Diecast #264: Sethian, Satisfactory, Mailbag

By Shamus Posted Monday Jul 8, 2019

Filed under: Diecast 64 comments

Another wrinkle in the adventure to get the RSS feed working: As I’ve said before, the only way to get the podcast RSS to do its job is to place a link to the show somewhere in the post. I normally generate the boilerplate stuff (like the media player you see below) using shortcode and it creates the links for me. But the RSS generator doesn’t see these auto-generated links, so it doesn’t know this is a podcast. To get around this, I must manually put a fully qualified link using raw HTML in the post body. That’s annoying and will cause chaos if the URL of this site ever changes, but fine.

But I also don’t want 2 identical links to the same audio file. (The auto-generated one, and the manual one I’m forced to add.) That would be confusing for the end user. To get around this, I make the manual link invisible by making it a single empty space. This means it isn’t visible to the user, which is fine since it only exists for the benefit of the dumbass RSS generator.

BUT!

The newer versions of WordPress have made the editor “smarter”. Now it sees an empty invisible link, concludes that’s a mistake, and then silently deletes it from the post. I feel like I’m actively fighting the system all the time like this, where I have to come up with workarounds to protect my other workarounds because the system is trying to do my thinking for me.

Sigh. I don’t know. Maybe the RSS feed will work this week. Maybe it won’t. I did what I could.



Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.

This link exists only so the stupid RSS generator will do its job.

Show notes:
00:00 EA Lacks Self-Awareness

It’s not hard, guys. Just read literally anything people are writing about you and the problems should become clear.

08:47 Sethian


Link (YouTube)

14:07 DOTA Underlords


Link (YouTube)

On the show I joked that this idea of mixing collectible card game with DOTA sounded like money, but in truth I kinda suspect the market is already saturated. CCG’s suffer from a really intense version of the network effect, meaning we end up with a winner-take-all system that favors the entrenched over the innovative. Considering how hard Artifact flopped earlier this year, I’m having a hard time seeing how any new CCG can carve out a piece of the market for themselves. And that’s ignoring the looming threat of loot box laws.

In short, this is a great idea for a game 4 years ago.

18:40 Satisfactory


Link (YouTube)

22:03 Minecraft again!

Minecraft is an incredible game, but vanilla Minecraft is so vanilla.

31:09 EVE Online Drifters

37:22 Mailbag: Challenge Runs

Salue consuls Shamus et Paul,

which kind of challenge runs other than speedruns (if any) are you guys interested in? Pacifist runs, Genocide runs, Low level/initial equipment, Literally blindfolded runs, the (in)famous FFX NSGNSNCNONENNENBB challenge?

Hoping this e-mail doesn’t get weird formatting and looking forward to your answer.

Vale,

-Tim

41:58 Mailbag: Favorite Women Game Developers

Dear Diecastians,

As much as I enjoy Paul and his affable sense of humor, I really miss Soldierhawke and hope you will have her back on the show soon.

With this in mind… Who are some of your favorite women programmers, game designers or writers?

Freundliche grüße aus Berlin,
Leslee

54:13 Mailbag: You never really own anything anymore.

Dear lumpy sphere throwers,

You never really own anything anymore. I know that’s been a theme in the writing at 20-sided, and I’m sure this isn’t the first example. But it may be one of the largest mass-deletions so far in our new digital landscape.

And while I’m writing in, is the private gaming site dying out? Have Steam community pages and wikis taken the place of personal fan sites as storehouses of obscure lore and other esoterica?

Keep those dice a rollin’,

Will

 


From The Archives:
 

64 thoughts on “Diecast #264: Sethian, Satisfactory, Mailbag

  1. Michael says:

    But I also don’t want 2 identical links to the same audio file. (The auto-generated one, and the manual one I’m forced to add.) That would be confusing for the end user. To get around this, I make the manual link invisible by making it a single empty space. This means it isn’t visible to the user, which is fine since it only exists for the benefit of the dumbass RSS generator.

