KubeRoot

Ended up ranting about metaprogression, oh well.

I appreciate games that know what they want to be, and have an intended difficulty for you to experience/master (I also have nothing against adjustable difficulty and/or accessibility options, but I like knowing what the devs expected). I also appreciate roguelikes’ uncompromising approach, with the original concepts like non-modality, and expecting you to face challenges to get rewarded instead of bypassing them.

Metaprogression… Goes three ways. There are games which get easier as you upgrade across runs (which either get easier than they should or start too difficult), games where beating them at a difficulty unlocks harder difficulties (love that, as long as there aren’t too many things to separately unlock, since it lets you ramp things up to your comfortable difficulty while providing a ultimate challenge to reach), and games where you unlock content as you play (can be good for easing players into the game, but take it too far and you’re back to having to put X hours into the game to get the full experience)

Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, Luck be a Landlord do the second (StS has ascensions, Dead Cells has IIRC boss cells, LbaL has floors), but they do things differently in other regards. StS has you unlocking content based on accumulated score across runs with a specific character, but it doesn’t take too long. It also has a true ending that you can’t do on your first runs. Dead Cells seems to have a ton of content and upgrades that take a long time to unlock. LbaL doesn’t have any other metaprogression IIRC, but it does lock at least two important mechanics to specific floors (and up).

Heaven’s Vault.

I gave the game multiple tries, because I love the idea of a language puzzle game where you have to figure out the language bit by bit, based on context, environmental clues, and similarities between words. I also like the story and lore I’ve seen so far, and would like to see more.

But I just can’t get past how the gameplay is built. It feels like the game is trying to do multiple things at once and failing at all of them. Every part of the gameplay is slow, with long animations and slow cutscenes everywhere.

While playing you get dialogue opportunities with your robot, but taking them means you need to either stop what you’re doing or risk missing things, or even interrupt them through an arbitrarily placed cutscene/dialogue trigger. And if you don’t take them, you don’t know what you’ll miss.

Traveling between locations in your ship looks fun, but it’s also slow, while also having dialogues happen during it. It also has the option to have your robot take over steering, skipping the navigation sending you to your destination… An option that shows up according to the developers’ whims, so you don’t know how long it might take to show up.

On my last playthrough I decided to try using a mod, I think it was called RuinVault, which speeds up animations and dialogue, lets you skip navigation immediately, and even has a button to straight up speed up time - and what killed that playthrough was when I was leaving a location and my character went “Hmmm, I think I have some of my translations wrong”, and straight up forced me to pick a different option for some of my translations. It made me realize the game is basically forcing me to get the puzzles done “on time”, instead of letting me actually figure them out. I thought I was playing a puzzle game, but if the game decides you’re having trouble with a puzzle, it slowly forces you into the correct solution?

In the meanwhile Chants of Sennaar came out, and while it seemed simplistic compared to Heaven’s Vault’s language, it also felt like an actual puzzle that the game let me solve, and it could still tell a story through both environments and the text I had to translate.

I reckon I might just need to find a playthrough video to watch because playing the damn game is just endlessly frustrating.

Huh, it’s been a long time since my playthrough, but I feel like the game was very “emotionally engaging”, what with the struggles of all the characters, both the Hearthians you can talk to and the Nomai whose writing you get to read. I found the story really moving, and the nonlinear way it’s told and the way it’s weaved with the progression to be amazing.

I’m going to say yes, but if you just can’t enjoy the “proper” experience, but you enjoy it with the slight “cheat”, then that could be better than not playing.

Worth noting is that the time it takes to start raining varies, food respawns, creatures move around. If you can’t make it to the next shelter and die, you restart the cycle in the same way - but if you grab enough food to hibernate and go back to the same shelter, you might find it easier to progress on the next cycle.

That’s funny, I like Terraria, but I kinda feel the opposite way, because building stuff serves little to no purpose, progress is generally dictated by going to specific places and talking to specific NPCs, killing specific bosses, finding/grinding specific items. It all feels relatively on-rails, whereas in Factorio everything I build has a purpose and no predefined way I have to do, and there are a lot of choices and optional things I can do.

Of course I’m not saying that to dismiss your opinion, just wanted to share my side.

A bit of the second one, but not fully? I don’t think using “female” as a noun when talking about a person sounded good, but it’s appropriate for animals. I imagine incels chose that because it wasn’t the way people spoke, but was only weird at worst, so it wasn’t that suspicious initially.

It kinda makes me unable to properly focus on a word due to the visual noise of the next words fighting for attention, kinda glazing over and jumping ahead without having processed what I’m reading properly, having to go back and focus on each word individually.

