Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger
Yeah, I haven’t been able to access it for several months now. It still seems to be running, frustratingly enough, which makes it seem like it’s an issue of absentee admins who just haven’t really noticed.
But maybe my experience with it has been uniquely frustrated.
It’s a shame. I was really hoping for there to be an active – if quite small – Pathfinder community here. The subreddit is… Not my cup of tea.
Did one of your spellcasters know the Gate spell? If so, what stopped the PCs from pulling the BBEG out of their lair and beating them up from the comfort of their homes?
Anti-magic field?
The BBEG has taken great efforts to hide their true name?
Private Sanctum spell?
The fact that Gate is an inter-planar spell, and not an intra-planar spell?
As the GM, one of your jobs is to present challenges for the party to overcome. That means actively countering their abilities list just as often as it means giving them a bone and letting them shine. The big moments of flexing mean a hell of a lot less when all they do is flex.
I was under the impression that the whole thing has been about Tencent wanting to license the digital product rights to D&D, not the actual game. I’m not sure why that’s caused an uproar over the actual IP ownership.
Huh. I asked it to make me a level 5 Wizard for PF2e, and it spit out… python code to generate one myself???
And Tencent has a minority stake in, like, every functioning software company that’s ever done an investment funding around at this point. They make it a point to diversify their holdings across basically the entire software industry at this point.
They’re fairly hands-off in those endeavours, since they’re doing it to protect themselves against shifts in the market.
Their in-house made stuff, though, is… Well, let’s just say it’s efficiently monetized.
In business, all data are vanity metrics. If they make you look good, you slap that shit on everything; if they make you look bad, you “don’t have it”.
It’s just that sometimes you can use negative data to make decisions that look good to those above you, and sometimes you know that you can’t.
Yeah, I’m wounded by the commission omission of Cape Breton. But I think it’s just that there’s nothing dubious about our islands.
Edit: Sausage fingers and rogue autocorrect.
if abusive admins on a power trip will just arbitralily wipe my stuff “accidentially” whenever they feel like.
You’ve jumped to a lot of conclusions here.
You’re using a website that’s operated by volunteers, that’s seen a ton of abuse from spammers and bots, that’s run on software that’s pre-version-1 and that lacks advanced mod tools, and that likely has an admin team that’s using some hacked together third party scripts or tools to try and identify bad actors. It’s not only possible, but entirely reasonable, that one of those tools may have falsely identified you as a spam account, and someone either just ran a script that banned a bunch of people, or got into a flow state and just hit the wrong button out of habit.
Pointing fingers and accusing others of bad behaviour out of pure speculation while you’re both stomping your feet and having a fit because you feel hurt while simultaneously telling others that the lens they’re using is “pure speculation” is… Not productive, to put it mildly.
This is Elon Musk erasure.
Yup.
The flip side of this, is, of course, that voting with your wallet means that people with bigger wallets get more votes, and that results in the rich always getting their way.
Not explicitly, maybe, but implicitly, absolutely, and in multiple ways:
In so, so many ways, people say they prefer the latter over the former. Usually just with the caveat that the homeless people also be invisible.
Save scumming is natural, and normal, and nothing to be ashamed of.
It does make hair grow on your palms, though.
Just waiting for the 2nd amigo to show up so you guys can commence with the Mexican-Spider-Man-point-off.
Being popular and being a good game are completely different things. Being fun and being a good game are different things. Being useful and being a good game are different things.
I’m not making a value judgement on whether 5e is likeable. I like 5e. It’s just that it’s not a complete and coherent experience.
Argument ad populum doesn’t change that.
5e is a bad table top game, but that’s part of what’s made it so successful - it’s not treated as a game unto itself anymore, but just some loose guidelines to help generate setpieces, and people like that.
But also BG3 seems to recognize this and actually fills in the broken or missing game elements, just like everyone’s DM does whenever they come across these gaps. It takes an opinionated approach to implementing the rules, and does so with the confidence of years of building CRPGs.
It’s an impressive feat.
We did!
https://www.mint.ca/en/shop/coins/2016/star-trek-enterprise—$20-for-$20-fine-silver-coin-2016
The Royal Canadian Mint even has a Memory Alpha entry: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Mint
They were never about hardware limitations. Limitations of imagination of the designers, maybe, but we’ve had action games for 35 years now.
Actions such as ‘press the trigger and your character will shoot a gun’ and ‘press the button and your character will swing their sword’ can now be easily expressed without going through a command system.
And yet we can’t purge ourselves of the awfulness that is quick-time events. I don’t buy the argument. It’s an attempt to handwave away trends without discussing real causes and effect. If the suggestion here were true, other similar mechanics, such as QTEs, would have been dead a long time ago, not be a core element of a huge number of triple-A titles.
This aligns with my experience of a very particular kind of game designer. I worked with one who, in a casual conversation about games where someone said “there’s no wrong way to have fun,” they responded with “yes there is, and it’s my job to tell people what the right way is”.
This is not a systemic issue, at Ubisoft or anywhere else. It’s a particularity of a kind of person who is deeply drawn to games, but who also doesn’t see other people as, well, people. It’s a person who has made friends with games and game systems because they’re incapable of being friends with, well, sapient beings.
Video game studio projects tend to have multiple designers working on them, with the creative director (or just “director”) and lead designer working on large scale design things - genre, core loop, etc - and progressively less senior designers working on progressively smaller, progressively more soul crushing design work. Think things like item design and balance. Weirdly enough, the ones who think they’re the arbiter of fun don’t generally progress very high up this chain.
Not in team-based design environments, at least.
No one on threads is going to be interacting with Lemmy communities in any meaningful way. It’s an incredibly janky and annoying experience following groups from microblogging interfaces.
My guess, based off of absolutely nothing, is that they expected stronger growth out of the gate, given the rate at which r/Pathfinder2e had been growing, and hoped to see that community choose the Fediverse. But the mods there crated their own forum that drew very little traffic in its own right, a bunch of people shifted to the discord, and then everyone quickly filtered back to the subreddit when it became clear that there mods had no will to actually do anything beyond the symbolic.
So, they lost interest.
But that’s naked supposition and conjecture.