T w e n t y S i d e d
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast359
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
00:00 Filament
Why was this game not called String Theory?
15:29 Mailbag: New World Drama
Dear Diecast,
So, the Syndicate faction (purple) on my New World server just had their first bit of major drama today—the guild leader of The Olympians, the guild that has held Everfall since the game started and thus was a very rich, popular guild, took THE ENTIRE guild treasury and switched factions with some of their guild officers, then immediately used that treasury to declare war on Everfall.
Faction chat is blowing up with the story, the guild—now led by someone who hasn’t been on in days, so there’s no one to pull the group together—is hemorrhaging members, and my guild may just wind up the new premiere area controlling guild as a result.
It’s an interesting server—there’s a major PVP Syndicate guild that doesn’t go after territories on their own. What they do, is they hire themselves out to the guilds that DO have territories to fight in their wars. From what I’ve seen, they haven’t lost one yet. We actually just hired them to defend OUR territory, because we’re getting attacked by a major PVP guild and don’t have enough high-level players yet.
The drama kinda reminds me of what you were talking about with your Goldshire post, and makes me think New World is, indeed, going to be pretty successful.
Have you seen any drama on your server(s)?
I’m on Argadnel btw if you’d like to come join in the fun.
Jennifer Snow
A small gripe: This game only allows you 2 characters per server. I already have 2 characters playing on the East Coast, which means I can’t make more. The excuse is that you don’t “need” more than one character because there aren’t any classes and any character can do any job. Which sounds nice, but you have to respec your skill points and get a whole different set of gear to switch from (say) healing to damage-dealing. That’s a huge pain in the ass, and I’d just as soon keep different characters.
Maybe I want one character to play with family, another to play with friends from work, and another for solo, because I want each group of people to stay in the same level range.
Maybe I want one character for PvE content, another for PvP, and another for weird experimental solo play.
Remember when games would let you create a dozen different characters? I notice our allowed slots began shrinking about ten years ago, right when free-to-play was really taking off and they realized they could sell us character slots.
I hate this. The future sucks.
20:21 New World Currency Crisis
Money is leaving the economy faster than it’s being created, which means money is scarce. Which means the game is suffering from a deflationary crisis.
Normally people trade goods using the in-game auction house, and the auction house takes a little cut. Sure, you could spam chat, trying to sell your goods without giving a cut to the AH, but that’s a lot of hassle to save a few gold, which you could raise in a couple of minutes of grinding.
But now that money is precious, the AH cut represents a lot more value. Maybe you’d need to work for half an hour to make it back. So now it’s worth the time and trouble to sell goods manually.
Which leads to the question: Why is this only happening now?
On the show I theorized that this was the result of towns having more upkeep. All the city infrastructure has been upgraded, which means that it costs more per day to keep the city going. Maybe this is draining money out of the economy faster than a few weeks ago?
Or maybe the constant PvP warfare is draining money? I don’t know how the large-scale stuff works so I don’t know what it costs or who pays for it. Still, if war was a money-sink then it seems like people would stop spending money on war. Yes, I realize we have this problem in the Real World™ too, but in the real world lots of people make money from war and there are real resources at stake. In the game, war is expensive, there’s no money to be made, and controlling a region doesn’t give you anything except bragging rights and a second job running the damn place.
Or did one of these recent patches throttle back on how fast money enters the economy?
In most MMOs, your income scales with level. A quest might pay (say) thirty cents at level 1, 3 dollars at level 10, and 300 dollars at level 20. But here in NW, income seems to be very linear, and perhaps even flat. I did some grinding last night, killing level 20 foes. Most of them dropped no money, but once in a whileMaybe one in eight? One in ten? someone would drop 5g. Then I did some grinding of foes that were level 30, and got similar results. Then I found an area with foes at level 7 and repeated the experiment, and found that foes dropped ~3.7g.
This creates some weird incentives. If I want money, it’s more efficient to run around one-shotting zero-threat foes than it is to engage with level-appropriate content. Is this intentional?
I don’t know. It’s weird. All of this began just as I started playing a faction-less crafting maven, so I’m having trouble following the problem because I’m disconnected from half the economy.
32:27 Mailbag: Tech Ahead of its Time
Dear Diecast,
I hope you’re doing well! Recently, I watched a video about Sir Clive Sinclair (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwJqOt2SOls) – a British inventor who made micro-computers and other electronics in the ’70s and ’80s. His company ultimately went under, because they made an electric scooter that was just too ahead of its time. This made me wonder – have there been any products – could be both hardware or software – that you think were too ahead of their time, and – had they been made a decade or two later would have killed it?
Keep Being Awesome,
Lino
Here is the vlogbrothers video I mentioned:
Link (YouTube) |
45:35 Mailbag: Evolving Tastes
Hm. I seem to have messed this one up. I got caught up talking about the opening paragraph and forgot to answer the question. Oopsie.
Dear Diecast,
I was wondering if any of you have already watched the currently newest popular series, called ‘Squid game’. It’s the type of realistic-ish sort of anti-utopia (dystopia?) Netflix seems so fond of making. I’d love to read a series on its worldbuilding too *wink wink*
I was also wondering, since both of you have been gaming for a while now, if your tastes in what kind of games you like best have evolved over time?
Kind regards,
Galad_t
47:48 Mailbag: Cosmetic Appeal
Dear Diecast,
lately I have been distracted in my DS2 100% run by a dreadful enemy: Fashion Souls.
In short I have succumbed to the appeal of dressing up my character in a mix-and-match of the various pieces of armour and clothing the game offers. In Dragon’s Dogma I also succumbed to Fashion Dogma, as it’s called in that fandom.
Do you guys have games where playing dress-up with your character or customising your car/plane/submarine/… can become a time sink? I believe some people like Skyrim for that, but I’d be interested in hearing your opinions.
Vale,
-Tim
Footnotes:
[1] Maybe one in eight? One in ten?
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
The only major time I got hit with fashion souls was Xcom. I really wanted to personalize my soldiers and when Xcom 2 released it came with a bunch of cosmetic dlc which I bought. I had tons of fun making each soldier unique. But then you get to the next tier of armor and all the cosmetic items become invalid. Your whole team is forced into identical suits of power armor. Really annoyed the heck out of me and is one more reason why I like 1 over 2. Also they added more languages but they still haven’t provided a single ASIAN language. Look I don’t care if they only give Japanese or Korean, whatever. I’d give it to all my Asian soldiers since I can’t speak any of those languages anyway. But no instead I need to make them be English, or French, or German…Italian. Like give me a freaking Asian language you trogs.
Xcom 2’s soldier customisation options included cigarettes as cosmetics, which annoyed me no end. It was an unusually irresponsible decision for a game released in 2016.
Given that said game also naturally included machine guns and high explosives, I do not think a cigarette particularly stands out as ‘irresponsible.’
That might seem intuitive, but statistically you’d be completely wrong.