    BUT!

    The newer versions of WordPress have made the editor “smarter”. Now it sees an empty invisible link, concludes that’s a mistake, and then silently deletes it from the post. I feel like I’m actively fighting the system all the time like this, where I have to come up with workarounds to protect my other workarounds because the system is trying to do my thinking for me.

    My first thought for an invisible link would have been to give it a “style=display:none” attribute.

  2. Ivan says:

    So, I dunno what RSS does/is. Is it worth all the trouble?

    Anyways, I liked Bob Case’s video about EVE (partially about EVE) a while ago enough to download the installer, but then never actually got around to playing it. Mainly because iirc some part of registering for an account was more complicated/annoying than I can tolerate (I.E: even slightly complicated). But, yeah, if EVE is becoming Less like he subscribed, any appeal I even had to try it is gone.

    Also, how is Satisfactory, please? I only rarely listen to these podcasts, and in fragments, but at least from what I heard here you do not hate it. But, if I already adore Factorio, why should I try Satisfactory? What does it do that is better?

    1. Retsam says:

      So, I dunno what RSS does/is. Is it worth all the trouble?

      RSS is a computer-readable format for describing internet content updates, which is can be read by programs (or, commonly, browser extensions) called RSS Readers. I’ve never really bothered with them, myself, but AFAIK, there’s two major benefits:

      1. The RSS reader can tell you when the site has updated, rather than having to remember to check, which is especially nice for content that updates irregularly or infrequently.

      2. The RSS reader can put all your content updates into a single feed, so you don’t need to navigate to a bunch of different sites.

      1. King Marth says:

        Totally worth it. I recommend Feedly (which basically picked up from Google Reader), and then I use Feed43 to create custom feeds from html scrapers for arbitrary sites with questionable update schedules. You don’t need that too often though, many sites build in the RSS standard.

        Podcast rss is its own thing, where a podcast client can auto download new episodes.

        1. Scampi says:

          I bothered using it before finding out that clients I used became obsolete too fast to be worth it.
          If you’re not me (and you aren’t) I’d definitely recommend it.
          For anyone else who dumped their luck-stat: better don’t or you’ll waste more time finding new RSS clients than you would reading the feed the usual way.

        2. Socks says:

          I second Feedly.

          RSS feeds make the job of tracking website updates so much easier.
          And I can read them at a time and place that suits me.

          Google had Google Reader for a long time, but shut it down.
          I moved to The Old Reader temporarily, but it became cumbersome in its UI.
          Feedly is a very good RSS reader, with apps on iPhone and iPad (and probably Android), as well as a desktop URL.

          The Twentysided RSS feeds seem to always work fine.
          Now that the Diecast podcast feeds work again on Apple, it saves me time in finding the update, downloading, moving to my phone, syncing, and then remembering to clean it up later. Thanks for the effort!

    2. Lee says:

      RSS is an older technology, where websites can post a file that indicates when they have new articles, and the contents of those articles (or a preview). Users (like me) can choose to subscribe to an RSS feed, and using an RSS client (Feedly Reader in my case), get notifications whenever the site has a new article.

      It’s basically a self administered news feed for the users. I couldn’t say how many of Shamus’ readers use RSS, but the site is old enough that it’s likely to be quite a few.

    3. Paul Spooner says:

      I’ve really enjoyed Satisfactory. There are flaws, but I’m overlooking them because it’s an early access title.
      The main difference is Satisfactory is simpler and smaller scale than Factorio.
      Here are the videos I’ve made, if you want to hear more thoughts. Basically Satisfactory Let’s Plays.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaKJ3fjc4M0&list=PLszaR-m_1QlqtgsumxSehdki2r2tXD2Eg
      Interesting to note the differences between Shamus and my playstyle. I make messy factories, never use walls, and am still playing on my first save file. Shamus makes big organized buildings, and frequently starts over at the beginning.

