Haha, I think they should have made that option 0%, to further the paradox

I’m not certain, I think it’s an infinite loop.

I.E. If the answer is 25%, you have a 50% chance, if the answer is 50%, you have a 25% chance, if the answer is 25%, you have a 50% chance…

This is my main thought. Once the immediate threat of Trump is past, the country will return to the global standard of “elect whoever wasn’t running things when everything got worse”. I hope the liberals see that writing on the wall and put electoral reform in place so that the smaller parties stand a chance and aren’t all killed by the usual “strategic voting” nonsense.

I really think it’s Canada’s best shot at not electing a Conservative majority when the party seems to be at peak crazy. I’d really rather not count on them returning to the center over the next 4 years when global politics is more divided than I’ve ever seen.

I can provide an earnest argument, if you like. I put 400+ hours into DotA in college, and enjoy games like Valheim, Lethal Company, and Monster Hunter with friends regularly, but pretty adamantly avoid competitive anonymous multiplayer these days.

1. I dislike the increased commitment of multiplayer games. When playing with a group, I have to worry about “letting down” the group, and must play fully sweaty at all times. Learning is also much more stressful and frustrating due to the social element. Even if the group isn’t toxic, I’m more aware of my failures and their consequences.
2. There are engaging and difficult PvE games that challenge me, with good AI. Souls, Sekiro, DOOM Eternal, and Hollow Knight are all excellent examples with lots of unique and interesting challenges. I also enjoy stuff like speedrunning, which can take easy but fun games like Mario Odyssey and raise the skill ceiling infinitely.
3. Matchmaking eliminates the feeling of progression. I love the satisfaction of improving. I.E. Beating Sekiro and starting NG+ only to crush the opening areas that took hours because your skills have improved so much, travelling through an earlier area in Dark Souls and marvelling at how easy it feels now, or setting a huge new PB in a speedrun. Matchmaking with strangers eliminates these moments, because your MMR increases with your skill, trapping you at a 50-ish% win rate permanently, unless you smurf, which is short lived and kinda scummy. You may improve and hit a win streak, but will quickly be slapped back as your MMR increases. And I don’t find seeing that number climb up to be nearly as satisfying as real moments that prove your skill.
4. I enjoy some atmosphere and narrative. It’s tough to deliver a cool world via character trailers exclusively, and most multiplayer games never get an “Arcane”. A single player experience will always have some of that, and it can be awesome.
5. Pacing and variety. A good game experience is paced out with moments of calm, maybe some puzzle solving or narrative, and moments of intensity and tough fights. That stuff is good when done well. Something like DOOM Eternal gets my heart pounding like nothing else in arenas on higher difficulties, but knows to let you breathe in between, so I can enjoy that heart pounding pace for more than 30m at a time. Online games will try with something like spreading players out in a Battle Royale, but it’s not the same.
6. Also, I just like pausing, lol. If my wife needs something, it’s nice to be able to just put the game down, I don’t like being chained to my desk for 20-40 minutes depending on how the game goes because I’ll lose rank and disappoint the team.

Also, I say anonymous because a lot of these problems disappear if you play exclusively with friends. I love the Smash series, for example. You have an objective skill benchmark in the friend you’re playing with, as well as someone who’s understanding when you have to go or do something. That’s really cool, but also damn hard to schedule and not something I do often for PvP.

Competitive anonymous multiplayer is great, for those that like it. More than happy to let you enjoy that. But personally these cons outweigh the pros for me, and I’ll continue to be disappointed when something I’m excited for turns out to be competitive anonymous PvP.

Nothing like the games you’re describing, but Tunic is an utter delight, and was made by an amazing solo dev in Halifax!

At this point I think it’s just fun. So much of the conversation around Elon is deadly serious, doom and gloom, and this is just… lighthearted mocking about something that doesn’t matter. It’s a refreshing change.

And it does seem to matter to him, so undermining that image he works hard to curate is an added bonus. And hell, if Path of Exile is what makes someone realize what a pathetic lying moron he can be, then that’s fantastic as well, even if it’s an odd thing to have that epiphany for.