Taking representative figures from a heavily-armed, futuristic dystopia (i.e. the USA in the late 2010s):
– Cigarette-related deaths per year: 480,000, of which 41,000 from passive smoking.
– Firearms-related deaths per year: 38,000 of which 60% self inflicted.
A resident of the USA is approximately two times more likely to die from somebody else’s cigarette smoke than from somebody else’s bullet.
That’s a really interesting thing to learn and I would also like to preempt rash comments by reminding everyone to please not get into political flamewars.
As the commander said to Admiral Piett…
I think that there is a significant difference in how those deaths are weighed. Something like (Trying to avoid any politics here, just looking to illustrate) a mass shooting killing 15 people would lead the news for weeks, even if 28 people died from drunk driving that same day just as a daily average, and something like 9/11 reshaped the entire country with three thousand deaths, while there are tens of thousands of deaths from obesity-related causes annually. I think it would certainly be the case that there would be a great deal more concern over a rise in bombings or mass shootings than an increase in cigarette sales. (Though, in fairness to your point, that is arguably at least somewhat due to humans not being great at objective risk assessment.)
I do think there’s an important distinction in this particular case, though. The theory that videogame violence influences players to commit real-world violence really isn’t supported by the available research. Conversely, there is a much larger body of evidence to show that media depictions of smoking influence teenagers to smoke.
So basically, games with guns in them don’t make kids violent, but games which include positive representations of smoking (like, say, having the heroes smoke) do make kids more likely to smoke.
I believe there was research that showed that depiction of violence in media was correlated to a greater sense of anxiety in people, although the difference did not appear to be statistically relevant according to a one-sample t test.
The study you cited appears to undermine your point if you read through it. Quoting it directly:
Ethical considerations preclude experimental studies that would expose youth to marketing and media to see whether they would initiate tobacco use. However, laboratory and field-based experiments have shown that media portrayals of violence in films (low engagement) and video games (high engagement) produce subsequent violent attitudes and behaviors in children and adolescents. The causal relationship between violent media and behavior makes it plausible that tobacco marketing and media also affect behavior.
It certainly is not true that playing Call of Duty turns one into a murderer, but it is likewise not true that a character smoking a cigarette makes one into a chainsmoker. The effects are likely relatively marginal in either case, but the cited study does not seem to indicate that there is a major difference between the effects of the two in media, smoking v. violence. I am sure there are plenty of other studies finding plenty of other results on both topics, but at least going off of yours, and generally speaking, the reasonable conclusion would seem to be that video game violence likely marginally increases violent tendencies in aggregate, and video game smoking likely marginally increases the odds of smoking in aggregate.
Which does give you a point given the game’s T rating. Perhaps a failure of the ERSB rather than the game? But still something you might prefer to have not been included, as (what could be considered by some) an unsavoury element we wish to fade from society but that is still pervasive, like, say, binge drinking, domestic violence or various forms of harassment.
At the same time, as an adult who does not smoke and will not smoke any more than he would shoot someone, it’s a cool feature I could use for my stylish soldiers.
I don’t know. It seems to me to fulfill the purpose of cosmetics rather well. Cosmetics exist to be able to create characters with a certain look, and it is both the case that people in real life smoke, and that a lot of famous characters in fiction smoked. So allowing the player to customize a character to look like a real-life person they know, or even themselves, or a famous character seems to be just what cosmetics are SUPPOSED to do. And since the game doesn’t force you to use that customization or even to use cigarettes as items for a purpose it doesn’t seem like it’s promoting cigarette smoking, which is what would be considered irresponsible.
Lol the schoolmarm convention is next week.
Your second hand smoking stats are also unsupported by any actual science. Not that smoking is good but it’s a real thing and goddamn it we’re allowed to have vices still. Normal people like to have options, and you trying to censor things will not lead to a better world.
Dude, feel free to smoke your lungs out. I won’t try to stop you. Just be aware that the position that smoking is a harmless vice is one that you have been deliberately sold and that there is a wealth of objective evidence that, in the case of tobacco, censorship does, in fact lead to a better world.
This is an interesting slope you’ve constructed. Are you sure this is safe? Seems a little slippery.
You make a case for banning tobacco advertising, and from there jump to “games should never depict characters smoking”. Even when we’re talking about optional DLC on a game that is already rated M?
What’s next? Skyrim won’t let your character enter the water for a half hour after eating 500 cheese wheels? Maybe a big warning pops up to remind Max Payne to not operate heavy machinery after he eats pills to cure his bullet wounds? Should we demand that id adds a cutscene where The Doom Marine eats a well-balanced breakfast before he murders seven hundred demons? We don’t want kids to skip breakfast! Let’s petition Rockstar to make it so characters must always put away their cellphone before they’re allowed to drive down the sidewalk in a stolen semi.
Yes, there might be some people who are unable to detect and process fiction. I don’t think we need to make all of our art for them.
That would be funny, “You’ve just eaten [500] Cheese Wheels. Please wait 1 hour before swimming.”
“Your stomach is over-encumbered, you may not run for 1 hour.”
Part of me really wants to know how it would handle integer overflow.
The game scolding you for eating negative cheese wheels would be great.
If the wait was proportional, I wonder what shenanigans you could get up to.
If the wait time was proportional then it too could overflow. “Please wait -596 hours before swimming.”
“You ate -79 cheese wheels, please wait 1073741827 hours before swimming.”
Dovahkiin sighs and forces down another 79 cheese wheels.
The whole hour before you swim thing is a myth anyway. Just like in Korea with fans at night (fear they can lead to death).
I would love to see a Mass Effect where Shepard cannot romance anyone for fear of all the alien STDs.
Fable II had STDs, as a mild incentive to use the condoms that were also in that game.
Mass Effect 2 also let you romance Morinth, to predictable results.
Really? I have never played Fable 2, but that just feels weird, almost makes one a little uncomfortable for some reason, having that in a game. Which I suppose was probably the point. Interesting!
Mass Effect 2 also contains a scene in which Shepard knowingly gives Tali an STD, and her opinion is that it’s totally worth it. Which is kind of a strange message, thinking back on it.
IS that what happened? As I remember it, Tali’s immune system-response changed between games…mostly so that inter-species sex stopped being ‘fatal’ for Quarians and became ‘inconvenient’.
So what was ‘worth it’ was basically a short-lived cold/rash.
Still, if you’re actually talking about a scene from a DLC, I wouldn’t know.
I do not believe that was an STD, just whatever illness she would get from exposing herself out of the suit, though I may be remembering it wrong.
I think it’s unfair to claim that I’m setting up a slippery slope when I very specifically made the point that the effects of media depictions of smoking are provably distinct from the effects of e.g. videogame violence.
