I played a long while ago and a string of similar incidents eventually made me leave.

I came back ~6months ago, and it was more chill, but still not great.

I will say that if you’re in a group of 3 or more non-toxic people, you almost never get toxic players. Not only because you’ve only got 2 chances to roll low rather than 4, but also because they’re more aware that probably won’t get anywhere.

Free to play with microtransactions is just the way to go for games that can be monetized in that manner. The lower barrier to entry means far more downloads and the piecemeal monetization means that players will frequently end up paying more than $60 alongside the larger player base.

Does Payday have a singleplayer mode? I thought it was a multiplayer game.

a situation where your character would get killed for a bad dialogue choice.

I think this is a ridiculous thing to criticize too. Dialogue is important in a game like this and it has (sometimes lethal) consequences.

Imagine if this argument were applied to combat. It turns out that it is impossible to beat some encounters by role-playing a loner wizard who refuses to cast spells. Nobody in their right mind would actually believe that is a valid criticism.

The most they’ll have to pay is 20 cents. And that’s only with the 200,000th to 210,000th download for developers who are using the free version of Unity (provided that the developer is also making more then $200k/yr in revenue). After that, the developer will probably get Unity Pro and the download fees will start up at $1 million/yr in revenue and more than 1 million downloads. At that point, I don’t think that the 15 cents to 0.1 cents that will be charged will hurt too badly.

So the Stanford post assumes that we continue to consume roughly 2% more energy per year. At that rate, in 1000 years we would go from consuming 1.753×10^13 W to consuming 6.98×10^21 W. This would be 40,000 times the energy the sun puts on the Earth. Because most energy quickly turns into heat, this would heat up the entire surface of the Earth to the point where it is uninhabitable. I feel that tidal locking would be the least of our concerns at that point.

Professor Liu seems to have made a simple mistake: What his model showed was unsustainable was not tidal energy, but actually his assumed exponential growth rate of energy consumption to ludicrous levels, levels that would spell disaster for the Earth.

That said, the website’s math checks out. The linear approach is a very basic year 1 physics problem that can be quickly confirmed.

The values we need for this calculation:

The mass of the earth (M) is: 5.97×10^24 kg

The radius of the earth (R) is 6.37×10^6 m

The angular velocity of the earth (w) is 7.29×10^-5 rad/sec

The current total worldwide primary energy consumption is 1.753 × 10^13 W. This is pretty close to the article’s assumption

The equations necessary:

The moment of inertia of a solid sphere of uniform density is: 2/5 MR^2

Rotational kinetic energy is calculated by: 1/2 I w^2

After some very basic plug-and-chug:

This provides a moment of inertia of the earth (I) of: 9.69×10^37 kilogram meters squared

And a total rotational kinetic energy of: 2.575×10^29 kg m^2 /s^2 This is pretty close to what the Stanford website calculated.

So if we used the suggested 1% here, it would take around 5.0 x 10^10 years to tidally lock the earth to the moon with our current energy consumption. But that’s not what was assumed in the article. It was also assumed that we would continue to expand our energy consumption by a constant 2% per year. This requires basic calculus.

We have energy consumption that starts at the previously mentioned: 1.753 × 10^13 W

Below, n is equal to the number of years.

This leads us to a consumption growth formula of: 1.753×10^13 * 1.02^n

To indefinitely integrate that formula, we simply divide it by ln(1.02), which gives us: 8.85236×10^14 1.02^n (we will drop the +c because it’s not necessary here)

And now we just need to solve the following equation for n: 2.575×10^29 = 8.85236×10^14 1.02^n

Solving gives us a real solution of: around 1681 years. This is close enough for me to say that the math checks out, considering that I didn’t start with exactly the same base formulas. But ultimately this is besides the point. The math is right, but the premise of a constant 2% growth is ultimately unsustainable. Short of building planet-scale radiators to shed heat, the earth would become uninhabitable by virtue of the sheer energy consumption alone.

Dwarf Fortress (before the Steam edition.) There was no in-game tutorial. I found a 2 hour long fanmade tutorial on Youtube, and even after that I had to learn a lot of stuff from the wiki.

