I think encumbrance adds something really important to the game but it’s really delicate. Namely, I think the pacing of games is better when encumbrance exists compared to not.

What encumbrance does is force you to make some decisions about loot right now as opposed to later at the merchant. I have to decide to pick something up intentionally because I don’t want to have to deal with all this junk later. When I later go to a merchant, I only now have stuff in my inventory that either (a) I want to have on hand to use or (b) I think will be valuable to sell.

A game with no encumbrance does not enforce this part of the decision making on you. You no longer are required at pick-up time to make any part of that decision. As a result, players are less likely to interact with loot at all until they get to the merchant. At which point they now need to spend much more time sorting through their stuff to figure out what to sell or keep. In other words, the optimal way to play becomes simply clicking the take all button on every container you find and dealing with it later. I personally would find this interact worse as the chore of dealing with it becomes bigger and bigger and harder to manage with no in game penalty for doing this to yourself. Basically, players have to choose to play the game in a way that’s fun rather than being forced to play the game in a way that’s fun.

There’s also a second important thing that encumbrance adds to games like this: scarcity of resources. Not scarcity in a sense that resources of any kind are hard to come by, but in the sense that the player has to purposefully make decisions in order to amass things like gold or camp supplies. With encumbrance, I could still just take all every container until I fill up, but then I would have an inventory filled with worthless junk which might sell for much less. Or I might have less room for camp supplies. What I think most players will end up doing, though, is being more selective about what they pick up, enabling them to be more efficient with their sold goods and inventory space to prioritize things that help them succeed. Without encumbrance, this entire aspect of gameplay is removed.

Sure, it might feel bad in the moment to have to make a decision between two items for the sake of encumbrance, but I think the value it adds to the game is generally more than it takes away.

The game is really, really good.

Genuinely, it’s just a really fucking good game and I think thats most of it.

My issue with all of this is thus, and the article touched on it a bit:

Gamers don’t give a shit if games are buggy. Actually, we only really want it to be a baseline level of playable. And even then, we’ll probably suffer through a lot. What we want is a fun game.

In fact, I don’t actually think most of us give a particular shit about micro transactions or battle passes other than that they tend to be accompanied by games that are abjectly less fun without them. I wouldn’t have batter an eye if baldurs gate has a cosmetic store because what I want has nothing to do with that.

I want to play games that are fun. That’s the bottom line. Baldurs gate is incredible because it’s good. I would have paid more for it than I did. I would have suffered through micro transactions and battle passes if I had to. Because I don’t give a shit about that.

I’m just tired of games releasing and not being fun.

I can’t give you what you’re looking for, but the great part about challenges like this is that they are real problems to solve with input data to deal with.

You might try reorienting yourself, then. Instead of trying to teach your students the perceived “point” of each problem, use the problems to teach them about common design patterns and any algorithm that might apply that they don’t already know about. It’s not necessary to present the “best” solution and algorithm to each problem and only teach that, in other words.

I used one from a couple of years ago to practice dealing with first class functions. Would’ve been wildly inefficient at run time, but I had a fun time returning functions from functions and trying to use that to make really modular, overengineered code. And I feel I have a better grasp of that concept because of that experience even though it probably wasn’t how that problem was intended to be solved or even a good solution to it by any stretch.

Man FFXIV is no ray of sunshine but I can’t imagine it’s anyway near as bad as literally any competitive game. I’ve never been called a slur in FFXIV before and it feels like it happens once a session for things like Dota, LoL, Overwatch, Siege, etc.

Wow I always new I hated Calibri but looking at it up close REALLY made me hate it. I don’t know what it is about that font but I just can’t stand it.

See you found a solution but I’m still curious how you had this problem. There were very few enemies that I felt had a health pool wildly too large and it was usually as a result of the enemy upscaling feature rather than death March. Those two enemies begin the Djinn and a certain swordsman fight from the DLC.

I had to consistently play with upscaling on because the enemies were generally too squishy and I was killing them so fast the challenge of death March was wasn’t completely unnoticeable.

I wonder if it was your build or perhaps some other aspect of your gameplay that made this happen?

The money makers here want you to play their game. The more time you invest, the more money they make in subs. If you want to skip all that game and thus, in some ways, get all that progress done without having to pay all that sub, you’ve gotta fork over some cash.

Really think you should give FFXIV a deeper thought beyond just looking at the store and finding the level skips.

Even if you were to buy a skip, there’s still a considerable amount of game in front of you to play. They are only meant to get people to modern content without having to (to some people) slog through hundreds of hours of older stuff. It’s not a p2e micro-transaction by any means — far from it.

As others have said, the story skips are kinda awful.

