The whole “most startups lose a lot of money and fail, but some will be wildly successful” model is kind of rotten. Especially when the "wild success " often means breaking laws or becoming consumer hostile.

It’s like some eternal September shit. Of course a private for profit entity like discord is going to eventually turn to shit*. It’s like the scorpion and the frog fable**. People should know that. But there are just so many people who this is their first time ever encountering these ideas.

And some people just don’t care about things. I had that galaxy brain realization a couple months ago. Imagine if everyone cared just a little more. So many problems would just go away.

*Valve arguably being an exception so far, but that could change on a whim

** https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

You have to remember a lot of people are colossally stupid, but still are in positions to make decisions.

Oh yeah I got a cheap wireless mouse and keyboard for it, worked fine. One or two crashes, but mostly just fine.

Pray to Saint Luigi for guidance.

How I feel about mana depends largely on how quickly it regenerates. It can be just a reskin of spells-per-day or spells-per-encounter, or it could be something more interesting.

DA:O had unlimited mana potions, which meant essentially you spend a small amount of time to refresh mid fight. Not very deep tactically, but more or less fine.

I don’t think resource management is really a thing most people actually enjoy. Most people don’t like timed missions, so you probably don’t want to use that to prevent people from resting a lot. You don’t want to soft-lock players by letting them blow their resources too soon, so they can’t win the fight but don’t have a way to restore. The dark souls style “you reset at the checkpoint but so do the monsters. Keep trying until you get it right” works for me, but a lot of people hate that.

There are so many ways you could do magic, and it’s a bummer that vancian magic takes up so much space.

DND just isn’t as good and universal as people think it is, but it’s hugely influential anyway.

Side note: DND is balanced around like 6 “medium” encounters per day. You’re supposed to slowly trickle down your resources. Turns out most groups do one encounter per day on average, and then the system doesn’t work very well at all. There’s lot of patches (eg: gritty realism) but the problem remains people don’t seem to want to do that kind of cadence.

I meant how in poe1 and 2 might (the stat) is 3% more damage per point, so it’s hard to feel the difference between might 10 and might 15. Does +15% of 10 damage make a meaningful difference? It’s probably the same as +12%, right, or is there decimal damage too? I guess when multiplied by power levels it’s a bigger deal, but that’s kind of opaque.

Also “like proficiency bonuses on crack” is deeply funny to me as someone who played DND 3e. Base attack bonus every level, skill ranks up every level, oh so many memories and not all of them good.

I really liked poe2 and would play a third one.

I really liked that they made powers per-encounter instead of per-rest. Per-rest really doesn’t work well despite DND trying really hard. It especially doesn’t work well without a human steering to prevent things like “you killed everyone in the castle, now go rest for 8 hours before opening the final door to the boss”. Or you can programmatically enforce that, but players don’t like that. Mostly because it sucks to do like an hour of stuff and realize you’re too low on resources to win, and have to reload.

I’d probably prefer the stats to be coarser or more meaningful. It’s hard to get a feel for “3% more damage”. Especially when the base damage is like 5-15.

Remember when all those internet duds were mad that Dragon Age 2 was “sHoVinG tHe gAy aGeNdA dOwN oUr tHroAts!!!” because the NPCs would romance the PC regardless of gender? And they absolutely lost their shit that Anders might express interest and, if you’re not interested, you’d have to politely turn him down once?

Those are the worst sort of people and I frankly wish them ill.

I dunno. problems, mysteries, and war aren’t usually portrayed realistically in video games, either.

I never got far in stardew, so maybe?

I think that you can just give them gifts until they’re horny for you is like the quintessential example of poorly done video game romance.

Half-assed sex scenes (no pun intended) are probably worse than ones that are well done.

I still think a lot about one of the beats in a DA:I romance. But like… all the ones from DA:O were kind of bad. But also the one I played in DA:V was so PG-13 and sterile it wasn’t any fun at all.

I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

But…

I’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t really a lot of “quests” in gw2.

There’s the main story, which is a green marker on your map. That’s always there (unless you turn it off or finish it)

There’s orange markers for nearby events. That’s like “zombies are attacking! Save the town!” or “help these kids pick apples” or whatever. They’re just things that happen in the world and, to a limited degree, change the world state. Like an area might be full of toxic vines until an event finishes successfully, or a merchant might only sell items after his mission succeeds.

There’s red markers, which are basically the same as orange, except they tend to be world events and not local.

And then there are collections, which are kind of like quests. They’re not super advertised. They’re kind of of “get these achievements for a special reward”. Sometimes NPCs will give you one- like “go find all my favorite fish” or whatever. They’re optional, but sometimes fun and sometimes have good rewards. Like if you finish the one where you get most of the achievements for one chunk of the game, you get a max-stats accessory that all your characters can share.

Anyway. Long reply. Nothing is really beamed into your head, no.

That seems fine to me.

Match should be broken up. But apparently some people learned nothing from history and some people don’t care as long as they make money

Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.

Fans were happy to run the servers at their own expense.

In the distant past of like 2000, you didn’t have to pay for online functionality. Also, people could host their own multiplayer servers. It was nice. Consoles and capitalism did a team-up to make things shittier for the end user, though.