At 16x, you will get 72MB/s read speed. My SSD has a 560MB/s read speed. Because of this discrepancy, loading a game from a blu-ray disc will take roughly 7.7 times longer. A 20 second loading screen becomes a 2.5 minute loading screen. This alone justifies the cost of keeping it on my SSD. Especially because if I want to remove it I don’t lose permanent access to the game, I can download it again in a couple hours.

Prosperous Universe is quite different from a typical incremental game, but it scratches the same itch for me. The game is very complex, and other players drive the economy, leading to some price/availability unpredictability that is interesting. Gotta keep your bases fueled, but you also want to wait for prices to rise or fall, and potentially use your ships to trade at other markets.

It’s quite nonlinear in progression and there’s a lot of ways to expand.

Minecraft. It’s so dang cozy to me.

If you have infinite inventory space, then you need a way to navigate through infinite items. Towards the end of the game, a player could easily have nearly every item in the game. For some games, that would be fine, but for many, that would make the list of items prohibitively long. Filtering and searching would help, but if you’re looking for an item that you forgot the name of, a search doesn’t necessarily do much.

Then there’s balance reasons. Some games use their inventory system to limit the player, making sure they don’t start a level with enough health potions and grenades to cheese every fight.

In survival games, a finite inventory sets the gameplay loop: you go exploring/mining and then return to base, drop off your stuff and head out again. It makes your base valuable, if only because that’s where you keep most of your resources and moving would be hard. It also gives the player a break from one task. I played a Minecraft mod that gave me an effectively infinite inventory. I went mining for so long that it started to feel like an awful slog. Because my mine shafts went on too long, getting back was itself a hassle. When I reverted back to a more typical inventory size, I could feel how a full inventory breaks up the grind and prevents mining from getting out of hand.

I feel that the line is not nearly as sharp. I play a lot of freeform games for extrinsic reasons. Building a cool castle in Minecraft is probably an extrinsic motivation, for example.

When I played Minecraft a whole ton, It was because I was on a server, and I was motivated by impressing my friends, a clear extrinsic motivation.

In WoW, I’m largely motivated to master the game so that I can keep up with my boyfriend, running 20+ dungeons and Heroic (soon Mythic) raids. Another extrinsic motivation.

Etterna, a rhythm game is probably my most intrinsically motivated game. I play it mostly because I enjoy the feeling of mastering a new skill. But even that is extrinsic to some degree, because what most clearly shows my skill? The game praising me with AAs and big streaks. I wouldn’t enjoy Etterna without those things, so I wouldn’t play a gradeless version.

Minecraft is the coziest game for me. Whenever I want to just zone out, but feel productive, it’s a good option.

There is world PvP. With the world population being so low, and the world size being so large it’s pretty rare. There’s also a lot of ways to avoid it, but whenever you’re outside your own base it’s always a risk. If you play smart, it’s almost always possible to get away from a player, even if they’re very highly geared. Most clans are pretty insular, a group of friends who have been playing for a long time. I’ve never joined a clan, personally, so I have no idea what they’re like.

Haven and Hearth is a slow base building MMO. You build up skill points exploring and finding new items, spend the skill points to unlock more stuff, build a base and start upgrading your stuff from there. It’s honestly really cool.

The shrines respawn over time. No need to worry about consuming them. The Lillith statues are permanent stat boosts to all characters, not activating them when you encounter them is harmful.

The shrines aren’t really a balance element, because they only last a minute or so, and usually make you hilariously overpowered for a little bit.

Unless the game was some decentralized open source game, but I’m having a hard time imagining a game like that also needing blockchain tech, outside of maybe having a record of games played for speedrunning purposes, but that’s extremely niche.

• Ori and Ori: Will of the Wisps. These games are beautiful and atmospheric. The story is basic, but it’s a world to get lost in.

• All of the supergiant games (except for maybe Hades). So Bastion, Transistor and Pyre. Dripping with style, Bastion and Transistor have a pretty straightforward story, but it’s well told. Pyre’s story is a bit more complex, with a heavy focus on characters and your choices with them.

there was cliques and entourageous. That’s not anarchy.

Isn’t that basically one of the key features of anarchy? There may not be an official structure, but people are allowed to form groups and associate based on their values and goals. The fact that this ends up feeling like high school is a pretty big black mark against anarchy in my book.

Though a corporation being anarchist is kinda absurd.

Against the Storm. It’s a roguelite colony sim. Which didn’t make any sense when my boyfriend described it like that, but they pull it off so well.