But honestly I mostly wanted to start a thread about strange and counterintuitive statistics. PDTOM talked about how humans are bad at working out relative risks, which got me thinking: how dangerous is a cigarette really, in comparison with a bullet? It’s actually quite interesting (I think, but I’m a nerd, YMMV). You can’t really get numbers on consumption of cigarettes or bullets, but you can probably assume that it’s proportional to sales, since the rates at which these goods are sold are pretty static. So, the USA buys about 250 billion cigarettes a year, and about 10 billion bullets. If you plug those numbers into the mortality statistics, that works out at about 1.9 deaths per million cigarettes sold versus about 3.8 deaths per million bullets sold. Which would mean that one pack of cigarettes is about as dangerous as 10 bullets.
You keep citing statistics, but you’re completely ignoring the basics, like age, rating and such. If a game is rated “M” it means it considers the players are mature enough to make their own decisions. And true, this isn’t necessarily how it goes. People often make terrible choices regardless of their age but censoring stuff is not going to make people less dumb. If after decades of people knowing very well the effects of cigarettes they’re still being consumed you’re not going to make it stop by refusing to show it in a videogame. You need a complete overhaul of current society’s education for that and good luck with that.
Furthermore, in the example you’re giving it makes even less sense. Cigarettes being an optional cosmetic means that they’re likely to only be used by those who already like them. It’s not like they’re deliberately tied to a character one considers “cool” (like, say, Solid Snake). These are all characters with basically no personality to speak of and whose look is dictated by the player. No one’s going to put a cigarette on a character, play with them for a few hours and then think “Holy shit, this guy’s so cool! I’m gonna buy me a pack of smokes to look just like him!”
Xcom2 isn’t actually rated “Mature”, though, is it? Amusingly enough, it’s rated “Teen” by the ESRB for, among other things, tobacco use.
I already covered your other point elsewhere, but you can just look up the CDC, Cochrane, WHO etc. reports.
Wow, those numbers are wild, I suppose I never thought about the cigarette one in particular, I guess I underestimated the amount an average smoker uses. Your idea is a very interesting (if morbid) one, sales v. deaths. Alcohol would be an interesting one, but you could do it by price as well, just a quick look shows c. $250 billion in sales vs. c. 95,000 deaths, if you just extreme-spitball at a dollar a drink, it would be the safest one, .38 deaths per million sales. Gasoline would be interesting too, 124 billion gallons to 36,000 deaths, average a death for every 34 million gallons, though if you make it by car instead (which is obviously a little different), over two thousand deaths per million cars sold.
You could do some silly/weird stuff with numbers like that. Apparently there are about 10 million swimming pools in the U.S. and c. 400 deaths, which makes your average pool much deadlier than the average cigarette or bullet, though you could maybe make a better comparison with something like gallons of chlorine, perhaps. I suppose, especially since the majority of the ‘bullet’ deaths are self-inflicted, one could also find some more morbid statistics on other items used in suicide.
So how do you feel about alcohol in games, do you want to ban it too because liver disease is a serious problem?
And on a nerdier note, most of those bullet deaths you’re counting are suicides, which have some replaceability (if someone really wants to kill themselves, a gun ban will just result in them jumping off a bridge, exactly how many people will be discouraged is impossible to know), while cigarettes are probably not filling some fungible desire for self-destruction. So bullets to cigarettes is an unfair comparison: it’s like saying gas cars kill more people per mile than diesel so we should ban gas, as though that wouldn’t result in the unsafe gas drivers switching to become unsafe diesel drivers.
I am not sure if this is a reply to me or Geebs (is there an easier way to see that? I cannot really tell with the way the comments are laid out), but just in case, I am not in favor of banning showing any of these things in games, particularly given that we already have a rating system, it is just interesting to look at the numbers, and especially how they do or do not match up with most people’s everyday perceptions of how dangerous things are.
Replying to Geebs, the layout is pretty narrow but it is visible if you look closely, mouse over the top left corner of my post and notice that it’s at the same indentation level as your post immediately above it (at least this works until we hit max reply depth, which this thread is just about at).
Ah, thanks!
The effectiveness of alcohol prohibition isn’t anywhere near as well studied as tobacco, but there was a huge reduction in both death from liver cirrhosis and alcohol-related mental health issues post-1920’s Prohibition which actually persisted after the ban was relaxed. However, in this century, the situation has changed and the most common indication for liver transplant is actually non-alcoholic fatty liver disease related to diabetes and obesity, so the potential benefits to public health are arguably less. The key difference is, there is far less evidence for media exposure to alcohol affecting drinking behaviour than for cigarettes, perhaps because coverage of alcohol has historically focussed more on the negative aspects. So, no, I don’t think the potential benefits are anywhere near as clear in the case of alcohol.
I’m also old enough to remember when videogames started with the FBI’s “winners don’t do drugs” splash screen, and I don’t believe anybody ever believed those worked.
I kind of want to stay away from a discussion of firearms for reasons which should be obvious, but note that I have repeatedly pointed out that videogame violence in any form does not demonstrably lead to real-world violence.
The interesting thing about the assumption that being against cigarette advertising means also being some sort of universal censorship advocate who “just wants to ban everything” is that it’s a narrative straight out of John W. Hill’s playbook, that has been pushed so hard by the tobacco advertising industry over the last seventy years that it’s now completely embedded in the public consciousness. Look him up, he was genuinely impressive.
That’s not because you’re against cigarette advertising, it’s because you’re against M-rated cigarette cosmetic DLC.
Yeah, I thought that’s where you were going with this. The thing is, it doesn’t matter; this particular battle has already been fought, and the Censorship Brigade won. The number of games with an ESRB rating for “tobacco use” sharply decline after 2016 (the year XCom 2 came out), to about a tenth of what they were previously. Apparently the industry is against cigarette cosmetic DLC, too.
What a shame.
/JC
These are definitely interesting numbers! I believe Ireland has made all films that include smoking automatically rated 18 for the last few years. I’m not sure if they’ve gone retrospectively into older films.
For instance, according to official mortality records, your chance of dying to a horse (or even a cow) in Australia is several times higher than your chance of dying to rabies in the US, but guess which one people are more scared of.
But the bovine murder rate falls disproportionately on farmers, since they’re the ones spending time around cows. Joe Average has much lower odds of death by cow, and similarly low odds of death by horse if he doesn’t own a horse.
More Rodeomen I’d think. And city slickers trying to tip cows.
I wonder if that statistic includes bad beef.
Or good beef.
I thought something similar when I read Geebs’ original comment (I have no desire to see all classic films made into 18+ content due to cigarette use) so looked up the age rating to see if this was already factored into who can access it easily – and interestingly the game appears to be rated T for Teen (14+) in the US, and interestingly this rating does make reference to the use of tobacco.
The reviews by presumably American parents here look like they make reference mainly to the violence and horror content.
It is PEGI 16 in Europe PEGI and the rating does not make any reference to the smoking.
Insert joke about european smoking here. I’m from the UK and vaguely remember smoking sections in pubs / restaurants, and am now used to the smoking ban, so it was a culture shock in Germany (which has also rated this 16) seeing smoking “areas” delineated by a line on the ground on train platforms (smoke travels in a vertical column dontchaknow), smoking rooms in shopping centres, and cigarette vending machines on the street.
