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Hosts: Rutskarn, Mumbles, Josh, Chris, and Shamus.
Show Notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #45: Candy Crush, Banner Saga, Total Biscuit”
Diecast #45: Candy Crush, Banner Saga, Total Biscuit
Experienced Points:
Electronic Arts: Greed Is Not the Problem
I’m kind of wishing I’d taken a different angle with my column this week. I wanted to talk about why EA is a badly run company, but I’m worried we’re going to get dragged into an argument over the definition of “greed”. I’ve run into this debate before, and I’m kind of kicking myself for not preemptively deflecting it.
In short: Some people say “greed” meaning “wanting more when you don’t need more”. So, asking for a raise when you already make the standard salary for your field and have enough to live on, or raising prices when your company is already solvent would both count as “greed”. The OTHER definition is a sort of monomaniacal pursuit of more, even when it results in making less. So if you charge $50 for a hamburger when the restaurant next door only charges $5, that’s greedy.
My mental definition of greed is #1, and I’m basically accusing EA of #2. If your mental definition is already #2, then I suppose the article will come off as strangely self-refuting: “EA’s problem isn’t greed, it’s that they’re greedy!”
Anyway, I know I’ve played this tune in the past, but the recent Dungeon Keeper fiasco drove me to write about it again. My beef isn’t that EA made a stupid shallow bastardization of a classic game to make money, (although that is a problem) it’s that they did so in a way that isn’t even clever or profitable. The game begins haranguing you for money before you’ve even settled in, before you’re even invested in it. A well-designed game would let you build half your dungeon and amass a bunch of (actually worthless) in-game gold, and then gradually ramp up the money required to keep going.
“I can’t quit now! Look how far I’ve come! Oh, it’s only a dollar to keep going. That’s reasonable, right?”
Then four days later:
“I can’t quit now! I’ve put a week into this and I’m so close to the next milestone! Oh, it’s only another five bucks to get rid of these messages for a whole day? I guess that’s fair. Say, I wonder how much I’ve spent so far…?”
Instead, Dungeon Keeper just starts panhandling before you’ve even settled in. I could understand some clueless indie making this blunder, but EA should know better.
My grief is reminiscent of my problems with Taco Bell back when I was a young man. I wasn’t mad that I was an overworked, underpaid peon. I was mad that all the corner-cutting was for nothing. If you’re going to screw me, the least you could do is make sure you’re not going to be hurting yourself in the process.
Site Theme
It’s that time of the decade again wherein I muck about with the site theme and annoy everyone. Today’s goals are:
- Get rid of the goofy double-indent problem I was having with multi-paragraph numbered lists.
For example, before the change THIS paragraph would have been indented from the previous one. That was dumb and goofy.
- Clean up stray tags. Because of the way I’ve hacked away at this theme over the years, it’s accumulated a lot of cruft. Maybe at some point in the past I had a little doodad in a div box. Then I removed it. Because of the way WordPress is wired up, it’s really easy to get rid of the content and leave a <div class="now_useless_class"><div> behind. I’m always trying to track these down and get rid of them.
- Fix the problem of comment coloring. Previously, all comments alternated between blue and silver, regardless of thread depth. That was fine for flat conversations, but as threads got increasingly complex you’d end up with a blue reply to a blue reply to a blue reply to a blue reply. You’d scroll several pages down and lose track of who is replying to whom. If you want to see a good example of the problem at its worst, then see this post or this one. Note that with this new theme in place you won’t see the blue-blue-blue reply chain anymore, so you kind of have to use your imagination.
- Turn the comment dice into a sprite sheet. (I did not get this done. As of this writing, comment dice are disabled. It’s on my to-do list.)
My current solution to problem #3 is probably not going to last. I predict people will complain that it suffers from a bad case of angry fruit salad. Which is fair. But this rainbow puke is useful as both an illustration of the problem and a good way to visualize the tools we have to work with.
What we really want is to create a situation where no reply will match the color of the post being replied to. To do this, you should technically only need four colors:
- Everyone replying to a blue comment will be either silver #1 or silver #2.
- Everyone replying to a silver comment will be either blue #1 or blue #2.
Sadly, you can’t do this with the default WordPress setup. The only way to make this happen is to code your own comment loop. I did this sort of thing in the past, but it’s a time consuming pain in the ass that needs to be re-done every time I upgrade. Coding your own comment loop also creates a lot of performance worries.