      1. Ivan says:

        Nice video, thank you. I’ll probably have to watch some others to see how putting down the belts goes, because that is one thing about Factorio that annoys me, putting down and rotating belts, turning multiple lanes, all that jazz is very clunky in the Factorio interface.

        I did notice some interesting UI features there. Primarily, the fact the power system interface just flat out tells you the capacity. Factorio will tell you drain, and show production as a proportion of the potential capacity, but that is an inexact graphical representation. It’d be nice to just be given a number – this is how much power you can supply if everything is running at once.

        1. Decius says:

          Satisfactory belts are ‘select the start point, select the end point, and if it can go from A to B without going to far, entering the bounding box of some other machine, being too steep, or turning too sharply a ghost appears when you select the destination, and comes into being when you confirm it.

          Valid destinations include structures that do nothing except provide places for conveyors to go, and if you try to end a conveyor on open ground it automatically builds a basic conveyor pole there to hold it.

    4. Ninety-Three says:

      Also, how is Satisfactory, please? I only rarely listen to these podcasts, and in fragments, but at least from what I heard here you do not hate it. But, if I already adore Factorio, why should I try Satisfactory? What does it do that is better?

      It’s Factorio in 3D, in early access. The only thing about the game that that description does not cover is that it is surprisingly pretty. Think the aesthetic that No Man’s Sky wanted to have, only Satisfactory uses hand-authored levels so it’s got none of the bland/empty procedural content issues. Because early access, there’s less to do overall than Factorio, but if you’re into Factorio, the content will last more than long enough to be worth your money.

      Try it if:
      You have played all the Factorio you can stand and want something new to scratch the same itch
      You wish Factorio were prettier
      You want the sense of immersion/presence/whatever that comes from getting to navigate and survey your factory in 3D (I’m not sure how convincing this is, because I wouldn’t have found it very before playing, but Factorio feels almost like programming, writing lines of abstract code, where Satisfactory feels much more like you are building an actual thing that exists)

      1. Ivan says:

        I like the programming aspect of Factorio, more than the in the thick of it creative style stuff. Blueprints, Construction Robots, these are my best friends when I play Factorio. Having said that, that might be due to the kind of annoying clunkiness of the low level manual building mechanics (in Factorio), so as I said in my reply to Paul above, I’ll probably be checking out some more videos to see how Satisfactory handles that.

        Perhaps in future, Factorio will be my go-to for giant factory tesselating goodness, and Satisfactory will be where I go for a bit of resource hunting, exploring, and low level construction. If not, then I probably won’t be checking it out until they put in proper blueprinting mechanics, tbh. Factorio recently put in Updater Blueprints, which are just heavenly, so Satisfactory selling itself to me on its automation just got even harder.

        It IS very pretty, from what I saw, which certainly isn’t a minus. Happily, it’s pretty in what looks like a non-hardcore graphically intensice kind of way, which is good. It’s just colourful and nice looking.

        1. Decius says:

          I can’t imagine an interface for blueprints in Satisfactory that won’t require everything to be fixed to a continuous block of foundations, all above the ground. The edge cases where something just barely fits because the ground is slightly uneven would be a nightmare to resolve when placing on ground that is slightly uneven in a different manner.

  3. Yerushalmi says:

    I feel like I’m actively fighting the system all the time like this, where I have to come up with workarounds to protect my other workarounds because the system is trying to do my thinking for me.

    There is nothing I hate more than technology that thinks that it is smarter than the user.

    1. Joshua says:

      Reminds me of whenever I’m using the current version of Word and it tries to “help” with the formatting. It becomes absolutely horrible whenever I’m pasting something from another source, such as a quote, and all of a sudden the previous two paragraphs change font, font size, indentation, etc. Then I spend several minutes trying to fix it. I’m not sure why this behavior is supposed to be desirable.