I’m not sure where I stand on this, but I can see the argument against a game with an age rating of 14 having an option to make characters look cool (as most cosmetics are presumably used for) by using cigarettes, when the smoking age is 18 in its native country, and smoking is well known to be considered cool by youths and habits typically formed as a result of this image, and is unanimously advised as being bad for health by governments and health organisations.
Of course it’s probably not the game’s fault that it was rated what it was rated… but I suppose it was their choice to give that as a specific customisation option, I can see why it would irk someone. In the way that it might irk someone if a customisation were to point the gun at one’s head and pretend to commit suicide, or to say or do something bigoted – generally considered to be bad, could be considered tasteless, perfectly possible to see it purely as fiction and not be influenced, also possible to be influenced or be seen as tacit promotion of unwanted behaviour that does exist in society.
Difficult one I’d say, don’t know if anyone would care if it were someone munching on a cheeseburger.
There is a key difference, though, between mechanisms that rely on the person already thinking it cool and mechanisms that could inspire someone who doesn’t think it cool to see it as cool. In this case, it’s clear that the mechanism only triggers for people who already think it cool, as long as you need to add that cosmetic to characters and none of the “cool” characters start with it. In that case, it’s hard to argue against including it because, again, only people who already think it cool will use it anyway, and it’s a useful option to make a character look like real-life people or famous characters.
In general, I find this distinction isn’t made enough for “bad things” that a game might have. Games are always driven by the players, and so if there’s an action that’s “bad” you can’t claim the game encourages it if the only players who would do it are ones that want to do it for some reason that either requires them to already find the action desirable or else is based on considerations that aren’t related to that action and so aren’t likely to get them to think that that “bad” action is really “good”. In games, unlike in movies, why a player does something is really, really important and is too often ignored in these sorts of analyses.
The funny part is that the XCOM cigarette/cigar cosmetics aren’t even “cool” looking. Like, I’ve never smoked because for as long as I can remember it was drilled into my head that HEY ACTUALLY SMOKING IS REALLY BAD FOR YOU and I can appreciate good advice, but even as a kid I remember occasionally mimicking “smoking” (with appropriately long and slender snack foods) around other kids, because of glamorized representations we’d seen in media.
The XCOM cigarette is anything but glamorous. It hangs limply out of the side of your soldier’s mouth, awkwardly clipping through their lip. It’s about as un-cool and un-sexy looking as you can get. They never glamorously blow a cloud of smoke, or interact with it in any sort of cool way, it’s basically just a prop pasted on to their face. As mentioned I don’t smoke, but I don’t have an objection to fictional characters doing so—but I’ve literally never used that cosmetic (or the cigar) on a soldier because it just looks so bad. If anything, it would put me off smoking even more.
And equally, not all characters ought to be a pillar of moral (or indeed health) virtue in all media accessible to those under the age of 18/16/14/12 etc, any more than they should all espouse the same opinions. Perhaps he smokes due to the stresses of war, or for any of the reasons that so many people smoke in real life (apparently 1/5 worldwide).
Though we are pretty strict on the depiction of illegal drug use (Karate Kid was originally a 15 in the UK because of the potential implied rolling of a joint haha!), but then tobacco isn’t illegal.
In terms of your point about things that encourage use vs things that are available but would require previous encouragement to be appealing, smoking itself always seemed like a funny example of that in some ways to me – if you’ve never had it before it’s like a horrible mouthful of… well, smoke – it’s only once one is addicted that it becomes enjoyable, so there is no incentive or reason to start (other than coolness I guess) unless you particularly want a new habit or form of recreation in your life. The barrier to entry is way too high for me. The one time I tried a roll up I burnt the back of my throat life a fool, and a cigar tasted like a mouthful of ash.
The state of Vermont will NOT apologize for cheddar cheese!
FYI, Damiac didn’t say smoking is a harmless vice. They said that SECOND HAND SMOKING isn’t supported by actual science. Try reading the text properly next time.
Secondhand smoking being bad is supported by actual science. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/secondhand_smoke/general_facts/index.htm
Apart from science, it seems logical that the smoke coming from a cigarette does not become 100% harmless just because the one holding the cigarette hasn’t inhaled it.
The best thing about XCOM2’s comsetic gear?
There are probably over a dozen (free!) cosmetic mods that were as good – if not better – than the paid DLC.
Partly that’s a personal thing – I think the cosmetic DLC looks like bad Mad Max ripoffs, whereas the mod that lets your soldiers wear saucepans as helmets was right up my street – but, still…a lot of the free mods could be worn at all tiers, could be intergrated with other mods, all sorts of stuff.
If nothing else, get the mod (can’t remember the name and can’t look it up right now, but I know it exists) that makes your cosmetic changes override gear changes, so your soldiers don’t change appearance with different gear levels. But I absolutely agree, there are a ton of incredible cosmetic mods out there. I got all the DLC cosmetic options, but I hardly use them in favor of modded ones.
One time I hired on five new recruits and every one of them arrived wearing hotpants. Really, what are the odds?
Clearly you recruited them from a strip/burlesque club that ADVENT shut down. They were literally turned out in nothing but their work clothes.
(If that happened to me, I would totally give them all stripper-themed nicknames and pretend that ‘ex-stripper’ was their collective backstory.)
Damn, I miss this randomness – it’s something the XCOM games did well.
While I’m a subscriber and so things might be different for subscribers, in TOR they’ve actually given me more character slots over the past few years. I figured I might have to delete one of my old characters to start a new one, but there are enough slots around for me to be pretty close to being able to create enough for two run-throughs. Given what we talked about last week, TOR seems to be bucking the trends that are happening in other MMOs.
For me, I’ve been gaming for quite a while — back to the Atari 2600 days — but due to evolving technologies and my access to them I’ve moved from action and strategy games with some CRPGs to CRPGs and mostly JRPGs. I always liked story in my games — I would play games like Master of Orion 2 hotseat and play out a bit of a story — but it’s only the later CRPGs and JRPGs that were able to really give me that.
I don’t listen to the podcasts — it’s easier for me to read than it is for me to watch/listen to things — but I’d imagine that they mentioned Saint’s Row and City of Heroes, which are the biggest ones for me. Creating customized characters is what made City of Heroes a game where I ran a ton of alts and never got very far in the game. In Saint’s Row (the Third and IV), there were major sections of the game where I ran around trying to buy the clothing stores so I could see what options they gave for my character. Fortunately for me, the driving gameplay was the most fun for me anyway, so it wasn’t really a waste from my perspective.
I think part of the reason why TOR ended up having more slots is the server merge/condensing that they had a while back, which, depending on how many characters you had on the different servers, either gave you extra space to work with or left you with two dozen characters for I believe fourteen slots, though I have not played for a while. I was also a subscriber, though, so I also cannot say what it is like for free players, I know it used to be only two slots some time back.
