Kind of ironic for the meme because cod 4 did have a version of sbmm.

Skill based matchmaking is the worst thing to happen to team based games in my memory. Theoretically it should lead to engaging games but it usually just is a mishmash of the high mmr players being high as a kite and low mmr players that got carried too far.

Just feels like, why try if you’re guaranteed a 50% win rate no matter what? That leads to more friction between the people checking out and playing for fun and people playing to make their mmr bigger.

It used to be fun to see your progression relative to the lobby and how you were improving over time. If it felt too easy you could give yourself a handicap with an off meta gun/strat. If it was hard it felt extra good to have the rare game as a top performer.

And before people say “you just like stomping noobs”, I’ve been on both sides in many games. Floated top 2-3% in Rocket League and hated every minute, been a cellar dweller in some shooters and had hundreds of hours of fun.

Counterpoint, I know lots of people that do/have done lots of those things who also aren’t complete psychopaths

My skim of the srd gave the impression of a crunchy exterior with a gooey center (which definitely is good for some tables). Hell, the first page has a header for “rulings over rules”! That phrase was a common GM pejorative for 5e; used as justification to offload balance from the system to the players. The core systems seem strong but with lots of asterisks to keep them backseat to player agency.

Loose turn structure, PC death only with player consent, GMs generally don’t get to make a move unless it’s explicitly available, spending meta-currencies to legally fudge dice rolls, etc… It seems like most of it was designed for players to have a strong control over narrative with lots of pressure valves to reduce the impact of unlucky dice. I like the Hope/Stress system, but Fear seems like it only exists to give the GM permission to do normal GM things.

At any rate I’ll be interested to see it in practice. It seems like the system Critical Role always needed, they’ll probably be able to do some cooler narratives without sanding down 5e’s rough edges.

Last I heard (the playtest) Daggerheart was somewhat unpolished and lacked mechanical teeth to make it more than a narrative prompting experience. Recent reviews seem positive though, I’ll have to take another look.

That’s kind of a funny example because, on a quick skim, nothing he did was exceptionally clever or unusual (other than workarounds for not having source code). R* basically paid him 10k for some basic profiling that they never bothered to do.

I agree, real code always has tradeoffs. But there’s a difference between a conceptually simple change taking 3 weeks longer than planned and 6 months. The reality is game code is almost always junk and devs have no incentive to do better.

Getting a feature functional and out for launch day is the priority because you don’t have any cash flow until then. This has been exacerbated with digital distribution encouraging a ship-now-fix-later mentality.

This means game devs don’t generally have experience with large scale, living codebases. Code quality and stability doesn’t bring in any money, customer retention is irrelevant unless you’re making an mmo.

When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it’s under the assumption of a reasonable code base. Most games are built off of common engines and you can sometimes infer how things are likely organized if you track how bugs are introduced, how objects interact, how things are loaded, etc…

When something is a 1 day bugfix under ideal conditions, saying it will take 6+ months is admitting one of:

• The codebase is fucked
• All resources are going to new features
• Something external is slowing it down (palworld lawsuit, company sale, C-suite politics, etc…)
• Your current dev team is sub par

Not that any of those is completely undefendable or pure malpractice, but saying it “can’t” be done or blaming complexity is often a cop out.

Well for one they’re a consumer who paid for a functional game. Nobody expects drivers to break out power tools and mod their car right off the lot.

It’s even more embarrassing when modders do fix it. Some random guy with no source code access manages to fix an issue in 3 weeks that a whole team couldn’t fix in 3 years.

while harder difficulties turn enemies into sponges that absolutely destroy you in 1 or 2 hits.

Sounds like a normal dark souls experience to me, I see no issue

A. The game is actually art and the artist vision includes an option making it playable for more people

B. The game is a product that they want to sell to more people, adding difficulties sells more

I don’t see the issue either way. Why care what audience it’s conforming to, you’ll either enjoy the game or you won’t?

Oh I’m sure, but it seemed like a different beast. American Idol was really tuned into the characters and personal drama, there was never that much meta-drama. Almost like the Super Bowl vs. World Cup

Isn’t it the inverse of that? And Hemingway always struck me as more of a “write drunk, edit buzzed” guy

As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life?

Off the top of my head: basic biology so I’m not dumb enough to be antivax. History subjects that require more than elementary maturity so maybe we can avoid another Holocaust. Enough physics, ecology and chemistry that I can comprehend how climate change is happening. How basic statistics work so I’m not completely lost when someone throws around misleading data.

None of that is automatic from a 4th grade education and is crucial to be a functioning citizen. Learning to take unquestioned GPT answers is not a substitute for actually learning any of those.

You either went to a painfully bad pipeline of schools or were too dumb to recognize the important parts.

Good god, if you went through an entire education and don’t realize how fucked of a take that is I don’t know what to say. Go try again at a different school maybe?

The problem is offloading critical thinking to a blackbox of questionably motivated design. Did you use it to solve problems or did you use it to find a sufficient approximation of a solution? If you can’t deduce why the given solution works then it is literally unknowable if your problem is solved, you’re just putting faith in an algorithm.

There are also political reasons we’ll never get luxury gay space communism from it. General Ai is the wet dream of every authoritarian: an unverifiable, omnipresent, first line source of truth that will shift the narrative to whatever you need.

The brain is a muscle and critical thinking is trained through practice; not thinking will never be a shortcut for thinking.

Forgive my American ignorance, but do people actually watch Eurovision as entertainment? I feel like I’ve only ever heard of it as an arena for politics/protest/controversy, never “hey listen to this great song that won”. Is the controversy part of the draw?

If the socks are removed or altered your fiancé’s collar will be remotely detonated. The only key is hidden in the farthest stall of this 7-Eleven bathroom. Hope you don’t get… cold feet

That researcher is a real life Dr. Hoenikker. Vonnegut is probably shrugging in his grave