      1. Lino says:

        What I love even more is when I paste something from another source, and it borks my entire page, I change the formatting, and then I move on with whatever it is that I’m writing. Then, when I add something before that thing that I pasted, it borks up the page AGAIN! The only thing I love more is when I see this has happened after I’ve already printed the damn thing!

        This is why, whenever I have to paste something from a site, I always paste it in Notepad first, before pasting it over to Word – that seems to solve the issue.

        1. Droid says:

          There’s an “insert text only” command in Word which does exactly that for you: it ignores all the formatting (which Notepad is too dumb to use, so it’s the same step, really) and only gives you the text as if you had typed it in yourself.

          If it’s still in the same place I remember it, it’s in the right-click menu below the standard paste option or in the top bar menu, also somewhere near the normal paste option.

          1. Joshua says:

            Thanks. It looks like I have to select the Paste drop-down arrow, and then the last option under Paste. It looks like I can also do it via the CTRL-ALT-V for Paste Special, but I have to choose Unformated text from the menu. This is in contrast to Excel, where I can do CTRL-ALT-V and then additional letters like V, T, F, etc. to quickly paste special, which I do all of the time at work.

            But my question remains, how is suddenly changing the format of the previous paragraph, or the entire previous page as Lino says, supposed to be desirable behavior? Why would this benefit anyone?

      2. Geebs says:

        Word is teaching you to go write your text in an actual text editor, which is a pretty helpful lesson.

        (Yes, I never got over what’s happened to Word since version 5.1 for Mac)

        1. Kyle Haight says:

          I never got over what happened to Word since version 2.0 for Windows. I guess I’m old school.

        2. Nimrandir says:

          What’s Word? Is it a different shell for your LaTeX compiler?

          1. Geebs says:

            It’s rhyming slang

      3. Decius says:

        Shift-ctrl-V to paste plaintext.

  4. Gresman says:

    I get the weird feeling that I am sort of to blame for some of the creative greetings in the mails.

    But I might be wrong.

    1. tmtvl says:

      It’s been going on since the original run with the SW gang, you just made it popular.

      1. Gresman says:

        Can’T remeber that far back. Even after listening to each episode.
        Just for fun let us keep saluting our icosahedral overlords no matter the origin of the inconsistent way of greeting. :)

  5. Atle says:

    You could try non breaking space, or some utf zero width character. Maybe WP isn’t smart enough to remove those.

    1. Lanthanide says:

      It should work. The whole point of non-breaking spaces is that tools and editors are supposed to treat them like any other alphabetical character, rather than having special whitespace rules like they can do for spaces, tabs and linefeeds etc.

  6. Joe says:

    The download link to the latest episode is broken. The file is there, it’s just 0 bytes. I had to stream the episode instead.

    Insofar that I know any devs of games I play, yes, they’re all middle aged men. There are plenty of women in the PR/marketing side, but the devs tend to be less represented. The one exception is Martyna ‘Outstar’ Zynch. She’s a Polish animator. Worked a little on Witcher 3 before going indie. Though it’s more her personality on Twitter and YT that I like.

    There was another woman at CDPR, though I can’t remember her name. The Filipina, I think. Level designer? I saw her in the Noclip documentary. She had a great personality.

    Paul illustrates an interesting problem about visiting the good old Pirate Bay. If I had any experience in that field, I would suggest using a VPN. But of course this is hypothetical.

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      Interestingly, VPN doesn’t protect you from discovery when you’re downloading a torrent. The packet timing pattern (over a period of minutes or hours) forms a signature that the seeding entity can submit to the ISP for end-user matching. Usually all that happens is the ISP sends you a warning e-mail if you’re matched more than once a month or so, but I imagine they could press charges if they felt it was getting out of control.

      1. Ivan says:

        Wait, the seeding entity can do that? The one that, as far as I can tell, is more criminally liable than the leecher? Interesting.