Sort of coincidentally, a game that seems to be quite good with giving you a number of character slots is Star Trek Online, which seems to add a new free slot with every expansion, I think it is up to eight or so (though there are enough factions that there is not all that much extra space.)
Saints Row 3 not only gave you a huge range of dress options, but gave you Respect (experience points) for buying different outfits, which gave you an incentive to change up your look occasionally and wear the more ridiculous options.
Thank you for answering my question! And although I’m not a big fan of the Vlog Brothers, that video was really interesting! Related to that, I recommend watching this Kurzgesagt video on fixing climate change. I think it’s quite a refreshing perspective (and it’s also really well animated).
Regarding “Fashion Souls”, I’ve never been all that much into customising my character in games. The only one I can remember doing it in is Jedi: Fallen Order, where I really liked mixing and matching different ponchos with a few of my favourite droid paint jobs.
Perversely, the reason I liked it so much was the relatively limited number of options I had, which encouraged me to experiment with different looks.
Fixing something that is normal and natural. Yeah, that’ll work out real well.
One of the defining characteristics of humanity is that we regularly fix things that are normal and natural to suit ourselves.
For various definitions of ‘fix’.
It’s our thing.
Customizing my character is like half the fun for me in an RPG, which is one of the major reasons I stayed with Champions Online for so long (and I still revisit it every few months). But I certainly prefer a game not to have any customization options than a half-assed system where you can only change a color scheme or maybe pick between three different hairstyles.
Champions Online, I must have spent a solid hour in the character creator before I actually started playing. So many options!
Never felt much desire for Fashion Souls, since the game is hard enough that I’m going to wear whatever gives the most plusses. I do get irrationally angry when I only have enough equip load to wear half of a set of armor – I end up wearing an elaborate fantasy helmet and boots with realistic-looking chest armor and it looks ridiculous.
More funny-looking is the fact that, as you increase endurance, you’ll go from wearing a matched set, to wearing the matched set plus the trousers from the next set up, but then change the trousers back once you can wear the body armour from the next set, to wearing half-and-half, and then wearing all but one bit. Means you end up looking ludicrous for quite a long time.
In advance of Elden Ring, I’ve completed an SL1 run of DS1, DS2, SotFS, and DS3. DS1, it doesn’t matter so much what you wear, even without levelling at all – Havel’s set in order to tank Nito and the 4K’s is perfectly viable. DS3, you have loads of options – a good mix of entry-level weapons, light armour, shields and rings means it’s a puzzle to get just the optimal mix for the next boss (although you end up looking stupid a lot of the time). Both DS2 and SotFS are an utter nightmare at SL1; I was mostly wearing the peasant’s set, which gives a tiny-but-essential adaptability increase, plus the cartographer’s helmet (which I murdered him for, for its tiny dex bonus) and went through most of the game with no shield, a crappy weapon two-handed, and either the ladle or the work hook off-hand, for their piddling bonuses as well. But on the plus side, I was never invaded at all.
tl:dr; fashion’s great, as long as you’re not scraping by to survive.
I read the same New World Deflation articles and my first reaction was to be skeptical that it was happening at all. They talk in extreme generalities, cite no sources and don’t even think to ask the question of “What changed to make this the case?” I don’t know the first thing about New World so maybe it’s real, but everything about this story and the way the internet is handling it looks exactly like what I’d expect if someone went onto the internet and told lies.
Do we have anyone playing the game not in Shamus Mode that can comment on what’s going on?
I have a friend at work who when I mentioned some of the observations here (in the comments, not Shamus’s no-faction run) basically said they were all wrong. They say that high level towns and thus PvP are super-necessary because all the best gear requires crafting in maxed-out towns, which require PvP to obtain and tons of money from taxes and PvP to maintain. But he’s not actually leveled to endgame yet and is in a successful guild so it’s not like he’d actually know firsthand.
I would expect that since the group “owning” the town has to pay to keep it from downgrading, and they’re allowed to set taxes, tons of groups are just maxing out the taxes because duh. Which may or may not be driving players away from those areas, making it impossible to sustain them on taxes. As the initial rush wears off and people stop playing as much and thus less money enters the system, there should always be a post-launch die-down as some mid-high level players decide they’ve seen what they need to see and bail.
It might also be that the numbers on the back end are designed to make it so it’s nigh-impossible for more than X cities per Y players at Z level to be maxed out. So every server that has sufficiently fractured factions is throwing away money trying to build more than they’ll ever be able to hold.
And all these mentions of mercenary guilds and guild drama suggest that plenty of guild leaders are dumping money down the drain screwing with people (“for the lulz”), which would be yet another reason a system that works on paper could end up failing.
To me it sounds like the system is working excellently. Most MMO economies stagnate because of the unlimited cash available from grinding. So the developers implement money sinks of various types (player housing and equipment repairs are probably the most common) to try and take money out of the economy, but they only work within a certain limit, and there are some players who just ignore all the money sinks anyway.
Bartering of items to avoid paying cash is a sign that the economy is working well and that pockets aren’t becoming overloaded with cash. The mercenary guilds and lulz are also good because they keep the limited cash moving around. And all of these are emergent player interactions, they’re adding ‘depth’ to the game.
Arbitrarily setting high taxes in the New World? That’s never ended badly.
I get very little enjoyment out of fashion stuff in my games. I will try to change my gear to not look dorky, but rarely spend more effort than that. I certainly never spend real world money on fashion.
On the point of New World supply issues, I suppose this is an interesting view of an economic crisis. If materials are difficult to procure it will cause prices to soar, which stifles monetary circulation.
Concerning the Virtual Boy, Rodrigo Copetti has written up an analysis of the architecture of the console (as well as various others).
Well WOW didn’t have animals drop money. Of course they still drop vendor trash that vendors want for some reason (who doesnt want to pay good money for a cracked dire bear tooth), but at least they did think of that weirdness. I can also imagine a warhammer wearing down if youre clubbing spiders filled with corrosive spit, or you get blasted with fireballs.
the virtualboy was red because red LEDs were cheap. It was still a stupid idea but it was the cheapest 3d they could do at the time and they wanted something intermediate. Even the name is stupid, -boy implies that it was portable, but it was too big and clunky for that. Tech (like the brick phones, or recording music) develops a lot faster if it is released. It shows there is demand for it, it exposes problems an engineer might not think off, and it often is good enough. I dont think mobile phones were ahead of their time, it is not like they existed, failed, disappeared, and reappeared 10 years later. They just evolved from being primitive to being advanced. Electric cars I think are a better example of being ahead of their time, a good idea but there is just no battery technology to support them for decades.
Electric cars were actually viable in the 90s, just not for road-trips. The average commute distance in the US is 26 miles. The Census Bureau puts it at 30 minutes which would be 35 miles or less. (This article shows commute times haven’t changed much since the 90s.) That’s well within the 55 mile range of the General Motors EV1.
55 miles really isn’t viable. Yeah, it lets you get from point A to point B…. but not back to Point A, and not if you also want to go to Point C. Where I live, “55 miles left’ is “Urgent need to refuel”.