GraphQL man… the whole thing does this by design. Just in the last week I had to implement a custom retry function because the python requests one very reasonably doesn’t consider a 200 status code to be an error.

Yeah, at a fundamental level it requires an elected leader to change the system that just elected them. It’ll never be in their best interest.

It’s definitely an odd one, but hey, if Path of Exile is the thing that gets many people to go “hey, he’s a liar”, I’ll certainly take it.

More than happy to see this story spread, as it’s hilarious enough to spread virally, but also makes Musk look pathetic and like a compulsive liar.

I mean, seriously, he’s the richest man on earth, why is his ego so fragile as to need to “prove” himself as a gamer, and to need to prove that so badly as to take a risk like faking that accomplishment live.

Drives me crazy how many churches still manage to conclude that drinking is an outright sin. Like… forget the conversations we can have about the particulars of drunkenness versus drinking basically everywhere it’s mentioned, how did we ever get past Jesus turning water into wine to believe this was a sin in the first place?

You have to jump through so many hoops of ignoring the obvious in scripture to even begin to argue for it, and yet it’s a widespread belief.

Honestly, I had no idea there was a related tradition. Song’s a banger though, more than happy to have it.

Politely, no one asked? OP asked a direct question, I’m doing my best to answer it, and you’re… dunking on me about a point nobody was talking about?

At best, this is an odd non-sequitur. At worst, it’s toxic behaviour meant to shut down any discussion about a topic you personally dislike.

I’m assuming you’re looking for a basic answer from Christianity. In that case, the TL;DR is that Humans are created in God’s image. We’re endowed with God’s emotions, not the other way around, and emotions aren’t necessarily bad, they’re just corrupted in us by sin.

God experiences all kinds of emotions in the Bible, he is “jealous” for us, he’s also depicted as sad or angry in many cases. Even Jesus, a “perfect man without sin” feels anger and flips the tables of a synagogue when he sees people turning that religious practice into a corrupt business.

So a religious answer to “shouldn’t God be beyond human emotions?” would be that emotions aren’t inherently bad. We should be angered by injustice, for example. Emotions can be bad, if you let them control you and fly into a rage for selfish reasons, for example, but they don’t have to be bad.

It’s not lying as much as it’s advertising. If they’re asking about your greatest weakness, tell them. Just don’t neglect to mention how you mitigate that weakness too, and are improving. Don’t let your answer end on “I’m a disorganized mess”, end it on “so in the last year, I’ve started building and using checklists and it’s been really effective”.

In the same way, be up front if they ask about the criteria you don’t meet. But consider your entire answer, again, you can say something like “I actually haven’t worked in that language before, but I’ve done lots of work in Python and Java, so I’m confident I can pick it up quickly as needed”. If they don’t ask, then it probably wasn’t really that important of a criteria to them, so you shouldn’t waste your interview time talking about it either.

Don’t volunteer all your worst traits, you only have an hour, so focus on describing your strengths as often as you can. Nobody expects to completely understand you as a person in one hour, they’re specifically asking you to come in and advertise yourself. Instead, read between the lines in the listing (I.E. Things mentioned in the job description or title are likely more important than something in a single bullet point. Look for repetition, or how much they talk about each requirement.). Figure out what the “customer” wants that you’re good at, and ensure you emphasize it, repeatedly. Define clear takeaways and make sure they know what you’re offering, and will actually remember it too.

And practice your answers to many questions. Come up with your best anecdotes for “a time you resolved a conflict with a coworker” and all that nonsense in advance, so that you can confidently segue into those stories that best emphasize your takeaways when asked. Do some research on the company to come up with a good answer to questions like “why do you want to work here?”. The answer doesn’t have to be your top priority, which is obviously “a paycheque”, but just append an unsaid “instead of somewhere else” and answer honestly, because people are good at detecting insincerity. You likely haven’t applied to every company on earth, so tell them why you chose them.