        1. Fred says:

          What entity are you referring to here? The person downloading the torrent is violating the law, the VPN operator is either complicit or doesn’t know that a torrent’s being downloaded, and the ISP is covering their butts, by getting the person to stop torrenting. The seeder(s) are different people not yet mentioned.

          1. Paul Spooner says:

            As I mentioned in the show, Disney seeds torrents of their content. Probably others do as well. That’s “the seeding entity” I was referring to.

            1. Decius says:

              I would be interested in seeing Disney attempt to sue someone for downloading a file that Disney was uploading.

      2. Decius says:

        For the infringed party to press charges or open a civil lawsuit, they would have to go through several additional steps just to identify the individual. They would also have to convince a prosecutor to care.

        The ISP has no standing to do either.

  7. Chad Miller says:

    The embedded player isn’t working for me in this post (Safari, iOS)

  8. tmtvl says:

    Yeah, not skipping any dialogue in Skyrim would make it a very slow and long-winded experience. Kinda like FFX with its unskippable cutscenes.

    GDQ had romscout on a couple of times to run Castlevania:SotN while literally blindfolded a couple of times. Definitely worth a watch.

  9. Chad Miller says:

    Re: Underlords – apparently it’s Valve’s attempt at creating an official version of a popular Dota 2 fan mod: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dota_Auto_Chess

    Re: Dialogue that only ends if you skip it – South Park: The Stick of Truth actually has a gag like that. Jimmy has a stutter and there are a few places where he won’t stop until you press the Skip Dialogue button.

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      Count on South Park to get there first.

    2. The Rocketeer says:

      This seems to be the intent of the extremely long krogan tirade in Mass Effect 2; the game is just begging you to literally pull the trigger on that interrupt.

  10. John says:

    Ah, the tangled history of DOTA Underlords. It is written that:

    In the beginning, there was DOTA Auto Chess, a mod for DOTA. And, lo, it was popular. And the mod team saw that it was popular, and resolved to make a similar but DOTA-less mobile app that they might profit thereby. Likewise, Valve saw that it was popular and so they went unto the the mod team and spoketh to them thus: “Let us collaborate. You shall make an Auto Chess mobile app and we shall make an official DOTA PC version called something else. Underlords, maybe. Underpants? Ah, we’ll figure it out.” And it was so, and all was well.

    Yeah, except then the mod team announced that they were also going to make a PC version of DOTA-less Auto Chess. Oh, and by what must surely be a strange coincidence the League of Legends bunch announced a new League of Legends spinoff called Teamfight Tactics. Interesting times in Auto Chess land are ahead.

    1. Decius says:

      AscendedMod, twice: A standalone game made based on a mod based on a game based on a mod of a game.

  11. JDMM says:

    The problem I sort of have with EA is I can only defend them by what aboutism which is to say they are bad but they’re entertainment company bad, there’s worse things such as pick your poison (Tobacco? Pharmaceuticals? Mainframe providers?)

    But it’s a losing battle, my devastating counter of “but have you considered other companies are bad?” doesn’t really affect people

    1. Ninety-Three says:

      Half of the EA hate is that they’ve become the poster child for lootboxes, tacked-on multiplayer, and various other practices that a lot of consumers hate and a lot of consumers (some of them the same people as the first group) keep giving money to. Insofar as people have a problem with those practices, their problem is either with the fact that companies exist to serve market demand (in which case take it to the politics forum), or that other people keep buying games that they personally don’t like (in which case suck it up, be like me and restrain your contempt to occasional snide remarks about other people’s plebeian tastes).

      The other half of the hate is that there’s a narrative going that EA are bumbling incompetents who turn everything they touch into lead. When bad things happen in a studio linked to EA, everyone from comments section randos to influential journalism personalities blames EA, and then when it comes out that Bioware messed up the ME3 ending all on their own, no one issues retractions because that’s not how the internet works. So the next time something bad happens at an EA studio, people will remember the time they were mad at EA about ME3 and use that as evidence that EA is to blame for Anthem too. No one will issue retractions when Jason Schreier reveals Bioware messed up that one all on their own, and the circle of life confirmation bias continues.