Most electric vehicles available now here in the UK have a range of around 240 miles.
Plug in at work nets you an additional eight hours of charge. Many office lots have plugins just for heating in winter, but the same plugs could be installed at offices for charging in warmer climates. Also keep in mind that 26 miles is the _average_ commute – all of the people who drive 20 miles are more easily served. I don’t know what type of commuting you’re doing that 55 miles is considered an emergency, but it sounds like highway driving for a longer commute, not the type of driving that the earlier cars could serve.
Alternatively, the TLDR is the many renters of the EV1 who were _literally_ lined up outside the impound lot, begging to purchase the vehicles instead of having them destroyed. Clearly an underserved market.
And who, pray tell, is going to PAY for all that extra electric usage? The company? Hardly. You’d either be billed for it or have it deducted from wages, and probably with a surcharge because why not. Of course, that’s assuming you have a working power grid, which we soon won’t because everyone was stupid enough to move to unreliable, expensive, ecologically devastating garbage like ‘green’ energy. Good luck with your electric car when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.
Just ask Texas how well that worked for them last winter.
Texas’ had a minority of their power from renewables; Their problems were primarily from lack of winterization on their oil and gas power. If you’re concerned about ecology, you should be considering the fact that carbon dioxide will ruin all ecologies, if we don’t get off of those types of power. Windmills in a farmer’s field doesn’t really affect much ecology, beyond what farming already did.
(Didn’t edit this before my time limit ran out.) And yes, charging the employee for electricity in their stall is very reasonable. Just the same as charging for parking in a good or bad lot, only giving parking or roofed / better parking to certain employees, or any number of other parking situations that are totally normal do-able.
Anecdotally, I’ve never commuted more than 10 miles (the width of my city), and would have ample charge left for errands, groceries, etc in a single day. The research and production of the cars in the 90s was already a sunk cost, ready to serve the demographic which fit within the limited range of those early models.
About the vlog video: There was a Nintendo developer interview at one point talking about game design, which brought up Miyamoto’s definition of a good idea: “A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once”. Anyone can solve one problem in isolation, most easily by ignoring the constraint that created that problem; I can make the software run much faster if it doesn’t have to work. It’s an accomplishment to gain more than you give up.
Regarding technology ahead of it’s time that fell by the wayside, the Halcyon is the first that comes to my mind. Rick Dyer was about three decades too early, and I remain impressed with the work he managed to accomplish. Here’s a fantastic video on the topic if anyone’s interest. The Virtual Boy is another of my favorites and I find it endlessly fascinating. This short technical examination is one of my favorite examinations of it.
As for Fashion Souls, it’s something I fall for in basically every game that lets me. I will spend inordinate amounts of time playing dress-up in RPGs if I’m given the choice. Before transmog was introduced in WoW, I had my banks full of “RP gear”- low level items and whatnot that I kept around for their looks. When I was bored, I would go out and run dungeons and old raids looking for more fashion items. In Soulsborne games I go out of my way to get the equipment items I want, stats be damned. Dragon’s Dogma? You better believe I was gonna look good while I climbed around on top of monsters. Even when I had my brief stint with FFXIV, I would go out of my way to find good looking equipment despite not being very high level.
I don’t ever spend real money on it though. DLC cosmetics are fine, but I roll with whatever is in-game.
Yeah, as much as I like playing dress-up in games, I’d never shell out actual money for in-game cosmetics. Spending rift crystals which are plentiful in BBI is fine, though.
The reason deflation is hitting New World is because basically the only way to create money is via quest rewards, and max-level characters generally have done their quests already.
Enemies don’t drop money. You can’t sell drops to vendors.
Therefore deflation.
Which is a nice change of pace from Kingdom of Loathing style hyper-inflation which is typical.
It’s a nice change for folks like us reading about it – I imagine it’s a lot less fun for people playing the game. Hyperinflation alone doesn’t ruin a game experience (ask any Bethesda fan), but having top-end content inaccessible due to the design of the game’s economy seems pretty ruinous.
It’s not the ONLY way, and humanoid enemies do drop money every so often. More often with luck gear. You can even farm it if you’ve got good aoe damage. You can even get drops from players in PvP which is weird. Argh I died and pooped an item i don’t own.
High level gear generates money when salvaged, too. But once you run out of quests you need a moneymaking strategy that doesn’t involve the trading post, because that will dry up as more people hit higher levels.
My tastes haven’t changed much at all, I’ve always been a JRPG and Turn-Based-Strategy guy. I used to play some shooters like Goldeneye and Halo, but that was never my main thing and I’ve gotten worse at aiming over the years.
The only dress-up game I’ve ever gotten into was Tales of Berseria, and that’s because the dress-up lets you make people look hilariously stupid. The game has a dedicated Hat Mode, because otherwise every character’s hair will clip through the hats. There’s a character with one eye covered by his hair, and you can give him an eyepatch for the other one. And they show up in the in-game cutscenes. There’s a helmet that’s way too big, and turns entire cutscenes into the back of this helmet. I love it.
It amazes me how many JRPGs have 1) characters wearing equipable items in cutscenes and 2) tacky as heck equipment. Awkward Zombie made fun of Bravely Default for this. But for me the best example is Lost Odyssey where a character is having a really emotional death-bed moment… but I’m too distracted by the gawdawful glasses they’re wearing.
Haven’t played either of those ones, so I’ll just clarify that Berseria has separate slots for cosmetics and those are the only thing that change appearance. The only reason to put them on is specifically to make your character look different.
Didn’t KotOR have really (and strangely ONLY) stupid hats?
All the equipment in KotOR looked stupid. It bothered me that every character has a personalised outfit that generally looked good on them, but if you wanted some actual protection you had to put them in a hideous, brightly coloured, and oddly proportioned bodysuit.
There is only Fashion Souls. For a while my main in DS3 had 50 VIT just so I could wear nearly anything without fatrolling. Later, I played a character that used only fist weapons, and as it turns out, one of the benefits of a weapon that weighs nearly nothing is that you can easily wear heavy armor without blowing your build boosting encumbrance. I got to flaunt so many awesome armor sets that I could never justify before, like Drakeblood; Lothric was blessed to catch these hands.
Same for Dragon’s Dogma, although not nearly to the same extent; it’s much more important to have the strongest possible equipment in that game, although moreso for weapons than armor. Actually, one of my big complaints about DDDA was that all the overpowered BBI armor sets are goofy Hallowe’en costumes.
And Monster Hunter World, most of all. It took a while for them to get the ball rolling on layered armor, but the game is at last a fashion hunter’s paradise. I literally have every armor and layered armor in the game, as well as every fully-upgraded Great Sword (and the ability to layer them), so it’s pretty safe to say I’ve done my fair share of experimenting— even if my actual fashion tastes are pretty understated in MHW.
