enkers

That’ll happen when your pollution gets slurped up by the biteys. If you can manage it, a wall with with turrets and an ammo supply belt to feed them is good early solution.

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I’m still addicted to the new factorio expansion. 125 hrs on my current save and counting. The factory must grow!

Pepe is a beloved internet meme, not a symbol of hate. Rightoid asshats need to leave pepe and doge the fuck alone. >:(

Oh! I’d never heard about this game before now, but it looks really cool. Too bad about denuvo though, that’s a nope from me too.

However, I think he did take donations for early access to new titles,

When video game companies accept money for early access to their games, that’s a sale. You give them money, they give you access. I’m not sure why that wouldn’t also apply here.

From your description, unless you were allowed to donate $0 for access, that sounds a lot like a sale to me.

I will warn you, it’ll push your requirement for understanding game mechanics, and make you solve problems in new ways from the base game. It’s also not feasibly beatable without at least some understanding of circuits, logistic mechanics, and (space) trains.

That said, good luck, and may your factory grow in perpetuity!

It’s not for everyone, but if it’s for you, it’s amazing.

I’d highly recommend beating the base game first if you haven’t already. The complexity really ramps up quite a bit, so if you struggle with the base game, it might be better to hold off. That said, if you’re confident in your problem solving skills and willing to push through some of the tougher bits, you could totally jump right in to Space Age.

I think I’m at around 100 hrs in to SA so far, and maybe (optimistically) half way through, and I’ve loved every bit. Except Gleba, fuck Gleba. :)

So was this just a purely “everyone’s doing it, so the customers (shareholders) expect it, so we’ll follow suit” type thing? Do mass layoffs inspire confidence in the stock so it goes up? It’s hard to understand from a rational position that throwing away money makes money for the investors.

Apparently it was against the rules of that community and I was banned.

Sounds like they’ve done you a favour. Now you don’t have to see their random hater circlejerk community again.

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime.
That’s why I use this app to normalize time.

I mostly agree. I kinda felt decisions mattered in a game like Disco Elysium, but you’re still essentially on the same overall track; the only way, things could really matter is if the story lines completely diverge, and that almost never financially makes sense, since you’d essentially be making multiple games and selling it as one.

I don’t think that’s the distinction that GGG is trying to get at though. What they’re going for is making micro-decisions matter. You have to turn your brain on and use it for combat most of the time to stay alive, so you can’t just zone out and go on autopilot then pay attention for when you know you’re going to need it. They want to focus on a much more active play style where there are more telegraphed attacks and dodging all the time.

I enjoy those mechanics too, but I don’t want them all the time. I want a blend of hard and easy, if that makes sense. I want to be able to blast through some content and make my goal clearing it as efficiently as possible, not worrying about dying every second.

And maybe I’m concerned about nothing, and it won’t be that way, but I’d rather try it and be happily surprised than go in with high expectations and be disappointed.

Oh it absolutely is, and it’s totally understandable why they’re making PoE2. But I think there’s also a sizeable number of players whom that aspect (ye old spreadsheet simulator, that is) really appeals to, and what’s more is that they’re very devoted to the game. And while PoE2 might have a broader appeal, I’m not so convinced that it’ll be able to retain as many of those players.

That’s kinda half true. It’s certainly GGG’s intent, and there’s no official way to buy in game currency for real money, but you can absolutely buy it through third party websites. So effectively, you can still sell items for real money, you just risk getting banned.

But yeah, you’d be correct that the currency market doesn’t really help facilitate that. It was just already happening.

As a long term player of PoE, I don’t really see myself playing PoE2 long term. My expectation is it’ll be fun to play once or twice and a good game to onboard new players to the franchise, but it won’t have the same depth of complexity as the original.

Also, the whole “gameplay decisions matter” doesn’t vibe with me. Perhaps that’s a bit baffling, but what I want is that gearing decisions matter, and deciding what content to do matters, but regular gameplay mostly only matters when when you choose to do challenging content.

I think GGG realizes that a significant portion of their core player base isn’t completely sold on PoE2, and that’s why they’re developing both in parallel.

Additionally, and this is specific to the addition of a marketplace, they’ve always maintained that they didn’t want to add it because frictionless trades would be bad for the game’s economy. So I think they see this as more of a test whereas a lot of players see it as an outrite win.

One minor caveat where CPU could matter is AVX support. I couldn’t get ollama to run well on my system, despite having a decent GPU, because I’m using an ancient processor.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. MS has been offering game pass at a good value for a while now to entice users and grow their platform. Now it’s time to start squeezing value. Standard enshitification cycle stuff here, and a good reason not to play their game.

There are a ton of different variations of the golden rule that mostly have slightly different implications. Pretty much every religion has some flavour of it, and there’s a good reason for that.

Cooperation has for a long time been a necessary part of human life if one wishes to accomplish much of anything, and the golden rule has long been a building block of cooperation. Of course, it’s not particularly scientific and it’s precise implementations, as you’ve noticed, are either vague or not fully correct.

Enter game theory. The prisoner’s dilemma problem is a model cooperative game that explores various behaviour patterns between two parties. As it turns out, some of the best strategies to maximize personal gain given other opponents with unknown strategies are called: “forgiving tit-for-tat” strategies.

Basically, cooperate until you’re betrayed, punish betrayal, but then return to cooperation. I think if you squint a bit, you can kinda see how there’s similarity to the golden rule.

Veritasium has a pretty informative video on the subject: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM

In short, yeah, it’s pretty good.

Hot take: Buying an early-access game because you assume it’ll be a lot better down the road is just silly. Just because no man’s sky did a full 180 and made an awesome game from a shaky launch doesn’t mean any other E-A game will follow the same trajectory.

If you’re not happy with the feature set it has when you buy it, and you’re not OK with the developer potentially dropping the title immediately, you probably shouldn’t have bought it.

That’s honestly something I appreciate about wube, and further makes me want to buy ASAP. I’ll be buying the expansion regardless, but the knowledge I probably won’t be missing out on a future potential sale does feel nice.

The expansion price is more than justified IMO.

I’m honestly surprised that their pricing model isn’t more prevalent. As I see it, it’s always on sale price, so it loses out on the $x2 early buyers, but makes up for it in spades in brand loyalty.

I suppose the bean counters elsewhere have decided it’s not really a viable strategy unless you’ve got such a game, though.