Lastly, like an advertiser, don’t be afraid to segue from other questions into your prepared answers. “Yeah, I’ve always loved X, that’s why I wanted to work here actually, I’d heard a bit about how you were getting involved with X, but with this interesting twist, and thought that sounded like something I’d really enjoy working on”. The interview questions are designed to get you talking about yourself, it’s not a survey where the strict questions are all that matter, and you can simply joke about it if the question comes up later.

Haha, dang it. Seems I got confused, turns out that was just a bedrock thing. Could’ve noticed that if I’d looked more closely at my own link 🙄

To add to this, Minecraft Java Bedrock used to ship their code with all the debug symbols included, making modding easy. Although these were recently removed, much to the displeasure of the modding community. Everyone should throw a vote at this feedback issue to request them back, btw:

https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/360054740151-Re-add-debugging-symbols-to-the-releases-of-bedrock-edition

Shocking that anyone would believe, let alone publish that headline. It comes across as obviously false given the ultra-subjective and human nature of poetry.

Also, I ended up reading about six more blog posts, lol. You’re excellent at piecing together many disparate pieces into a cohesive whole, which is well supported by facts. I particularly liked your piece on “capture platforms”, and your whole blog was a good reminder regarding the power of the abstractions we make as developers. It’s easy to forget the importance of what we do and how it has real effects on the world.

Fair point! I actually love this suggestion, rethinking more ways to make the game easier without breaking the core experience.

I don’t think From Soft is totally languishing in this department, the games include an increasing amount of ways to make the game easier, such as Elden Ring introducing summons, an open world you can tackle in any order (although this falls off post-Morgott, as does the game overall imo).

But you’re right, I’d love to see them potentially dabble with things like dynamic difficulty to create something that simultaneously better challenges experienced veterans and eases the ride for newer players. Or at least something to keep bosses you missed in the open world format somewhat interesting when you find them later. I don’t think they’re done iterating here, and I expect them to continue to improve at accommodating more players, without violating their other design goals.

I also agree there’s some worrying trends in the design, as From Soft struggles to find ways to challenge their most diehard fans. Malenia’s waterfowl dance, for example, which requires odd specific movement to dodge that’s impractical to learn organically. Or her moves where she simply cannot be staggered, breaking expectations in a confusing way. In general as well, the games have trended towards being faster and requiring more “reactionary” play, and I do miss the more methodical combat of DS1, when the game was much less twitchy and more about carefully planning your moves.

I’m not sure I agree that From Soft has stopped being experimental though, Sekiro was a complete departure right before Elden Ring, as was returning to Armored Core for the first time in a decade right after. Elden Ring also dabbles in an interesting blend of mechanics. Transitioning to an Open World is a massive and obvious one, but I’m also happy to see powerstancing back, interesting new weapon arts, the physick flask is a great new system, horseback combat on Torrent, and stuff like charged attacks and posture similar to Sekiro. Not perfect, by any means, I actually find the balancing of this wealth of mechanics and build options to be pretty shaky, but it’s far from a boring +1 iteration that doesn’t try anything.

Let’s clarify a little bit here, because I actually am curious. How much easier would you actually want the game to be? Howlongtobeat puts Sekiro’s main story at 30 hours. Asking a friend who’s very experienced at Sekiro and has played it dozens of times, he takes ~10 hours to beat it on a replay. So even if the game was dead easy, and had nothing to teach you, and you had no reason to explore or look around, you’d only save a maximum of 2/3rds of that time. More realistically, it would probably take 15 hours to complete if we factor in the exploration, even if the game was straightforward enough that you could kill each boss in only a few attempts.

So what would you have liked this easy mode to look like, in order to save you that time? And what value would you have gotten from that, in what amount of time, compared to setting aside 30 hours, or watching someone else play it?