I can’t say I’ve had the same experience with vehicles, although that probably has more to do with how few games I play that offer robust vehicle customization. I will say that I just finished a Subnautica playthrough in which my Cyclops, Seamoth, and Prawn were called Bread, Butter, and Jelly, and painted to match.
If my PC wasn’t a potato I’d try out MHW. I have Freedom Unite for the Vita, and played a bit of MH1 on the PS2, but I never put a lot of time in them. Maybe I should dust them off again.
Also, Punchyfist run best run. Now that I’ve gotten 100% on classic DS2 I’m trying Ranged-only build on SotFS. It’s an interesting change.
I distinctly remember making suboptimal choices and backtracking across the continent or digging through the ridiculously over-complex (and per-day grind based) crafting system in Dragon Quest 9 (Sentinels of Starry Skies), because it actually showed your gear- in the stylized chibi-ish spite style that was used all over the DS, but still.
Fashion in Monster Hunter World is kinda strange in that Capcom must have noticed that many of the weapons clip obviously through the armour sets with every stride of the main character’s run animation and just gone “sure, we spent 100 million dollars on polishing this game but, eh, whatever”.
On a tangent; the best moment in my short MHW stint was when the player-created Palico is in the opening cutscene for all of one second, just to fall into the abyss. I was really hoping that the game was actually going to kill off the creatable character instantly. It would have been glorious. Alas, they meet you on the shore. Missed opportunity.
Glad to hear you both are enjoying Filament! That’s a pretty good description, that you’ll breeze through 4 out of 5 puzzles and get stuck for three days (true story) on the fifth. Though I had the opposite reaction to the voice work: I thought it was fantastic, some of the better voice acting I’ve heard in a game, full of little expressive flourishes and nuances of voice that go well above and beyond a bare mechanical reading of the script. Maybe I just don’t have a big enough reference pool, I dunno.
I do think the alt-80s world of Filament is perhaps a bit darker than it seems under the surface, though, which might also cast some of the goings-on aboard the good ship Alabaster in a new light. From the logs and snippets of advertising and other materials found hidden around the ship, the Filament Corporation seems like a sort of dystopian cyber-punky megacorporation that can dictate huge swathes of its employees lives, including flat-out assigning everyone a new name that they must use at all times in any future correspondence on pain of immediate termination (probably of “employment” rather than “life”, but…). While it does seem to be the case that everyone volunteered/asked to be on the mission, I don’t know if you guys have gotten far enough to get the point where it becomes clear Filament does not exactly have its employees best personal interests at heart, choosing to continue the mission even after people start mysteriously disappearing (you mentioned the revelation that the planet they’re studying is actually a hologram, and it’s not too far beyond that if I remember correctly). In light of that information I felt like Juniper comes off a bit more sympathetically, as once she learns
the rest of the crew did not, in fact, escape without her like she thought but have been disappeared as wellshe comes off as suffering from massive survivor’s guilt. Though I’m still expecting her to turn out to be an AI or something in the end, so…who knows.My favorite genres now are not the same as my favorite genres when I was younger. I think that’s less because my tastes have evolved over time, though it’s certainly possible that they have, and more because I am an old man (as video games go) and my favorite genres now didn’t exist when I was younger. My favorite genre right now is probably turn-based tactics games (XCOM, Battletech, Final Fantasy Tactics, etc.). Games like that just weren’t available on the Apple II or the NES when I was a kid in the 1980s. If they were, I certainly never heard about them at the time. The closest thing I played–and I played a lot of it–was Interplay’s Battlechess. I don’t even like chess all that much, but something about moving units around a on a grid and making them smash into each other really spoke to me even then. If turn-based tactics games had been a thing when I was young, I’m pretty sure that they would have been my favorite genre then too.
I had to wait for Sid Meier to invent Civilization before I could discover that I loved 4Xs and for Westwood to invent Dune II before I could discover that I loved RTS games. (Then I had to wait for Blizzard to invent StarCraft so that I could discover that I really only loved Westwood RTS games.) The point is that as the number of games and the number of game genres increase of course I, and presumably also other people, will discover new things to love. It doesn’t so much indicate changing tastes as it does the sudden ability to indulge tastes we didn’t know we had.
Man, Dune II doesn’t get enough love. I remember playing a remake with FMV cutscenes.
I played Dune II on a Sega Genesis. Needless to say there were no FMV cutscenes. The long-sought key to RTS on consoles is, as it turns out, for the RTS to be really slow and kinda primitive.
The remake you’re talking about is probably Dune 2000, which came out sometime post Command & Conquer but sometime before Red Alert 2.
That’s the one!
I remember it being very pretty.
They even got the creepy mentat from the movies to do the cutsceens.
Much the same here. Most of my favourites now are ‘make your own fun’ sandbox style games with crafting, survival, and brutal worlds (Kenshi, Rimworld, C:DDA, Project Zomboid, etc). Back in the day I was a total JRPG whore though.
On the personality battles between colors, I don’t think I can I agree with your take. I kind of do, but then I think of my Planetside 2 experiences.
In PS2 there’s Blue, Red, Purple. I played Blue because other people I knew went Blue. But really I vastly preferred Purple’s weapons and equipment. Eventually I tried playing Purple and later Red. I was struck by the huge personality differences of the players between the player factions. I definitely preferred Purple’s mechanics and equipment. But the people…
Purple was a bunch of people meandering about aimlessly. Red was a bunch of bickering jerks. And Blue was organized and objective driven. In reductionist terms, Purple was all followers, Red was all leaders, and Blue was a healthy mix of the two. The difference was stark. Of course Blue was dominating the maps. They were acting like military in a military style game. I never even realized how utterly hopeless Red/Purple were until I played for their teams.
So I get what you say about bigotry. But at the same time I’ve seen it. The personality types reinforce the player base in a self magnifying way. Players who did not like a particular playstyle would not stay in a particular faction. I couldn’t stand the type of play in Red/Purple even though I preferred their mechanics. So it forced me back to Blue. Likewise someone who hated the type of player in Blue wouldn’t have stayed in Blue. (BTW by “organized” I mean basic stuff like “Everyone spawn a tank at the same time. We’ll all leave in 5mins.”)
Therefore I believe it is possible to make broad semi-bigoted statements about player factions. Only because it’s a self-sort.
I’ve finished Filament. Good puzzles, mostly. But the story is garbage and doesn’t make any sense. Best mute Juniper and ignore the emails.
I recall Pirates of the Burning Sea had a similar problem with its economy. Cash was a crafting component, but there wasn’t an obvious recurring source of it. I think you were eventually supposed to sell trade goods to Europe or something. Early on though, it just meant nobody could make anything. It got so bad, the devs had to reseed the auction houses several times. My friends and I resorted to making alts, doing their early quests, and transferring the cash rewards over. I don’t know if the developers ever fixed the issue during the life of the game, as we quit playing after a month. You know it’s not going to last when there’s less than twenty people in your whole faction at peak hours.
