I completely agree. The experience sucks. I almost think programming would be better to follow a skilled trade path like electricians or something with apprenticeships and the like. The current system isn’t working for anyone, really. I mean I suppose it works for people like me but that’s not sustainable.
I’ve got twenty five years in and I know how good I’ve got it. I may not always be able to get the job I want, but I don’t ever have to worry about not working. That’s an incredible luxury. But also, unfortunately it really sucks training up completely green developers. They often contribute negative value to the team and then once you finally get them to the point where you can start relying on them, they leave or your team gets broken up. That’s not the fault of young developers at all, but it’s just a reality we all have to navigate. I do enjoy working with enthusiastic and curious people, and experience is certainly no guarantee of that. And I like having new perspectives and skills, even if I hate to crush their expectations with the reality of development. We currently can’t use fucking lambdas because they aren’t supported on our ancient version of Spring.
Survivor. I can’t ever keep any of them straight. Jedi: Foo the Last.
A new one??? No I could tell some stories. They aren’t first hand knowledge so I guess they are disputable, but it has been far worse, but I’m an older guy and thankfully the world has changed in thirty years. At a minimum someone I know had to deal with complaints that someone at the city govt was printing porn to the shared office printer. Huge stacks of it that he’d pick up at the end of the day .
I loved every other Diablo and went hard on 4. Then one day I just put the controller down and never picked it back up. I might play more later, but I’m so tired of games that are just nakedly obvious about being nothing but a grind and a job. I wasted so much money getting PSPlus for just this game. All told I spent about $150 on this and the only thing of value I got was a few hours playing with some old friends who also stopped playing and made me realize I wasn’t getting anything else out of it.
I’ve played a hell of a lot of BG3 and it feels completely the opposite. There is so much content that motivates me to do it for roleplay reasons. It doesn’t feel nearly as grindy. Some of the dialogs are a bit much to slog through after seeing them a few too many times, but they were all great the first time through, and it motivates me to try different options to get different dialog. But everyone knows BG3 is good.
Guess I’ll round out my list.
I really enjoyed Jedi: Outcast. Like BG3, the story is as good as the action, but there’s really only one storyline and if I recall you can get pretty much everything on a single playthrough so there aren’t really even mechanical decisions to make other than how to approach a combat.
Horizon: Forbidden West was pretty fun. I put it down for other games and haven’t gotten back to it but I will. Seems to share a lot with Jedi. Similar gameplay, similar linear storyline. It feels like mechanical choices are more meaningful and maybe you can’t do everything on a single playthrough but again I haven’t finished it.
Hogwarts Legacy: my wife wanted this because Harry Potter, but then it made her motion sick. So I felt obligated to play it to get our money’s worth and I didn’t make it very far at all before putting it down. Maybe there is more there further into the game but it didn’t grab me enough to find out.
Also if I pay for a mod and they release a patch that breaks it (seems unlikely but we’ve already gotten about two or three more patches than I expected), I would expect them to fix the mod or pay the creator to do so.
Oh and I would expect them to magically resolve conflicts between paid mods.
If a free mod breaks and never gets fixed, or a free mod breaks another mod, fair I have no expectations there. But once I fork out money that’s not a mod, that’s a product now. And if Bethesda is taking my money, they are responsible for the product.
“Virtual” and “collectable” are two words that don’t belong in the same sentence unless it’s, “Online collectibles are virtually worthless.”
Yep. I mostly document why the obvious or best practice solution is wrong. And the answer is usually because of reliance on other poorly written code - third party or internal.
I agree. Particularly because it’s less about the truth and more about what can be proven in court. But even more, they don’t want to pay a lawyer a bunch of money to defend this even if you could prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. You can tell by the way they didn’t want to pay a lawyer to answer this question.
It’s hard to say what algorithm would serve you better. Seems like this does what you are seeing it to do. It’s not how I’d do it, but I don’t prioritize unblocked users. To fix this, I’d assign a multiplier for zero blocked users. It might be one so that no blocked users is the same as one mathematically. But maybe free speech is so important to you that you give it a multiplier of 2 or wherever.
active_users / [MAX(1,blocked_users)]
This would be a multiple of 1. Change the 1 to a 0.5 for a multiple of 2.
I didn’t look at the script but it probably has a Max function which just returns the higher of two numbers, effectively putting a lower bound on the possible values.
I don’t want to deal with other assholes online. Same reason I’ve stopped playing Diablo 4 after a couple of months when all the previous games I played for years.