      1. Distec says:

        It’s been so many years, but my recollection was that ME3’s ending debacle was laid squarely at Bioware’s feet. At the very least, people like Casey Hudson and BW’s writing staff got singled out; especially after it was made known that the ending was basically napkin-drafted at the 11th hour. There might have been some grumblings about EA on the margins (ie. “Maybe BW had to rush the ending due to EA’s constraints?” accusations), but the consensus seemed to be that it was mostly the developer who majorly shit the bed. Although you’re right that EA probably also got tarnished further just by mere association.

        It’s their most recent title – Anthem – where I’ve seen the phenomenon you describe play out. Don’t get me wrong; having the EA label on your box probably has good predictive power as to how much of a shitshow you’re about to get into. But the reflexive tendency to blame almost everything about the game on EA got totally divorced from reality, and people seemingly forgot that Bioware has been an engine of disappointment for more than a few years now. And so the meme that “EA ruins everything” has become unmoored from the ground.

        It’s annoying. But I’m willing to give a pass on the false positive for now since EA has done a lot to engender animosity and mistrust. I would hate for the meme to persist past its usefulness if EA suddenly made an about-face and became an amazing, quality game company that respects its audiences. Thankfully, I don’t think that’s something I’ll ever have to worry about.

        1. galacticplumber says:

          When the business is hot you can do no wrong. When the business is cold you can do no right. Spend literally decades in an ever-escalating campaign buy up studios, gradually let the talent go, mismanage them, or both before eventually pulling the plug all while jumping headfirst onto any horrible business practice you can find? You don’t deserve forgiveness. You deserve to go out of business. That’s my position with them.

          There’s no magic series of actions they can take to self-redeem. Just cease existing so they’ll stop effecting the industry, and I can someday forget they ever existed.

          1. Ninety-Three says:

            If I had written half of those things in describing the circle of confirmation bias, it would have looked like a strawman so thank you for writing them sincerely.

            1. galacticplumber says:

              Confirmation bias is avoiding acknowledging evidence conflicting your point. That is not what is happening above. It is a statement that there does not exist, and cannot physically exist, enough evidence, in this case good deeds done, to meaningfully effect the outcome.

              The difference? Show as much as you like. Source it well and I’ll even believe it’s accurate. It’s just not ENOUGH.

              1. Ninety-Three says:

                My mistake, you merely hate them more than is physically possible to correct. Don’t know why I thought that was related.

      2. Matthew Downie says:

        There are other reasons for EA hate, such as their history of treating their employees badly.

        From the “EA Spouse” blog:

        “Within weeks production had accelerated into a ‘mild’ crunch: eight hours six days a week… the team was told that this “pre-crunch” was to prevent a big crunch toward the end; at this point any other need for a crunch seemed unlikely, as the project was dead on schedule… The producers even set a deadline; they gave a specific date for the end of the crunch… When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.

        Weeks passed. Again the producers had given a termination date on this crunch that again they failed. Throughout this period the project remained on schedule… The managers stopped even talking about a day when the hours would go back to normal.

        Now, it seems, is the “real” crunch, the one that the producers of this title so wisely prepared their team for by running them into the ground ahead of time. The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm — seven days a week — with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm)…

        EA salaried employees receive a) no overtime; b) no compensation time!; c) no additional sick or vacation leave…

        This crunch also differs from crunch time in a smaller studio in that it was not an emergency effort to save a project from failure. Every step of the way, the project remained on schedule. Crunching neither accelerated this nor slowed it down; its effect on the actual product was not measurable. The extended hours were deliberate and planned; the management knew what they were doing as they did it.”