Most fashion/customizing I did was Team Fortress 2. I’ve arguably spent more time trading items on several websites to get more/better looking hats/effects than actually playing the game, and I have over 1000 hours on it. I suffered from, after getting my ‘ideal realistic best look’ (without spending any money on the thing) there was just no real interest to continue. At some point I just decided to cash out, and as a jobless teenager from a third world country, selling my items for dollars actually gave me a pretty penny. I still do the TF2 trading even though I hadn’t gone in-game for like 5 years until this Halloween event, but only to sell items on the Steam Community Market, make some cents, and eventually add up enough to buy games that are 80% off.
1. People are getting their characters to higher levels. This means you die more often as you attempt higher-level content, and the resulting repair bill is VASTLY more expensive. Upkeep on a high-level character is MUCH more expensive than on a lower-level character, especially if you do things like buy a house. And, as the questing opportunities dry up at higher levels–the main source of cash for most players–you have a problem where earning is a big problem.
2. The PVP wars qua wars are actually not quite the issue. Yes, it costs 15k to declare war. However, EVERYONE who fights in the war (up to 100 people) gets a wad of cash at the end, even if they LOSE. IIRC you walk away with about 300 coin if you’re on the winning side and about 150 coins if you’re on the losing side. So 100 x approx 200 and at the end you’ve got more money in the economy than you started out with. The real issue with the wars is the cost of upgrading your fort and the inevitable downgrading of everything whenever a territory switches hands. Most people use 1 or at most 2 of the settlements as their main trading/crafting area, meaning that only one or two of the territories is usually raking in enough cash from taxes to really build up a pile beyond their upkeep costs. And, also, since the tax money belongs to the company, people don’t distribute it, so that money doesn’t really ever enter the economy. And that’s not even dealing with the problem of Invasions, which are mercilessly hard, come constantly, and will mass-degrade your settlement, forcing you to pay for upgrades all over again. If you want to bring in tax money you HAVE to keep your settlement upgraded, otherwise the people will go elsewhere.
3. Amazon did a HUGE crackdown on gold farming in New World. They eliminated gold found in fishing treasure chests, a major source. And they mass-banned the accounts of people who were playing on illegitimate free codes and gold farming, largely, again, from fishing. And the population of the game has gone down by about 50% since the start, possibly because the farmers were mass-eliminated, possibly because many of the players have simply moved on.
So, add increasing character upkeep costs as people level up and decreasing playerbase and, voila, you’ve got a deflationary economy.
In the endgame, about the only way to really farm cash is to get up a group and hit high-level elite areas with tons of chests, loot ALL the chests, and salvage the items. You’ll get about 3 coins per item. A good elite run can net you 20-30 or more items that you can trash for cash. Either that or just do a billion of the community board and faction board quests in easy zones wielding crafted trash so you won’t damage your expensive armor.
It sounds like the New World economy is only stable with growth. That’s a good system as long as there are more players joining the game than leaving. Soon as it dips into net-negative territory it will create a feedback loop. It will quickly become impossible for players to upgrade their gear regardless if they want to pay for it or not.
Those guilds with control or fighting for it will eventually become bored or decide it is not worth it and lose the territory. At which point if they weren’t already bankrupt, the money in their guild becomes locked away. Same as if a wealthy player quits the game. Newer fresher guilds without as many resources will always be in the same situation, but with worse off initial conditions. And it will always continue that way. It’s doomed to go into decline. Less due to deflation and more due to inherent instability. All the feedback loops go the wrong direction. Perpetual poverty is not something that generally endears players either. I think this is only going to get worse.
Oh BTW the taxes thing is not a real factor to deflation. It is important on the small scale, but a wash on New World’s economy as a whole. What matters is the net change of money entering the game via mechanics vs the net change in money leaving via mechanics (which includes upkeep) + whatever is permanently locked away by players quitting the game. Taxes are just transfers between players and neither adding nor leaving the game. Factoring them in incorrectly double counts them.
It’s not the taxes, it’s that the taxes are either eaten up by upkeep or don’t reenter the economy ever because the company leader gets bored. It’s buried in a mason jar in the back yard and never used.
Add to this that there’s basically infinite amounts of goods circulating and good luck finding anything you can sell for more than a few cents a unit. If it’s rare enough to sell you probably won’t be willing to part with it.
Trick number 1 to staying afloat is to keep your expensive gear from getting damaged.
This is definitely a weird opinion, but I’m actively bothered when a game lets me customize my character’s look. I’m not a character designer, videogame, that’s the dev team’s job! I always prefer having one really good-looking model for the playable character than being able to create sixty gajillion OK-at-best looking main characters. Same goes for armor – I’m actively bothered by my character’s outfit changing with new armor because it always means I’m wearing this mishmash of disparate clothes that has the best stats but looks awful. Don’t get me started on when it shows up in cutscenes – I have vivid memories of the main character of Xenoblade Chronicles very emotionally yelling about getting revenge for his hometown while wearing very well-stated swimming trunks on a snowy mountain. Luckily, the Definitive Edition of that game lets you use the skin of a different set of armor than what you’ve equipped, so I can just plop on the starting equipment’s look on everyone. I understand why people want to make a character that’s theirs, but I don’t enjoy fiddling with that sort of thing (I’ll usually change the hair and that’s it) and I want a good-looking character. I think the way Mass Effect does it – where the default Shepards are very clearly designed characters rather than just an OK looking preset – is a good middle ground.
That is interesting, I have almost the complete opposite opinion, I have very little interest in playing any game that does not at least marginally let me customize or personalize the main character. The way I see it is that if I want to experience Joe Hero’s story, someone else’s character, then I would watch a movie or read a book, since it is not interactive, and that if I am playing an interactive video game, I would like it to be ‘my’ character to some extent, even if it is just cosmetic. I do not have anything against people who like premade characters, just different preferences, and there are a few games with set characters that I enjoy, but, for example, I have had a lot of fun in both GTA Online and Red Dead Online where you can make your own character, even if the game is less developed, and have basically zero interest in playing the actual game for either, because I do not care to play as someone else.
I do agree that Mass Effect makes for a good middle ground though, accommodating pro and anti-customization folks.
I’m of a similar opinion as Rariow. I don’t enjoy customizing characters. At the same time I’m not a fan of the swimsuit problem either. The most I do is tap the ‘randomize’ button a few times and then that’s it. I won’t engage with any of that after.
In fact I remember years ago getting quite annoyed at a friend of mine’s wife. She was quite insistent I needed to personalized my Little Big Planet character and upset that I refused.
This is too late for pretty much anyone to notice, but with all this interesting discussion I would feel remiss if I didn’t provide a link to Joel Goodwin’s Ouroboros Sequence, which to my mind is the Mess Effect of puzzle games.
Despite the name, they don’t have to be read in a particular order. The Monte Carlo Player, Dead in the Water and Hole in my Chest are particularly relevant to the issues brought up in the podcast.
Also, this comment about the “turn-one dick move” is relevant to Shamus’s observations about that singularly maddening thing puzzle designers seem unable to resist.