Plus, I gotta say that it doesn’t really make a difference. They don’t give anyone an advantage over anyone else and don’t impact the way you experience the game at all. If you don’t like them, just don’t buy them.

At worst, you’ll run into some guys who are really bad because they skipped a huge portion of the game to get to modern content. But it doesn’t give them any edge over you by any means.

Again, I can’t stress enough how these affect other players 0%.

Can’t find it anymore, but I watched a Warframe video way back in the day talking about how there will always be a loot cave. It’s nigh impossible to make a game that’s so perfectly balanced that nothing is more optimal than another thing and players will always gravitate towards more optimal.

Maybe you can say that one method produces just 1 more item per hour than the alternative, for example, but we’ll still all congregate there because it makes the experience just a little faster. Hell, even if you do optimize the loot cave out of the game, there will still be loot caves just because of human nature. Like even if there isn’t a difference, people will claim there will be and we’ll congregate there anyway.

Imo, the best way to handle loot caves is to just intentionally change it each season or so, or deliberately lean into it so there’s a different loot cave for different types of gear. You can’t avoid it by removing them, I think. Because you can’t really remove them.

Yea, except USB-C is an objectively better connector for both ends of the cable. And it’s not like using USB-A has been made illegal.

If any connector were to be made the standard, I think I’d generally prefer it to be the best one available, wouldn’t you?

But this doesn’t make any sense at all. Defederation is like… the main power afforded to us by creating a federated system. It’s practically the only way instances can actually make themselves unique because it’s the only power they have compared to their Reddit counterparts.

Defederation can’t possibly “not be normal” because otherwise the system of instances and joining your favorite one becomes a complete illusion.

Like imagine this. The Reddit admins set site wide rules and the Reddit moderators set rules for their subreddits. Each user must follow the site and sub rules or have their content removed or account suspended, in the case of a site rule violation. Now, the fediverse is different than that. People posting in a community in lemmy.world are only responsible for the rules of that community and for that instance. But their content also affects other instances who might have stricter rules.

And what are the admins to do about that? The one issue which faces federated sites that doesn’t affect Reddit and it just so happens to be solved by the single moderation tool which the fediverse gets which Reddit doesn’t.

Bloons TD 6. It puts out what you put into it. There’s definitely some skill required but you can largely avoid most of that stuff. Once you have a semi working strategy, you can kinda cruise into new levels for a while no problem. It’s my favorite game to playb while listening to stuff.

Im pretty sure there’s a button to jump right to it… I forget what it is by default.

The best games which feature an open world and the best games for their open world are a very different list, imo.

For example, the Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk share a really awesome story-based rpg that happens to play in an open world but I don’t necessarily believe their open world is among the best in the industry.

I’d probably have to say that the Witcher 3 is my favorite game which features an open world and my favorite open world in any game has got to be Terraria. You could argue it’s a different class of game, but I feel that the tendency the game has to force you to explore and then introduce new stuff to the world that allows you to re-explore the same places is a really excellent take on the open world formula. Terraria really has very excellent exploration and reexploration which I think are the hallmarks of open world games. Not just inviting you to get to know the world, but changing it over time and asking you to get to know it again.

I’m not sure I can change your view but will say that PoE was one of the most frustrating, clunky experiences in gaming I’ve ever had. I can’t remember how far I got but I remember ultimately feeling like the game was ugly and the story was boring and gameplay was irritating.

I like crafting my own builds and trying to mess with things on my own and PoE actively seems to prevent you from doing that effectively. The skill tree is so bloated and convoluted that to try and make something on your own with having an immense amount of experience in the game would be an exercise in futility.

For me, Diablo IV has been a great experience. At worst, it’s about as good as Diablo III, which I also happened to enjoy a lot. There’s no comparison on my end. I enjoy one of the game and wouldn’t download the other again unless I had a gun to my head.

It will use ActivityPub.

Doesn’t this mean I can interact with the entire ecosystem without ever touching their app (ie from Mastodon or any of them)? Or have I misunderstood the systems in place here?

Yea, probably. Especially for the bigger subreddits. But something like most of the entire website is going to experience suddenly shifting to a moderation force with little to no experience as Reddit just tries to get things online again. If we all thought moderation was a shitshow now…

Reddit as an entity is just frustrating. Not just the recent debacle, but the pattern of getting slightly more awful with each passing minute. I’m hoping I enjoy my stay here well enough that I never feel the urge to go back. Unfortunately, it’s less about what Reddit can do to get me back and more about what the Fediverse can do to keep me.

I liked seeing and engaging with unlimited new things with each passing moment. It would not be very satisfying for me to lose that. Time will tell.