So right now we’ve got rainbow comments. Other solutions are possible, I suppose. We could use ten different shades of blue and silver, but there are only so many distinct shades of each that are suitable as a background for black text. And one shade of medium pale blue isn’t nearly as easy to distinguish from another shade of medium pale blue as (say) green.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Site Theme”
Skyrim EP6: Adventures in Incarceration Shenanigans
Link (YouTube) |
Professor Rutskarn’s Introduction to Elder Scrolls Cosmology 101: New Gods
So maybe you don’t want to worship the Eight Divines, a gaggle of model-building intergalactic nerdcases with dumb names. And maybe you’re not on good terms with the Daedra after they made out with your boyfriend in one of those speakered-up parking spots at Sonic Burger. The question is: with those two options removed, who’s left to worship? Consider these three options:
1.) Nobody Much.
MORTAL: So Aedra, what’s the advantage of devoting my life to you? Are you going to deliver me from earthly suffering?
AEDRA: Yes! One specific kind of suffering, like not being able to carry enough stuff! We will alleviate this for several hours at a time!
MORTAL: That’s the kind of perk you’re willing to offer if I spend my entire life worshiping you?
AEDRA: Or you could drop like ten bucks on a shrine once in a while. But yeah. That’s our upper limit.
MORTAL: Daedra, how about you?
DAEDRA: Yeah, sure, standard contract: we give you all the sex and booze and violence and money and artifacts you can carry away in a sack, and in return, you let us sort of…you know, kind of, ruin your life. A bit.
MORTAL: No.
DAEDRA: Shit. They’re catching on.
Funny thing, how functional atheism is pretty common for a universe with more than three different types of Gods.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Skyrim EP6: Adventures in Incarceration Shenanigans”
Skyrim EP5: You’re Making a Mistake…
Link (YouTube) |
We talked a bit about guards and solving crime in this episode, which reminds me of one of my ancient Oblivion posts. The way the game handles crime is a perfect illustration of how the game makes itself seem dumber by making the AI “smarter”. (Or at least, more sophisticated.)
Lots of people have complained about the flaws in the system where stolen items can’t be sold to any reputable shopkeeper. After all, if I steal an apple and go to the next town, certainly I shouldn’t need to fence the apple! This is an understandable complaint, although truly solving this problem is more difficult than it seems at first glance. It requires a lot of AI to figure out if an NPC should be able to spot an item as stolen.
So in an ideal world, what would determine if someone could spot a hot item?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Skyrim EP5: You’re Making a Mistake…”
Missing Comments
I meant to post a heads-up about this, but it totally slipped my mind. Sometime in the last 12 hours, this website was moved to new hardware. While the IP change sorted out, some of us were seeing the site on the new hardware and some of us on the old. So, there were effectively two copies of this site in existence, and which one you saw depended on whether or not your DNS server was aware of the change.
Thus, some comments were left on the old machine and are now lost forever. Sorry for the confusion. Since you’re seeing this post, then the problem is solved for you and no further comments should go missing.
If it makes you feel any better, this new hardware is really nice. I don’t know how it is for people visiting the front page, but on the backend it always took me about 10 seconds to load up the comments queue. That’s now down to one second.
So that’s cool.
Anyway, carry on. And just so this post doesn’t go to waste: Anything you’d like me to talk about in my weekly column? I have the next couple of weeks planned out, but it never hurts to have a sense of what people want to talk about.
Onward.
EDIT: The comment editing plugin is enabled again on a trial basis. We’ll see if it misbehaves this time.
Skyrim EP4: Camilla Baba Jaga
Link (YouTube) |
Chris hit on a really good point in this episode, which is that Elder Scrolls AI goes along with zombiekind much better than with sapients. The mindless bloodlust, the lack of idiotic and repetitive combat taunts, the sometimes janky pathing, the inept “search for the player” stealth mechanics… it all fits mindless beasts, and comes off as unintentional comedy when used by gangs of bandits.
I also enjoy the scenery of Draugr ruins more than the somewhat bland caves used by bandits. I think Draugr ruins are more interesting places to explore, their inhabitants make more sense, their loot is more varied, their atmosphere is more tense, and the traps are more clever. But the fact that they’re so good is probably why they’re featured in the core game so often, which is why people get sick of them.
I suppose that having just a couple of different “spook” foes would help alleviate this. As the game stands now, caves are filled with one of the following: Draugr, Falmer, Forsworn, Necromancers, Vampires, Dwemer Automatons, or Bandits. (There are many factions of “bandits”, but they all play pretty much the same.) There are also a few wildlife foes scattered around: Bears, saber cats, skeevers, spriggans, wolves, and giant spiders. While these wildlife foes don’t have their own dungeons, they appear in little pockets to break up the monotony.
That’s not bad in terms of foe variety. But this game is so huge and the dungeons so numerous that it’s pretty much inevitable that you’ll start to feel like it’s getting repetitious, particularly if you wander off to do some unstructured dungeon diving.
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