Having the option to play with friends is awesome. I don’t want to play with random people and every feature that is built to facilitate that is negative value for me because that’s not just money that could go towards making the core game better, but now there are elements designed to push me into playing a game I don’t want to play to get the full experience or all the rewards or whatever.
If the single player experience is fun, great. If expansions extend that fun, great. Otherwise I have no use for them.
Honestly Bethesda games are just a modding sandbox for me. I’ve played hundreds of hours of Skyrim and I’m not sure I’ve ever finished the main quest. I know I’ve never taken a side in the civil war. The built in story and quests are important but my fun comes from downloading mods and just roaming like a wandering monk doing whatever quests I run into. Sometimes OP, other times with immersive mods or alternative perks or spells.
I’m probably not a typical gamer as I’ve had hundreds on hours into BG3 and only made it to act 3 once so far and have yet to finish any of my runs before I decide to have a relationship with someone different or try a durge run, or evil, or realized I forgot to resolve some quest that is now closed. I’m not sure how long a full run is maybe 100 hours? But it’s a lot to invest before I get bored and want to try something new.
I also have a need to collect all the gimmicky items even when I know I have or will get much better stuff for the slot. I play Bethesda games the same way. Gotta run over and collect the book of arcane bow if I’m going to be an archer…
Anyway, mods are a core part of the deal for me. They should prioritize them more.
My favorite things were random PvP at Tarren Mill, getting a group together for UBRS, LBRS, and Strath back when that was all we could do, and some of the epic storylines leading up to dungeons and raids like the Drakkensryd.
I met my guild leader just out questing and we started roleplaying and it grew from there. Does anyone actually meet folks out questing any more? I haven’t played in a long time. I got back together with some friends for one expansion and that was the end of it.
I fondly remember my wow days and friends. But it doesn’t fit into my life any more. It’s too all-consuming. Plus, it feels less like an adventure and more like a theme park. Everything is so tidy and precise with carefully measured dopamine hits at regular intervals.
There’s no getting back the things I’m nostalgic for. Even if all the people came back and I got back into my guild, I have kids and obligations. I don’t want my kids to hear me say something like I can’t attend their play because it’s raid night, or watch me rush to finish daily quests before bed like any of that shit matters.
I’m still casual friends with some of the folks I met through wow. But I’m done with it.
Hey if a company making lots of money excites you, more power to you. But, of all the things one could get excited for about a game, this seems like pure spin. Is it fun? Revolutionary? Iteratively better than it’s precessor?
Diablo 4 sold like hotcakes and it is certainly not any of the above, so I’m pretty skeptical about the usefulness of this particular data point. But again, if this is what excites you about the game then have at it.
I don’t care how fast it sells - I’m not an investor. I care about whether it’s going to blow my balls off with how awesome it is. How many copies it sells on day one is more a function of marketing than quality.
Jokes on them. That stuff turns me off. I’ve been playing one iteration or another of Diablo for over 25 years. I mean I take long breaks but I always come back. But Diablo 4, as well as it’s made, isn’t Diablo. I don’t want other people in my games unless they are IRL friends, and while I enjoy seasonal powers because I enjoy the gameplay, I don’t care about the rewards. And I’m just not a big fan of stacking tiny little 1-2% buffs and calling that advancement. When I drop a skill point I want to feel it without breaking out statistical analysis.
I played the hell out of it up until the season and then for about a month into the season. And I think I’m already done with it. Rather play BG3, or replay Jedi, or finish Horizon Forbidden West assuming I still remember how to play. D4 was a good story and the production values are top notch, but it doesn’t have the replayability joy of earlier games.
There are no tools for reliably detecting the presence or absence of AI writing. But also, I’m just fine with banning sites because they are terrible. There is no requirement to promote garbage sites (and increasing their revenue and SEO by affording them an air of legitimacy) just because they haven’t been caught doing anything particularly egregious. At best, give them a six month timeout or something in case they eventually get their shit together.
Respectfully, this handling of garbage websites like they are actually journalistic endeavors is what confuses certain folks about what news can be trusted and what can’t. Now those folks can’t tell the difference between antivax, flat earth, and respected quality news. I mean I’m not holding you personally responsible or anything of course, but I’m just saying this presumption that low quality content has some kind of right to be shared and promoted needs to be looked at just as carefully as a decision to ban any particular site.
If the writing is that bad, it belongs on the list. If it’s that bad and is still written by a human it belongs on possibly an even worse list.
Math is less important than logical thinking which often, but not always, goes with math skills. More important still is intellectual curiosity. Do you like solving puzzles? Do you like the feeling of breakthrough after a frustrating struggle figuring out how something works? Those will take you a long way.