#single-player experiences

[razberrypuck]

anyway Dr. WD Gaster being a soft and kind soul makes his character infinitely more interesting to me than him being evil or even just kinda mean. like his passion for his craft lies not in fucked up experiments, but in a genuine love for learning and the opportunity to teach others and do good by his people. he's definitely strange (all scientists are) and kinda intimidating but he's literally the most thoughtful and considerate person ever it's just a little bit hard to tell because of the way he speaks does anyone HEAR me. he's one of the few characters that WOULDN'T benefit from the mad scientist trope.

[tkachunk]

you let tim wear an a for two (2) preseason games and he forgets how to act

[druidonity2]

Dragon Noodle Soup :3

[thelvadams]

i genuinely think ninja theory might be the most talented devs out there right now

[dysfunctionalnerd]

source

Aug. 23 2024

I just threw up in my mouth a little bit

[utilitycaster]

just an idle weird thought given the proximity of Phineas's breakdown in Midst, Ashton's breakdown on Critical Role, and some stray thoughts I've had about Tula on D20, Suvi on WBN, and that female blorbos post that goes around from time to time; but I feel like that very specific identity crisis/explosive depression spiral re Phineas and Ashton is truly a thing that makes me go oh this character is actually everything is weirdly gendered. It's almost always a man who has it; Ashton is honestly the only example I can think of who isn't a man (though I think Suvi might be headed for this, which is one of the many reasons I love her).

[askagamedev]

I'm playing Trials of Mana and Angela is massively, hysterically broken. It's to the point where Hawkeye is useless and Duran is only used when I need to break a boss's super attack chargers. But Angela is doing Duran's damage as massive AoE's. I notice in many RPG's this tends to frequently be the case where mages are just overwhelmingly powerful without a noticeable drawback. Why is this?

It isn't mages as a thing, it's mostly that single player games don't need to be balanced. As long as the gameplay experience is engaging and puts players into the flow state when playing, it doesn't actually matter if one class/character/build/etc. is stronger and another is weaker. Players can choose to challenge themselves or take an easier time by using the stronger character/class/build/etc.

It's much more detrimental to give players a major option that isn't particularly engaging. This is can be because the option is so strong the game becomes boring, so weak the game becomes frustrating, so repetitive with minimal things to think about or solve, so complicated that the player has difficulty finding the fun, or any of another thousand problems. Regardless of which reason, the result is the same - the player drops out of the [flow band]. Players that can't get into or stay in the flow band will typically drop the game entirely because the experience isn't fun and there are better things they can do with their time. It doesn't matter how powerful or weak options are relative to each other as long as those options help keep the player in the flow band.

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[thefirstknife]

Seeing some of the latest whining over on Twitter, I think I've realized part of the problem: the content creators who have made playing D2 their life think it's "too easy" and that "toxic casuals are ruining things" because they refuse to admit they're simply too skilled to find a huge challenge anymore. But instead of rebranding to something else and moving on to learn a new game where they'll face challenge and struggle they continue to insist that the game is bad foe catering to "the lowest common denominator". Some of them also seem kind of entitled? Lime the idea that any no-name players (aka people who aren't Big Names in the fandom) could possibly do amazing snd outplay them feels like they're being cheated out of what they're "owed" as their Top Player Bragging Rights? But not everybody who puts in the work to get good at the game engages with the fandom, either. It just feels a lot like some of them think "I put in the work to master it, so nobody else should be allowed to match me and also it needs to keep up with me because I made this game my life". Feels very weird and entitled to me. And I say this as a person who has played some games so much that the highest difficulty settings are a breeze! I just accept that I've mastered it and move on when I want challenge.

Oh yeah, the new elitist dickhead whining is live in the community and it's the same thing as always. Agreed with what you wrote! I think streamers just literally want things to only be "difficult" for them and impossible for everyone else so they can feel special. They can deny it all day long, but there is no logical reason to want FEWER people to play an exciting competition and for FEWER people to feel like they can complete it. Because if people feel like they can't, they won't bother. Why would I waste my time? I'm not getting paid to play the game.

