• 3 Posts
  • 325 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • and there’s a well-defined mission in each zone

    It’s been a long time but I remember there being missions with scripted events and objectives and stuff, but then also areas where the main thing to do was simply travel through it to get to other places. My favorite moment from the game was when I worked out that you could skip a portion of the normal progression by getting to a higher level area early to buy more powerful equipment, but actually getting there was a real challenge due to being underleveled and the difficulty of getting past enemies without killing them. I got a group to make the attempt (which took some explaining and persuasion because it wasn’t the normal next thing to do) and we spent hours on it and got to the last leg of the journey, but ultimately had to give up because our death penalties were stacked too high to get through that last bit. I was able to make it on a later attempt with a different group using character loadouts more specialized for the task.

    Something I think GW1 did really well was doing various things like this to build up a sense of location and meaningful travel, which does a lot of work to compensate for the gameplay itself happening in isolated instances and making the world of the game feel expansive and epic.





  • I don’t watch his other content but in that one video he was absolutely doing exactly what a typical user would do in his situation. He was trying to follow a tutorial, he ran into the sort of warning message Windows users are conditioned to breeze past, and followed the onscreen instructions without trying to understand the confusing stuff. They changed how it worked after that incident, as they should if mass adoption is at all desirable.



  • What about a way to donate (held in reserve for that purpose?) money after the fact for specific commits, and then have a way to indicate which things you’d be most likely to donate to going forward if they are completed? This would mean less reliable payments since there wouldn’t be a guarantee any given contribution would result in a payout, but there wouldn’t be any disincentive to work on things and there would be a general idea of what donators want. Plus doing it that way would eliminate the need for a manual escrow process.








  • I have read some articles about this, and I can see how it makes sense in some contexts. Like iirc when this happened to Red Lobster, they were able to make money through a combination of ripping off a certain group of investors, and the significant value of the company’s real estate holdings. That makes sense.

    In the case of online magazine equivalents though I really don’t get it. What is there to sell off? Shouldn’t any potential long term profits be priced in at the point they get bought out? If the company has tangible assets like offices, couldn’t they just sell those without firing anyone and have people work from home? The intangible assets are all directly tied to the publication’s reputation and audience, which seems like it would die off fast without anything worthwhile on the site.