd be important, but looking at it now, the file is so large that I can't believe that it's necessary to export that whole thing just to get my own lines in there. I did also export the talk table applying specifically for my mod, and I have to believe that will suffice.

 

This is what betas are for! Sorry about that.

 

(If you do find any missing/blank lines as a result of removing it though, please let me know!)

Edited June 16, 2017 by Qwinn

[AdenYeshua]

I cannot begin to even comprehend half that tripe, much of that was us BOTH coming to a conclusion and looking at surrounding events. As ridiculous as you leg table whatever the hell you call it I will dissect and destroy every piece of info you have provided.

 

Can you measure the gravity of The Chantry's commitment? No.

Do you know how much resources were dedicated to the task? No.

Do you know how much financial commitment if any was provided? No.

Do you know if there definitively loses outside of Ser Henric? No. (this is explained by the plot "I don't know how many of us are lost)

Do you know why Headquarters wasn't involved? No.

 

So the ENTIRE foundation of your argument is literally made up, in your own head. The burden of proof is on your shoulders as you claim they "Dialed it up to 11" and "Extreme" when in fact the player sees what an Extreme effort is from the church, and it's not here.

 

Will save me a lot of grief going forward.

 

I doubt very much there is going any forward, you admitted to throwing a temper tantrum and quitting cause things didn't go your way, your arrogant and no joke often refer to yourself in the third person. Hence "How to piss Qwinn off" as the user base needed a guide to your inner workings, I've repeatedly without avail had to tell you to calm down and in all likelihood the next time something doesn't go your way even if it's a fellow Bioware writer you will fly off the deep end again. You are incapable of handling debates (much like 7 years ago) even though you invite them. The only real backup you're going to get is people who want something from you. Uninstalling as your reading comprehension likely broke or messed up other intended things, besides this mod touches to many files and either needs to be all inclusive or nothing. It's a shame before our interaction I had a pretty decent amount of respect for you.

Edited June 16, 2017 by AdenYeshua

[Qwinn]

If anyone else understood what I was saying (and apparently the entire bit regarding who the burden of proof lies on went completely over his head), I'm going to ask you to chip in and handle explaining it all. Cause I really need to be done with this, but I don't know if I can resist correcting such mind bogglingly stupid arguments when they're thrown into a thread that I need to keep reading. Or the endless stream of insults I've had to endure, which makes me once again wonder why I'm here at all.

Edited June 16, 2017 by Qwinn

[AdenYeshua]

Or the endless stream of insults I've had to endure, which makes me once again wonder why I'm here at all.

 

 

It's funny cause not only did the insults originate from you, but they can be found in the very same post claiming why you're insulted. I will never insult the Qwinn again you can be sure of that. Asking others to fight your battles is pretty low though but who am I to even question the Qwinn. Could you please send me a guide next time on your awesomeness so that I might avoid a future issue with the Qwinn?

[sialivi]

AdenYeshua:

It's now day 4 of this argument. This is the type of fights that drain all the joy from working on a mod, and I'm speaking as a mod author myself. You got overruled. Is it worth continuing the fight until the mod is retired again because you can't drop it?

[AdenYeshua]

AdenYeshua:

It's now day 4 of this argument. This is the type of fights that drain all the joy from working on a mod, and I'm speaking as a mod author myself. You got overruled. Is it worth continuing the fight until the mod is retired again because you can't drop it?

 

No, no it's not. But I will not be the last, if anybody can impart any wisdom on this man it's to chill out. Because this is the internet, it's full of parallel ideas, motives, and all manner of life. He needs to get with the program we've heard it all self-destructive, self-harm, melodrama, and various other forms. Just chill man, Jesus Christ.

 

I will move out of the way but one day he's going to come across somebody not so accommodating. That's when he will quit. You're a mod author maybe you can help him in some way overcome himself.

[Qwinn]

sialivi:

 

Just spent the last hour and a half trying to fix the floating elf in the Circle Tower 2nd floor. I don't see how it can be fixed. The stage isn't an issue - the elf is sitting properly in the chair the entire conversation. It is only after the conversation ends that he shifts. What's happening is that he and the chair are occupying the same space after the conversation, and the engine shifts him over. Something I noticed previously is that, when an area loads, It seems that it can handle two objects occupying the same space - but that cannot be done after the area is loaded. The engine will balk and kick one out of the way, and that's what's happening here. If I deactivate the chair at the end of the conversation, the elf goes right back to where he's supposed to be, but if I then reactivate the chair, bam, elf shifts over. I even tried lowering the chair into the floor a bit to see if that would cause them to not occupy the same space, but it didn't work, and I also suspect it's not the entirety of the problem. I think that when a conversation ends, for a split instant before the ambient effect (sitting down) gets reapplied, the creature is in it's normal pose - standing up. And when the elf is standing in that split instant, his legs are *in* the chair, and that forces him over. There's no room between the chair and table for any standing at all. So my last shot was to deactivate the chair, command him to move back to his original location in sitting position, and then reactivate the chair. Even with the chair lowered into the floor a bit, it didn't work. Even when it doesn't *look* like the elf and chair are occupying the same space, the engine still thinks they are somehow, which means either the chair or the elf's geometries are larger or differently shaped than they appear. I'm out of ideas. So - yeah. I have to admit failure on this one. Sorry.

Edited June 16, 2017 by Qwinn