Day 1 raid race is a community contest, meant for the community, aka all players. It's not "special contest for top players only," it's a contest for everyone. It's supposed to be something everyone tries out and does their best, as well as something that is reasonably achievable for more than a grand total of 12 players.

Over the years, Bungie has been hard at work turning raids into an activity that more people will want to play and finish. Including adjusting the way day 1 race is happening and when. They WANT more people to participate which is evident through lowering the amount of grind needed to be ready and moving the race to the weekend, and now extending it to 48 hours. This helps everyone; the community and the devs.

More below:

The moment the day 1 raid race is accessible, that means more people will attempt it and more people will realise that they ARE good enough to raid and complete the contest mode. When the raid race is locked to a power level grind that nobody outside of people playing the video game for a living can achieve, that drastically reduces the number of people who will enter the race. When the raid race is releasing in the middle of the week, nobody outside of streamers will be able to compete. Now, day 1 raid race is no longer limiting in ways that we, the players, can't control.

This means more people can attempt it and at that point, we're dealing with pure numbers. More people attempting means that more people will finish. So when streamers are whining about "numbers," they're whining about the simple hard cold unchangeable logic of math. More people than ever are playing, more people than ever are attempting, more people than ever were able to watch the whole race and figure that they have a chance, and then they had plenty of time to try. This resulted in more completions than ever. Very little to do with the raid being "easy." It wasn't. It was accessible.

There are probably incredibly good players out there who couldn't participate before because they didn't have time or weren't available off work or couldn't ruin their mental and physical health over a 24 hour video game contest. There are probably perfectly average players who can still complete the raid race if they have more time to practice.

And this bothers content creators, because it's telling them that they're not special. Some Joe Shmoe with a 6 year old PC and $5 headset might be incredibly good at Destiny, possibly even better than them, but he didn't have time to compete before. Now he does, because Bungie removed the limit that a player can't control and the content creators are fucking mad as hell because Joe Shmoe, 47, a dad of 3, can finish the contest mode.

They keep insisting this is not the reason they are mad; they're mad because.... uh.... Contest mode is supposed to be SUPER HARD and it's an EXCLUSIVE EVENT that happens TWICE A YEAR!!!! And like. Yeah? Joe Shmoe has the same feeling about it. Joe Shmoe also gets two days a year to participate in a community event. Again, content creators are slowly learning that they're not special and it's a hard hitting truth. Also if more people are playing the raid race, then they're not watching them. That's gotta hurt as well. It's at least 5 fewer subs.

I am so fucking done with their bullshit and their repeated attempts to demean everyone's accomplishments by yelling about the raid being easy and bad and whatever. They are sad people with a void in their hearts.

The raid was absolutely hard. More people than EVER attempted it and MANY haven't been able to complete it. The raid wasn't "easy" in the sense they mean it (they mean easy = bad), it was different. It required different skills and it had a different goal and a different fantasy to invoke in players. Every single one of those bitches used every known cheese and meta tactic to brute force every damage phase and every mechanic, to the point of many of them not figuring out an entire mechanic in the final encounter. They straight up did not understand a mechanic and then dare to say that it was easy. But yeah. They were grasping at every broken build possible and then whining about it being easy. Well I did it with 30 resilience. I am better.

They are absolutely entitled. They feel like they are owed everything in this game because they've been here since 2014 and that if the game is not catering to them, then it's objectively bad. Literally, as you said, they've mastered the game and they're bored of it. But hey, there's money in clickbait about negative stuff so they will keep being miserable playing something they obviously don't like anymore.

I'm so done with those assholes. The raid was an absolute BLAST for me. It was super fun, it was really difficult and it took a long time to get it done, but my team did it, even through a horrible bug that cheated us out of a clear 10 hours early. The raid is SUPER fun, it's an excellent new addition to the raid roster, super helpful for newer players and newer raiders. The mechanics are really smooth and simple, they don't require a lot of callouts, but still rely a LOT on coordination of the whole team. Incredible work threading the line between an incredibly fun raid that is also accessible to everybody. I'll be doing it a lot, it's a really chill experience that still gets your adrenaline going. Bungie did an amazing work with it and I absolutely love it.