I’m going to call out rEFInd for dual booting, since it doesn’t require you to configure anything and finds and recognizes bootable partitions at boot time. Less stuff to mess up, less work when you want to add/remove an OS.

The quote is that it can download an application though

I don’t think the line is that fine in that case, considering all random mechanics in Balatro give ephemeral rewards that only last until the end of a run, which is an isolated instance of a game with limited playtime, those mechanics cannot be paid for with real money, the resulting rewards cannot be sold for real money or traded with other players, and generally cannot affect any other players in any way, not even visually through cosmetics.

As far as I know, Balatro is only really being targeted because it’s stylized after poker, with the enforcement having no actual understanding of what the gameplay looks like.

I think at bigger risk from actual laws would be MMORPGs where you can get random loot drops from enemies/chests, and those also tend to have markets where people grind valuable drops and use in-game trading to transfer them to other players in exchange for real money.

every wired connection is exclusive to the device and full duplex.

That doesn’t seem quite right in reality, since the moment you have multiple devices connected to one switch and both sending data to the router, they’re sharing the connection. Switches can handle multiple connections at the same time way better than an AP, being able to receive from multiple devices at once, but the bandwidth will ultimately still be shared between the devices.

I think an even more important aspect to me is something I don’t have a good term for, but something like honesty/intrusiveness. The key issue is that advertisement should be an honest, truthful, non-deceitful representation of a good/service. But instead ads are designed to catch your eye, insert themselves into your thoughts with catchy music, play on your emotions even using kids, all while avoiding really telling you what they’re about.

On the note of consent, it reminds me of a certain website for webnovels, which hosts ads submitted by users, for their own novels. It’s been kind of ruined by GenAI, but it feels very different when the ads are often badly made memes about the premise of the story, since that’s what you’re already on the site for and it’s the actual authors wanting to share their stories.

How about I reach out to the editors and offer them 80% of that money to not play any sound effects? Though the interpretation of the editors in question being humans implies they will still know everything about my life in realtime, and I’m not sure I’d take that kind of sacrifice

But, a more practical and effectice way to address those things is to attempt to provide an alternate, more equitable, more transparent paradigm for its use.

Yeah, the issue is that I simply disagree, and consider the usage of models trained on data obtained without permission to be immoral, and thus unless the model is trained entirely on data supplied with consent (which is supposedly implausible), and thus people facilitating and/or promoting the usage of such to be… ethically unaligned me, and thus I don’t want to associate with them

All that said, I also don’t want to argue or try to convince you here, and want to thank you for being civil in the discussion

I’ve also seen a bit of this, and I also find it annoying… though 99% of the time that I see something like this, its some kind of like cryptobro, when lambo, diamond hands, type person.

I’m pretty sure some of the most popular communities on db0 use GenAI art for banner and icon - checking now, the banner art for piracy, ADHD memes, anarchism, yepowertrippingbastards appear to be GenAI (admittedly fewer than I expected), and the icon for the instance itself is suspicious.

Unfortunately though, that’s also not a problem exclusive to db0, and with the nature of federation it’s kinda inescapable when most people don’t care, unless I want to lock myself to niche communities.

I will also note, I believe db0 is hosting or participating in some kind of distributed GenAI network called The Horde, so it’s not just individual community members’ opinions, it’s an organizational endorsement of GenAI.

IIRC people were testing cybertrucks for some auto-closing functionality, and if they encountered resistance, they would back off… Then try harder, slicing through hotdogs

At the risk of starting an argument (sorry)… I see any use of GenAI as support and endorsement of the technology, and I see the technology as a systemic attack on creative work by real people. It’s stealing the results of hard work of people to produce derivative work with the intent of replacing those same people. Thus, while self-hosting does remove some concerns related to big corporations, I think it still empowers them by supporting the tech they deal in.

I do block dedicated GenAI communities, but it’s more widespread than that, showing up in unrelated comms, being used to generate community icons and banners.

And of course an instance isn’t homogenous with regard to its users, and I don’t condemn people for using db0, but IIRC the host of db0 is supportive of GenAI, which is what I primarily referred to, and what steers the direction the instance is taking.

db0 is also pro-GenAI, which seems unfortunate to me.

One thought I’d like to add is, not all art is meant to be “enjoyed”, and there’s value in art that invokes unpleasant, even painful experiences.

In a way, it’s the opposite of the meme, something that can be worthwhile yet painful if it “lands”, and boring/tedious and bland otherwise. Though I also know some songs that cover bleak topics that hit me personally, but are also absolute bangers, so those aren’t mutually exclusive either.

Yes, the publishers have control over that, which is why I’m saying it doesn’t make sense to praise Steam over games on it going on sale.