To say that an option for an easy mode, on the screen, when you start, that you do not have to select, would damage your experience, is wild. That is very, very, weird. You are adamant the idea that someone could have a variant in preferences, that affect you in no way, would damage your experience because what? Because you had to see the option on the screen? Because people you deem lesser gamers would have played it? Is this some weird ideological axiom? Because people are simply doing something different than you? What is it that bothers you so much about other people having a different choice, you don’t need to make, or experience?

I mean… quick recap here. You said the way I was behaving was “very, very weird”. You claimed I was offended solely “because I had to see an option on the screen”. You claimed my reasoning was about “lesser gamers being able to play it”, clearly insinuating that I simply have a superiority complex as a “weird ideological axiom”, as if it’s the foundation of the way I think. You also basically stated that I’m deeply bothered by anyone having a different opinion or experience.

Don’t try to gaslight me about this being insulting. I’ve never expressed any anger here at disagreement, nor have I brought up anything about superiority or inferiority. You’re bringing baggage into this from other people you’ve argued with before, and then insulting my character over a strawman version of my argument.

Also, when you clearly associate a behaviour with a person, insulting that behaviour is insulting the person. You can’t claim you didn’t associate the two when you chose to write “YOU” in all caps several times while describing the behaviour you were insulting.

It’s also not at all ridiculous to assume the “What is it that bothers you so much about other people having a different choice, you don’t need to make, or experience?” at the end of that rant was rhetorical like the questions preceding it, again, don’t try to gaslight me into thinking that quote was purely “laying down an array of possibilities, and then asking what yours was”, and that I’m being “sensitive”.

If you actually didn’t mean offence, then I’d encourage you in future to skip the “array of possibilities”, especially when those possibilities are exclusively descriptions of assholes.

That aside, thank you, I actually do appreciate you recognizing that you can’t just “double your health and damage” and get a good easy mode. That’s an argument I frequently come across while having this discussion, that they could “just scale everything down” in an hour or so, it’s become what I tend to assume people mean when they say “just add an easy mode”. You’re also a very different person than what I usually end up having this argument with, in that you have actually played Souls, and understand the value of the more challenging default, but still wanted an easy mode. In that sense, I’d have no issue if you had played an easy mode. There’s lots of mods to do so, for example, and I wouldn’t have any problem if you had gone and played one. Frankly, I wouldn’t have issue with anyone installing a mod to play an easier version. The option is literally there, just not on console, unfortunately, but I blame the console manufacturers for that, not From Software. I like the clarity in installing a mod that you aren’t playing the game as intended and getting the full experience, which means it doesn’t “segment the user base” or potentially cause people to miss out by thinking they’ve experienced everything From Soft intended.

The argument I generally take issue with is that From Software have some kind of “moral responsibility” or are “stupid and losing business” for not adding an explicit easy mode. A half-baked easy mode would do more harm than good, in terms of review scores and giving many players a worse experience. And a well-made easy mode is not an insignificant amount of work. Balance is one of the hardest things to get right, From Soft is literally still doing balance patches on the base game of Elden Ring, and easy mode would essentially double the amount of situations where things have to be balanced. It would also double QA work, as every scenario needs to be tested in both difficulties. And just… loading different things conditionally into a space isn’t always easy either, look at all the struggles and weird bugs id have experienced with DOOM Eternal’s Master Levels, and they’re a team lauded for their technical prowess. One of From Soft’s best attributes is that they iterate very quickly. A team of ~400 people have made Dark Souls 1, 2, 3, Bloodborne and Sekiro and Elden Ring in 11 years. That’s more than a game every 2 years, not even counting DLC and other projects, in an era where game development is trending towards 5+ years as the norm. I’ve already asserted that I don’t feel an easy mode would be nearly the same quality of game as the main entry, so I’ll come out and outright say that I don’t think an easy mode would be worth the months of effort that properly balancing and tweaking such a mode to make it good would add to development. But that’s totally subjective, and you’re more than welcome to do that math differently.

If From Soft release their next title with an easy mode, then great. I won’t go picket their office or anything, I’m not pathetic. But if they do, then I really hope it’s good, and I really hope the people who finally “get” to play will give the intended difficulty a chance.