I cannot FATHOM a mindset that people have where they want people to NOT be able to experience raids. The most bizarre thing in the world to me. Raids are PEAK content in the game that devs spend a lot of time making and that is currently not being played as much as they want, which is actually a problem resource wise. Since they take so much resources to create, but aren't being used, it's a shame.

This raid was absolutely made with that in mind. They want more people to play to raids. This raid is "easy" in the sense that it is accessible. And there's nothing those assholes hate more than accessibility, I guess. God forbid people who paid for the expansion get to play the expansion. That includes the day 1 contest mode race absolutely. It's for the whole community, not for 50 people with a twitch.tv account.

Every content creator whining about this is a bitch who does not care about the health of the game or the community. They want a game made for them, and only them. They think they own it and that it's good when only 3% of the players play raids. They want every regular player to suffer and leave, to not have fun and to not experience these amazing activities.

They want the game to die.

[zeravmeta]

number one reason everyone should play pokemon romhacks btw

[gurenkurosen]

ohh i think im coming to a bit of a realization actually as to why mmos are so scary when im forced to party

[mommytimmy]

what do you mean people can make posts on the internet without knowing anything about what they're talking about? 🤯

[blitheringbongus]

Can't believe Scar saw a rapidly approaching, dishevled mumbo and went "he's so cute." I need to run unorthodox experiments on them.

IKR SAME OMG

They’re literally perfect for each other <- delusional

But seriously they have so much lore together in my silly brain and the few interactions they do have (WHICH HAS BEEN INCREASING A LOT LATELY MAY I ADD) has been FUELING the fire rapidly and gods gods GODS do I have many thoughts about them

[batsplat]

fucked up that italian is at the top of atp tour rn but he’s like the most boring italian possible. wtf.

so boring he's basically an austrian

icl, by some irony my top three most beloathed sporting nations are spain, italy and australia, so for me the way motogp works is that the most moral way to deal with those countries is to just put them in a containment zone and have them tear each other to shreds. perfect. a victimless situation, except for the spanish, italian and australian athletes in question, and crucially it is Good and Valid for them to suffer

so I typically root against italians anyway across sports, just for vibes. I don't massively have anything against the other half dozen italian men bumbling around the upper end of the tour these days, but I also know I'd generally find them annoying if they happened to be as good as sinner. (I do like paolini!! and was a schiavone appreciator as a kid, so it's not a militant anti-italian stance.) I'd find almost anyone who is as good as sinner annoying. like motogp is a very rare exception to me as far as dominant athletes go, and those guys have to be actively insane for me to not get pissed off at them. my stance is that italians are not inherently interesting.... it's just valentino specifically, and then his reflected rizz also making his various proteges interesting. motogp features an above average number of interesting italians even amongst the non-valentino-affiliated, but that's just because you have SO many of them I reckon. whereas sinner is exactly in the mould of what we've come to expect from men's tennis stars: dull professionals allergic to controversy (minus the occasional unwisely applied anabolic steroid). craziest bit has been the atp pr push to shove that man down all of our throats. they're trying to sell us hair colour as an actual personality. the carrot boys thing is literally the most obvious psyop I've seen in my life. you can't fool me, that man has not had a single mildly interesting thought in his life. I'll say it: even his tennis doesn't really move me. at least I now know better than to expect more from that stupid fuck ass tour

[un-pearable]

two very contradictory headcanons about why jay isn’t a speed runner:

jay’s a huge speedrunning fan but is banned from most leaderboards due to an abnormal amount of single-event upsets that make it LOOK like he’s cheating…

he thinks they’re super cool and interesting but is extremely bad at it so he claims he doesn’t speedrun on principle bc it’s “disrespectful to the creators of the game :/”

[antirepurp]

the way i only want one classic sonic era game ported onto more convenient platforms and im never going to get it. knuckles chaotix my darling dear i miss you so much

[derelictheretic]

You can play the game I made with my team by the way!! It's a simple shoot 'em up and I recommend the local co-op or duel mode they're super fun ✨️✨️