      3. shoeboxjeddy says:

        That’s not what the Kotaku article said though. It said that they badly needed technical help with the engine, but were last priority because FIFA lootboxes were worth more to the company. They were made promises of how using Frostbite would go, then EA systematically broke those promises. How is that “they failed all on their own” exactly?

  12. shoeboxjeddy says:

    I haven’t listened to the show, but your understanding of DOTA Underlords seems incorrect. It’s a CCG in the sense that you’re drafting preset characters, but the name of the mod it’s based on gives you a much better understanding of what kind of game it is (Auto Chess). This is not a “buy loot boxes to get amazing cards” kind of game like Hearthstone. It’s a free to play game with no gameplay affecting microtransactions where the gameplay is much more about memorizing beneficial combos of units, items, and teams and trying to create a really good one on the fly, having to deal with the whims of RNG as you go. And the popularity of this seems to be exploding really quickly, as every competing version of this all have a bunch of players raring to go. The “this is too late” thing doesn’t really make any sense. That’d be like seeing DOTA 2, LOL, and Heroes of the Storm all coming out and going “does anyone even want to play this new genre of game, isn’t it too late for this… new thing to be popular?”

    1. John Salt says:

      Don’t worry, they’ll throw in microtransactions eventually…

      1. shoeboxjeddy says:

        It seems extremely likely that there will be skins for the characters and how the field looks and how your avatar looks. And to my mind, that stuff is fine so long as it’s not in the form of loot boxes. Direct purchases only please. And also, that the game remains free to play and doesn’t add power gaining items to the items to buy. If it’s free, it needs some way to generate revenue and offering cosmetic changes for direct purchase is perfectly legitimate in my eyes. It’s in adding gambling or pay to win that it would draw my ire.

        1. Mistwraithe says:

          Or “pay to not waste your time”. That seems unlikely in this genre though (it’s how most single player free to play games squeeze their money out of people).

          1. shoeboxjeddy says:

            Yeah, for this specific game, I don’t think so. There’s no timer element to it. And selling playing pieces would break the game completely. It would be like if you logged on to play online chess, and it said you could either pay $5 to unlock bishops or unlock them slowly over time with level ups. Like Rocket League, the game part of this game is relatively sound. They can of course add tons of undesirable money grubbing AROUND the prestine game (…like Rocket League ended up doing).

        2. Decius says:

          I would like a model of “Gain lootboxes through play or MTX, or buy any specific thing that you want through MTX”.

          I’d also love a $100 “buy the entire game” model to go with most f2p games, but I don’t know if it would attract enough people to make up for the revenue hit from the whales.

          1. Ninety-Three says:

            Faeria went with that model initially: freemium grind, standard “give us two bucks for one pack of cards” microtransactions, plus an option to pay $50 or $100 (I forget which) to buy a playset of every card. They removed the option very early in, and I can only assume that decision was based on market research about profitability. Maybe the economics work out differently if you’re doing it at Hearthstone scale, but the early results don’t look promising.

  13. The Unforgiven says:

    The RSS link is to an old episode. Can’t remember which one, but it was the one that begins by you talking about a poll you made, the results thereof, and how the number of people who comment are only 5-10 percent of the people who read and/or listen.

  14. psychicprogrammer says:

    If you want something really safe to torrent to try it out, how about linux? most distros have an official torrent you can download from their website. Eg ubuntu’s https://torrent.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/xenial/release/desktop/

    1. Gresman says:

      Albums on OCRemix are also provided as torrents.
      With that option you get nice music as well.

      1. Paul Spooner says:

        OcRemix ftw. Write in about it and we can play some tracks in the background!

        1. Gresman says:

          Can do. :)
          There is some awesome stuff out there.
          I forgot to write in my latest inquiry.

          The Turles album is quite nice as are the castlevania ones. It definitely helps that the original music is cool.

  15. Will says:

    Sorry for asking such a downer question to round out the podcast.

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You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

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